Why have "pilgrimages" become popular?

In the UK, at least, "pilgrimages" (including to "Recognized" Christian sites) have in recent decades become popular among churchy people and the secular-intellectual middle class more generally, and are often depicted in the mass media. 

Since Christianity continues its steep decline and top-down destruction; this phenomenon could only be happening if pilgrimages were - or, at least, were expected to be - "a bad thing" and to do spiritual harm. 

And indeed, this largely seems to be the case. 

For a start; modern people are simply incapable of responding to symbolic phenomena such as pilgrimages, with the kind of spirituality-sustaining and motivating power that was possible (indeed apparently usual) in medieval times. 

For instance, the premier healing pilgrimage site of Lourdes was closed during the Birdemic; so clearly real belief in the power of place and pilgrimage thereto was absent. 

Indeed, nearly all Holy Places (including all churches) were locked-down and the public excluded; with the expressed approval of the pious - evidently, there is nowadays negligible actual lived-experience of a Holiness linked with place and artefact.   

So modern pilgrimages (whether by the explicitly materialist-secular majority, or by the minority of self-identified Christians) are inevitably more of the nature of a holiday/ lifestyle-thing than anything resembling a real pilgrimage. 

This is evidenced by the give-away of recording and depicting pilgrimage photographically and "sharing" these images and narratives on social media - whether serially "as it happens", or "curated" retrospectively. 

It is obvious that extremely few "pilgrimages" would happen if the participants were forbidden to record and later boast... I mean talk - about their "experience". 

In sum, modern pilgrimage is more like a do-it-yourself form of that populist literary genre "travel writing", than they are a sign of anything in the remotest degree "spiritual". 

Insofar as pilgrimages do "work" - that is, insofar as they actually have a positively transformative spiritual effect; then this is nothing to do with official, recognized, popular, fashionable, photogenic pilgrimage sites; but a matter of individual significance. 

It is most likely that nowadays a special place of pilgrimage would be almost unique to a person or a few people; as a consequence of sharing an unusually similar outlook and experiences. 

And, even when a pilgrimage "works" spiritually in the desired and intended fashion; there is still a hazard to the fact of linking the experience to a place. 

Life away from the place is perhaps thereby devalued; or else if the pilgrim was to relocate and move to dwell in the place of pilgrimage - then would occur the problem of over-familiarity, habituation; of building-up "tolerance" to the spiritual benefit.

In a nutshell: even a spiritually-successful pilgrimage may be alienating - that is, the mediating role of place may distance us (temporally and spatially) from a direct apprehension of the divine in life.  

In sum; it seems to me that, in our era, pilgrimage should be regarded as at best providing a spiritual clue, perhaps an epiphany; and an effective pilgrimage needs to be used as a kick-start towards something else that comes after; rather than leading to the more usual pilgrimage-addiction, or the recycling of the primary act of pilgrimage - whether in discourse, memory, or in practice.