How to Build Peace as a Tourist
by Bryan Carey
How can religious tourism and peacemaking go together? After the dean of the College of Tourism & Management in Konjic, Bosnia attended our recent Catalyze peacemaking trip, my local colleague and I received an invitation to participate in the College’s Religious Tourism and Theology conference.
The dean’s personal vision for this conference, partially informed by the personal experiences she had with us at Catalyze only a couple weeks before, was to help foster connection between the Balkan region’s diverse ethnic and religious communities.
During an interactive panel, I had a chance to share briefly about the challenges of doing inter-religious tourism. In a place like Bosnia, where the negative impacts of division, conflict, and war are tangible, travelers can’t avoid being confronted with the violent past. When that occurs - for example, when a tourist or host community mentions how a religious building was destroyed or its people expelled during war - there is a choice about how to engage with the past, and to either contribute to peace or division. It’s natural to interpret stories from the past in order to show that “our community” is better than another: “they” are the savage aggressor and “we” are the innocent victim.
However, although it’s much more challenging to engage in self-reflection about the complexities of division and conflict, there is potential within religious tourism to do just that - to turn a point of challenge into an opportunity for peace building so that we can move together toward mutual understanding and a just peace.
This is true not only in Bosnia but around the world. Let’s be catalysts for peace not only in our own cities and neighborhoods but also as we travel and encounter the histories and stories of others. There are enough causes of division in the world. Let’s be people who make peace instead.
