Travel should open up our horizons. You know – expose us to different cultures, new foods, alternative rhythms of life, and diverse worldviews. The good traveler not only seeks out these aspects of other cultures, but takes those cultural elements into herself and lets them speak to her. She might appropriate new habits or ideas, or simply be forced to shift her own understanding of the world as the multiple truths she encounters are wrestled with.
Good travelers like these are the ones who change the world, or more accurately, the ones who formulate the ideas that change the world. So, for instance, during the Renaissance as war, trade, exploration, and diplomacy took men further away from their homes than their ancestors had ever thought possible to encounter lands none of them had ever dreamed existed, the world, by necessity, had to shift. New philosophies, sciences, and religious ideas challenged traditional assumptions. New experiences and knowledge necessarily deconstructs what was previously known. The experience for these men led to the Enlightenment – a necessary shift to accommodate a larger world. As the world grows smaller and we travel to other cultures more regularly (whether physically or virtually via the internet), similar shifts occur. It’s all part of being an observant, thoughtful, traveler. Or at least it should be.
To me, ideally, pluralism expands us and blesses us. It forces us to constantly examine ourselves and our world, changing our assumptions and developing our worldviews as we grow. I want to be like that, I want to be the good traveler. My problem is that I grew up in and exist in a world of Texas tourists. If you’ve never encountered an actual “Texas tourist” consider yourself lucky. You can easily spot them when you’re abroad as the fellow travelers who pay almost no attention to the culture they visit. They ride in tour buses with others just like them, wear tennis shoes, cowboy hats, fanny packs and rhinestone embroidered shirts, stay in American hotels, eat American food, and assert their opinions loudly to whoever they can get to listen. I cringe when I run into them while traveling (and double cringe when it’s obvious they are from my home state of Texas). I’ve heard them telling shopkeepers in Mexico how to run their business, yelling at French security guards for not speaking English, complaining that there is no normal food to eat in Spain, and mocking offered hospitality in Russia. They don’t want to be touched by the other culture. If anything, they simply want to impose their own culture onto others as the only right way to exist.
This is the church world I know. The world where missionaries return from the field and compare the people they are working with to mindless monkeys (I am so not kidding). Where participating in martial arts is forbidden because of the “Asian” influence. Or where to participate in certain ministries I had to swear I didn’t dabble in occult practices like yoga. Where friends don’t celebrate Christmas, Easter, or Halloween because they are too pagan. Where it is too cosmopolitan and liberal (and therefore suspect) to eat Sushi or Indian food (or Ethiopian, or Persian, but Tex-Mex is of course okay). Where we were told not to move into certain neighborhoods because they were too Asian, or too Hispanic, or too Black. (And that’s just cultural issues, nevermind theological or philosophical diversity.) This is the world of Texas tourists – never engaging the world, rejecting and mocking it on occasion, but never letting it speak to them and help them to grow.