american holy land: orientalism, disneyization, and the evangelical gaze

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American Holy Land: Orientalism,

Disneyization, and the Evangelical Gaze

JACKIE FELDMAN/AMOS S. RON Introduct ion The American Protestant gaze on the Holy Land has been influenced, not only by Biblical paradigms, but by Orientalist world-views and the process of theming and disneyization. These processes shape the gaze both through the mass-culture industry, as well as within Evangelical churches. By analyzing the construction and narration of two fairly re-cent Biblical sites, we demonstrate how new Holy Land sites are tailored to reflect changing American Protestant gazes and expectations. At the same time, local agents may strategically channel those gazes to legitim-ize their own interests and world-views.

Orientalism, according to Timothy Mitchell, has three salient fea-tures: essentialism, otherness, and absence. By organizing and producing the Orient as passive, static, emotional and chaotic, as opposed to an ac-tive, mobile, rational and orderly West, the colonial world can be mas-tered, and that mastery will reinforce those defining features.1 At the same time, the Orient was infused with romance, as a place of desire.2

1 Cf. Timothy Mitchell: “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order”, in: Ni-

cholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: The Universi-ty of Michigan Press 1992, pp. 289-317 at p. 289.

2 Cf. Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978, p. 1; Malini Johar Schueller: US Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1998, p. 4.

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Furthermore, since the 19th century, the Orientalist view of the East – and the Holy Land in particular – has been produced and reified by the exhibitionary order: by the presentation of the East as spectacle. Wheth-er as tableau vivant, miniature model or World’s Fair exhibit, such forms present themselves as controlled environments which can be vi-sually consumed and comprehended by the Western spectator. The 19th century spectacles of the Orient also shaped American and British tour-ing practices in the Middle East.3

In the United States, additionally, the Holy Land and Zion have served as an American cultural myth, which inspired numerous specta-cular models and representations. These representations legitimized American Protestant visions of themselves and the world.4 Along with oil, visions and narratives of the ‘Holy Land’ as a site of mainly Chris-tian origins have forged cultural investments that allowed many Ameri-cans to become intimately involved in the Middle East.5 Here, we wish to focus on the way American Protestant values and images are being in-scribed on the physical space of Christian sites in Israel/Palestine, shap-ing a Holy Land in the American Orientalist image.

Orientalism, however, is not uniform across cultures and time pe-riods; it interacts with other interests and ways of seeing the world. American Protestant visitors’ images and expectations of the Holy Land are subject to changing forms of sensory experience of both geographi-cal sites and religious truth at large.6 An important influence is that of Disneyworld and other theme parks.7 As part of the late 20th century processes of globalization, Alan Bryman has identified disneyization as a process including four components: 1. themed environments, “material forms that are products of a cultural process aimed at investing con-structed spaces with symbolic meaning and conveying that meaning to

3 Cf. T. Mitchell: “Orientalism”, pp. 303-314. 4 Cf. M. J. Schueller: US Orientalisms. 5 Cf. Melani McAlister: Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests

in the Middle East since 1945, Berkley, Los Angeles: University of Cali-fornia Press 2005, pp. 1-2.

6 Cf. Amos S. Ron/Jackie Feldman: “From Spots to Themed Sites – The Evolution of the Protestant Holy Land”, in: Journal of Heritage Tourism 4/3 (2009), pp. 201-216.

7 Cf. Alan Bryman: “The Disneyization of Society”, in: Sociological Re-view 47/1 (1999), pp. 25-47; Alan Bryman: The Disneyization of Society, London: Sage 2004; Noam Shoval: “Commodification and Theming of the Sacred: Changing Patterns of Tourist Consumption in the ‘Holy Land’”, in: Mark Gottdiener (ed.), New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Cul-ture and Commodification, Lanham et al.: Rowman & Littlefield 2000, pp. 251-263.

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inhabitants and users through symbolic motifs”;8 2. hybrid consumption – the interlocking of different institutional spheres within forms of con-sumption; 3. merchandising – the sale of goods with copyright images and logos – and 4. performative labor – service work involving display of a certain mood as part of the labor involved.9 Disneyization has made its way into religious worship as well, with a series of Christian theme parks that have popped up over the last twenty years, many, though not all, geared for Protestants and built in the United States.10

For the purposes of this paper, we adapt John Urry’s understanding of the tourist gaze11 as a historically and socially constructed way of consuming landscape. The particular modes of the tourists’ search for the extraordinary, claims Urry, have consequences for the ‘places’ that are its object and, consequently, for the people building and running those places. In recent years, scholars of tourism have noted how pro-cesses of McDonaldization and disneyization have extended the ‘envi-ronmental bubble’ typical of group tours to more and more touristic spaces throughout the world.12 We will demonstrate how forces of Ori-entalism and disneyization have generated a distinctly contemporary American Protestant pilgrim gaze, which, in recent years, has been ac-commodated by new Holy Land sites which materialize that gaze and thus reproduce it.

We begin by providing a brief sketch of the processes of Christian sacralization of space in the Holy Land, particularly for Protestants. We then turn to two recent Biblical sites – Yardenit on the Jordan River and Nazareth Village – and demonstrate how the American Protestant gaze is objectified by local agents’ construction of sites to accommodate it. In doing so, we will also show how local Israeli or Palestinian agents de-vise strategies to channel that gaze to serve needs of their own identity politics.

