PBS television host and guidebook author Rick Steves is often lauded as the most trusted American voice in European tourism. His 50-book guidebook series sells one million copies each year (and the only guidebook that outsells “Rick Steves’ Italy” in the United States is a guide to Disney), his show “Rick Steves’ Europe” is about to enter its 35th year on PBS, and his NPR show will turn 20 in 2025. His popularity as an evangelist for American tourism in Europe, however, is also matched with critiques that his recommendations lead to overtourism, like the Cinque Terre in Italy, which Rick Steves arguably introduced to Americans in his first edition of Europe Through the Backdoor in 1980.
While most scholarship approaches the study of travel through analytic lenses of leisure, consumption, and even settler-colonialism, this paper examines Rick Steves’ five-decade-long career through the lens of religion. Specifically, I draw from research on secularism, religious nationalism, and popular culture (e.g, Asad 1983; Jennings 2010; Lofton 2017; Gorski 2017; Feltmate 2017; Musselman 2019), as well as multi-method qualitative research of Steves’ compendium, to argue that analyzing Steves’ project through the lens of religion affords an important hermeneutic perspective, one that illuminates how travel is a form of pilgrimage and moral formation—specifically, a project of civil repair. Civil repair is a sociological theory of “democratic reconstruction” based on “extending and deepening feelings of social solidarity” (Alexander 2024: 1). Through the lens of civil repair, we can analyze Steves’ project through both the lens of critique as we examine the contradictions of his prescriptive travel philosophy (Taylor 2024) as well as an hermeneutics of faith (Ricoeur 1970; 1981) that takes Steves, his guides, and his travelers at their word when they say traveling with Rick Steves is akin to a spiritual experience that has changed their lives.
For instance, Steves’ progressive vision as a Lutheran philanthropist and Democratic activist, including his resistance to the Trump administration, highlights the ways in which he approaches travel as a form of civil repair. His philosophy of “travel as a political act” encourages North American travelers to step outside of their comfort zones, drop their nationalist commitments, and embrace the world through a “cosmopolitan revelation” (Taylor 2024). I consider this philosophy through Kurasawa’s (2004) concept of a “cosmopolitanism from below,” a cultural belief built on personal and practical experiences on the ground rather than a top-down policy from institutional actors. However, this project of civil repair is filled with contradictions, as a successful project that encourages travelers to appreciate the local also risks consumerist extraction as a result. In framing this moral code as a political project, we should ask if Steves’ travel philosophy is also a form of left religious nationalism that purposefully blurs the boundaries of national identity into one that is both consumable and assumable. Does Rick Steves iconicize Europe via a supersessionist logic of being at home in the world no matter where you are? Religion, I argue, is the only analytic framework equipped to expose these contradictions.
Finally, this research has important implications for understanding our current political moment, especially the rising threats of American authoritarianism and “America First” sentiments. Considering Rick Steves’ target audience is middle-American PBS viewers, he fashions himself as uniquely prepared to speak to broad swaths of voters who have loved and respected him for years but who are swayed by the Trump administrations nationalist promises. In this paper, I argue that we should question what Rick Steves’ project of travel as a form of civil repair teaches us about the successes and failures of Democratic politics in the United States today—particularly the growing resistance to liberal “ideology,” DEI initiatives, and global society. Through the lens of performance, I analyze Rick Steves as an actor performing cultural scripts about tradition, the local, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and spirituality to an audience of travelers, and hermeneutically reconstruct his schematic of what is sacred and profane (Durkheim 1995) to assemble an understanding of American nationalist imaginaries and the possibilities of civil repair.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2024. Civil Repair. London: Polity.
Asad, Talal. 1983. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18 (2): 237-259.
Bellah, Robert. 1967. “Civil religion in America,” Daedalus 96(Winter):1-21.
Durkheim, Émile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by K E Fields. New York: The Free Press.
Feltmate, David. 2017. Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in the Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy. New York University Press.
Gorski, Philip. 2017. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2004. “A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a Solidarity without Bounds,” European Journal of Sociology 45(2): 233-255.
Lofton, Kathryn. 2017. Consuming Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Musselman, Cody. 2019. “Training for the “Unknown and Unknowable”: CrossFit and Evangelical Temporality,”Religions 10 (11) https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110624
Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (D. Savage, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the human sciences. (J. B. Thompson, Ed. & Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, Anne. 2024. “A Cosmopolitan Revelation: Travel as a Religious Act with Rick Steves’ Europe,” Material Religion 20(3-4):233-256.
PBS television host and guidebook author Rick Steves is often lauded as the most trusted American voice in European tourism. While most scholarship configures travel through lenses of leisure, consumption, and even settler-colonialism, this paper examines Rick Steves’ five-decade-long career through the lens of religion. Drawing on work on secularism, religious nationalism, and popular culture, as well as ethnographic data of six Rick Steves tours and text analysis of his PBS show, guidebooks, and radio show, I argue that analyzing Steves’ project through the lens of religion affords an important hermeneutic perspective that illuminates how travel is a form of pilgrimage and moral formation—specifically, a project of civil repair. Steves’ progressive vision as a Lutheran philanthropist and Democratic activist, including his resistance to the Trump administration, affords us the chance to examine the consistencies and contradictions of travel as a project of civil repair, including cosmopolitan identity and overtourism.