Let us prey on religious tourists

Scotland can capitalise on the growing popularity of spiritual tourism, but should that really include pandering to pagans as well as pilgrims, asks Tim Luckhurst

Considering their strict vows of austerity, the white canons of the Premonstratensian order who occupied Dryburgh Abbey at its foundation in 1150 had a real eye for beauty. Nestling on the wooded banks of the Tweed beneath the triple peaks of the Eildon Hills, Dryburgh is enchanting. Standing inside the north cloister as the sun descends behind the ancient stone of the great western doorway, it is easy to understand why Sir Walter Scott and Field Marshal Earl Haig chose to be buried there.

Amid the ruins I could imagine monks dining beneath the circular window of the refectory. Even my agnostic heart was moved to contemplate a dimension beyond the physical. Apparently I am not the only non-believer to find religious architecture inspiring.

Try this for a conundrum. Church attendance in Europe is at a historic low. Fashion has a bigger fan base than God, and pornography is more popular than prayer. But research by the World Tourism Organisation indicates an unprecedented boom in religious tourism.

So next month the first United Nations-sponsored world conference on religious tourism will consider how European destinations can attract more of these visitors. Those in charge of promoting Scotland as a tourist destination are naturally anxious to grab a slice of the pie. This month they brought together religious leaders, academics and marketing analysts at a seminar entitled Religion, Pilgrimage, Spirituality and Scottish Tourism.

“There are a number of world trends that fit in with a move to religious tourism,” says Dr Ian Yeoman of VisitScotland. “The affluent modern citizen is a much more sophisticated traveller than before. People are searching for a more authentic experience. Religion, pilgrimage and spirituality have a part to play.”

Of course Scotland has long played host to tour parties of committed Christians. The travel agent Douglas Logan of Speciality Scotland Travel has been bringing in American Presbyterians for nearly 20 years. “Some just want to come to Scotland with friends from the same church, but others have quite specific requirements. One lot had been studying Martin Luther in Germany and Switzerland and decided to add a week to study John Knox in Scotland.”

Logan took them to Knox’s house in Edinburgh and to one of the pulpits in Perth from which this father of the Protestant reformation preached his stirring sermons against idolatry in May 1559.

Other tours take in Iona, where St Columba landed in 563AD, and Whithorn Priory in Galloway, the first Christian settlement north of Hadrian’s Wall, which was founded in 397AD by St Ninian on his mission to convert the Picts and Britons. Whithorn is home to the oldest evidence of Christian worship in Scotland, a commemorative stone inscribed in Latin with the words “Te Domine Laudamus” — “We praise you O Lord”.

But such trips are mainly for the faithful, and although they are different from the hazardous pilgrimages on which thousands of Scots embarked before the Reformation, Scotland will not get rich by simply encouraging American churchgoers to explore the origins of their faith. VisitScotland seeks a broader model.

“There is a decline in Christianity and traditional worship,” says John Lennon, a professor of tourism at Caledonian University. “But if you consider Scotland as a sanctuary destination, a retreat from the hassles of modernity, mobile phones and the internet, then we have a very rich heritage of places with a religious past.”

Inspiring locations include Iona Abbey, the burial place of early Scottish kings, the University of St Andrews (founded 1413) and the four border abbeys at Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose, which bring the furious violence of the Reformation vibrantly to life. St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh and its Glasgow counterpart founded in 1197 are popular, too, as is Rosslyn Chapel (even if you hate The Da Vinci Code).

But turning religious tourism into big business will take more than ancient masonry, statues and stained glass. VisitScotland is keen to promote something akin to the feeling of inner warmth I experienced in the grounds of Dryburgh Abbey. Formal Christian faith may be too rigorous for our hedonistic 21st-century psyches, but we are not immune to spirituality.

Sceptics see this fondness for new-age mysticism as confirmation of the novelist GK Chesterton’s dictum: “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” But Yeoman sees it as a marketing opportunity. “Religious tourism can be about visiting a sacred site, attending a ceremony or admiring architecture. But Scottish churches are also linked to ideas such as volunteerism, doing good. Religion has important connections to genealogy through church records and graveyards.”

He also waxes lyrical about links between Scottish religious institutions and celebrity marriages (Madonna) and film tourism (The Da Vinci Code again).

Seen like that, Scotland’s religious institutions can contribute to the marketing of this country as an intriguing repository of bite-sized nuggets of “heritage”. And as this is an image that already attracts visitors (83% of overseas tourists visit at least one castle, church or monument), Scotland’s tourism planners have high hopes that religion, spirituality and heritage can be blended to further increase numbers.

Scotland may not boast a location to compare with the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or St Peter’s Square in Rome. But castles, churches, prehistoric monuments and scenic beauty combine to offer an experience resonant with unspecific spiritual significance.

“Although formal religion is declining, there is a rise in a wider form of religiosity” says Alastair Durie of Stirling University. Critics call it Pagan Pilgrimage tourism. In Scotland it attracts people to sites as diverse as the Standing Stones of Stenness in Orkney and the Findhorn community in Moray.

Durie says encouraging such a pick-and-mix attitude to religion is not problem-free. “There is a danger of reducing the Christian faith to little more than a heritage tradition, a sort of homeopathic religion shorn of its core meaning. What tourism defines as religious tourism includes visiting churches without any religious intention. It treats places of worship as just part of the heritage cycle.”

In recent years, Egypt has used this approach to formidable effect, attracting millions of European tourists to its panoply of Pharaonic, Coptic Christian and Islamic antiquities without attempting to promote faith-based pilgrimage. Might Scotland ignore its centuries of Christian tradition in order to profit from a similar approach? Tourism officials recognise the need for caution. History suggests that true religious pilgrimage — whether to Mecca, Jerusalem or sacred European sites such as Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela – has greater longevity than spiritual heritage travel. Durie offers this warning: “What you really learn from history is that tourism is a very precarious industry. Scotland should not put all its eggs in this basket.”

Amen to that.

The Sunday Times

24th September 2006