8 Mark Gottdiener: The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fan-

tasies, and Themed Environments, Boulder: Westview Press 22001, p. 5. 9 Cf. A. Bryman: Disneyization, p. 2. 10 Cf. Scott A. Lukas: “Politics of Reverence and Irreverence: Social Dis-

course on Theming Controversies”, in: Scott A. Lukas (ed.), The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2007, pp. 271-293 at pp. 274-275; A. S. Ron/J. Feldman: “Spots”.

11 Cf. John Urry: The Tourist Gaze, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications 22002.

12 Cf. George Ritzer/Allan Liska: “‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’: Complimentary perspectives on contemporary Tourism”, in: Chris Rojek/ John Urry (eds.), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and The-ory, London, New York: Routledge 1997, pp. 96-109.


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The Histor ical Development of Protestant Concepts of Space and Travel

In the Holy Land, sacred narratives are at the origin of sacred space.13 In the 4th century, a large number of sites associated with Biblical events were identified, many through pilgrim reports; churches sanctified those spaces through the performance of rituals and processions, and Constan-tine constructed several large memorial sites that sanctified the Biblical events – and his imperial power, made manifest through construction and iconography.14 Thus, pilgrim itineraries and stories often served as predecessors to the construction of ‘facts on the ground’. Christians then performed rituals sanctifying those Biblical events in their home churches, producing copies of holy sites, painting pictures, and dissemi-nating relics that formed images and expectations that the pilgrims took with them to the Holy Land – and back to their churches.15 Thus, long before discussions of American hyperreality16 or postmodern simula-cra,17 the symbolic and material exchange between original and repre-sentation is an essential movement throughout the history of sanctifica-tion of Christian Biblical spaces. Often new sites were dedicated (Prison of Christ, mounting stone at Bethphage), or old ones refashioned, in accordance with such expecta-tions. Even central events in Christian Heilsgeschichte, such as the Bapt-ism of Jesus or the place of his Crucifixion, have been marked in differ-ent sites by different churches and in different periods. Thus, as Halb-wachs showed 80 years ago, the territory of Israel/Palestine is a palimp-sest upon which religious groups impose their successive conceptual

13 Cf. Robert A. Markus: “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Ori-

gins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places”, in: Journal of Early Christian Studies 2/3 (1994), pp. 257-271.

14 Cf. Francine Cardman: “The Rhetoric of Holy Places: Palestine in the Fourth Century”, in: Studia Patristica XVII/I (1982), pp. 18-25; Noel Lenski (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press 2006; Robert Louis Wilken: The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

15 Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith: To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987, pp. 74-95; see also R. A. Markus: „How on Earth“.

16 Cf. Umberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, Orlando: Harvest/HBJ 1986.

17 Cf. Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press 1994; id.: America, London, New York: Verso Press 1988.

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grids.18 Pilgrimage, along with imperial and ecclesiastic power, and, oc-casionally, local authorities, partitions space in ways that make it possi-ble for non-critical thought to accept the resultant reality at face value.19

For Catholics, holiness arises from the sense of being part of a long, often unbroken history, during which the will of Jesus has been enacted in the world through the agency of the Church.20 While Protestants took exception to ‘holy sites’, as mediating objects whose sanctity was trans-ferred to them through physical contact with the Divine, they have in-creasingly been drawn to the land as the physical illustration of signifi-cant loci of their faith. For Protestants, sacred scripture provides the ba-sic repertoire of potential sites.21 The landscape calls forth words, not as heard but as seen, as if lettered across the view. Their outward sight should call forth in inward vision the words of remembered prayers and scriptural passages.22 “The Protestant task is always to return to that first simplicity which so exactly matches the Protestant’s own. The plainness of the landscape is itself held up as evidence of the truth of Protestant-ism.”23 Thus, for Protestants, a holy place ‘covered over’ with Orthodox or Catholic churches is, in effect, a site which commemorates ecclesias-tical domination (and of the false church!) rather than the ‘truth’ that, in their view, the ecclesiastical institution has usurped, distorting the unim-peded relationship between the individual and Christ. Topography, un-cluttered nature, simplicity, rather than traditional churches, become the scriptural signs inscribed on the Protestant Holy Land.24 Furthermore, Protestants presented Jesus as “a fellow-seeker after the unmediated Di-vine, as if He were not the object of the pilgrimage, [the Divine person

18 Cf. Maurice Halbwachs: “The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the

Holy Land”, in: id., On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press 1992, pp. 191-235.

19 Cf. Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space, Oxford, UK, Cambridge, USA: Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 280.

20 Cf. Noga Collins-Kreiner et al.: Christian Tourism to the Holy Land: Pil-grimage during Security Crisis, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2006, p. 17.

21 Cf. Glenn Bowman: “Christian ideology and the image of a Holy Land: The place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities”, in: John Eade/ Michael J. Sallnow (eds.), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2000, pp. 98-121.

22 Cf. Gershon Greenberg: The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1620-1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scrip-ture’s Sacred Territory, Lanham: University Press of America 1994, p. 106.

23 Charles Lock: “Bowing Down to Wood and Stone: One Way to be a Pil-grim”, in: Simon Coleman/John Elsner (eds.), Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage, New York, Oxford: Berghahn 2003, pp. 110-132 at p. 123.

24 Cf. A. S. Ron/J. Feldman: “Spots”, pp. 205-206.


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of the Trinity] but as if He were himself merely the first and chief of pil-grims.”25 They seek the ‘original’ stones where Jesus might have walked on, in order to ‘walk with Jesus’.

