Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit the sites associated with Jesus' life and death. Using archival research and participant observation, this dissertation explores why pilgrims choose to go and the impact of the experience upon their lives. It expands on and offers a complement to previous studies of Christian Zionism and tourism through its focus on the "lived religion" of evangelical Protestant and Catholic pilgrims. It grounds Holy Land pilgrimage in its American context, showing how the practice illuminates and adds to our understanding of trends in post-war U.S. Christianity, such as the rise of a Christian leisure industry, the paradenominational "small group" movement and ecumenism.

The project is loosely structured around a set of overlapping pairs—individual/collective, material/immaterial, home/away—that offer a chance to explore the multivocal nature of the pilgrimage. A few distinct themes emerge. The first concerns how evangelicals and Catholics relate to each other and to sacred places. This project argues that evangelicals are more place-centered than often supposed, whereas Catholic pilgrims are more focused on the Bible and a "personal relationship" with Jesus. A related theme is how pilgrims make sense of the commercial nature of the trip as well as the conflicts they encounter. I argue that pilgrims, steeped in post-war Golden Rule culture, avoid intra-group conflict but use the idea of "commercialism" to draw boundaries with Christian others. At the same time, they are confronted with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to which most react ambivalently, struggling with what they see as their dual role as insiders (Christians) and outsiders (Americans).

A final theme concerns the role of the journey during life cycle transitions that particularly affect middle-old women, such as the death of a spouse and the birth of grandchildren. Pilgrimage is a hybrid: both ordinary—tied to women's everyday role as the family's ritual specialist—and extra-ordinary, since pilgrims leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first time. Mass-market pilgrimage is one way American Christians use new technologies, commercial products and ways of being mobile in service of home, in order to stabilize and preserve it.