Another Tourism is Possible:
A Theological Critique of Commercial Tourism and
Re-imagining Tourism as Mission of Incarnation
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| Theological seminar on Commercial Tourism |
We are gathered here as an intentional community, inspired by Christian faith to unmask the interconnection between commercial tourism and its impact on marginal communities, and to uncover the environmental impact of commercial tourism. We do this critical reflection and analysis to develop missiological and theological perspectives to inspire our faith communities to engage in just and alternative tourism. As we have seen in the stories from Sri Lanka, commercial tourism is the invasion of neo-liberal globalization into our communities and our lifeworld. It commodifies human beings, nature, and cultures, to maximize wealth. It also dehumanizes the tourists by converting their vacation, pilgrimage and leisure into unjust and destructive activities that are dangerous to the future of life on earth. This presentation is an attempt to develop a theological and ethical critique of commercial tourism and to explore alternate practices of tourism informed by the perspectives of tourism-affected communities.
Seven years ago, the day after Christmas day, the coastal communities in South and South East Asia cried aloud when giant waves in the form of Tsunami invaded their shores. Death literally hunted down the households in the coast line resulting in the untimely death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Millions were displaced from their livelihood. The scars of the Tsunami are yet to be healed. The dominant narratives explained the Tsunami as a natural calamity, and blamed overpopulation as the reason for the magnitude of the disaster. The groaning that refuses to fade down is in fact a counter narrative: A counter narrative that exposes the structural sin and injustice that cause eco-crisis and genocide.
The coastal regions of the countries affected by the 2004 Tsunami have been undergoing tremendous changes in recent years. In the era of globalization, as there is no salvation outside the market, it is imperative to enter the bandwagon of progress and development by linking local economies with transnational capital. Globalization has invaded the coastal regions of these countries in the form of commercial tourism. Tourist resorts and hotels conquered the coast line destroying the tropical mangrove forests, one of the world’s most important ecosystems. Mangrove swamps have been nature’s protection for the coastal regions from the large waves. They also serve as the habitat for three-fourths of the commercial fish species that spend part of their lifecycle in the mangrove swamps.
The coastal regions, the habitats of the traditional fisher people, have been converted into tourist resorts to attract tourists and thereby foreign exchange. Many of the tourist resorts that mushroomed in the coastal areas came into being by uprooting hundreds of villages of the fisher people, who used to live in a harmonious relationship with the ocean. Thousands of hectares of mangrove forests and other bushes were cleared to make the resorts beautiful for the tourists. Traditional communities have been displaced from their land and livelihood to welcome the transnational corporations to take over and abuse their land, water, and environment.
The groaning from the tsunami affected communities exposes this correlation between the ecological disaster and globalization. This narrative is based on the very fact that the tsunami could not destroy coastal villages covered with mangroves. In other words, the tsunami was more than a natural calamity. It was the consequence of the commodification and plunder of the ecosystem for profit. Disasters are not only caused by corporate interests but they also provide the corporations new opportunities to continue their pillage in the name of humanitarian interventions and reconstruction. Naomi Klein calls this phenomenon “the disaster capitalism.”
