A Nation of Religions
EDITED BY STEPHEN PROTHERO
A Nation of Religions
The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
∫ 2006 The University of North Carolina Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A nation of religions: the politics of pluralism in multireligious
America / edited by Stephen Prothero.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8078-3052-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8078-3052-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8078-5770-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8078-5770-x (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. United States—Religion. 2. Religious pluralism—United
States. 3. Religion and politics—United States. I. Prothero,
Stephen R.
bl2525.n36 2006
222.973%09051—dc22 2006011156
cloth 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
paper 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
stephen prothero 1
part i \ Muslims
1 Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate
Attitudes of Mosque Leaders toward America
ihsan bagby 23
2 Progressive Islam in America
omid safi 43
part ii \ Buddhists
3 From Pearl Harbor to 9/11
Lessons from the Internment of Japanese American Buddhists
duncan ryûken williams 63
4 Reproducing Vietnam in America
San Jose’s Perfect Harmony Temple
hien duc do 79
5 Tibetan Buddhism in America
Reinforcing the Pluralism of the Sacred Canopy
robert a. f. thurman 94
part iii \ Hindus and Sikhs
6 Mr. President, Why Do You Exclude Us from Your Prayers?
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism
prema a. kurien 119
7 Sacred Land, Sacred Service
Hindu Adaptations to the American Landscape
vasudha narayanan 139
8 Making Home Abroad
Sikhs in the United States
gurinder singh mann 160
part iv \ Church, Mosque, Temple, and State
9 From Alleged Buddhists to Unreasonable Hindus
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965
courtney bender and jennifer snow 181
10 Agonistic Federalism
The Alabama Ten Commandments Controversy
stephen dawson 209
part v \ Conclusions
11 The De-Europeanization of American Christianity
r. stephen warner 233
12 Religious Pluralism and Civil Society
james davison hunter and david franz 256
Acknowledgments 275
Bibliography 277
Contributors 283
Index 287
A Nation of Religions
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S T E P H E N P R O T H E R O
Introduction
In the United States, religion matters. In overwhelming numbers,
Americans believe in God, pray, and contribute their time and money to
churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. As much as race, gender, ethnicity,
or region, religious commitments make individual Americanswho they
arc. The significance of religion is not confined, however, to self-identity and
the private sphere, in the United States, religion is as public as it is pervasive,
as political as it is personal. And so it has been for a long, long time.
Some Puritans, no doubt, came to the New World just to catch fish, but
many more came to build a biblicalcommonwealth, to construct, inhabit, and
defend what the first Massachusetts governor, John Winthrop, called a "city
upon a hill." Nineteenth-century Americans reinterpreted that spiritual errand
as an errand to the West, but as they pushed the frontier across the Mississippi
and over the Rockies, they too saw themselves as doing God's work. In the
i9&os, GovernorWinthrop's evocative phrase became the centerpiece ot President
Ronald Reagan's struggle to rid the world of godless communism (and
win evangelicals to the Republican Party).
Well into that decade, most American intellectuals remained convinced
that religion was collapsing under the weight of modernity or at least was
retreating meekly to the private sphere—convinced, in other words, that religion
played no more important a role in the life of the nation than it did in
their own lives. These intellectuals were wrong. Faith may be fading in the
ivory tower and among other partisans of what sociologist Peter Berger has
termed "Eurosecularity," but it is vibrant in virtuallyevery other quarter of the
United States.1
Faith remains so vibrant, in fact, that any attempt to understand
the nation without understanding its believers is bound to fail. If you
want to know what moves America, you need to know what moves Americans.
And here a prime mover is God in many guises, religion in its many
manifestations.
The First Amendment, of course, prohibits the federal government from
establishing religion but says nothing about religious groups consecrating
1
2 Introduction
the state. Nation-states typically legitimate their regimes through myths, rites,
and theologies, and the United States is no exception. But Americans have put
their own spin on that ancient tradition of the sociopolitical construction of
reality. From the Revolutionary War to the new millennium, Americans have
interpreted the saga of the United States as a gospel of sorts—good news to
the Puritans, the Protestants, or the pluralists. In fact, one source of the
country’s political and social stability is Americans’ willingness to anoint their
nation with God’s favor—to see themselves as God’s chosen people and their
march to freedom as an Exodus tale.
