Although the Camino has traditionally been a Catholic pilgrimage site, it is increasingly attracting a more spiritual, rather than more religious, audience.
advertisementRachel Sanborn was in her early 30s and struggling in a relationship, and dreamed of escaping to Spain’s Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage her father had taken that transformed his life.
A born rebel and adventurer (she dropped out of college to meditate in India for a year), Sanborn quit her job, gave up her health insurance and pooled her savings to walk the Camino in two months.
On the third day of her walk, she vowed to return every year. Nine months later, she returned and guided the first group of eight pilgrims.
Ten years later, she’s now 45 and lives in the Bay Area, leading Camino grief walks and walking meditations through a travel company she founded. Red Monkey Walking TravelThe red monkey represents homage to Hanuman, the Hindu god of joyful service. Having been raised a Tibetan Buddhist, Christian and Jew, Sanborn considers herself to be all three, and she believes everyone can find a way to make the Camino useful for their religion.
“We’ve had everyone from devout Catholics to Chinese atheists,” Sanborn said.
“For the past 1,000 years, the Camino has always been open to people of all religions. Some of my first Camino friends walked from Iran – Iran! And they stopped in and outside locked churches to read poetry by Rumi.”
The growing trend of non-Christian pilgrims
Sanborn represents a growing trend of non-Catholic, and even non-Christian, pilgrims attempting the Camino de Santiago. Nearly half a million people walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain in 2023. About 40 percent of them did so for purely religious reasons, according to statistics released by the pilgrims’ office.
Traditionally a Catholic pilgrimage, ending at the shrine of James the Apostle in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, today secular pilgrims set out on the Camino for a variety of motivations other than religion: health, grief, transition, Cultural Explorationhistory and adventure.
Sharon Hewitt of St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, walked part of the Camino with two friends in the fall of 2016. Her motivation was to spend time with friends and have a “meaningful” vacation. Although Hewitt doesn’t consider herself religious, she found a certain devotion in the rituals and challenge of the eight-day walk.
“I didn’t do it for religious reasons, but there are overlaps,” Hewitt says. “A lot of religion is the discipline, and it’s the same with the Camino: after a hard night, you get up and keep going.”
This integration of religious and secular motivations has profound implications for people like Nancy Mead, president of the Anglican Friends of Santiago de Compostela Centre, an ecumenical religious organisation.
Mead, an Episcopalian from Rhode Island, says there are as many reasons why people do the Camino as there are people who do it. For her, it’s a religious experience, but along the way she’s also learned life lessons that apply to everyone, faith or no faith.
She has walked seven different routes of the Camino and each time she has to remind herself to pack lightly – beauty products and extra clothes only make the journey heavier.
“Spiritual but not religious”
Due to population growth and the emergence of “secular spirituality”, the number of “spiritual but not religious” pilgrims on the Camino has increased over the past two decades.
Jackie Frost, a researcher at Purdue University, Health and Wellbeing Among non-religious people, she says, researchers are increasingly using the language of spirituality to talk about secular experiences of feeling connected to something greater than oneself, something that she says often happens in the natural world.
“We’re starting to secularize a lot of what were once religious rituals,” Frost says. “Think about meditation, yoga, or atheist churches. A lot of people are interested in ritual and finding meaning in these communal events.”
As this growing spiritual-but-not-religious group borrows religious rituals and beliefs, the question arises of how to do so without appropriating them. Many of the reasons nonreligious people go on the Camino are similar to the reasons religious people go.
In a 2019 study published in the journal Sociology of Religion, researchers looked at the motivations of atheist and religious pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago and found a vast overlap between their motivations. Most people Connect with nature and with yourself deeply. The only differences were in measures of community and religious motivations, both of which were higher among religious pilgrims.
advertisementLiz Bucher, an expert on religious ethics and author of the upcoming book “The Religion Factor: How to Reinstate Religion in Our Spirituality to Make It More Meaningful, Responsible and Effective,” said the rise in spiritual but non-religious pilgrims shows the need to find meaning even if we reject religion.
But she doesn’t think it’s as simple as just discarding the religion part, and she’s not sure she would get the same benefits without it.
“If you want to experience the essence of pilgrimage, you have to engage with the religion of the pilgrimage,” Bukar says. “Spirituality is the element of religion that they like. Religion is part of the secret sauce.”
Ultimately, pilgrimage is spiritual tourism, Bukar said.
Unpleasant truths your tour guide won’t tell you
Bucard describes the Camino today as a “curated, socially constructed experience that involves organizations.” She once led a Camino for college students, and she came to believe that the journey led to this idea that you can access spiritual connection or transcendence. Take part in a temporary experience.
advertisementShe says the Camino falls into the category of spiritual hacks and shortcuts that she discusses in her new book, which people take when they “don’t want to do religion.”
Bucar required students to write a statement of purpose for the class, and most cited a desire for a life-changing experience as their reason for walking the Camino. “They’re looking for a quick fix, a life-changing experience,” Bucar said.
She’s not opposed to taking students back, but she would do it differently: Instead of focusing on an inward-looking journey, she would encourage students to learn about the historical context of the route and controversial parts of history that official Spanish tour guides might leave out.
After all, St. James is also known as Santiago Matamoros, “the Moor Killer.” You won’t hear from your tour guide that Matamoros helped Charlemagne kill Muslims. She made constructing a historical narrative a priority.
“I would make it less enjoyable for them and less of an ‘experience.’ It’s much more valuable for these experiences to be uncomfortable and confusing,” Bukar said. “You have to approach it with a religious sensibility.”
advertisementFor some, Christianity will always be part of the Camino.
For Sanborn, Christianity will always be at the heart of the Camino, even for those who bring other religions to the pilgrimage, and for those who have no religion at all, but he agrees with Bucard that Christianity on the Camino hasn’t always been pretty.
“I think it’s important to respect the Christian faith of the Camino and to appreciate its traditions and its wonderful art and architecture. Camino “We’ll also walk both through the site where over 80 people were taken from their mountain homes and through the city where they were burned at the stake. So I think it’s important to look at the good and the bad of religion,” Sanborn said.
“Every time I step in Church or Cathedral On a hot day, it’s hard not to be in awe of it.”
But Sanborn disagrees with the idea that non-Catholic pilgrims (“sometimes called tourist pilgrims”) can’t experience what the Camino has to offer.
“Everyone I’ve met on the Camino has gotten more than they expected, so I think it’s best not to judge,” she says. “There’s something special about the Camino that I don’t understand. It’s part of the great mystery of life. It’s magical.”
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