The grand plan to redeem the war-torn Sri Lanka predated the tsunami by two years. The priests of this redemptive mission to plot the entry of Sri Lanka into the world economy were USAID, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The experts identified tourism as the panacea for Sri Lanka’s accumulated ills. “Under the plan, Sri Lanka’s jungles…would be opened up to adventure eco-tourists…Its religions…would be retrofitted to nourish the spiritual needs of Western visitors—Buddhists monks could run meditation centers, Hindu women could perform colorful dances at hotels, Ayurvedic medical clinics could soothe aches and pains.”[1]Sri Lanka thus became the high-end tourist destination by combining luxury, wilderness, adventure, pilgrimage, and ecological tranquility into a single package. But in order to facilitate this redemptive plan, the government had to prepare the way: The government changed the prevailing legal barriers to private land ownership. It also changed the labor laws according to the interests of the investors. The government further initiated the modernization of the infrastructure—highways, airports, water and electricity. Global financial institutions were generous enough through their loans to help the government to prepare the way of redemption. Finally that dawn has come when “the poorest among them were being asked to give up the little plots of land and property they had—a vegetable garden, a simple house, a boat—so that a Marriott or a Hilton could build a golf course and villagers could pursue careers as street hawkers in Colombo.”[2]
This is the time when the giant waves visited the small island. For President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the tsunami was a kind of “religious epiphany,” which helped her to see the “free-market light.” “We are a country blessed with so many natural resources, and we have not made use of them fully…. So nature itself must have thought ‘enough is enough’ and whacked us from all sides and taught us a lesson to be together.”The tsunami was a divine punishment for failing to sell off Sri Lanka’s beaches and forests! Standing at the ravaged beaches of Sri Lanka, Naomi Klein observed: “And yet, underneath the rubble and the carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along—a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden. It was the same up and down the coast: once the rubble was cleaned away, what was left was…Paradise.”[3]
According to Herman Kumara of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Sri Lanka, it was “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization, potentially even more devastating than the first. We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US marines.”[4] As Naomi Klein observes, “The two economic poles of globalization, the ones that seem to live in different centuries, not countries, were suddenly put in direct conflict over the same pieces of coastline, one demanding the right to work, the other demanding the right to play. Backed up by the guns of local police and private security, it was militarized gentrification, class war on the beach.”[5]
The post-tsunami redemption package was christened as reconstruction, and the community felt it as “victimizing the victims, and exploiting the exploited.” So the victims were angry and they protested against the salvific mission of reconstruction. Narrating a protest march that she witnessed in Arugam Bay, Naomi Klein writes: “As they marched past the hotels, a young man in a white T-shirt with a red megaphone led the demonstrators in a call-and-response. ‘We don’t want, we don’t want…’ he called out, and the crowd shouted back, ‘Tourist hotels!’ Then he shouted, ‘Whites…’ and they cried, ‘Get out!’ Another young man, skin toughened by the sun and the ocean, took over megaphone duties and yelled, ‘We do want, we do want…’ and the answers came flying: ‘Our land back!’ ‘Our homes back!’ ‘A fishing port!’ ‘Our aid money!’ ‘Famine, famine!’ he shouted, and the crowd replied, ‘Fisher people are facing famine!’”[6]
Commercial Tourism: A Critique of Neo-liberal Globalization and Development
“A prescription for development” is the title of the following poem, written by Cecil Rajendra. According to him, his poems mushroom in the froth and ferment of his struggle for survival. This poem articulates sarcastically the story of the colonization of the lifeworld that is taking place in postcolonial nations:
Our National General Assembly was in deep mortification.
An insensitive journalist (from some northern region) had branded our country
a model of Underdevelopment.
How to gain recognition as a developed nation pondered our President.
The answer?—Commission
a group of technocrats to study, possibly remedy this intolerable situation.
Months and seminars later they outlined their prescription:
What you have here, sir
are too many green hills—a surfeit of lush vegetation.
Trees are fine but unproductive and hills are an impediment.
There are too many cane fields and too many plantations.
We do not know what development is,
but an agricultural economy is the badge of underdevelopment.
Your beaches are beautiful, sir but lack utilization;
there are no tourists, hotels or any high-rise apartments.
Your streets are traffic-free and your towns too quiet;
your people seem stress-free and a trifle too contented.
They eat fruits and vegetable and drink natural water
which we’re shocked to discover is indecently clean and pure.
So what we recommend, sir—for your race to development—
is first massive deforestation followed by massive importation.
You need juggernauts, bulldozers and belching factories
condos and fast-food chains and hordes of snooping tourists
You must import mineral water and a medium-sized nuclear reactor;
and a score of foreign psychiatrists to service your expat industrialists.
We beg your pardon, but pollution is the hallmark of development.
To qualify as an advanced country you have to boast a proper degree
of noise/smog/dumps and derangement.
With no hesitation, our President embraced their recommendation.
in ear-miffs he now sits in a haze-shrouded apartment.
High above, but not quite beyond the city’s teeming shout and bustle;
with a glass of Perrier water he pops tranquillizers by the bottle.
He has a direct open line to his Swiss psychiatrist;
keeps an emergency canister of oxygen taped to his wrist.
But grinning from ear to ear as he chomps on his hamburger
Mr President is now all glee.