This theological legitimation of America was from the start a Protestant
endeavor. One popular myth of the nation was that God had held the New
World in abeyance until after the Protestant Reformation, lest it be populated
by the ungodly. Or, as one American put it, ‘‘The Reformation had taught the
Christian world afresh the value of the individual man, standing erect, the
Bible in his hand, fearless before priest and king, reverent before God. . . .
When a new light for the social and political life of mankind began to ray out
from the open Bible in the hands of Luther, God opened the way to the new
continent.’’≤
Such myths of America, while never uncontested, remained plausible as
long as virtually all Americans were Protestants—plausible in 1776, for example,
when there were fewer than one hundred Roman Catholic churches in the
colonies and only a handful of synagogues, meager numbers compared with
the two-thousand-plus churches controlled by the top four Protestant denominations
(Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans).
During the 1830s, however, Roman Catholic immigrants from western Europe
began to flood the country, followed in the late nineteenth century by a
new wave of immigrants from eastern Europe, many of them Jews. At first,
few of the nation’s handlers believed that these immigrants and their religions
could be integrated into the Protestant myth of America as God’s promised
land. Conversions, after all, were few, and accommodation was never as rapid
as the nativists would have liked.
In the 1930s, however, an intrepid few began to refer to Protestants, Catholics,
and Jews as roughly equal partners in a nation that was no longer Protestant
or even Christian but instead Judeo-Christian.≥
During World War II,
that formulation became commonplace, and by the early 1950s President
Dwight D. Eisenhower was famously tracing ‘‘our form of government’’ to
what he called the ‘‘Judeo-Christian concept.’’∂
Introduction 3
This concept burst onto the public stage with the publication of Protestant,
Catholic, Jew (1955) by sociologist Will Herberg. Now a classic in the study of
American religion, this book epitomized even as it scrutinized the new JudeoChristian
consensus. Herberg (a Jew) began by observing immigrants’ tendency
to hold fast to their parents’ faiths even as they forgot their parents’ languages.
In the United States, he argued, speaking Yiddish or Polish marked
one as un-American, but observing the Passover Seder or attending Mass did
not. In fact, religion acted as the primary vehicle for self-identity and social
location for immigrants in this new land. ‘‘It was largely in and through his
religion,’’ Herberg argued, that the immigrant crafted an American identity.∑
There are always limits, however, to acceptable religious identification, and
in postwar America the Judeo-Christian tradition demarcated them. Herberg
saw a ‘‘fundamental tripartite division’’ of postwar America into Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews, all of which practiced a common patriotic piety Herberg
called the ‘‘American way of life.’’ To be sure, these traditions di√ered in some
matters of belief and practice, but all three shared certain basic theological
and political convictions that bound the nation together in the face of the
ethnic, racial, and class divisions ever threatening to tear it apart. According to
Herberg, all championed the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
humanity, all a≈rmed human rights and democracy, and all stood fast against
godless communism. At least in the 1950s, to be American was to be committed
to one God, to listen to his voice in the Bible, and to try to follow his
commandments. ‘‘Not to be . . . either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew,’’ he
wrote, ‘‘is somehow not to be an American.’’∏
Herberg’s reinvigoration of melting pot theory circulated widely during the
1950s and gained traction as the words ‘‘under God’’ made their way into the
Pledge of Allegiance (in 1954) and as ‘‘In God We Trust’’ became the country’s
o≈cial motto (in 1956). By the mid-1960s, however, both his ‘‘triple melting
pot’’ theory in particular and assimilationist theorizing in general were beginning
to seem stale. In 1965, new immigration legislation opened the borders
to another wave of newcomers. That year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William
Douglas observed that the United States was no longer merely a JudeoChristian
country. It had become, he wrote, ‘‘a nation of Buddhists, Confucianists,
and Taoists, as well as Christians.’’π
In the United States today, the Asian American population is growing more
rapidly than any other ethnic group. In 2002, 12.5 million Asian and Pacific
Islanders were living in the United States. This figure amounted to roughly 4.4
4 Introduction
percent of all Americans and had risen from 7.3 million (2.9 percent) in 1990.
