The Pluralism Project at Harvard UniversityThe Challenge of Pluralism
Diana L. Eck
Nieman Reports “God in the Newsroom” Issue
Vol. XLVII, No. 2, Summer 1993
In May of 1990 in a suburb of Boston not far from the starting point of the Boston marathon, the Hindu community of New England dedicated a temple to the goddess Lakshmi, pouring the consecrated waters of the Ganges over the temple towers, along with the waters of the Colorado, the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. In April of 1993 in Sharon, the Islamic community of New England broke ground for a major new Islamic center to provide an anchor for the nearly 20 mosques in the Islamic Council of New England.
These events are increasingly typical of the religious life of New England. Indeed, the religious landscape of much of America is changing -- slowly, but in dramatic ways that test the pluralist foundations of American public life.
The Jain community celebrates the end of its season of fasting with a great feast held under a bright yellow and white striped tent in the backyard of its temple in Norwood, formerly a Swedish Lutheran Church. A young man being ordained as a monk kneels shaven-headed amidst the Cambodian Buddhist community in its temple in Lynn -- one of three Cambodian Buddhist temples in the northern suburbs of Boston. Sikhs come to their gurdwara in Milford for the celebration of Vaishaki. African American Muslims gather in Malcolm X Park in Dorchester to celebrate Id Al Adha during the month of the pilgrimage to Makkah. Buddhist dignitaries from a dozen monastic lineages assemble in Cumberland, Rhode Island, where a Korean Zen Master for the first time in history formally transmits his lineage of teaching to three American teachers, one of them a woman. This is New England in the 1990's. The whole world of religious diversity is here.
This new reality is not a New York-California phenomenon of the cosmopolitan coasts of America. This is a Main Street phenomenon. There are Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in Salt Lake City, in Toledo and in Jackson, Mississippi.
The questions raised for America are far-reaching and will be important questions for journalists to follow -- not only those who write explicitly on religion, but those who write about education and the controversies of school boards, about politics and the influence of religiously based political action committees, about the courts and the continuing reinterpretation of the foundations of religious freedom by the Supreme Court, about hospitals, health care and medical ethics in a multireligious environment. Over the next decade, this new multireligious reality will have an impact on virtually every aspect of American public life.
One hundred years ago this summer the World's Parliament of Religions was held in Chicago as part of the Chicago World's Fair. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians came from around the world to join with the Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Unitarians who organized the 17-day event. In 1893, India's Swami Vivekananda dazzled audiences with his eloquent statement of Vedanta philosophy and Dharmapala, the energetic Buddhist reformer from Sri Lanka, berated his listeners on their relative ignorance of Buddhism. They were new and exotic figures for most of the Americans at the Parliament who had never before heard a Hindu or a Buddhist speak. What is most striking in 1993 as Chicago prepares for a gala centennial of the Parliament of Religions late this summer is the fact that today the diversity of the 1893 Parliament is the reality of the neighborhoods of Chicago.
The Chicago metropolitan Yellow Pages list dozens of entries under the unusual headings "Churches: Buddhist" or "Churches: Islamic." There are nearly 70 mosques and Islamic centers in the Chicago metropolitan area. According to the Chicago-based Islamic Information Service there are half a million Muslims. The suburbs of the city boast two sizable and elaborate Hindu temples in Lemont and Aurora, to say nothing of the 18 smaller places of Hindu worship. There are at least 25 Buddhist temples in the Buddhist Council of the Midwest -- Japanese Jodo Shinshu, the Thai Wat Dhammaram, the Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian Buddhist refugee communities and homegrown American Zen communities. There are Baha'is, Zoroastrians, Jains, Sikhs and Afro-Caribbean Santeria practitioners. The local planning committee convened to plan the centennial of the Parliament is far more diverse than the Parliament had been.
One need not go back 100 years to document the dramatic rise in America's Asian population. Most of it has taken place in the last 25 years. It is important to remember, however, that 100 years ago at the time of the Parliament, U.S. immigration policy toward Asia was a policy of exclusion. The Statue of Liberty stood in New York harbor facing the Atlantic and not in San Francisco facing the Pacific. Chinese workers had built the railways of the West, were industrious miners, and had built Buddhist temples and celebrated Chinese festivals in seemingly unlikely places like Helena and Butte, Montana. In 1882, however, the first Exclusion Act was passed, aimed specifically at the Chinese. In the decades that followed, the exclusion policy was reaffirmed and gradually extended to other "Asiatics." In the 1923 Supreme Court case "Hindus," which in this case meant a Sikh named Mr. Thind, were excluded from U.S. citizenship. Through the first half of the 20th Century Asian immigration was tightly constricted.
