Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Palestinian Christians take up secular conceptions of religious heritage as a substitute for church ritual. It argues that in identifying Christianity as a 'heritage', Palestinians tie the experience of divine presence to particular ways of imagining the Christian past.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian Christians take up secular conceptions of religious heritage as a substitute for church ritual in the Old City of Jerusalem. Jerusalem's Christian holy sites have been controlled by European monks for centuries, though the majority of the Christian population is Palestinian. Major religious and historical sites are kept open for public visitation while local congregations worship in separate parish churches. At certain times of the year, however, the more famous sites - usually occupied by tourists, pilgrims, and monks - take on a different role. Annual festivals celebrating saints and miracles, which feature rituals performed by clergy but also historical traditions led by lay Palestinians, provide the latter with a way to experience a link to the generations of indigenous Christians who lived in the city before them, all the way back to the first Christians. The paper compares the different ways in which this link is articulated, ultimately arguing that the festivals produce a slippage between re-enactment and ritual. In doing so, they grant marginalized Palestinian Christians privileged access to major shrines and allow them to recognize their own social history in the universal Christian heritage. Their collective experience of the past is thus grafted onto their ritual experiences of the divine, providing them with a sense of continuity that informs the way they act in the present and prepare for the future.