ABSTRACT
New religious movements (NRMs) are described as religions that have emerged from the nineteenth century up to the present. The spiritual marketplace also drives many of these activities, including ‘secular pilgrimage’ and ‘spiritual tourism’, which types of tourism overlap with ‘religious pilgrimage’ and secular forms of tourism. Modern western tourism has its roots in the English upper-class tradition of the ‘Grand Tour,’—a type of travel from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries where young aristocratic young men would travel to study the great cities and monuments of western culture. Spiritual tourists to Sedona often claim that they were ‘drawn’ there, and like Glastonbury, the site is replete with power spots and vortices that enhance the energy flow at Sedona, leading to enhanced ‘spiritual awareness as well as healing experiences’. Spiritual tourists and members of New religious movements (NRMs) have very different attitudes towards spiritual and religious tourism.