The 1965 immigration act proposed by John F. Kennedy and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson set immigration on a new footing, eliminating the national origins quotas that had linked immigration to the national origins of groups already established in the U.S. It is to this legislation that one can attribute the modern burst of Asian immigration -- from about 1 million Asian Americans in 1965 to 7.3 million in 1990. The 1990 census shows how rapidly the "Asian and Pacific Islander" population is growing. In one state after another the percentage of Asian American population growth from 1980 to 1990 is by far the highest of any ethnic group -- in Minnesota up 194 percent from 1980, in Georgia up 208 percent, in Rhode Island up 245 percent. Nationwide, the Asian population rose 79.5 percent in the same decade. New immigration, not only from Asia, but also from the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, has begun to change the cultural landscape of many parts of the U.S. in ways that are dramatic and yet so subtle we have scarcely begun to see them.
What does this mean in terms of religion? One can make an educated guess from statistics on ethnic composition, but the truth is we do not know. The one recent statistical study done by the City University of New York as an ancillary project of the National Jewish Population Survey has been widely disputed, especially in its projection of the numbers of Muslims in the U.S. as 1.4 million. This contrasts with a minimum of 8 million estimated by the Islamic Society of North America and a figure of at least 5 million estimated by responsible scholars. Even a conservative estimate would mean there are more Muslims that Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the United Church of Christ. The more highly charged question is whether there are more Muslims that Jews. However uncertain the response to that question may now be, it is clear that within a few years Islam will have become the second largest religious community in the U.S. Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Sikh communities may be small statistically, but the news of the 1990's is that they are very much present and their presence is not that of the passing gurus of the Seventies, but that of new American immigrants who have brought their faith with them to this country and are about the business of building the institutions to perpetuate it.
The Pluralism Project is a three year study project which has engaged Harvard students at all levels -- undergraduates, masters students and doctoral students -- in what is basically "hometown" research on this changing religious landscape of America. Our research is guided by three questions. The first is a more focused version of the demographic question: What do specific American cities now look like, religiously? How many mosques, temples and gurdwaras are there in Denver, in Houston, in Oklahoma City, in Minneapolis? Our second question is how are these traditions changing as they take root in the American context? Are there emerging some distinctively American adaptations of Buddhism or Islam? Finally, how is the United States changing as this new multireligious reality begins to be visibly present in our public life? How are schools, hospitals, and councils of churches engaging with this new multi-sided religious life?
One of the cities we have studied is Houston. The remarkable fact about Houston is not its Texas glitter, its NASA space-age image, or its huge Southern Baptist churches, but its substantial Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu populations. Houston is the only city in the country with a comprehensive Islamic plan for the zones and neighborhoods of the city. The Islamic Society of Greater Houston has divided the city into eight zones, with a main mosque and satellite mosques in the various regions of this sprawling city. The southwest zone has dedicated a new mosque, which is the showpiece of Islamic Houston, accommodating 900 for Friday prayers. Not all the mosques in Houston are part of the I.S.G.H. regional plan, for there are about two dozen mosques in all -- Sunni, Shi'a, Ismaili, African-American. Over 10,000 Muslims crowd into the George Brown Convention center for prayers on the Id festival days. In 1970 there were fewer than 1000 Muslims in Houston; today there are estimated to be 60,000.
The Buddhist population of Houston is almost as large, with an estimated 50,000 Buddhists and 19 Buddhist temples at last count, nine of them Vietnamese. There are 14 Hindu temples and organizations including the spectacular Meenakshi Temple in the southern suburb of Pearland. The Hindu population of Houston is estimated to be 40,000, with an annual summer camp sponsored by the Vishva Hindu Parishad and a city-wide celebration of the birthday of Krishna in the George Brown Convention Center attracting 6,000 to 10,000 people.
Houston, like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, may be unusual, but smaller cities have a share in this diversity as well. In Oklahoma City there are five mosques, none with an exterior sign indicating the presence of an Islamic community. There are four Hindu temples, one Sikh gurdwara, two Vietnamese Buddhist temples, a Thai Buddhist temple, and a Japanese Buddhist Soka Gakkai International group. In Denver there are 11 Buddhist temples serving an immigrant Asian population that includes fourth- and fifth- generation Japanese Americans along with newer Thai, Cambodian, Korean, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants. Indeed there are six Vietnamese temples in Denver. In addition there are three mosques, two Sikh gurdwaras, two Hindu temples and a Taoist temple. In Portland, Oregon there are four mosques and 18 Buddhist centers. Buddhism is said to be the city's fastest growing religion, with both recent immigrants and home-grown Euro-American Buddhists.
