For this fine and illuminating ethnography of American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, Hillary Kaell traveled with one evangelical group and one Catholic group. She also interviewed participants in three other evangelical and two other Catholic tour groups. Kaell focuses on the travelers rather than tour leaders, noting that other scholars have already extensively scrutinized the ideology of Christian Zionism, which she did not find to be as strong among travelers as it may be among some prominent and much-studied ministers. Kaell argues that these tours are life events during which participants “grapple with what it means to be a Christian in the United States today” as they negotiate the “juxtaposition of religion with commercialism, tourism, and global experience” (5). Thus she makes a contribution to the field of American lived religion in her portraits of these travelers, most of whom are older, and most of whom are women (7).

Kaell makes a major intervention by including Catholics as part of this story. As she points out, nearly all work on American Christians and the Holy Land has centered on protestants, and much of that has investigated the particularly protestant ways they interacted with the Holy Land, such as rejecting Catholic and Orthodox worship sites while preferring natural sites that seemed to them to be original and unmediated. Scholars interested in Americans and the Holy Land in historical context will especially find her first chapter of use. What she includes about protestants is necessary to her project but well-traveled material. Much less familiar is her discussion of American Catholics' historical interest in the Holy Land, such as the construction of replicas of Holy Land sites at the Franciscan Monastery of Mount St. Sepulchre in Washington, D.C., in 1899 (35). These replicas were based on medieval Crusader history rather than the time of Jesus, which protestants favored. Chapter 4 situates contemporary Catholic travelers in the context of changes associated with the Second Vatican Council. While Catholics are often cast as devotional rather than scriptural, Kaell finds that Catholics traveling to the Holy Land often consider themselves “Jesus-centered and scripture-focused” (101), and most had engaged in Bible study groups. Many of them contrasted their views on the Bible to those of their parents, who, raised before the Vatican II document Dei Verbum, had been more likely to see Bible reading as a signifier of protestantism (102).

Interestingly, Kaell finds that many contemporary American Catholics' views of the Holy Land are not that different from what we already know about American protestants' views. On their trip, Catholics' reactions to the Orthodox areas of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were that it was dark, overly ornate, and too crass, in that they were expected to put money directly in priests' hands (127). Confronted with Orthodox difference, she writes, “American Catholics react by resorting to long-standing criticisms that, ironically, Protestants once used against the Church” (128). Some Catholics also were critical of evangelical protestants they encountered at a Jordan River baptism site; as one memorably put it, it appeared to her like “a trailer park Disney World” (130). This is a valuable corrective since, as Kaell notes, “In the U.S. context, scholars generally concentrate on Protestant anti-Catholicism” (130) rather than criticisms that might go in other directions.

There is much here that adds to our understanding. The main reservation I have with this book is its relationship to politics. Kaell does not avoid all political questions; for example, she analyzes the issue of Western ownership of the Holy Land when she argues that, these days, “Western pilgrims do not seek political control of the Holy Land” (159). Rather, she notes, they seek a sense of belonging through their identification with the land claims of either Israelis or Palestinians. Yet Christians who identify with the latter group are seriously marginalized here. Where, in a book purporting in its subtitle to be about American Christians, are non-evangelical protestants? One cannot expect an author to do everything, of course, but non-evangelical protestants visit the Holy Land in large numbers. As we learn in an endnote on page 211, 30 percent of Americans who travel to the Holy Land are “mainline Protestant, members of Black historic churches, and Pentecostal” (211), while evangelicals comprise 35 percent and Catholics 25 percent. Kaell finds that most travelers she encountered wished to avoid political topics, which is why leaving non-evangelical protestants out of this narrative creates a false impression of American Christians and the Holy Land in the present moment: these Christians are often committed to involvement in, rather than avoidance of, the political issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Nevertheless, the Catholic tour group she accompanied did broach the topic of the conflict. Kaell's description of how it happened suggests she had attempted to avoid tours with overt political content. Because of “the influence of a few group members” (23), she writes, the tour became more explicitly pro-Palestinian than she anticipated. Without the special request of the group's “most vocal members” (58), she writes, the tour would not have “included a number of extras related to Palestinian Christians” (22). Nothing of the sort happened on the evangelical tour: evangelical pilgrims expressed a commitment to avoiding politics at the same time that they were, as Kaell acknowledges, quite “pro-Israeli” (26). Even though Kaell's wish to minimize the role of the conflict in this project is understandable, not further analyzing this evangelical stance allows a pro-Israel position to be framed as nonpolitical whereas the pro-Palestinian position of some Catholic tour members is framed as intrusively political, a difference that has been reproduced throughout the historiography on this topic for many decades now.