For that damned foreign journalist has just declared our country,
“The Developing Nation of theYear.”[7]
The historical analysis of the colonization of the lifeworld does not mean that the invasion of the lifeworld came to an end with the demise of colonialism. Rather, subjugation—which is known as recolonization in today’s world—continues in new forms and ways, and we have seen how it happens in Sri Lanka. Neocolonialism represents the contemporary process of recolonization, where the subjugation of the lifeworld of the communities at the peripheries through the economic and military hegemony of the Empire and the transnational corporations, continue with the support of theological legitimization. Development and globalization are the two contemporary manifestations of the process of the colonization of the lifeworld.
The meaning of the term development in its contemporary sense is derived from the modern development thinking and project inaugurated after World War II. Up until the last two decades of the twentieth century the teleology of modern development was uncontested though the means to reach that telos was subject to a variety of criticisms. “In development, all the modern advances in science, technology, democracy, values, ethics, and social organization fuse into the single humanitarian project of producing a far better world.”[8] Here one can identify the rootedness of development in the dominant Enlightenment principles of belief in progress, reason, science and modernity. Modern development in common parlance is understood as humanitarian technical assistance, wherein Northern “experts” help Southern governments to reach the standards attained by the North through the mediation of Western technology, institutions and practices.
Being a humanitarian project with a teleological vision of a better world, and a deontological commitment to bring in civilizational transformation at the peripheries, development has been considered as the solution for the underdeveloped nations. Initially, objections to this project only concerned the paths to development. However, there has been an eruption of voices from all over the world raising fundamental questions about the very paradigm of modern development, which in recent times has become a monolithic hegemonic doctrine called “developmentalism.” Developmentalism is primarily a belief in the economic growth model of development as the only viable paradigm of development in the contemporary world. It “is the truth from the point of view of the center of power; it is the theorization (or rather, ideologization) of its own path of development, and the comparative method elaborates this perspective.”[9] The truth from the center of power does claim universal validity, and hence it is imperative for the rest of the world to welcome this truth into their lifeworld. The heretics of this gospel are destined to remain in their primitive state of affairs. For developmentalism, they are “development’s Others,”—communities diagnosed as pathological and to be cured by the development apparatus.
In the following words Arturo Escobar briefly summarizes the predicament in which the countries at the periphery have ended up after six decades of development: “At times, development grew to be so important for Third World countries that it became acceptable for their rulers to subject their populations to an infinite variety of interventions, to more encompassing forms of power and systems of control; so important that First and Third World elites accepted the price of massive impoverishment, of selling Third World resources to the most convenient bidder, of degrading their physical and human ecologies, of killing and torturing, of condemning their indigenous populations to near extinction; so important that many in the Third World began to think of themselves as inferior, underdeveloped, and ignorant and to doubt the value of their own culture, deciding instead to pledge allegiance to the banners of reason and progress; so important, finally, that the achievement of development clouded the awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling the promises that development seemed to be making.”[10]
Neo-liberal globalization, with its inherent logic of commodification and marketization, is in practice a social fascism that excludes, displaces and annihilates communities and nature through the colonization of the lifeworld. It was prophesied six decades ago by Karl Polanyi in his critique of the marketization of society: “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment…would result in the demolition of society.”[11] In Polanyi’s analysis this is a shift from a “society with market” to a “market society.” Said differently, it is a shift from a society where economic relations and practices were “embedded” in the social relations to a society colonized by the hegemonic logic and practice of the market.
The suppressed voices and narratives of our times, which we heard at the very beginning of this presentation from the coastal regions of Sri Lanka, speak out from the peripheries of our “market societies”—stories of “tortured bodies” and “altered earth.” Communities which used to be the subjects of their destiny in their subsistence economies have been sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberal globalization.