Increased pilgrimage was inseparable from the colonial project of dismantling the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.26 This was mani-fested in the establishment of pilgrim and tourist infrastructure such as churches, modern hotels, hostels and hospices to serve the needs of pil-grims of colonial powers and encourage them to come, as well as through the many journeys undertaken by church officials and missiona-ries, who also established missions, hospitals and Christian schools. Part of this larger movement was the ‘discovery’ of the Protestant site of Calvary, the Garden Tomb. The latter relied on information and ways of seeing expressed through the survey, mapping and excavation work of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Visits to archaeological sites and archaeological discourse are a prominent aspect of Protestant pilgrimag-es – both liberal and Evangelical. British and subsequently, Israeli arc-haeology often cleared ‘later levels of habitation’ to ‘reveal’ the Biblical foundations underlying them and enable direct contact – even commu-nion – of the individual with Biblical times. Other related Protestant (and, not incidentally, Zionist) pilgrim practices are the panoramic view, where one can visually control the landscape without mingling with the masses or natives,27 as well as the extensive use of maps and map stu-dies. The British and later Israeli project of mapping the country dug ‘underneath’ the Arabic place names to ‘reveal’ their Biblical Hebrew

25 Ch. Lock: “One Way to be a Pilgrim”, p. 118, cf. also p. 122; see also Ja-

nie R. Todd: “Whither Pilgrimage: A consideration of Holy Land pilgri-mage today”, in: Annales de la Commission des Pélerinages Chrétiens, Je-rusalem: Notre Dame Center 1984, pp. 20-54.

26 Cf. Doron Bar/Kobi Cohen-Hattab: “A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Cen-tury Palestine”, in: Middle Eastern Studies 39/2 (2003), pp. 131-148; Ye-hoshua Ben-Arieh: The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, Jerusalem, Detroit: The Magnes Press and Wayne State Universi-ty Press 1979; Thomas Hummel/Ruth Hummel: Patterns of the Sacred: En-glish Protestant and Russian Orthodox Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century, London: Scorpion 1995; Burke O. Long: Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-sity Press 2003; Daniel Bertrand Monk: An Aesthetic Occupation: The Im-mediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict, Durham, London: Duke University Press 2002; Hilton Obenzinger: American Palestine: Mel-ville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999.

27 Cf. Jackie Feldman: “Constructing a shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli guiding performances for Protestant pilgrims”, in: American Ethnologist 34/2 (2007), pp. 351-374.

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origins;28 such practices created a land dotted with recently uncovered and identified ruins that could be presented as self-evidently Biblical, while Oriental Arabs could be relegated to the background, or if proper-ly costumed, made into stand-ins for Biblical figures.

American Protestant ism and Zion Zion has a long history as a charged term in American Protestantism, and the American nation often depicted itself as a chosen people, its land as promised, its historical trajectory as a wandering through the wilder-ness, and its enemies – the Indians – as Canaanites to be vanquished by God’s people.29 The American experience with Indians and the frontier, and their lack of direct experience of ruling others in the East before the mid-20th century, yielded somewhat different images that were projected on the Oriental other than say, in Britain.30 Americans were more famil-iar with Old Testament passages relating to the Land, and many of its place names were superimposed on the American continent (Bethlehem, New Canaan, Efrata, Hebron, Nazareth).31 Unquestionably, this ‘Holy Land craze’ was also fueled by popular 19th century ideologies of mille-narism in the United States.32

An example of such Protestant Holy Land education is Palestine Park at the Chautauqua Institution, “a half-acre tract of land outfitted in 1874 with a scaled Jordan River, Galilee, and Jerusalem”,33 built on the shores of Lake Erie in Upstate New York in 1874. At the time, Chautauqua was an important center of Protestant adult religious education, and the im-agined Holy Land in America, a “geographically materialized narrative of Christian redemption […] [in which] fantasies of the Holy Land, en-

28 Cf. The PEF project was also the basis for the Zionist project to create the

“Hebrew Map”. For the common roots of Zionism and Protestantism, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin: “The Return to the History of Redemption (Or, What Is The ‘History’ to Which the ‘Return’ in the Phrase ‘The Jewish Return to History’ Refers)”, in: S. N. Eisenstadt/Moshe Lissak (eds.), Zio-nism and the Return to History: A Reevaluation (Hebrew), Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi Press 1999, pp. 249-279.

29 Cf. H. Obenzinger: American Palestine. 30 Cf. M. J. Schueller: U.S. Orientalisms, pp. 1-21. 31 See Wilbur Zelinsky: “Some Problems in the Distribution of Generic Terms

in the Place-names of the Northeastern United States”, in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 45/4 (1955), pp. 319-349.

32 Cf. Y. Ben-Arieh: Rediscovery; G. Greenberg: Holy Land. 33 Stephanie Stidham Rogers: “American Protestant Pilgrimage: Nineteenth-

Century Impressions of Palestine”, in: Koinonia Journal: The Princeton Se-minary Graduate Forum XV/1 (2003), pp. 60-80 at p. 60.


