It is hardly surprising that segments of the church community have welcomed proposals for the marketing of Jamaica as a 'religious tourism' destination, as broached formally by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett on Monday.

We say 'broached formally' for certainly the idea, which has been embraced by the organised Christian community, is not new. In fact, in yesterday's Gleaner, under the headline 'Church welcomes religious tourism', Fun in the Son organiser Tommy Cowan pointed out that "that has always been the idea for the gospel show".

So it is not an unfamiliar scenario, where the pull of Jamaica's music, a creative outlet pursued mainly by lower-income Jamaicans without any government or big business support at its embryonic stage, in large part sets the stage for a formalisation of a tourism product around this magnetism. We have seen it before with Jamaican popular music, with the voices of Desmond Dekker, Laurel Aitken and Millie Small, among many others, reaching foreign shores long before there was a tourism strip, hip or not.

And certainly the Rastafarian adherents and admirers who continue to make trips to Jamaica consider themselves to be on a pilgrimage to the source of their faith, whether Rastafarians actually consider themselves to be a religious body or not.

In addition, various church organisations have hosted overseas gospel performers (duo Mary Mary was billed for the closing night of the recently concluded 2008 Air Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival) and numerous pastors there are those who would suggest that this practice is more an ebb than a flow in the net international reserve.

Formalisation and government support, however, are critical to the coordination and transformation of individual and informal activity into a sustained economic pursuit and we welcome the intention to capture some of the 50,000 church groups which run travel programmes from the United States regularly.

At the same time, we presume, tha Mr Bartlett spoke of travel programmes and the Rev Dr Roy Notice of the New Testament Church of God in Mandeville mentioned "retreats and conventions", that the proposed religious tourism would not be all-inclusive in the manner of huge north coast properties where the visitors are hosted in a carefully constructed, sterilised piece of Jamaica with the mayhem filtered out. We expect that since the Church is expected to have a direct impact on people's lives, religious tourism would be all-inclusive in the sense of being all-embracing of Jamaica and Jamaicans outside of the resort setting.

And we hope that in this case, 'religious' does not automatically mean 'Christian', as from Baha'i to Yoruba, there is diversity even within the overwhelming Christian domination of religious belief in Jamaica.

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