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Keeping The Promise Of Religious Freedom

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http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/08/20080819113100cmretrop0.3268701.html#axzz4Hyr3sGO1

Keeping The Promise Of Religious Freedom

19 August 2008

Read more: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/08/20080819113100cmretrop0.3268701.html#ixzz4Hyr9srZ9

By Diana L. Eck

Two of the bedrock principles of the United States are religious liberty and the separation of church and state. At the time the Republic was founded more than two centuries ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans were Christians. Since that time, however, as the author of this article documents in her book, A New Religious America, the United States has become the world's most religiously diverse society, especially during the last several decades.

Diana L. Eck is professor of comparative religion and Indian studies on the faculty of arts and sciences and a member of the faculty of divinity at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The huge white dome of a mosque with its minarets rises from the cornfields just outside Toledo, Ohio. You can see it as you drive by on the interstate highway. A great Hindu temple with elephants carved in relief at the doorway stands on a hillside in the western suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee. A Cambodian Buddhist temple and monastery with a hint of a Southeast Asian roofline is set in the farmlands south of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The religious landscape of America has changed radically in the past 40 years, a change gradual and colossal at the same time. It began with the "new immigration," spurred by the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, as people from all over the world came to the United States and became citizens. With them have come the religious traditions of the world – Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, African, and Afro-Caribbean. The people of these faiths have moved into American neighborhoods, tentatively at first, their altars and prayer rooms in storefronts and office buildings, and basements and garages, nearly invisible to the rest of us. But since the 1990s, their presence has become evident. Not all Americans have seen the Toledo mosque or the Nashville temple, but they will see places like them in their own communities. They are the architectural signs of a new religious structure in the United States.

Americans know, for example, that many internists, surgeons, and nurses are of Indian origin, but have not stopped to consider that these medical professionals have a religious life, that they might pause in the morning for prayer at an altar in their homes, that they might bring fruits and flowers to the local Shiva-Vishnu temple, and be part of a diverse Hindu population of more than 1 million. We are well aware of Latino immigration from Mexico and Central America and of the large Spanish-speaking population of our cities, and yet we may not recognize what a profound impact this is having on American Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, from the singing of hymns to festivals.

A Vast Pluralism

Historians say that the United States has always been a land of many religions. A vast, textured pluralism was present among the native peoples -- even before the European settlers came to these shores. The wide diversity of native religious practices continues today, from the Piscataway of Maryland to the Blackfeet of Montana. The people who came across the Atlantic from Europe also had diverse religious traditions -- Spanish and French Catholics, British Anglicans and Quakers, Jews and Dutch Reform Christians -– a diversity that has continued to broaden over the centuries. Many of the Africans brought to these shores with the slave trade were Muslims. The Chinese and Japanese who came to seek their fortune in the mines and fields of the West brought a mixture of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions. Eastern European Jews and Irish and Italian Catholics also arrived in great numbers in the 19th century. Both Christian and Muslim immigrants came from the Middle East. Punjabis from northwest India came in the first decade of the 20th century. Most of them were Sikhs who settled in California, built America's first gurdwaras [Sikh places of worship], and intermarried with Mexican women, creating a rich Sikh-Spanish subculture. The stories of all these peoples are an important part of America's immigration history.

The immigrants of the last several decades, however, have expanded the diversity of our religious life exponentially. Buddhists have come from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Korea; Hindus from India, East Africa, and Trinidad; Muslims from Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Nigeria; Sikhs and Jains from India; and Zoroastrians from both India and Iran.

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Immigrants from Haiti and Cuba have brought Afro-Caribbean traditions, blending both African and Catholic symbols and images. New Jewish immigrants have come from Russia and the Ukraine, and the internal diversity of American Judaism is greater than ever before. The face of American Christianity has also changed with large Latino, Filipino, and Vietnamese Catholic communities; Chinese, Haitian, and Brazilian Pentecostal communities; Korean Presbyterians, Indian Mar Thomas, and Egyptian Copts. In every city in the land, church signboards display the meeting times of Korean or Latino congregations that nest within the walls of old urban Protestant and Catholic churches.