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tangled with ideologies of religion and national selfhood, were acted out”.34 Through landscaping, construction of models of the Tabernacle and Jerusalem, and performances by actors and vacationers dressed in Oriental ‘Biblical’ costume, the site created a Christian fantasy world, more accessible and far less arduous than that of contemporary Pales-tine. It catered both to the desire for tactile intimacy with the Biblical past and American’s emergent imperial sense and fascination with exot-ic, primitive Orientals, while proclaiming the triumph of Christianity.35 It may also have spurred modern-day Protestant pilgrimage, as Ameri-cans traveled to find “the beautiful, utopian, promised land pictured in their Bible illustrations”.36

In order to affirm the progressive nature of the Protestant, in opposi-tion to a backward ‘Orient’,37 pilgrim contact (as opposed to that of mis-sions) with locals and especially Oriental Christian churches was to be avoided. Hence, Protestant tours of the period, particularly British and American ones, promoted effective isolation of pilgrims from both the locals and Russian pilgrims through accommodation in tents, imported Western food and beer, and bathing huts at the Jordan. Where limited contact was made with natives, it was usually to see how Biblical cus-toms were preserved in indigenous villages; even then, such visits often took place where English mission schools were built, thus confirming the progressive and civilizing nature of Western Christianity. Thus, Prot-estant pilgrimage shared in the romantic Orientalist gaze in which the natives became artifacts, markers of an unchanging past, and stand-ins for the Western visitors’ (spiritual) ancestors. The removal of the natives from the present to the past is, of course, a powerful expression of the Orientalist view.38

In the late 20th century, processes within American Protestantism have made Holy Land pilgrimage more popular: the greater accessibility and affordability of travel to the Holy Land, better tourism infrastructure in Israel, and the shift towards dispensationalism in American Protes-tantism, a doctrine which sees current events in Israel as manifestations of God’s hand in history on the way to the immanent end times. As Evan-gelical churches are seen as pro-Israel, since the mid-1970s, Israeli gov-ernments and local organizations have invested substantial efforts to cul-

34 B. O. Long: Imagining the Holy Land, p. 10. 35 Cf. ibid., p. 27. 36 S. S. Rogers: “American Protestant Pilgrimage”, p. 78. 37 Cf. A. Raz-Krakotzkin: “Return”. 38 Cf. Johannes Fabian: Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its

Object, New York: Columbia University Press 1983.

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tivate this niche market. The sites we have chosen to examine, Yardenit and Nazareth Village, are two such examples.

Yardenit In the 1980s, the Israeli government developed a new site for Baptism – Yardenit (‘Little Jordan’) on the Jordan River, at the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee. One traditional site of Jesus’ baptism by John the Bapt-ist, near Jericho (marked by a Greek Orthodox monastery), was on the border between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Kingdom of Jordan. It has been designated as a restricted military area since 1967, with limited and difficult access for pilgrims. The traditional site of Beth Abara, near Jericho, already marked on the Madaba Map (see fig. 1), is dusty, muddy and polluted. Another site, also designated as Bethany Beyond the Jordan,39 is on the eastern side of the Jordan River in the Kingdom of Jordan. This site, which receives more than one million vis-itors annually, is not visited by many pilgrims who restrict their week-long visit to the borders of the State of Israel. The Yardenit site is complete with concrete ramps and guardrails leading into the water, several amphitheaters for baptismal services, toi-lets, a changing room and showers, video filming services, and a snack bar. The adjoining restaurant serves St. Peter’s Fish lunches, and the (Jewish-run) Christian gift shop sells a wide variety of Christian litera-ture, music and souvenirs; rents robes and towels for pilgrims; provides plastic bottles for Jordan Water for pilgrims to take home and sells bap-tismal certificates.40 This well-equipped site is not linked with any church or mentioned specifically in any scriptural or traditional source. Yet it has become, over the course of 25 years, the place of immersion for almost all American Christians and is a ‘must’ site for prayer and immersion (or sprinkling of water) on the vast majority of Christian iti-neraries, both Protestant and Catholic.

39 The place, known as “Bethany Beyond the Jordan”, has been developed in

recent years, and is now on UNESCO’s tentative World Heritage List (http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/1556). See also: Kevin J. Wright, The Christian Travel Planner, Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Inc., 2008, pp. 51-52, http://baptismsite.com/.

40 See below p. 162 with note 43.


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Fig. 1: Madaba Mosaic Map showing pilgrim places in Israel/Jordan (6th century), detail

We suggest that the layout of the site, in which hundreds may witness the baptism simultaneously, is felt as appropriate by a public that seeks natural, uncluttered, open-air settings,41 yet is accustomed to worship in theater-shaped mega-churches (in which over 25 % of American Chris-tians worship); far more appropriate than the muddy banks of the river adjoining a Greek Orthodox monastery.

Moreover, the shaping of the space at Yardenit both reflects and en-courages particular contemporary Protestant forms of religious practice. The Yardenit space is a theatrical one, in which, in addition to the con-gregation grouped around the steps, tourists, both Israeli and foreign, of-ten come to gawk at the exotic white-clad pilgrims being submerged into the water, and coming up loudly proclaiming praise. While baptism has always been both an individual act of faith and a public affirmation to the world (cf. Acts 2, 38), it also came to mark affiliation with and com-mitment to a shared community of worship and practice (being baptized into a particular church). Here, however, the ‘witnesses’ of baptism do not coincide with the boundaries of the church community. It may well be that some tourist/pilgrim who might hesitate to be baptized into a

41 Cf. A. S. Ron/J. Feldman: “Spots”, pp. 205-206.

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church in their home area, might feel more comfortable in performing a ceremony in a place billed as historically ‘authentic’ and with a congre-gation whose boundaries are more fluid. The new devotee returns home already baptized, and does not need to deliberate at length with family and friends about their decision. This fluidity corresponds with the in-creasing mobility of American Protestants from one denomination or community to another in search of particular experiences and/or services – what Wuthnow terms the shift from a theology of dwelling to one of seeking.42 Fig. 2: Yardenit, the relatively new baptismal site on the upper Jordan River, near the Sea of Galilee. It has become the preferred site of baptism for most pilgrims.

