Sacred-Function Criticality and the Sacredness Constraint: Limits of Value Compensation in Religious Tourism Sustainability

Religious tourism can generate economic, environmental, social, and experiential benefits while impairing the functions that sustain a destination as a living religious place. This conceptual paper examines the limits of cross-domain compensation through theory synthesis, drawing primarily on spiritual-sustainability research and strong sustainability, and distinguishing value formation from value compensation. It develops sacred-function criticality as the degree to which impairment threatens religious functional continuity for a specified community and time horizon. Assessment considers constitutiveness, reversibility, and functional replaceability, with religious–institutional embeddedness providing context. Two conditional propositions associate documented dependencies with higher estimated criticality and credible recovery options with lower criticality under comparable conditions. The sacredness constraint states that, when maintaining religious continuity is an explicit objective, benefits alone do not demonstrate compensation; maintenance, restoration, or religiously equivalent replacement must be examined separately. A hypothetical comparison distinguishes benefits accompanying persistent loss from revenues enabling later recovery, without erasing missed ritual occurrences. The framework separates project approval and acceptance of trade-offs from evidence of religious continuity. It offers a function-specific basis for comparing tourism interventions alongside economic and ecological appraisal, while its empirical usefulness remains to be established.