Saudi Arabia wants tourists. It didn’t expect Christians.
HAQL, Saudi Arabia — The caravan of five Toyota Land Cruisers raced across Saudi Arabia’s rocky desert, weaving onto a highway so new it was not on the map. At the cleft of sea that splits the kingdom from Egypt, they stopped on a barren beach. Fifteen tourists spilled out and gathered around Joel Richardson, a Kansas preacher.
As the sun dipped below the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula — hazy across the water in Egypt — Richardson asked the group to imagine standing on the other side at the moment of the biblical Exodus, fleeing from Pharaoh’s army with Moses, when the sea ripped in half.
He opened a Bible and began to recite. “Who among the gods is like you, oh Lord?” he said. “Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?”
Two Florida retirees, a Colorado pharmacist, an Idaho bookkeeper, and an Israeli archeologist listened intently.
These were not the visitors Saudi officials expected when they opened the country’s borders to leisure tourists in 2019, seeking to diversify the oil-dependent economy and present a new face to the world. First would come the adventurers, they thought — seasoned travelers searching for an unusual destination — and then the luxury market, with yacht owners flocking to resorts that the government is building on the Red Sea coast. No one in the conservative Islamic kingdom had planned for the Christians.
Yet Christians of many stripes — including Baptists, Mennonites, and others who call themselves “children of God” — were among the first people to use the new Saudi tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadily in numbers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos arguing that Saudi Arabia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jewish and Christian Scriptures describe God revealing the Ten Commandments.
Mainstream biblical scholars vigorously dispute this. But that does little to dampen the pilgrims’ enthusiasm as they embark on what is, for many of them, the trip of a lifetime, hunting for evidence they think could prove the truth of the Exodus.
“It makes something tangible that you have believed in your whole life,” said Kris Gibson, 53, the Idaho bookkeeper on Richardson’s trip, who had never traveled beyond the United States and Mexico before she boarded a plane in February to Saudi Arabia.
For decades, nearly all the tourists who entered Saudi Arabia were pilgrims going to Mecca, the birthplace of Islam. Openly practicing other religions was effectively forbidden. Synthetic Christmas trees were smuggled in and sold as contraband. People accused of “witchcraft” were executed.
The country’s religious dogmatism began to ease in the 2000s, when tens of thousands of Saudis studied in the United States. Then, in 2015, a new king elevated his 29-year-old son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, into the line of succession.
Prince Mohammed declared that he would turn the kingdom into a global business hub. He unleashed a cascade of social changes, stripping religious police of their powers, loosening dress codes, and lifting a ban on women driving.
He also oversaw an increase in political repression, silencing almost every Saudi voice that might challenge him. In 2018, Saudi agents in Istanbul murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critical exile. A US intelligence assessment determined that the prince probably ordered the killing, a charge he denied.
Since then, Prince Mohammed has defied attempts to isolate him, deploying Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth in new ways to cement the country’s influence, including this month’s surprise deal between a Saudi-backed golf league and the PGA Tour.
When Gibson told a friend she was going to Saudi Arabia, he called her crazy. She worried about offending Saudis — wearing the wrong thing, eating with the wrong hand — but once she arrived, no one seemed to care.
“I’m just absolutely shocked at how beautiful it is,” she said. “Because, you know, in my head I’m thinking, nothing but sand.”
Israel and Egypt have local Christian populations and long ago welcomed Christian travelers, drawing millions of people a year, many of them American evangelicals. Saudi Arabia is a nascent market. But several tour companies now offer packages geared toward Christians.
Like most similar journeys, Richardson’s tour — costing $5,199 per person — covered an area that Prince Mohammed chose for a science fiction-inspired mega-project, Neom, where he plans to build a linear metropolis composed entirely of two parallel skyscrapers. Neom’s planners promise to preserve archeological sites. Still, some Christian tourists worry.
“I wanted to see it in its pristine nature,” said Michael Marks, 52, the Colorado pharmacist, who accelerated his plan to visit because of the project.
Like many Christian tourists, Marks became interested in the kingdom through the story of Ron Wyatt, an American nurse who popularized the idea that Saudi Arabia was the location of Mount Sinai.
Biblical archeologists typically place Mount Sinai in Egypt, although there are other theories. A minority points to writings by Roman historian Flavius Josephus suggesting that Jebel alLawz, a mountain in northwestern Saudi Arabia, is the site. There is also local lore that Moses spent time in the area.
Richardson led his first tour to the kingdom in 2019, when the tourist visas were first available. A bearded man with a dry sense of humor, he was raised nominally Catholic in Massachusetts. As a teen, he was a “very successful hedonist,” he joked.
In the early 1990s, he came across a revival meeting in Tennessee and became an evangelical. “The Holy Spirit just spoke to me and said, ‘Your entire life is just a complete lie,’” he said.
On one of their last days in the kingdom, he took the tourists to a Bedouin camp. Inside a tent lined with burgundy carpets, they dipped dates into goat butter and feasted on meat and rice piled on platters the size of chandeliers. “This is such a privilege, that we get to be at the forefront of all this,” he said.