There is considerable pressure ‘from below’ to be baptized. In the au-thors’ prior capacity as tour guides, we have not infrequently witnessed the vain efforts of pastors to dissuade members of the congregation from being baptized in the cold waters of the Jordan in wintertime. Likewise, the ‘renewal of baptismal vows’, though not practiced elsewhere by many congregations, is demanded by many participants, and encouraged through the site management’s production of an elegant certificate avail-

42 Cf. Robert Wuthnow: After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the

1950s, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1998, pp. 1-14.


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able in ten different languages and two different theological formula-tions (and provided free with robe rentals) to be signed by the pastor.43

We suggest that while the possible link of the location to a Biblical event (even if farfetched) and the ‘naturalness’ of the setting (a relative term) are essential for the establishment of a holy site, the success of Yardenit reflects changes in American Protestant church buildings, wor-ship styles and theologies. In American Protestantism, the differences between sacred and profane spaces have become blurred. If, in the past, places of worship were distinct buildings in the urban and rural geogra-phy that drew people to leave the everyday world and enter a sanctuary, now those churches are often nondescript, functional buildings that look like shopping malls or offices from the outside and remind people of everyday life.44 The Temple hall is being replaced by the mega church theatre; the hymn book makes way for the Power Point presentation of lyrics on the screen, sometimes with Holy Land scenes in the back-ground. Church officials provide financial and estate counseling to their parishioners. As the neighborhood church is being increasingly replaced by the ‘Christian community center’, where the worship hall is often lo-cated in a larger building containing athletic facilities, franchised food courts, Christian book and music stores, and financial counseling servic-es, commodification is no longer anathema to the Christian life of wor-ship45 – as we find at Yardenit.

The merging of religious space and that of consumption, as well as the American orientation, are even more explicit on the Yardenit web-site. The website announces that it offers baptismal facilities for “small groups as well as up to 1000 people at a time”. It has “one of the most modern rest-rooms in Israel, consisting of toilets, showers and dressing room facilities” as well as “an impressively spacious free parking lot”. The souvenir shop is, according to the website, “designed in the form of a bazaar in a Galilean style typical of the time of Jesus. It sells numerous holy items and rents robes and towels to the visitors, who take home a Baptism or a Rededication certificate. [...] For your convenience all

43 The first reads “X was baptized in the Jordan”. The second, for denomina-

tions that see baptism as a one-time experience, speaks of “renewal of bap-tismal vows”.

44 Cf. R. Wuthnow: After Heaven, p. 9. 45 Cf. This reflects the larger tendency of disneyization of American culture

(A. Bryman: Disneyization), in which the spaces of consumption, entertain-ment and work (and, we might add, worship) are increasingly merged. One of the authors (A. S. R.) was recently told that Pastor Chuck Smith, found-er of Calvary Chapel and a major figure in the Evangelical megachurch movement in the United States, was instrumental in founding Yardenit in the 1970s (Yonatan Bobrov: Interview with Amos S. Ron, January 21, 2009).

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prices quoted in the gift shop are both in American dollars and Israeli shekels. However most foreign currencies are accepted. The shop is tax-free, which means that persons spending the acquired amount of $100 or more are entitled to receiving back the tax which is payable on exit from Israel.”46

An additional webpage links the development of the site with pro-gress and the Zionist endeavor: “For hundreds of years, the Jordan re-mained desolate. Pilgrims and adventurous travelers described the des-cent to the Jordan, baptism and sailing as one of the most exciting events of their journey in the Holy Land. The character of the region changed dramatically only in 1932, when the Naharayim hydraulic plant was built to utilize the water of the Jordan and the Yarmukh rivers to pro-duce electricity. At that time, the Deganya dam, located next to the Yar-denit Baptismal Site, was constructed. […] The northern part of the river […], where the Yardenit Baptismal Site is located, is the only place where it is still possible to be baptized in the flowing water of the Jordan river, and experience a sense of purification and spiritual rebirth.”47 It is interesting to note that the (secular Jewish) kibbutz running the site positions itself both with the Protestant West – as restorer of the Biblical past –, as well as with Israeli pioneers – by identifying itself with the modern founders of the first kibbutzim (Deganya, Kinneret) that paved the way for the modern state of Israel.

Nazareth Village Nazareth was the site of the Annunciation and the childhood home of Je-sus. In Jesus’ days, Nazareth was a small village, inhabited by a tradi-tional, mainly agricultural Jewish population. Today, in the words of the Nazareth Village book, “this idyllic town has been transformed into a teeming city of 70,000 […] Horns blare from the cars and buses that jam the streets from dawn to dusk […]”.48 Nazareth’s population are Pales-tinian Israelis, and the religious sites in Nazareth, mainly Catholic and Orthodox, repulse many Protestant visitors who seek to spend their time in more natural and ‘Biblical’-looking environments.49

46 http://www.yardenit.com/info/content/facilities.asp, accessed on January 3,

2010. 47 http://www.yardenit.com/info/content/jordanr.asp, accessed on January 3,

2010. 48 Joel Kauffmann/D. Michael Hostetler: The Nazareth Jesus Knew, Naza-

reth: Nazareth Village 2005, p. 70. 49 Cf. N. Shoval: “Commodification”.