In the past several decades, massive movements of people both as migrants and refugees have reshaped global demographics. Immigrants around the world numbered more than 190 million in 2005, according to the International Organization for Migration, with about 45 million in North America. The dynamic global image of our times is not the so-called clash of civilizations but the "marbling" of civilizations and peoples. Just as the end of the Cold War brought about a new geopolitical situation, the global movements of people have brought about a new georeligious reality. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims are now part of the religious landscape of Britain; mosques are a fixture in Paris and Lyons, Buddhist temples in Toronto, and Sikh gurdwaras in Vancouver. But nowhere, even in today's world of mass migrations, is the sheer range of religious faith as wide as it is in the United States. This is an astonishing new reality. We have never been here before.

A Challenge of Community

The new era of immigration is different from previous eras in magnitude, complexity, and in its very dynamics. Many of the migrants who come to the United States today maintain strong ties with their homelands, linked by travel, e-mail, cell phones, and cable television news. They manage to live both here and there.

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What will the idea and vision of America become as citizens, new and old, embrace all this diversity? Whom do we mean when we invoke the first words of our Constitution, "We, the people of the United States of America"? Who is this "we"? This is a challenge of citizenship, to be sure, for it has to do with the imagined community of which we consider ourselves a part. It is also a challenge of faith, for people of every religious tradition live today with communities of faith other than their own, around the world and across the street.

When our children are best friends with Muslim classmates, when a Hindu is running for a seat on the school committee, all of us have a new vested interest in our neighbors, both as citizens and as people of faith.

As the new century unfolds, Americans are challenged to make good on the promise of religious freedom so basic to the very idea and image of the United States. Religious freedom has always given rise to religious diversity, and never has our diversity been more dramatic than it is today. This will require us to reclaim the deepest meaning of the very principles we cherish and to create a truly pluralist U.S. society in which this great diversity is not simply tolerated but becomes the very source of our strength. To do this, we will all need to know more than we do about one another and to listen for the ways in which new Americans articulate the "we" and contribute to the sound and spirit of America.

The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could not possibly have envisioned the scope of religious diversity in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. But the principles they articulated in those documents -- the "nonestablishment" of religion and the "free exercise" of religion -- have provided a sturdy rudder through the past two centuries as our religious diversity has expanded.

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The United States is beginning to claim and affirm what the framers of the Constitution did not imagine but equipped the nation to embrace.

Religion is never a finished product, packaged, delivered, and passed intact from generation to generation. Some in every religious tradition think of their religion that way, insisting it is all contained in their sacred texts, doctrines, and rituals. But even a modest journey through history proves them wrong. Our religious traditions are dynamic not static, changing not fixed, more like rivers than monuments. The United States today is an exciting place to study the dynamic history of living faiths, as Buddhism becomes a distinctively American religion and as Christians and Jews encounter Buddhists and articulate their faith anew because of that encounter or perhaps come to understand themselves as part of both traditions. Humanists, secularists, and even atheists have to rethink their worldviews in the context of a more complex religious reality. With multitheistic Hindus and nontheistic Buddhists in the picture, atheists may have to be more specific about what kind of "G-d" they do not believe in.

Just as our religious traditions are dynamic, so is the very idea of the United States. The motto of the Republic, E Pluribus Unum, "From Many, One," is not an accomplished fact but an ideal that Americans must constantly reclaim. The story of America's many peoples and the creation of one nation is an unfinished story in which ideals are continually brought into being. Our pluribus is more striking than ever -- our races and faces, our jazz and qawwali music, our Haitian drums and Bengali tablas, our hip-hop and bhangra dances, our mariachis and gamelans, our Islamic minarets and Hindu temple towers, our Mormon temple spires and golden gurdwara domes. Amid this plurality, the expression of our unum, our oneness, will require many new voices, each contributing in its own way.

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Envisioning the new America in the 21st century requires an imaginative leap. It means seeing the religious landscape of United States, from sea to shining sea, in all its beautiful complexity.

Adapted from the book A NEW RELIGIOUS AMERICA by Diana L. Eck, published by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers, Inc. Copyright © 2001 by Diana L. Eck. All Rights Reserved.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.