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Protestants' historical antagonism toward pilgrimage was more about its excesses and potential to distract than about the practice itself. "I say this not because pilgrimages are bad," Luther wrote, "but because they are ill-advised at the time." The time has changed. As the biblically minded have sought to "take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ," it's little wonder that in our peripatetic age, we are asking in new ways what it means to travel Christianly.

The question isn't whether we should travel more, or to more spiritual destinations. Indeed, many of us already travel too often and to too many places. The real question is why we travel in the first place.

The answer is deceptively simple: We travel first to leave. And then, later on, we travel to return.

The traditional understanding of pilgrimage is that it is first about going to a specific place, a site of unique holiness or spiritual significance. Other observers will underplay the shrine and focus on the path—it's not the destination, it's the journey.

Both the target and the trail are important. But at first, pilgrimage isn't about either. It's about the origin, the departure. A key Scripture for early and medieval pilgrims was God's commandment to Abram: "Leave your country … and go to the land I will show you" (Gen. 12:1). Likewise, the recurring narrative of the Old Testament is exodus. Yahweh repeatedly identifies himself as "the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt," and rarely as the God who brought the Israelites to the Promised Land.

Similarly, the medieval pilgrim was often motivated less by a desire to go somewhere than to leave somewhere. "Pilgrimage offered escape," British historian Jonathan Sumption writes in The Age of Pilgrimage. He quotes a writer in the 1600s complaining that too many pilgrims were motivated by a "curiosity to see new places and experience new things, impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands."

Luther didn't mind a tourism-minded pilgrim; it was, after all, better to do it "out of curiosity, to see cities and countries" than for the sake of good works or to keep a vow made to God, he wrote. But in the medieval era, the worst kind of traveler was the escapist: the vagabond, the perennial traveler, the person always on the move.

Today a similar debate happens on the road and in the pages of travel books and magazines on the difference between uncouth tourists and authentic travelers. "The tourist is always the other chap," Evelyn Waugh once quipped. Pilgrims aren't "tourists casually meandering through a city" or travelers "aimlessly wandering through the wilderness," Christian George writes in Sacred Travels. The pilgrim isn't just someone who eschews the tour bus in favor of the personalized walking tour. He is the person there not just to grab a snapshot, but to experience the divine.

Fewer pilgrims today travel in order to escape punishment for their sins, but the temptation to spiritual pride on such journeys is as strong as ever. Religious travel has thrown a kind of spiritual trump card on the table. An eagerness for such distinction misses how manufactured the quest for "authentic" spiritual experience on the road can be, or how transformative an organized excursion can become. After all, it was Baptist minister Thomas Cook, father of the package tour, who helped to rekindle Protestant interest in visiting the Holy Land in the late 1800s.

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April 2009, Vol. 53, No. 4