Colonization of the lifeworld has always been a theological project, and God talk has always functioned as a “sacred canopy” to face the legitimation crisis of the system. The God talk of colonialism involves three categories: the affirmation of the divinely destined agency of the colonizer to invade and conquer the Other; the teleological vision of an ideal state of maturity, progress, and growth which they want to impose upon the colonized with missionary zeal; and finally the strong sense of a deontological call to be the missionaries of this new religion. The following excerpt from a French document published in 1897 supporting colonialism categorically explains the deontological foundation of colonialism: “Colonization is not a question of interest but a question of duty. It is necessary to colonize because there is a moral obligation, for both nations and individuals, to employ the strengths and advantages they have received from Providence for the general good of humanity. It is necessary to colonize because colonization is one of the duties incumbent upon great nations, which they cannot evade without failing in their mission and falling into moral dereliction.”[12]
The colonization of the lifeworld has always been a project filled with violence. And more than anything else, it has been the God talk that has helped the colonizers to legitimize violence thanks to the theological concept of “sacrifice.” The violence of colonization seeks theological legitimization in two ways: firstly, by invoking a particular interpretation of the doctrine of atonement to glorify victimization—imposed sacrifice as redemptive (civilizing); and secondly, by focusing on a utopian telos which promises progress, growth, and human rights. So the God talk of colonization is a doctrine combining a masochistic soteriology with an eschatological vision of progress and development mediated by a chosen race. The “realized eschatology” of the “developed” nations is being invoked in this doctrine to invite the “underdeveloped” to convert to this religion. This spiritual conquest is fought masked in messianic claims of missionary agency and zeal to civilize and emancipate the Other, and the casualty of this subtle proselytization is the moral agency of the communities.
Christian social ethicists Larry Rasmussen and Elizabeth Bounds, along with Enrique Dussel, enable us to understand the violence of colonization in a deeper way. For Rasmussen, capitalist modernity is “killing us. It slowly devours its own children as well as the children of others”[13] whereas for Bounds, “capitalism is able to organize the most intimate areas of lives and shape profoundly our consciousness.”[14] This violence and sacrifice is divinely sanctioned for the realization of the telos of the messianic project of modernity. “The sacrificial capitalist economy commenced its five hundred year history by worshipping money as its fetish and by celebrating its earthly (unheavenly) religion during the week, instead of on the Sabbath…. The year 1492 ushered in a new era which has been immolating the colonized peoples of the periphery, or the so-called Third World, on a new god’s altar.”[15] To sum up, the colonizers have always been successful in constructing and effectively using God talks that legitimize different manifestations of colonization. Such God talks are not only hegemonic but toxic with the potential to colonize the minds of the communities.
As in the case of previous versions of conquest and invasion, God talk has been playing an undisputed role in the propagation of the new religion of “moneytheism” of globalization. Globalization, similar to its precursors—colonialism and developmentalism—is in itself a God talk with the vision and promise of a teleology, and a missionary zeal motivated by a sense of deontology. The teleology of globalization, unlike that of developmentalism, is much more persuasive and convincing now that the gospel choir of globalization has succeeded in popularizing a chorus of “There is No Alternative.” But the uniqueness of globalization is its emergence as a new religion with the market as the presiding deity. In the place of the old dictum of “no salvation outside the church” there emerged the new dictum: “no salvation outside the market.”
The god of globalization is the monopoly capitalist wealth. This god is Mammon whose telos is to maximize wealth by commodifying and marketizing living beings. The Indian Jesuit theologian Sebastian Kappen in his compelling analysis of the religion of globalization exposes the spiritual legitimization that the “Christian Ungod” provides to neo-liberal globalization. According to him, the omnipresence of this ungod in our times is a historical continuation of the spiritual legitimization that the Christian Ungod has been doing. Explaining the “Christian Ungod” Kappen writes: ‘It is the God whom Christians fashioned to legitimize their lust for wealth and power. It is this Ungod who inspired Kings, and Popes to embark on the Crusades and massacre of millions of Jews and Turks, who in the person of the Grand Inquisitor indulged in the brutalities of witch-hunting and the burning of heretics, who authorized the Christian Kings of the West to colonize and enslave all ‘pagan’ nations, who gave the green signal to slave trade involving the transportation across the Atlantic of 30 million Africans, who connived at the brutal extermination of the indigenous tribes of the Americas and Australias, who steadied the hands of those who dropped atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who in his new incarnation as an illustrious preacher stood by the side of president Bush in 1991 as the latter knelt down to invoke divine blessing on his projected war on Iraq, that was to kill thousands of Iraqis, men, women, and children. He is a god who will not hesitate to avenge the death of one North American marine with the death of ten times the number of Somalis. In short, he is a god who takes the side of the affluent against the poor, of the powerful against the weak, a god with hands dripping with the blood of the innocent.”[16]
Globalization as a religious system has succeeded in facing the legitimation crisis of the system. This success story of the missionaries of the new religion converts the existential crisis that humans and the wider community of life face today into a crisis of faith. M. P. Joseph, in his analysis of this crisis of faith, identifies the primacy of market as the mediating agent, a theological and ethical issue deserving serious engagement.[17] With the exclusive power of mediating agency, market becomes the true “ecclesia” of our times, according to Joseph. The concept of Divine is the major casualty in this new ecclesia of market because “unless the divine appears in the form of a colorful thing, with a decent price tag, and musters the ability to compete with other divine images in the market place, it deprives its charm. Ability to turn as an idol thus is an existential need for the concept of divine.”[18]Idolization of the Divine is certainly a crisis of faith because “the ungod of death is worshipped as the real god when the God of life is alienated and peripheralized as a heresy.”[19] Doesn’t such idolization make globalization a fundamental theological problem of idolatry?
