Rethinking Religious Engagement Through Worship: Airport Prayer Rooms as Sites of Secular Hospitality

Air travel is often accompanied by heightened emotions and elevated stress levels, arising from a range of challenges—from carefully managing check-in times and adhering to airline baggage allowances to the anxieties about confined spaces, turbulence, the potential impact of flight delays and cancellations, or more sinister imaginings of how flights might go wrong. In recognition of the diverse needs of travellers—whether of any faith or of none—many airports now provide a designated prayer or quiet room. It is my own practice, where time and circumstance permit, to make use of these rooms when passing through airports. I do so with a dual awareness: first of a personal concern—whether or not it is well-founded—that such rooms risk closure if perceived to be underused; and second of the commitment and care invested by individuals—both airport staff and fellow travellers—in maintaining these spaces.

Beyond these practical considerations, I have come to view these spaces as offering something significant: a distinctive model of interreligious engagement grounded not in doctrinal negotiation, but in shared presence and embodied worship. I attend to this possibility here.

Recent speaking engagements at conferences across the UK, Ireland, and further afield have afforded me the opportunity to visit several such prayer rooms within a relatively short span of time. I share here one such experience—both practically fruitful and theologically suggestive—with a view to exploring the wider significance of the airport prayer room as a site for engagement with other religious traditions. In particular, I consider its potential to model a form of engagement with other religious traditions through worship and presence.

I enter a clean, cosy room, minimalist in design and tucked just beyond the departures area. Fortuitously, I am unencumbered by my hold luggage—a 20kg suitcase containing everything but the kitchen sink—and I look for a place to catch my breath. Neutral, patternless flooring and walls offer a simple background for the pieties and practices of those who make use of the space, whether in prayer or quiet reflection. A soft-coloured carpet lends texture, gently demarcating areas for sitting or kneeling and suggesting pathways through the room. The intended uses of the space are intuitively apparent; the room is designed and curated with care to accommodate the varied needs of its visitors, creating an uplifting environment conducive to contemplation, calm, and connection.

Furniture, cushioned and finished in soft ash tones, is arranged sparingly yet thoughtfully, in a configuration that requires no signage or steward to make sense. Ambient lighting—soft, warm, and white—suffuses the space and creates a restful atmosphere, expanding its corners, softening the edges of furniture, and offering sufficient illumination for safe and comfortable navigation. I sit a few seats from someone quietly reciting Ashrei[1] and pray a collect from my own tradition: Go before us, Lord, in all our doings, with your most gracious favour…. Neither of us feels intruded upon by the other, though each is gently aware of the other’s presence. As he leaves, my companion in prayer nods a silent goodbye.

Such airport prayer rooms, I would suggest, represent an alternative and fruitful model for engaging with other religious traditions through worship: one that is, by nature, precarious—dependent as it is on secular hospitality—but productive nonetheless.

Extant models—or, more precisely, extant Christian models—of engagement with those of other religious traditions through worship typically fall into one of the following two categories:

First, a service is held in accordance with the rites and ceremonies of one of the particular religious traditions represented, a service in which all present are free to participate in the normative pieties and worship texts to whatever extent the individual feels comfortable, able, and represented by said text. For example, in the tradition I know best and which I name as my own (Irish Anglicanism), this might involve a service of Choral Evensong at which representatives from other religious traditions are present, often simply by providing greetings from a community or communities before or after the service proper. In this model, one religious tradition acts as the host; the participation of other traditions is made possible by hospitality.

Second, elements deemed eirenic from each of the religious traditions represented are welded together—often one tradition still acts as host, though with input from a variety of other representatives—to create a ‘lowest common denominator’ service, one in which participants can recognise elements from their own traditions.

As my tone perhaps suggests, both models are frequently underpinned by problematic frameworks of hospitality. Those in the position of host—often Christian—exercise a form of soft power, establishing the terms of engagement and thereby privileging one tradition while marginalising others. This results in a skewed model of inclusion, in which the centre (typically Christian) retains the authority to include or exclude, to set boundaries and define norms. Even well-meaning inclusion can thus become a mode of exclusion; exclusion can disguise itself as vague benevolence. The Christian inclusivist, however sincere, may unwittingly act as an agent of marginalisation, all the while perceiving their actions as generous and commendable.

By contrast, airport prayer rooms are self-regulating spaces. They rely not on the authority or power of any one tradition, but on the mutual respect, cooperation, and goodwill of their users. Their very possibility arises from their secular contexts, which—importantly—preclude the privileging of any one tradition over another. Secular hospitality is key to their success. Secular here refers not to the ideological or dismissive taunting of religion—not unlike the adolescent thrill of transgressing boundaries set out by parents—but spacious non-religiosity that accounts for religious pluralism; religion being a conduit of bodily know-how.

‘Belief is not a “state of mind”,’ writes Pierre Bourdieu, ‘still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (“beliefs”), but rather a state of the body.’[2] Belief, then, is not a matter of intellectual assent to six impossible things before breakfast,[3] but something embodied and enacted—lived through the body in habitual, meaningful action. It is a nexus of habits—not mechanical, but ritual and repeatable structures in time and memory—which includes, centrally, the act of worship.

Worship, in this light, is not primarily a cognitive exercise in meaning-making—as both of the dominant models imply, where assent to a set of doctrinal propositions delineates the boundaries of participation—but rather a material, embodied activity. Worship is a mediation: through signs and symbols, words and gestures, performed in accompaniment with others.

Prayer rooms thus serve as sites for the application and transmission of this bodily know-how beyond the limits of the particular religious tradition an individual inhabits: the tacit skills and gestures required for respectful, non-intrusive sharing of space. They enable the presence and participation of individuals from different religious traditions—or none—who engage according to their own rites, personal pieties, religious traditions, or reflective needs, without encroaching upon one another.

At the most fundamental level, meaningful engagement across religious traditions through worship depends not on theological agreement or liturgical flattening out, but on this shared bodily know-how: learned through tradition, education, practice, and imitation. Without spaces such as these, there would be few opportunities for this knowledge to be acquired or enacted. A reality which, I would suggest, would leave us all much the poorer.

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[1] A Jewish prayer recited three times daily, twice during the morning (Shacharit) and once during the afternoon (Mincha). Its core is Psalm 145, with a few additional verses at the beginning and end.

[2] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Belief and the Body,’ in Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (eds), The Body: A Reader, (London: Routledge, 2004), 88.

[3] This is a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

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© Christopher West, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Taoyuan Airport prayer room.