Tourism facilitates the growth in globalization through enabling encounters between individuals and groups from different cultures and traditions, and religion makes an important contribution to that expansion, through religious and spiritual tourists, as well as the destinations and artefacts they visit, and the activities in which they participate. Whether travellers adhere to a specific faith or spiritual worldview, or not, there is a manifestly significant increase in tourism by spiritual seekers of transcendent experiences, in addition to the worshipful journeyings of religious believers of many faiths. It is apparent that travelling for the purposes of religious and/or spiritual enlightenment and connection, along with higher numbers of faith adherents, will also contribute to the increase and make a wider contribution to swell the coffers of global tourism providers in markets around the world. Such growth mirrors the burgeoning events sector, and alongside these developments comes a need for professionalization and management of destinations (e.g. the holy city of Makkah), and of associated events. This book aims to add to the body of knowledge on forms of and motivations for religious tourism.It is still possible for small groups of pilgrims to travel together on their own planned itinerary – whether as local church groups visiting the Holy Land led by their vicar, or a posse of Christian motorcycling enthusiasts rallying their way round sacred locations in the UK. The evolving definitions of ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ are considered, as many people no longer identify themselves as ‘religious’. In the last UK Census of 2011, the Office of National Statistics research analysis focused on changes in the religious beliefs of Christians, Muslims and those with no religion. Some 59% of the UK population at that time (some 33.2 million people) reported that they were Christian. Meanwhile, numbers regularly attending traditional churches continued to fall, and the number of people who identified as having ‘no religion’ continued to rise, reaching a quarter of the population (some 14.1 million people), and growing across all age groups. So, while traditional Christianity appears to be declining in the UK, a trend mirrored across Western Europe and North America, elsewhere, numbers of religious adherents – both Christians and Muslims – are developing rapidly. This expansion is reflected in diverse localities and communities in the developed nations, and is largely situated in evangelistic religious communities, as they successfully gain new believers (Source: Spiritual and Religious Tourism: Motivations and Management).
Pilgrimage Tourism: a Search for the Truth and the Sacred
