Concluding Thoughts
When American Protestants had begun to focus upon the Holy Land by the end of the nineteenth century, they viewed a carefully crafted Christian view of the “mystery of the East”—a baptized, Protestant Orientalism. No longer an Ottoman backwater, Palestine was the Holy Land, a new revelation or “fifth gospel.” Protestants saw a potential future home for the Jews that would fulfill many of their religious expectations for the prophetic age of fulfillment to come. These expectations had been shaped in part by the Scofield interpretations of the prophecies of the Bible itself and their popularized interpretation in the broader prevailing field of premillennial Dispensationalism. In addition, in the view of many Protestants, the Arabs were benighted and lacking in the benefits of progress: they were in need of the benevolent protection and oversight of the West. Overcrowding and poverty in urban ghettos in the West had led to the discussion and consideration of various Jewish resettlement solutions, and Palestine seemed to be the perfect creative solution to the problem. These perspectives fed into what would become a widely accepted belief in the early twentieth century—the idea that Ottoman Palestine was rightly a Jewish homeland.
Though American Catholics have largely favored pilgrimages to Rome over those to Palestine, American Protestants have flocked to the Holy Land in droves since the middle of the nineteenth century. Many early Protestant travel writers attempted to create a new form of biblicism, a “fifth gospel,” in addition to the four in the New Testament. This new gospel adds to the revelation already present in the Bible through the analysis of such concrete, material phenomena as rocks, hills, and flowers in the geographical Palestine. This analysis sometimes echoed the commitments of Romanticism by celebrating the presence of the divine in nature in the East, but would emphasize prophecy and ultimately support Zionism.
Wide Protestant reading audiences in the United States were fascinated with this new emerging frontier to explore and understand, just as the West Coast of America had been attained and was finally being settled. They anticipated travel narratives of Palestine, appreciating the unique confirmation of prophecy, faith, and religious experience that the Holy Land afforded their ministers. The nagging uncertainties created by Modernism seemed soothed by the historical “proof” provided by pilgrimage narratives written by contemporaries. Protestants believed that one could not argue with the stones and the hills of Palestine. They simply stood there as silent testimonials—irrefutable monuments to Christian history. Protestant readers were also able to make a vicarious pilgrimage through narratives provided by their ministers, who each created a somewhat personal Holy Land based upon subjective experience, denominational emphases, and shared views. Nevertheless, there were distinct commonalties in the Protestant Holy Land tour genre, exhibiting common traits of the new movement of American geopiety.
Some of the views that were shared by these figures were polarized. Arabs were often either idealized as modern representations of biblical figures as they went about their lives, or pitied for their lack of civilization and progress. In addition, the Holy Land was seen as either over-civilized by the influence of Eastern Christians or excessively primitive due to its lack of technological advancement. The tension between the Protestant commitment to a religion of spirituality or heart rather than of place caused preachers to defend their idea of a holy site and of pilgrimage. Finally, the idea of a biblical curse upon the land of Palestine and its residents called its special holy nature into question and created a need for a prophetic and spiritual interpretation of the negative phenomena of the misery and poverty of the area—a massive undertaking, finding holiness in a place they found so miserable. Protestants had to turn to an inward interpretive and creative place to conform their pilgrimage to their beliefs and expectations. It necessitated a literary transformation of the raw personal knowledge of pilgrimage.
Protestant ministers brought home an interpretation of the gospel as an out-of-doors phenomenon, connecting Jesus to the wind, sky, and flowers of the Holy Land. Next, the idea of Jews on Arab lands was cast as a spiritual event rather than a political or colonialist one. As Palestine was presented to them, most Protestants believed that it was in the best interest of the Arabs to be colonized by the Jews in agricultural ventures in keeping with the latest popular Protestant millennial trends.
There was a striking difference between the Bible lands, characters, and scenes depicted in nineteenth-century parlor Bibles and the dirty, poor Ottoman backwater that pilgrim writers saw. A difficult to resolve confusion was the result—necessitating the adoption of new attitudes and frameworks towards Palestine. New Protestant parallel shrines quickly sprang up to serve American Protestant religious needs. Writers constructed new, coherent meanings from the raw jumbles of sensory experiences found in Palestine.
Local Arabs (and sometimes Jews) often provided enhanced scenery—a living Bible diorama—as they stood about in tribal clothing in less populated areas. Photographs of these locals became new Bible illustrations for American Protestants—sometimes labeled “Jacob with his flocks,” or something of that nature. Americans assented so readily to a Holy Land populated by Jews, not Muslims, because they had already seen photographs labeled in this way (e.g., Muslim shepherds labeled as Old Testament heroes). Suddenly, with the advent of pilgrimage narratives in the second half of the nineteenth century, maps and photographs of the Holy Land begin to appear in nearly every Protestant Bible. The Holy Land had become almost a Scripture unto itself, and it was smoothly and easily grafted into Protestant Bibles, enhancing its scientific credentials through the prestige of sciences such as geography and historical photography.
The lack of development of the local Palestinian culture combined with the treatment of women caused American Protestant pilgrims to treat Holy Land locals with indifference or even disdain. It was undecided as to whether the primitiveness of Palestine was pathetic mismanagement or picturesque historical scenery. In the end, as I have shown, the answer was “both.” The lack of development was thought to preserve the land of the Bible as frozen in time and available for study, while it also aroused benevolent societies and colonialist impulses.
In the new Christian Zionist view of the Holy Land, contemporary Jews became important players in a newly created premillennialist salvation drama, as Christians sought to usher in a new millennial era. The return of the Jews to Palestine through political Zionism would signal the final victory of Christ on the stage of human history. A massive political effort was under way by the 1880s—a Christian colonial project that would people the Middle Eastern remote corner of Palestine with Diaspora Jews. This project would transform Palestine into something more biblical and holy.
As Protestants recoiled from the ceremonial aspects of the well-established ancient Christian shrines already to be found in Palestine, they sought out new modes of Protestant worship in places where there were none. Following their Protestant heritage, they sought to purify and educate—they saw the shrines as corrupted and encumbered with centuries of foreign tradition that had departed from the true historical essence of the Bible. Hence they created their own parallel sites—sites that reflected American Protestant expectations and augmented the holiness of the area. When this was not possible, they sought Christ in the outdoors, in the wild untamed wilderness areas of Palestine. Since these places were pristine, they were thought to link directly to biblical times. In this sense, their writings suggested (even if they were unaware of it) that history had been stationary. Progress had not yet begun. New vistas of scientific inquiry presented themselves—the raw materials for a new academic fields of biblical geography and archaeology were announced and discussed in Western universities. The fertile shores lay waiting for the ambush of eager students and teachers, full of dreams and adventure.
The nineteenth-century Holy Land craze was the beginning of modern-day Protestant pilgrimage. It was the epoch when the broader Protestant public began to form opinions about Palestine where they previously had none, in line with some of their millennial hopes and expectations, and to look eastward for the beautiful, utopian Promised Land pictured in their Bible illustrations. As John Davis writes of Palestine Park at Chautauqua, the Holy City at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and the popular parlor pictographs of the Holy Land, “miniature worlds are dominated worlds.”
[1] Travel narratives were likewise small worlds unto themselves, crafted by religious leadership for widespread consumption that exerted a tremendous influence upon politics and culture in America for decades to come. Over time, the natives of the land were thought to make up a pleasant, historical, and biblical backdrop that served to enhance what became the modern tourist experience. By the twentieth century, enduring patterns for visiting and viewing the East were established by these early pilgrims, and their influence endured for decades.
1. John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 92.