Rick Steves, Bless Him, Is a Bible-Thumping Hack of European Travel. His Videos Are Blasphemy.
For non-Christian travelers, watching his vids means enduring a nonstop, uncritical sermon on every altar in Western Europe
How do you shoot a travel video in Alexandria without mentioning Cavafy?
How do you visit Paris without paying homage to the luxuries of Avenue Montaigne or slipping through the secret back doors of the Marais?
How do you do?
My name is Anthony Grant, and here’s my confession: I’d rather sit through even the most unbearable Rick Steves travelogue than endure four minutes of the train-wreck mumblefest that is Christopher Nolan’s cinematic obliteration of The Odyssey.
But still, Lady Steves—yes, I know he’s a proud father of two, but that lisp is so serving Lyle—just grates.
That’s not the beef, though. From Paris to Prague, has this guy ever met a church he didn’t do his level best to turn into a video catechism? It’s time to call out the insufferable Christian-obsessed bias that is blasted down our throats thanks to Steves’ unchecked domination of the generic travel video space and newspaper column space (we know, newspapers…but still.)
For decades, public television’s JCPenny-clad version of Mr. Rogers has sold American tourists a pristine, sanitized and serially blurred vision of the Old World, promising to guide us through “Europe Through the Back Door”—a slogan that, frankly, could use a little WD-40.
Anyway, nobody warned us that Rick’s back door leads straight into mandatory Sunday school. We don’t need that education, boys and girls.
It doesn’t matter whether he’s stepping into a metropolis of ancient trade, secular philosophy, or modern counterculture. Within six minutes, Steves will invariably find an overdone cathedral or weatherbeaten church, drag you toward the altar, and deliver a thinly-veiled (see what we did there?) lispy-breathless, dew-eyed homily on Jesus that nobody asked for.
Invariably when he does this, the shot is flooded with artificial churchy background music, as if to groom you into sharing Rick’s apparent and bizarrely inappropriate pseudo-epiphanies.
For non-Christian travelers, watching his filmography isn’t a gateway to European culture. It’s an endless, non-consensual pilgrimage.
At some point, the cloying, scripted commentary veers into the frankly creepy.
Maybe Rick didn’t get the memo that the French keep religion out of public affairs even more aggressively than we do—that laïcité, along with a few other minor inconveniences like starvation and no peasant discounts at Versailles, helped set the stage for the bloodiest of revolts: the French Revolution.
How can we put this politely? Europe has hundreds of pretty churches and carbon-copy cathedrals, mostly relics from ages even less enlightened than our own. They might be relevant to some “progressive” Christians like Rick Steves. But as God is my witness, they are robustly irrelevant to metro-loads of Londoners, Parisians, Germans and whatever-ans. They got modern lives to lead, Rick. Doesn’t mean we should bomb them — Berlin isn’t Tehran, after all! — but come on.
Less politely: Maybe Steves didn’t get the SMS from the producer he fired that Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, and millions of their fans don’t go to Paris to worship, or even particularly to admire Notre-Dame.
Rick maymay go to praypray.
Kim and Taytay go to shopshop and, though they came “for the culture” like every Barnard art major does, actually they came to make fuckfuck.
That’s what Paris represents to millions of Americans, whether they’re into the whole Jesus ‘n Mary thing or not. And Rick’s deceptively feline insertion of references to Christ into virtually every segment he produces begins to feel like its own kind of cop-out. Or sacrilege. Or worse. Mark Twain would retch.
Because of you’re traveling to venerate a religious figure, which in Steve’s case appears to have transmuted into doing PR for the Catholic church (the worst kind) you’re not a traveler.
You’re a pilgrim.
That’s anathema to travel journalism. It is the current blasphemy.
If you’ve got to have faith, you either better be George Michael or keep it to yourself. You can skip the overrated Pietà and feel fucking great about it.
This is not to say that Steves is lazy. Or that his current “partner” being a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America could pull him in a certain direction that is, shall we say, less than ecumenical.
Filming anything does take patience and work. Even Leni Riefenstahl had to roll up her sleeves now and then.
The construct is the problem. Rick Steves’ video USP is just a flimsy one.
You don’t trundle to four European microstates just so you can cross them off your “bucket list.” (Are we still doing those?) You don’t go to Frankfurt, period. And you don’t go to Paris and the Marais merely to talk about the “Jewish quarter,” which Rick can reduce to a couple of restaurants nobody has eaten at since, like, 1990 (trust us on this. Your imaginary Jewish nana cooks better.) To obfuscate the neighborhood’s rich pre-Revolutionary history—and then dodge its more recent gay history—is worse than reductive. It’s a fundamental misreading of Paris and what the city represents.
Rick’s recipe for rose-tinted kumbaya travel videologue never varies:
Read a few historical facts that could be skimmed from Wikipedia from a teleprompter, complain jovially about overtourism, then, by focusing on the most clichéd sights and regurgitating the most basic tourist tropes (order the local beer!), promote overtourism.
Introduce every tour guide as a “friend and guide”—a nice little ruse for promoting his own guidebooks.
Segue inartfully from any mention of art in a church to an Instagram-worthy (?) mini sermon on the mount of your own holier-than-thou fixation with Jesus.
Praise every local market as “lively” in that unmistakable way that suggests stupid Americans could never appreciate it unless they trace Rick’s exact footsteps and learn like he does how to pretend to enjoy some gross edible item while wanting quite desperately to spit it out.
Pretend every inane, outmoded tourist folk dance is an example of cultural authenticity that you pop-obsessed Americans can barely handle.
Mon dieu!
Not every trip to Rome also involves the Vatican. Ever heard of the Hassler?
Not every European square is so “full of life” that it gives you an excuse to gloss over the high cost of living, corrupt politicians and bad weather the locals have to contend with for the 20 hours of the day when they aren’t forming the background of the sanitized Euro fantasy you’re peddling.
Allons-y. Not every stinky French cheese has to be tasted!
Wine tastings? Many, many thousands will happily take a pass on that glass.
And Rick Steves, we are mightily glad that you aren’t Peter Greenberg.
But the sins of your banality must stop!
Can the Bible references. The Crusades are over. And by the way, Jerusalem is boring AF. But don’t you dare go looking for a church in Tel Aviv, or we will Jew you to the moon.
Pick up a book of Cavafy for a change and pair it with a cheap bottle of ouzo.
Mess up your lines. Slur your speech.
And baby, go to town.