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Established in 2000 by a local Protestant Arab, Dr. Nakhle Beshara, and supported by the Mennonite Mission Network (based in the USA and Canada and administered almost exclusively by North Americans)50 Nazareth Village was designed to bring “to life a farm and Galilean vil-lage, recreating Nazareth as it was 2,000 years ago. It is a window into the life of Jesus, the city’s most famous citizen” (site brochure). Accord-ing to the site’s founding director, D. M. Hostetler, the concept of Naza-reth Village was inspired by heritage sites such as Colonial Williams-burg in Virginia. In return for an admission fee, visitors encounter ac-tors, costumes, staged buildings and streets, and traditional ‘Biblical’ ar-tifacts like a threshing floor, newly built ‘traditional’ homes, streets, and an ‘ancient’ synagogue. Tourists encounter local men, women and child-ren dressed in traditional gear, performing traditional jobs like plowing, picking and crushing of olives, the production and repair of tools, weav-ing, winnowing, and more.51

The scene suggests appealing industry and evokes a nostalgic kin-ship with these agrarian people living close to the soil… There is no sign of dirt, thirst, ill health, or tattered clothing; nothing of hardscrabble po-verty. Like the heritage villages it is modeled on,52 the orderly and sparsely populated spaces of Nazareth Village paint a relatively subur-ban picture, with lives centered on home interiors and nuclear families. This picture is at odds with the communal and extremely crowded out-door life,53 attested to in the Jewish sources of the period and the re-mains of the densely built villages like Capernaum and Chorazin. What sets Nazareth Village apart from a plethora of themed religious environments,54 including several Holy Land theme parks, is its claim to

50 Lynn Bridgers: The American Religious Experience: A Concise History,

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2006, pp. 61-72. 51 In 2008, 60,000 visitors, are about 5% of foreigners entering Nazareth, vi-

sited the site. For the first quarter of 2008 about 65% of the visitors came from the U.S., mostly Protestants. 30% of the visitors were of EU origin (Shirley Roth: Personal Communication to Amos S. Ron, May 12, 2008).

52 Cf. Richard Handler/Eric Gable: The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, London: Duke University Press 1997.

53 Cf. Edward M. Bruner: “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism”, in: American Anthropologist 96/2 (1994), pp. 397-415.

54 Cf. Timothy K. Beal: Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, Boston: Beacon Press 2005; A. S. Ron/ J. Feldman: “Spots”; Yorke M. Rowan: “Repacking the Pilgrimage: Visit-ing the Holy Land in Orlando”, in: id./Uzi Baram (eds.), Marketing Heri-tage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past, Walnut Creek, Cali-fornia: Alta Mira Press 2004, pp. 249-266; Amir Shani/ Manuel Antonio

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the authority of place, as voiced by its founding director: “Nazareth Vil-lage is situated about 500 meters from where Jesus grew up… So when you talk about being only 500 meters away, that’s very, very close. And, in fact, we have found here a winepress from that time period... So we’re actually sitting in a site that we know was farmed by people that day, that time…. Our commitment is to authenticity. People that come here from other places can go to Disney, they can go to Florida… (to the) Holy Land Experience. They can go do that. But here it’s not Mickey Mouse… (People) want the real thing.55 They want to know that it’s as close as they can get to what Jesus would have known.”56 Fig. 3: A guided tour along the Parable Walk, Nazareth Village

The correspondence of the site to Protestant expectations is furthered through the narrative which organizes the sites around the “Parable Walk”. The reconstructed material culture is focused around illustrations of Jesus’ parables; thus the words are “lettered across the landscape”.

Rivera/Denver Severt: “‘To bring God’s word to all people’: The case of a religious theme-site”, in: Tourism 55/1 (2007), pp. 39-50; N. Shoval: “Com-modification”.

55 On Evangelical authenticity, see Yaniv Belhassen/Kellee Caton/William P. Stewart: “The Search for Authenticity in the Pilgrim Experience”, in: Annals of Tourism Research 35/3 (2008), pp. 668–689.

56 D. M. Hostetler: Interview with Amos S. Ron, April 27, 2005.


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Pottery lamps are placed on small shelves high upon the wall, to illu-strate Jesus’ parable of displaying one’s ‘light’ by “placing the lamp on a lamp stand” rather than under a bushel measuring vessel. The process of pressing olives is described at the oil press and linked with Jesus-as-pressed-olive at the Garden of the Oil Press at Gethsemane. The focus on parables eliminates the need for pointing to a particular ‘here’ as the site of a specific event in the life of Jesus, while anchoring the words of Scripture in material objects on display. The parables are also theologi-cally ‘safe’; by hedging the claims to authenticity (“Jesus might have been right near here”, “places like this might have inspired the parable of…”), the site appeals to Protestants without alienating Catholics and others.57 Fig. 4: Staged authenticity at Nazareth Village

57 This strategy is typical of many Protestant sites in the Holy Land and pos-

sibly elsewhere. The Protestants construct sites ‘in their own image’, and then they ‘invite’ others. At the Garden Tomb, for example, although on-site signs and the guiding/devotional literature cite Biblical verses referring to the resurrection, in guided explanations, they often say that they don’t really know for sure where it was (emphasizing locational authenticity) or how it looked (emphasizing visual authenticity), “but it is a marvelous visual aid”. The tactic of displaying small measures of ‘scholarly’ doubt is often used in heritage sites to delineate ‘facts’ and affirm the honesty of the interpreter (see R. Handler/E. Gable: New History, pp. 50-59). In an-other case, one veteran Garden Tomb guide often ends his speech on the authenticity of the Garden Tomb (as opposed to the Holy Sepulchre) with, “well, it’s not so important if it’s here or there; the main thing is, the tomb is empty! Praise the Lord!”

