Faith Tourism

Faith tourism—also known as religious tourism, special-interest tourism, knowledge-based tourism, and heritage tourism—is a form of religious travel that is motivated principally but not exclusively by the spiritual or religious content and associated services of the destination. It thereby covers a wide variety of both secular and religious purposes, including recreation, leisure, interest, intellectual edification, healing, and spiritual experiences. Faith tourism does not apply to a journey that carries a religious purpose, act, or practice in itself and therefore lies in the somewhat vague area between secular tourism and pilgrimage. The destination nevertheless must contain some sort of spiritual value for the visitor and can usually be broken down into five categories: (1) natural locales (sacred places, e.g., the Sea of Galilee), (2) religious buildings (temples and shrines, e.g., the Dome of the Rock), (3) buildings that incorporate religious content (museums, e.g., the Vatican Museum), (4) special events or festivals with a religious background (e.g., Ganesh Chaturthi), and (5) secular sites connected to a particular sacral happening or meaning (e.g., Lourdes, when it is visited outside the pilgrimage context). The visitor or visiting group is not obligated to spiritually identify with the religious background of the destination, nor need the sites necessarily be associated with current or existing religions. The travel must be voluntary, temporary, and unpaid for if it is to be considered a type of faith tourism.

Tourism is a constantly growing business, and its profitability has soared since the evolution of mass tourism in the 1960s. In economic jargon, faith tourism belongs to the category of special-interest tourism, which requires a particular set of management skills. Problems such as accessibility, noise protection, maintenance, and waste management must be solved without damaging the spiritual content (the “religious capital”) of the site. Thus, the atmosphere at the site is an essential part of faith tourism, but it is at the same time extremely vulnerable to contamination by the more mundane issues involved with its upkeep.

A relatively recent development in the realm of faith tourism is the attempt to commercially generate religious capital (e.g., religious theme parks, old or distinctive churches that attract tourism, etc.). Such capitalization on religious piety is a manifestation of a greater historical issue: whether spiritual value can be artificially created or managed like a secular product or service. This more contemporary phenomenon has yet to establish itself as a common characteristic of faith tourism.

With a growing amount of travelers motivated by religious attraction of some sort, religious organizations recognized the opportunity for connecting faith tourism to proselytizing; in other words, they discovered the public relations value of faith tourism. Therefore, religious sites that are especially famous have increasingly become assets to enhance the public image of the religion itself and to generate income. Furthermore, competition over both possible and currently existing sites is a problematic side effect that heightens tensions [Page 388]between religions whose relations may already be heavily strained. Another issue is the perceived profanization or desacralization of the sites by tourists. Thus, the tourist and religious value of a certain site can be contradictious and raise an immense field of problems within the religion.

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