World Religions
Entering the Castle
An Inner Path to
God and Your Soul
View Details »
Your Power to Create
From wishful thinking
to True Manifestation
View Details »
World Religions:
Introduction
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07
03: Background
"Truth is one. Sages call it by different names."
Rig Veda (India, c. 2000 BCE)
For over 200 years, the United States has been strongly identified as a nation with a single spiritual tradition. During that time, everything about the American population could be defined as some variation on a Christian theme. Although Christians here splintered into hundreds of different denominations, often contentiously so, they still have shared a common identity. America has essentially been run by Protestant Christians who are also white and Anglo-Saxon. Sequential waves of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, the Caribbean, and Latin America were welcomed but assigned to second-class Christian citizenship until they could be more fully assimilated. Jews were connected to Christianity through theological history, and, notwithstanding occasionally virulent anti-Semitism, found more freedom and security here than in any other place on earth, protected by legally established freedom of religion. Even America's home-grown religions, including the Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, have had predominantly Christian identities, albeit idiosyncratic ones. There were Muslims among the African slave population, and Buddhists and Taoists among the Chinese laborers who came here in the 19th century, but until very recently they were all but lost in the swirling melting pot with handfuls of atheists, freethinkers, Theosophists, and other minority believers and non-believers. The native inhabitants of this country and their religious beliefs were shunted aside to make room for the white settlers, and have not since re-emerged into a position of prominence.
But midway through the 20th century, all that began to shift dramatically. Changes in immigration laws in 1965 admitted new waves of immigrants from Asia and Africa until, as Prof. Diana Eck of Harvard's Pluralism Project has so cogently pointed out, we have gone from being perceived as a Christian country to being "the world's most religiously diverse nation." There are now, for example, as many Muslims living in the U.S. as Jews or Episcopalians. Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists have become accepted, indeed respected, members of American communities from the Northwest to the Southeast.
With this new diversity have come problems, but also enormous potential for learning and positive social transformation. In the past, America's racial antagonisms made it the object of scorn by often hypocritical Europeans who didn't have to deal with the vast range of racial and ethnic differences that we have faced. Over the last century, America pioneered race relations on a level that the rest of the world is only now beginning to have to cope with, and even our failures have been instructive. Now America is doing much the same for religious diversity. We are undertaking not only an astonishing experiment in spiritual cohabitation, but also one on which the fate of the planet hinges.