Globalization as the colonization of the lifeworld is a fundamental ethical issue because it not only robs the moral agency of the community, but it also assumes moral agency through its claims of universality and the propaganda slogan of “There is No Alternative (TINA).” Thus the ethical imperative in the contemporary world is to reclaim the moral agency of the dispossessed. Moral agency empowers the community with the discernment of its historical responsibility to be sensitive, critical, morally indignant, compassionate and creative to understand what the reality is, and to strive collectively to transform it radically to what it ought to be. Differently said, moral agency is the political and spiritual power to interpret and to change the world. A people with moral agency are, therefore, the architects of a different world because they believe that “another world is possible.”
When the people are empowered to reclaim their moral agency, they are able to see and analyze politically the reality from their own vantage point. This knowledge has the potential to unleash a revolutionary journey towards freedom and dignity. Cynthia Mo-Lobeda’s interpretation of moral agency is instructive here. Moral agency, according to Mo-Lobeda “is the power to subvert, that is, to resist and to live toward alternatives. That subversive and multifaceted activity is political….that is, it constitutes participation in the shaping of public life. The moral norm of active, embodied love is a call to political participation on behalf of life and against what destroys it.”[20] The priests of neo-liberal globalization know it very well, so they systematically corrode the moral agency and the political will of the community through colonizing their lifeworld.
And the Sea was no More: Decolonizing Faith in a Globalized World
What is the mission of the Church in a context where we continue to confront the colonization of the lifeworld in the form of commercial tourism and other neo-liberal development projects? What does it mean to be a Church in this context? The Book of Revelation, emerged in the context of the imperial totalizing claims of the Roman Empire provides us the apocalyptic vision of the new heaven and the new earth. This vision is the longings of a community and their landscape thingified by the imperial desire for accumulation, affirming the possibility of a “redeemed earth” beyond the totality. A closer analysis reveals that the apocalypse is a poetics of testimony, a vision that is born out of the determination of a community that refused to attribute the worth to receive “power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” to the imperial system. Rather, the dispossessed and the enslaved proclaim that “worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” Said differently, in the absurd poetics of dreaming visions that are illogical to the colonized imaginations, the Other becomes the site for a new discourse and praxis that envision a redeemed earth beyond the logic of the system.
Revelations’ musings on the metaphor of water is foundational here. According to the seer, on the redeemed earth, “. . . the sea was no more.” As Catherine Keller states it is a vision of hope as “the new creation entails the evaporation of the salt waters of tears and of seas.”[21] But a deeper engagement with the text and the context is essential to make sense of the vision of the absence of sea. For Barbara Rossing, the Book of Revelation is a critique of the “realized eschatology” of Rome.[22] Because of its political and economic might as an imperial state, Rome considered itself eternal and sovereign. The sea was the primary agency for exercising this might and power—to invade, plunder, destroy, and enslave communities and nature in the colonies. To put it differently, the sea was the “route” to the state of “realized eschatology.”
The city of Babylon reached this state of “realized eschatology” thanks to its imperial political economy. The list of cargos mentioned in Revelation 18 reveals how the landscape and the communities at the peripheries were thingified to this end.[23] The very presence of slaves among the cargo list underscores the pervasiveness of the colonization of the lifeworld. The realized eschatology of the system is always built on the colonized bodies of the other—the communities and nature. They are the ones destined to sacrifice at the altar of the Empire. The “realized eschatology” of the imperial political economy is hence inherently violent and destructive. We have seen the violence and destructive nature of the “realized eschatology” of neo-liberal globalization in the stories that we heard from Sri Lanka; how the land and the communities have been commodified and sacrificed for commercial tourism.
