A pilgrimage doesn't always begin with a first step. For one American hiker preparing to walk the Camino de Santiago, the real work started months before the trailhead — with research into how Christianity became the institution it is today.
Writing on The Trek, Marley Kreiser describes the third stage of a personal project called the Saunter of Spirit: coming to terms with the history of the Church after eleven years of Christian schooling. The schooling taught the Bible thoroughly, Kreiser writes, but never the history surrounding it — how the text came to be treated as absolute truth by so many.
The turning point in that research was the Emperor Constantine. His conversion in the fourth century pulled Christianity into an increasingly close relationship with Roman imperial power, changing the context in which the faith developed. Kreiser points to scholarship describing Roman expansion as a "predatory" political economy — and notes the irony that the empire Christianity later intertwined with was the same one whose soldiers executed Jesus.
The reflection continues through the Inquisition, which Kreiser emphasises wasn't a single institution but a series of separate bodies across Europe. Starting in 1231, the last of them — the Spanish Inquisition — only formally ended in 1834. That's a span of more than six centuries of religious persecution carried out in God's name, prompting the questions that echo through the piece: why does religious certainty so often become permission for violence, and who gets to define what truth is?
Kreiser quotes theologian Seán ÓLaoire's book Setting God Free, including the line "I wish to set God free to do what God does best, love," and describes a sense of growing liberation as the uncomfortable questions got dug into rather than avoided.
Why does this matter to travellers? Because this is exactly the kind of interior work the Camino has been used for over a thousand years. The walk to Santiago de Compostela isn't just a long-distance hiking route — it's one of the world's great pilgrimages, and modern walkers from every background (religious and otherwise) use its weeks of repetitive, meditative walking to process big questions. Kreiser closes the piece wondering whether each step on the Camino will keep unravelling what has been stirring within. That's a familiar feeling for anyone who has walked it: the trail gives you time, and time gives you answers you didn't expect.
For anyone considering their own long walk — whether spiritual, secular, or somewhere in between — the piece is a reminder that the preparation is part of the pilgrimage. The healing, as Kreiser puts it, had already begun before a single kilometre was covered.