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The entire project relies, if not explicitly, on films and other representa-tions, probably such as the Holy Land Experience in Florida, that shape the pilgrim’s experience of place,58 as well as the authority of scientist discourse as presented in popular renditions of archaeology.59 As one visitor said: “For the first time I could really envision what archaeologi-cal ruins must have looked like. Entering that synagogue is like traveling thru time.”60

While the argument of the Nazareth Village founder is meant to stake out a claim for the ‘real thing’, its reliance on authenticity of place may actually further strengthen visitors’ orientalizing gaze. Many Prot-estant groups complete their tour of the site with a prayer service in the heritage site’s synagogue. The walls there are bare, the space is of the right size for a bus group, the acoustics accommodate hymn-singing or speaking in tongues… Why look for a modest corner in a Catholic Church courtyard, when one can praise the Lord in a place that looks right and is “as close as they can get to what Jesus had known”? In a seven-day, type A see-it-all tour of the Holy Land, some Protestants re-place their visit to the traditional churches in town with a visit to Naza-reth Village,61 thus avoiding all contact with the Oriental Christians – and Muslims – in the marketplaces and churches of the Arab city of Na-zareth. Consequently, the improvisation and uncontrolled nature of the marketplace, “pregnant with [the] possibility”62 and open to crisscross-ing flows of people, noises and smells (as well as improvised contact with local Christians, rare enough in most Christian group tours) is elim-inated.

58 See the parallel claim with respect to Monument Valley in J. Baudrillard:

America, pp. 69-70. 59 Cf. Nadia Abu el-Haj: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and

Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press 2001.

60 http://www.nazarethvillage.com/research/content/synagogue, accessed on January 3, 2010.

61 On the other hand, some churches have promoted virtual practices as re-placement for voyaging and being there. Thus, in 1985, the Vatican an-nounced that Catholics could receive indulgences by listening to the Pope’s annual Christmas benediction on TV or radio, rather than travel to Rome (George Ritzer: The McDonaldization of Society. New Century Edi-tion, Boston: Pine Forge Press 2000, p. 55). The attitude of various reli-gions and religious officials towards virtualization of religious practices merits comparative study.

62 Dipesh Chakrabarty: “Open space/public place: Garbage, modernity and In-dia”, in: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14/1 (1991), pp. 15-31 at p. 26.


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Fig. 5: The synagogue at Nazareth Village

Given the power of the Protestant orientalizing gaze, the best way for Palestinian Christians to find a place in conservative American Protes-tant itineraries may be by confirming Western prejudices and portraying themselves (including what visitors expect Oriental tradition to be) as ‘living stones’ in a heritage site! In the words of the Nazareth Village website: “Come meet the people and experience first-century hospitality. Step through a stone doorway into the dim interior, and smell the smoke from the oil lamps. You will begin to imagine life in another time, when Jesus lived here in Nazareth”.63 Thus, by providing ‘native’ Oriental hospitality in a ‘primitive’ heritage setting, Palestinian Christians are seen to reassert their identification with their illustrious native son, Jesus.

Strategic Oriental iz ing – ‘Living Stones’ On the other hand, the power of the orientalizing Western gaze can be internalized and channeled to strategic ends. Thus, after the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2001, when tourist traffic slowed to a trickle, the

63 http://www.nazarethvillage.com/village.php (Emphasis by the author), ac-

cessed on January 3, 2010.

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site was opened to Palestinian Israeli Muslim school groups. They were presented with displays of how their grandparents lived and worked the land. At the same time, the Palestinian Christian youth of Nazareth could present Jesus as prophet and Palestinian peasant, thus legitimizing their own autochthonous nature as veterans of a glorious 2000-year history, which had been disputed by Palestinian Muslims – in part due to grow-ing influence of the Islamic Movement, which gained force in Nazareth in response to the Christian (and Israeli-promoted) celebrations of Naza-reth 2000. Thus, the tourist infrastructure and visits by American pil-grims generated new artifacts which, in turn, became sources of social capital in an intra-Palestinian struggle.64

Incidentally, the Islamic Movement recognized the combined power of Western tourists’ legitimation,65 sensory experience and archaeologi-cal discourse. According to the site’s founder, Nakhle Beshara, they op-posed the construction of a synagogue at Nazareth Village, claiming it would lend credence to Zionist claims to an ancestral Jewish presence in Palestine. As a fallback measure, they requested that a cross be placed over the synagogue entrance – a move rebutted by the project organiz-ers: “I told them, the New Testament says Jesus was Jewish and preached in the synagogue. If you can show me scientific evidence of a cross on a first-century synagogue, I’ll put one there”.66 In guiding Muslim school groups, however, one of the guides explained that he avoids conflict by referring to the synagogue of Jesus’ day as a majmaÝ (place of gather-ing), while contemporary synagogues are designated by a different Ara-bic word, kanÐs. Science is right; but so is the customer.