The vision of the new creation emerging from this dangerous experience of living under the sway of the idols of death is inherently a trans-systemic praxis that believes “beyond totality.” Hence “. . . and the sea was no more” is a profound ethical imperative that can emerge only from the site of the alternative political praxis—the Other and the subalterns. The New Jerusalem is antithetical to the political economy of greed and accumulation. The alternative vision of the Other reclaims the metaphor of water as the agent of healing and redemption. The water, which was stripped of its exteriority in the city of Babylon and reduced to being the route to its realized eschatology, is metamorphosed into a free gift available for all. The river of the water of life which nourishes and nurtures the city of Jerusalem is surrounded by the trees whose leaves bring healing to the nations. The book of Revelation inspires us to believe that alternative and justice tourism is possible if we are willing to come out of the Empire.
Following the Pilgrim God: Alternative Tourism as Mission of Incarnation
Alternative Tourism Group (ATG) is a Palestinian NGO established in 1995 to initiate an alternative justice tourism “which holds as its central goals the creation of economic opportunities for the local community, positive cultural exchange between host and guest through one-on-one interaction, the protection of the environment and political/historical education.”[24] ATG, through Justice Tourism, instills in us the audacity to believe that an alternative tourism is possible. The basic ethos and vision of this alternative tourism is found in the words of Father Elias Chacour: “You Westerners have been coming to the Holy Land for centuries to visit the shrines, the dead stones. But you do not see the living stones—the human beings who live and struggle before your eyes. I say ‘wake up!’ What matters are the living stones!”[25] This statement comes out of the disturbing reality that the majority of the tourists to the Holy Land goes there and returns without a genuine attempt to understand the life of the Palestinian communities under Israeli occupation. “Only by living what Palestinians experience all the time can a visitor recognize the injustices that are their daily bread.”[26] Justice tourism, therefore, is an organic experience of deeper fellowship of communities through hospitality where our diverse and distinct horizons meet together to celebrate the beauty of human solidarity.
Just and alternative tourism re-imagines tourism as a holistic experience of mutual flourishing, where both the guests and the hosts reject the neo-liberal exploitative trajectory of tourism and develop tourism and pilgrimage that protect the environment, improve the economic needs of the host communities, bring about justice and peace in the host communities, and enhance the humanity of both the hosts and the guests. It is a deeper spiritual experience which nourishes the guests through their organic engagement with the host communities—their cultures, environment, spiritualities, and history without the motive of exploitation and commodification. Justice tourism is committed to widen understanding, mutual learning, economic flourishing, environmental protection, and hospitality.
The code of conduct for travelers to the holy land developed by Palestinian organizations provides is an attempt to promote justice tourism: “Respect and learn about the local culture. Observe local customs. Interact and spend time with local people. Be aware that your cultural values may differ from theirs. Other values are not wrong or inferior; just different. Make sure that you encounter and engage with the local communities who are struggling for the respect of their dignity. Support the host communities in a responsible way, without encouraging them to change their customs in order to adopt yours. Co-operate with locals in conserving precious natural resources. Buy local products. Contribute to ensuring that tourism has a beneficial outcome for the local community. Use local transportation, guides, accommodation, restaurants and markets to benefit the local economy. Take time to live and experience the daily life of the local people.”[27]
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land has become a regular program for several of the urban churches in India. Christian leaders have been lobbying with government officials for providing subsidies for their pilgrimage to the Holy Lands to “enable poor Christians to strengthen their faith and knowledge about Jesus Christ to live a better spiritual and moral life.”[28] The Tamil Nadu government has already set apart 20 million rupees to provide subsidy for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land for the next two years. At the same time, there are critical introspections on the theology and politics of our “Christian” pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Church of South India (CSI) has already made the bold decision not to renew the contract with EL AL, the official airlines of Israel to publish their advertisement in CSI Life, the official magazine of the CSI. Viji Varghese Eapen, director of the Department of Ecumenical Relations and Ecological Concerns of CSI observes that, “Unfortunately we seem to foster some kind of geo-polity, forgetting the fact that, every rupee that we contribute towards the so called ‘holy tours’ goes to the ‘unholy war’ by Israel against the Palestinians.”[29]For the people of Palestine, “who consider it to be an ongoing nakba (catastrophe) for the past 64 years, tourism that legitimizes the occupation of their land is the last thing they want.”[30]