If one were to visit American cities and towns, as my student researchers have in the last two years, much of this changing landscape would still be invisible, which is one reason most of this comes as a surprise to many Americans. The prayer room of a newly forming Muslim community is in the garage of a home purchased by the community, in a commercial office building, or in a shopping plaza. One of the Shiite mosques in Houston is in a former athletic club, given to the community by a donor; its Qur'an classes on Sundays are held in the squash courts. The Kwan Um Sa Buddhist Temple, one of the oldest of the Korean Buddhist temples in Los Angeles, is in the spacious second floor quarters of an old Masonic Hall with its plush red chairs and, now, its golden images of the Buddha. The Hindu Satsang Mandali in Stockton, California meets in the hallways and rooms of a suite in a commercial building. The enormous Muslim Community Center in Chicago where over 1,000 Muslims gather weekly for the Jum'ah prayers is a former movie theatre.
This is the invisible change. There are thousands of small communities of immigrants that gather, trying to maintain for themselves and preserve for their children the traditions of faith that link them together culturally. They meet at first in living rooms or rented Knights of Columbus Halls, then perhaps in a building acquired for the specifically religious and cultural use of the community. A church may be ideal because it is already zoned for religious use. The Richmond Hill Sikh gurdwara in Queens meets in a former Methodist church. In Allston, Massachusetts, a Korean Zen community with martial arts as part of its meditation practice, has created a spacious zendo in the sanctuary of what was formerly a Baptist church. In Lynn, the Cambodian Buddhist community has acquired a Methodist church for its first home. An African American Muslim community in Dorchester meets in a building that was a church, then a synagogue and is now the Masjid al Qur'an. On the whole, a passerby would not notice 90 percent of the thousands of Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim religious centers in our cities and towns.
In the last decade, however, the new religious landscape has started to become visible. Hindus began building traditional Hindu temples, sited on hills like the Sri Venkatesvara temple in Penn Hills outside Pittsburgh, the Rama temple on a hill in the Chicago suburb of Lemont, or the Balaji Temple in the Malibu Hills of California. They built suburban temples in Boston, Atlanta and Albany, in Lanham, Maryland, and San Antonio, Texas. The white temple towers are covered with the images of the gods and goddesses. Buddhist temples are also being built and therefore becoming visible in a new way: the Providence Zen Center in Cumberland, R.l. the Chuang Yen monastery in Kent, New York; Wat Thai in North Hollywood, California. The most spectacular is the Hsi Lai Temple, the largest temple in the western hemisphere, built by the Chinese Pure Land community on a hilltop in Hacienda Heights, California. It covers 1.4 acres of land and includes a monastery, an educational wing, a conference center and a huge main shrine room with thousands of Buddhas set in niches around the walls.
The first mosque built as such in the United States was dedicated by Lebanese and Syrian immigrants in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1934. The Muslim population then was very small. When President Eisenhower attended the dedication of the National Mosque on Embassy Row in Washington in 1957, he spoke of the mosque as an expression of the important relation of the U.S. with the Muslim world. Today the U.S. is part of the Muslim world. There are new mosques in the United States designed and built by American architects, like the Islamic Center at 96th Street and Third Avenue in New York designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In Toledo a mosque rises from the cornfield just off an Interstate highway. In New Orleans, Tempe, Houston and Portland there are examples of American Islamic architecture.
The second question of the Pluralism Project serves to remind all of us that the history of religions is not over -- it is still happening before our very eyes. What is Hinduism becoming in the U.S., in Pittsburgh and suburban Chicago? Religions are not fixed entities that are passed intact from generation to generation, culture to culture. On the contrary, religions are more like rivers -- dynamic, ever changing, splitting, converging. How these traditions are changing in the U.S. is fascinating research, making the comparative study of religion in 20th Century America a field of study in itself.
A Vietnamese monk in Phoenix told one of our researchers, "We must take the plant of Buddhism out of the pot and plant it in the soil of Arizona." What will Buddhism become as it takes root in American soil? As laity take over many of the roles of monks? As monks adapt their lives and monastic rules to demands of a Thai American congregation in North Hollywood? As women take on roles of teachers, roshis, Zen masters? We pose these as research questions, but the answers are still tentative, still in the making.
