From tourism to pilgrimage: Travel with Rick Steves’ Europe as a project of civil repair

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.