A surprisingly large number of the tour buses/coaches I see bear names or symbols with Christian themes. I got to wondering if anyone here had any direct experience with Christian tours. What is it all about?
Is it that people don’t want to be in proximity with people who don’t share their beliefs? Do you have to promise that you agree with their religious views? Does someone have to vouch for you?
Is it that they include a large number of religion-centered activities and they don’t want people on their bus who decline to participate?
Do they bar people on the tour from bringing up topics that would tend to question the beliefs of the tour organizers?
Other than “Christian,” are there narrower requirements? Do you have to be a particular kind of Christian, e.g., fundamentalist/evangelist?
I have an idea that fundamentalist/evangelist Christians are more likely than other kinds of Christians to restrict their touring companions by religion. Is this correct? Or are there mainstream EpiscoMethoPresbypalidistiterian tours, liberal Catholic tours, or Unitarian Universalist tours?
I see a lot of these coaches in the Washington, D.C., area. Are there Christian tours to a wide variety of destinations or only to a small number of destinations popular among Christian tourists?
In my limited experience, they’re simply tours that are booked through a church/churches. If you’re a tour group operator, it’s a great way to access a bunch of people. There are some tours that are specifically religious in nature (e.g., sites in the Holy Land) but a lot of them don’t promise anything more than a stop at a cathedral or a free morning on Sunday so group members can go to church.
It’s just a group of people with common interests. You don’t have to sign a statement of faith or anything, but if you don’t share their commone interests you’re likely to be pretty bored I would think.
This isn’t the only example of a common-interest tour. I went on a solar eclipse tour in China last year.
I went on a Jewish tour of Israel a few years ago. My mother-in-law arranged it, so I don’t know what, if any, questions about our faith got asked. But we concentrated on Jewish sights- spent a lot more time at the Western Wall than at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, went to Masada and Sfat but not Nazareth or Bethlehem, and that sort of thing. I don’t know that a Christian would have been unwelcome on our tour, but they probably would have preferred a tour that spent more time at Christian sites.
Most people don’t go on vacation with the intention of having religious debates the whole time. Someone who kept trying to debate other tour members about religion would probably be about as welcome as someone who spent all their time trying to sell life insurance to other tour members.
We’re not Orthodox Jewish, and the tour was definitely not oriented toward Orthodox Judaism. We ate at places that offered non-kosher food, for example (we didn’t eat the non-kosher food, because we keep kosher).
I once followed a link from another message board to a brochure for a US-based evangelical/fundamentalist Christian travel company’s upcoming tour of Europe. (And of course now I can’t find it!) I don’t remember the brochure saying anything about a religious requirement, but I think most non-Christians and most Christians who are not evangelical/fundamentalist would find both the language of the brochure and the set-up of the tour to be a bit much.
The tour was somewhat unusual in ways that seem tailored to their target audience. For instance, although the group would visit both Rome and Paris, in neither city did the list of sights include any churches, probably to avoid visiting Roman Catholic churches. Also, most Americans on their first visit to Europe don’t visit Geneva unless business takes them there, and few are likely to seek out the English village of Scrooby - but if you want to retrace the highlights of the Protestant Reformation, those choices make sense, and I imagine that’s why they were on this tour.
Not every self-described Christian tour would necessarily go that far, of course. But clearly for some people, traveling with people who share their religion, on a tour designed to appeal to that religion, is an attractive option.
As for the question of whether there are such tour groups for other religions - I grew up Catholic and certainly remember hearing of Catholic tour groups going to Rome/the Vatican, or to “The Holy Land” (for some reason, in this context, nobody ever said “Israel”!). These were perhaps more pilgrimmage than vacation, but the choice is certainly out there. To the best of my knowledge you didn’t have to be Catholic to go, but that leaves the question of whether anyone else would choose to do so?
I don’t think Christian tours would be different from any other tour, in that respect. They don’t need special rules about not challenging people’s religious views, because they can deal with that under rules against harassing other customers. There are probably no specific rules against selling life insurance while on a tour, either, but a persistent salesperson would most likely get kicked out for it under more general rules.