What will Islam become in the U.S. with so many Muslim cultures converging in Houston -- Pakistanis, Indians, Trinidadis and Syrians -- all now Americans and all Muslim? How will the emergence of pan-Islamic organizations like the Islamic Society of North America influence the history of American Islam? Will there be a more "ecumenical" Reformed Islam, somewhat like the Reform Judaism that developed so distinctively in the U.S.? What will Hinduism become in the U.S., where an ancient, complex tradition now has to develop means of transmission that are brand new, such as weekend classes or youth summer camps? Hindus from India who were never asked, "What do Hindus believe?" are now having to answer that question -- in their neighborhoods and offices, in schools and P.T.A. meetings. The Northern California Hindu Businessmen's Association has published a simple reference card to "The Ten Commandments of Hinduism" -- a real innovation in a tradition that has never been codified or formulated in such a way. In some countries of Asia, temples and mosques may have state or royal patronage; one did not belong to a particular temple as a "member." In the U.S., however, these religious communities need to recreate themselves with a network of voluntarism, with membership lists for tax-exempt status, with newsletters and fund-raising dinners. In short, many of these communities have begun to generate the whole infrastructure of denominationalism.
Finally, with this new multireligious landscape, the United States is changing too. What will this wider range of cultures and religions mean to American life? This is our third question. The national identity crisis of the last five years, taking the form of the so-called "culture wars" and the current multiculturalism debate is about this question of our complex identity. Who do we mean when we say "we"? It is the most important question any people can ask. "We the people" of the United States is an increasingly diverse "we." In a world in which the "we" is being defined in ever more narrow ethnic or religious terms, the experiment of America is well worth watching.
There are public emblems of the changes that are happening. One of the U.S. astronauts on the Challenger was a Buddhist American. The newly elected mayor of Kuntz, Texas, not far from Houston, is a Muslim American. The senior vice-president of a major Boston technology think-tank is a Hindu American. On June 26, 1991, a Muslim imam, Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn, opened a session of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time. In February of 1992, Imam W. Deen Mohammed of the Chicago-based American Muslim Mission opened a session of the U.S. Senate with prayer, again the first Muslim ever to do so.
We may be Christians in the majority, Jews and Muslims next, then Buddhists and Hindus, but the majority is pledged to preserve the foundational liberties, of all minorities. There are many, however, who do not recognize this wider and more complex "we." There are still advocates of prayer in the public schools, like the Christian Coalition and Catholic Alliance in New York City, who imagine that the prayer would be a generic Judeo Christian prayer -- not a prayer from the Rig Veda, the Qur'an, or the Pure Land school of Buddhism. And those who insist on teaching "creationism" as the view of the divine origin of creation imagine unthinkingly that this means teaching the God-centered creation story of Genesis. But what about the unfolding of creation from the lotus which grows from the navel of Lord Vishnu in the Hindu creation account? The new complexity of American religion sets these persistent old agendas in a brand new context.
In April of 1990 the city council of Savannah, Georgia issued a proclamation in which Islam is recognized to have been " a vital part of the development of the United States of America and the city of Savannah." The proclamation acknowledges that "many of the African slaves brought to our country were followers of the religion of Al Islam." In light of this, the mayor and the city council of Savannah proclaimed that "the Religion of Al Islam be given equal acknowledgment and recognition as other religious bodies of our great city."
Festivals are also ready markers of a culture's presence. The Chinese New Year parade in New York is an old institution, but the Sikh Vaisakhi Day parade is new. The city that measures its official holidays by the suspension of alternate side of the street parking has added the two Islamic feast days -- Id al Fitr and Id al Adha -- to the official list. In San Francisco, the city issued a proclamation marking the end of the annual festival honoring the deity Ganesha. The article in India Abroad on September 6, 1991 read, "Mayor Art Agnos has issued a proclamation declaring September 22 Golden Gate Ganesha Visarjana Day. It is believed to be the first time that the mayor of a city in the United States had honored the Hindu deity."
Americans all carry coins with the motto E Pluribus Unum -- Out of many One. But given the more complex landscape of America -- culturally and religiously --America now has the opportunity and challenge to think anew about what that might mean. What is meant by this term pluralism?
First, I would want to insist that pluralism is not the sheer fact of this plurality alone, but is active engagement with plurality. Pluralism and plurality are sometimes used as if they were synonymous. But plurality is just diversity, plain and simple -- splendid, colorful, maybe even threatening. Such diversity does not, however, have to affect me. I can observe diversity. I can even celebrate diversity, as the clich� goes. But I have to participate in pluralism. In the Elmhurst area of Queens, for example, a New York Times reporter found people from 11 countries on a single floor of an apartment building on Justice Avenue -- all living in isolation and fear -- each certain that they were the only immigrants there. This is diversity to be sure, but it is not pluralism.