Alternative Justice Tourism is a call to repentance. In our dominant models of pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, we tend to “come to the Holy Land as spectators, touring holy sites as they would museums, not caring or realizing that for Palestinian Christians these are living places of worship. Reflecting the pious practices of the Pharisees, we search for a personal blessing, seeking to renew an egocentric, individualistic faith. What we choose to see and do only reinforces our prejudices, preconceived notions, and limited understanding of a complex situation.” Instead, we need to initiate alternative and justice pilgrimages, challenging the stereotypes and untruths about the communities. “The genuine Christian pilgrim seeks the living Christ in the now, in solidarity with the oppressed, the poor and the imprisoned.”[31]
The Palestinian Christians articulate the theological basis of justice tourism in a persuasive manner: “God intervenes in human history whenever life is threatened, abused, and destroyed—for the slain Abel, Uriah, Naboth, the slaves in Egypt, the poor and the widows. God revives the dry bones that ‘come to life, stand on their feet and become a great army.’ The reign of God is present wherever life is set free, the blind see, the lame walk and the good news of liberation is announced. God sends the prophets to liberate people from oppression and speak words of judgment. God is on an eternal pilgrimage into our here and now for the sake of justice and love. God’s incarnation in Christ is God’s way of entering into the moral struggles of the world and showing us how to live a truly human life. Jesus identifies himself with all those unjustly treated in order to expose injustice.”[32] Pilgrimage and tourism for us today, is to become incarnate in the here and now, entering into the struggles of the world as moral presence of transformation.
George Zachariah
[1] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (New York: Picador, 2007), 495.
[2] Ibid., 498.
[3] Ibid., 490.
[4] Quoted in George Zachariah, Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots, (London: Equinox Press, 2011), 34.
[5] Naomi Klein, Op cit., 508.
[6] Ibid., 492.
[7] Cecil Rajendra, Dove on Fire: Poems on Peace, Justice and Ecology (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1987), 50-52.
[8] Richard Peet, Theories of Development (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1999), 1.
[9] Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory: Deconstruction/Reconstructions (London
[10] Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52-53.
[11] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1944), 73.
[12] Quoted by Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997), 55.
[13] Larry Rasmussen, Moral Fragments and Moral Community: A Proposal for Church in Society (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 21.
[14] Elizabeth Bounds, Coming Together/Coming Apart: Religion, Community and Modernity, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36.
[15] Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum Press, 1995), 48.
[16] Sebastian Kappen, Spirituality in the Age of Recolonization (Bangalore: Visthar, 1995), 3.
[17] M. P. Joseph, “Present is not Eternal,” Agape Immaginaria 2 (December 2000), 14.
[18] M. P. Joseph, “Towards a Theological Critique of Globalization” in Tissa Balasuriya. Globalization and Human Solidarity (Thiruvalla: CSS Books, 2000), 10.
[19] M. P. Joseph, “Beyond Bandung Josef P. Wdiyatmadja ed. Building Asia , 2004), 181.
[20] Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing the Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 36.
[21] Catherine Keller, “No More Sea Harvard University
[22] Barbara Rossing, The Choice between Two Cities: Whore, Bride and Empire in the Apocalypse (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999).
[23] “Cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves and human lives.” (Rev. 18: 11-13)
[24] Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, “Living Stones and Dead Children: Palestine and the Politics of Tourism,” in Contours Vol. 20, No. 2 June-July 2010, 6
[25] Ibid., 5.
[26] Quoted in Philip Mathew, “Holy Land Pilgrims Urged to Show Concern for Palestinians,” in Contours Vol. 20, No. 2 June-July 2010, 9.
[27] Come and See: A Journey for Peace with Justice: Guidelines for Christians Contemplating a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, 17-18.
[28] http://www.sezariworld.com/component/content/article/48-india/1508-dispose-of-pleas-on-christian-pilgrimage-subsidy-apex-court-tells-ap-hc
[29] Quoted in Samuel Abraham, “A Helping Hand,” in Frontline, (August 24, 2012), 63.
[30] Ibid., 60.
[31] Come and See, Op cit., 11.
[32] Ibid., 12.
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