Conclusions American Protestant viewing of the Bible Land, like all ways of seeing, is not natural, but is historically, socially and ideologically conditioned by Orientalism, disneyization, commercialism and the changing hie-rarchy of senses.67 The elements of the American Protestant gaze direct pilgrims’ expectations in many informal and unrecognized ways. The ability to attract Protestant pilgrims is, to no small extent, dependent on

64 Cf. D. Michael Hostetler: Interview with Amos S. Ron, April 27, 2005. 65 See Jeremy Boissevain on Maltese festas: “Ritual, Tourism and Cultural

Commoditization in Malta: Culture by the Pound?”, in: Tom Selwyn (ed.), The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons 1996, pp. 105-120.

66 Nakhle Beshara, tour of Nazareth Village, July 8, 2009. 67 Cf. J. Feldman: “Constructing a shared Bible Land”.


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agents’ capacity to construct sites to accommodate this gaze. Thus, this gaze will continue to be a powerful transformative force of the sacred space of the Holy Land, especially given the Israeli government’s ear-marking of Protestant – particularly American Evangelical – pilgrims as an important market.68 The construction of such new sites (re)produces the Orientalist and disneyfied American Protestant gaze as facts on the ground – for others as well. The popularity of the existing sites has led the Israeli government as well as private groups to consider opening ad-ditional Christian theme sites in the future.69

Yet local agents – whether Jewish Israeli or Palestinian Christian – may employ strategic Orientalism as a means of empowerment: enjoy-ing tourist or pilgrim dollars without opening up their homes and lives to the intrusion of the pilgrim/tourist gaze, and, in other cases, even casting themselves as Biblical Hebrews or Living Stones in order to rally West-ern Christian support for the settler or Palestinian cause.70

Some scholars have seen disneyization as a sign of moral decline: Annabel Wharton derides the move from relic to replica to theme park, claiming that with the theme park, “images no longer seem to bear moral responsibility for their actions”.71 She claims that “the progressive ab-straction or commodification of sacred space – from a physical presence to a dangerously deceptive illusion – can be understood as the cultural counterpart to the evolving market.”72 Yet the American Protestant gaze, like all religious phenomena, evolves in accordance with historical and social circumstances. Since the mid-twentieth century, America has wit-nessed a decline in the authority of the written word and a rise in media-

68 While there may be a variety of Protestant gazes, it is the Evangelicals,

identified as the largest potential market for Israel tours, that are most in-fluential as potential consumers of Christian theme sites. Thus, even if at some point there arises a demand for alternative themed environments for other Protestants, the Evangelicals will set the tone. In recent conversa-tions over the construction of an Evangelical theme park near Bethsaida, Uri Dagul, liaison between Evangelicals and the State of Israel, claims that while ‘they’ would rather construct an Evangelical theme park, the author-ities prefer one suitable to the preferences of all Christians (Uri Dagul, In-terview, Jan 7, 2009).

69 U. Dagul: Interview, Jan 7, 2009; Ilene R. Prusher: “A theme park for the Holy Land?”, in: The Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 10, 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1110/p06s01-wome.html accessed on Jan-uary 3, 2010.

70 Cf. Jackie Feldman: Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee: Contempo-rary Conflict and Christianity on the Road to Bethlehem. History and Me-mory (forthcoming 2011).

71 Annabel Jane Wharton: Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2006, pp. 231-232.

72 Ibid., p. 235.

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tized images as a source of knowledge73 as well as multi-sensory expe-rience, including experience while on the move, in identity formation in general, and in American Protestant worship in particular.74 Identities (including religious identities) are increasingly mediated through cultur-al productions, including organized travel75 and theming in a wide varie-ty of everyday contexts.76

Looking at the history of the Holy Land, the medieval Latin word for the discovery and sanctification of a site or object was inventio. Those who would fault American Protestants for preferring to worship in more sanitized, ‘natural’, ‘authentic’ heritage sites have only to look at the imposition of imperial interests on the Holy Land by Constantine77 or the medieval European marking of the Via Dolorosa on the Holy Land, in accordance with models made in Regensburg or Leuven. If authentici-ty, as Bruner argues,78 is largely a question of authority, the major dif-ference between traditional pilgrimage sites and the new Protestant ones may be that the Israeli government and the academic archaeologist, ra-ther than the Vatican or the local priesthood, serve as supreme authority. The website and postcard replace the tableau vivant, the icon and the replica. The theming rejected in its Catholic form as ‘smells and bells’, becomes acceptable when it enters through the portals of mass culture. Simulation and the invention of seamless religious worlds have always been part of organized religion. The disdain for such representation79 may be merely part of a larger phenomenon of disparaging American superficiality in comparison with ‘authentic’ European high culture.80

73 Cf. J. Baudrillard: Simulacra; Marshall MacLuhan: The Gutenberg Ga-

laxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press 1962.

74 Cf. Tanya M. Luhrmann: “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity”, in: American Anthropologist 106/3 (2004), pp. 518-528.

75 Cf. Dean MacCannell: The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class, New York: Schocken Books 1976, pp. 39-56.

76 Cf. S. A. Lukas: “Politics”. 77 Cf. R. L. Wilken: The Land Called Holy. 78 Cf. E. M. Bruner: “Abraham Lincoln”, p. 400. 79 Cf. U. Eco: Travels. 80 Cf. Michael Harkin: “Modernist Anthropology and Tourism of the Au-

thentic”, in: Annals of Tourism Research 22/3 (1995), pp. 650-670.


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american holy land: orientalism, disneyization, and the evangelical gaze

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