So you’re saying that certain topics probably aren’t barred. But are they welcomed? People on a bus are likely to get into all kinds of conversations, sometimes ones that people not participating in the conversation might disagree with or otherwise object to. Assume that those people participating in this hypothetical religious debate are all willing participants and don’t feel harassed. Would a Christian tour be more likely to try to suppress such a conversation to spare the sensibilities of other members of the tour?
I assume that people joining a Christian tour are more likely than most to bring up religious discussions. It seems to me that religion-oriented topics almost always reveal some level of disagreement, dispute, or at the very least a diversity of opinions. Is there a limit at which this kind of a discussion would become unwelcome? For example, a discussion on whether baptism must be performed by dunking or whether sprinkling is okay would be acceptable, but not a discussion on whether Christ was merely a human prophet or whether he was divine would not be acceptable? Obviously such rules would likely not be explicit, but I’m wondering whether there would be some unspoken line.
Well, I assume the tour guides themselves don’t care that much about private conversations about group members, so long as they’re not disruptive. I mean if you’re on a Christian tour, and at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or something, and they say, “This church is on the site where Jesus’s body rested until he was raised from the dead.”, and you shout out “Jesus never resurrected”, people are probably going to get upset. But otherwise, I can’t see why they’d care much as long as you’re not obnoxious. I also don’t imagine there are a lot of big religious debates on the tours anyway. People on tours tend to talk about how nice the tour stops are, how good or bad the food is, and how much their feet hurt.
Do people on these tours tend to already be acquainted with each other, or at least be members of the same church or something like that? If they already comprise a societal group of some kind, then I suppose most of my questions are moot.
A lot of Christians equate “Christian” with “having morals I approve of.” They typically might expect the group to not have heavy drinkers, people who cuss, unmarrieds who cohabitate, and others whose behavior or lifestyles put them ill at ease. On the other end of the spectrum, there are party buses with a keg on board, usually with young people having their fun being somewhat rowdy. Each of these groups would probably be much more comfortable with people of like mind.
Now, there are Christians who would be right at home on a party bus. But the ones who specifically choose to be on the Christian bus do so more for reasons of social compatibility than for reasons of theology.
I’d be shocked if any tour company encouraged its guides to squelch discussions among group members that nobody is objecting to. The group members are the paying customers, after all.
There certainly weren’t any big religious debates on my Jewish tour of Israel. Most people don’t want to spend their whole vacation arguing, especially not about religion. I was with Mr. Neville’s parents and brothers and his middle brother’s wife, but there were also people we didn’t know on the tour as well.
I’m sure you’re free to go on such a trip if you’d like. There’s no religious test. However, I doubt that there won’t be any stops by some famous microbrewery for a tour and ware sampling. Plus, I doubt you’ll be touring too much on Sunday.
I would also be hesitant to let anyone on the bus know you’re not saved or whatever. Otherwise, you’ll be witnessing them witnessing at you all through the trip. By the end, you’ll either be saved or have murdered everyone on the bus. (BUS RIDERS BEATEN TO DEATH WITH STUCKEY’S PEACAN ROLL. ACCUSED COULDN’T ‘TAKE IT ANY MORE’)
This is one of the things I was wondering about. I know lots of Christians who don’t go around witnessing at every nonbeliever they see. In fact, all the Christians I interact personally don’t do this. Are you saying that Christian tourists are more likely to be that kind of Christian?
Well, often times people who are attracted to explicitly Christian tours tend to be the more evangelical kind of Christian, but that’s true of people who tend to frequent most sorts of explicitly Christian businesses.
The Catholic church my mother goes to arranges tour groups throughout the world. They exist because of the fact that the church is as much a social club as a religious organization. They accept people of all faiths on their tours, not just Catholics, and they go as a vacation organized through the church, not as a religious experience.
The emphasis here is that churches are far more than places of worship - they are community centers where one can join with others in other aspects of one’s life.
I imagine that the tours tilt Protestant because the megachurches that could most easily fill such a bus are almost always Protestant.
Here is Burke Christian Tours, one of the big ones. It says that the bus tours feature daily devotionals and a Sunday school class on, well, Sunday. Of course you don’t have to be a Protestant of a certain stripe to take the tour, but you may well feel out of place if you’re not.