Pluralism requires the cultivation of public space where we all encounter one another. Where are those public spaces? Certainly universities where the curricular and non-curricular issues of multiculturalism are boiling on the front burner. Public schools and school boards have also become the venue of this encounter with the discussion of the new Houghton Mifflin social studies texts in California and the publication of the "Declaration of Cultural Interdependence" in New York. Hospitals as well have had to confront critical issues of cultural and religious diversity in the face of crisis and death. Every one of these public institutions is experiencing the new tensions in appropriating a more complex multicultural sense of who the "American people" now are.
But where is the encounter that takes explicit account of the deep differences of religion? Religion is the unspoken "r word" in the multicultural discussion. It is present just beneath the surface in the heated multicultural debate. It is often in interfaith councils that religious issues can be raised to the surface and interreligious relations discussed as such. The last 10 years have seen the genesis of a few effective interfaith councils at the local and metropolitan level -- in Los Angeles and Washington, in Rochester, Wichita, Tulsa and San Antonio. Councils of churches have become councils of churches and synagogues. Then the Muslims joined, or the Buddhists and Hindus. Yet the process of developing this interfaith infrastructure is just now beginning in many cities. When a Hindu temple in Pittsburgh was vandalized and its sacred images smashed, or when a mosque in Quincy, Mass. was set ablaze by arson, or when a Vietnamese monk in Dallas found a cross burning in his front yard there was no infrastructure of relationships in place to respond.
Second, I would ask whether pluralism does not ask more of the encounter with one another than simply tolerance. Tolerance is a deceptive virtue. In fact, tolerance often stands in the way of engagement. Tolerance does not require us to attempt to understand one another or to know anything about one another. Sometimes tolerance may be all that can be expected. It is a step forward from active hostility, but it is a long way from pluralism.
Part of the problem is recognizing how little we do understand one another and how much our mutual perception is shaped by common stereotypes. Americans as a whole have a high degree of religious identification, according to every indication by George Gallup, and yet a very low level of religious literacy. Every high school graduate is required to dissect a frog, but every high school graduate is not required to know something about Islam -- the religion of a fifth of humankind. Few school systems have academic study of world religions built into the social studies curriculum. Few seminaries training leaders for churches and rabbinate have any required courses in the basics of other faiths -- even though the local context of ministry in the U.S. today will surely require such fundamental literacy. One of our researchers working in Oklahoma City in the summer of 1991 spoke with a city official about her survey for the Pluralism Project. His interest aroused by her effort, he offered, "You know, there's a Jewish mosque right down the street!" It turned out to be a Greek Orthodox church.
Finally, pluralism is not simply relativism, but makes room for real commitment. In the public square or in the interfaith council, commitments are not left at the door. On the contrary, the encounter of a multicultural society must be the encounter of commitments, the encounter of each other with all our particularities and angularities. This is a critical point to see plainly, because through a cynical intellectual sleight of hand, some critics have linked pluralism with a valueless relativism -- an undiscriminating twilight in which "all cats are gray," all perspectives equally viable, and as a result, equally uncompelling.
The encounter of a pluralistic society is not premised on achieving agreement, but achieving relationship. Unum does not mean uniformity. Perhaps the most valuable thing we have in common is commitment to a society based on the give and take of civil dialogue at a common table. Dialogue does not mean we will like what everyone at the table says. The process of public discussion will inevitably reveal much that various participants do not like. But it is a commitment to being at the table -- with one's commitments.
The United States is in the process of negotiating the meaning of its pluralism anew. In this new struggle to understand the American "we," the role of religion in our multicultural society will inevitably be discussed. The new religious communities of the U.S. are presently finding their own ways of participation in the public square. The American Muslim Council has been formed to be a focal point for the discussion of Muslim participation in the political process. At its meeting in February the issue of what a Muslim political action committee in a non-Muslim country might be was hotly discussed. The Islamic Medical Association brings the concerns of American Muslim doctors to bear on medical ethics. African American Islam -- both in its orthodox Sunni stream and in the Nation of Islam -- brings Islamic moral values to the crisis of drugs and violence. The International Network of Engaged Buddhists seeks to bring the insights of Buddhism and its philosophy of the interdependence of all things to bear on the environmental debate. The Jaina Association of North America considers the issues of animal rights and the extinction of species in light of the long Jaina tradition of non-violence toward all creatures. As the questions and the answers of the new American religious communities are brought to the table in the various forums of public life, the meaning of "pluralism" reaching beyond the sheer fact of our plurality will be tested for its strength again and again.
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