The U.S. Census expects this population to more than triple by 2050, climbing
to just under 40 million, or nearly 10 percent of the overall population.∫
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism have all benefited from these demographic
shifts, but Islam in particular has been buoyed by the new immigration.
An April 2001 study found 1,209 mosques in the United States. Of these
Islamic centers, 30 percent were established in the 1990s, and 32 percent were
founded in the 1980s. The number of mosques jumped 25 percent between
1994 and 2000, while the number of Muslims associated with each mosque
rose even more dramatically: 235 percent. The study concluded by estimating
the total American Muslim population at 6 to 7 million. That figure is likely
inflated, but even so Islam appears to be close to surpassing Judaism as the
nation’s second-most-popular religion—if it has not already done so.Ω
The Buddhist figure is particularly dicey. It depends heavily, for example,
on whether the count includes only people who respond ‘‘Buddhist’’ when
asked, ‘‘What is your religion?’’ or whether sympathizers are included as well:
people who may not self-identify as Buddhists but who might nonetheless
participate in a weekly Zen meditation group or subscribe to the Buddhist
magazine Tricycle. One recent study found 4 million Americans who call themselves
Buddhists but 25 million (roughly one-eighth of the adult population)
who say that Buddhism has significantly influenced their religious lives.∞≠
Because Hinduism and Sikhism have few white adherents, their numbers
are much easier to figure. The United States has roughly 1 million Hindus and
250,000 or so Sikhs.
From Protestantism to Pluralism
Over the past two decades, scholars of American religion have begun to
explore the lives of U.S. practitioners of all these religions. After focusing
for more than a century on Protestantism, scholars trained in history, sociology,
anthropology, and religious studies turned their collective attention after
World War II to Roman Catholics and Jews and more recently to religious
traditions that have prospered in the wake of the ‘‘new immigration.’’ Today,
the Protestant paradigm that informed works from Robert Baird’s Religion in
America (1844) to Sydney Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People
(1972) has given way to a new pluralist paradigm that sees the United States as
a nation of religions whose skyline is punctuated not only by church spires but
also by onion domes and minarets.
Nowhere is this new paradigm (and this new nation) more in evidence
Introduction 5
than in Professor Diana Eck’s ambitious and influential Pluralism Project at
Harvard University. Through her book, A New Religious America (2001), her
cd-rom, On Common Ground: World Religion in America (2002), and her Pluralism
Project Web site, Eck and her collaborators have demonstrated convincingly
that the United States is among the most religiously diverse countries on
the globe. It is, in short, a very di√erent nation from the one Herberg mapped
fifty years ago.
But what are we to make of all this diversity? How is it transforming the
public square? And what pressures is that public square bringing to bear on
America’s newest religions? The short answer is that we do not yet know.
Four decades after the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, scholars
of American religion continue to obsess on overturning the old Protestant
paradigm. This work has proceeded on two fronts. First, ethnographers have
produced many fine microstudies on topics such as the Italian Catholic Festa
of the Madonna of 115th Street in Harlem, Vodou priestess initiation in Brooklyn,
and Cuban Catholic patriotic piety in Miami, teasing out in each case the
multiple meanings participants make out of these religious practices—how
ordinary Americans draw on religious resources not only to make sense of the
world but also to make a home in it. Alongside these ethnographers, Eck and
others at the Pluralism Project have been mapping the post-1965 religious
landscape, conducting microstudies of urban areas from Boston to Los Angeles.
And their model has been replicated elsewhere. This mapping project
will never be complete, but it is nevertheless quite advanced. We now know
how many Hindu temples Houston has, how many mosques Miami has, and
how many Buddhist centers Atlanta has. The cumulative e√ect of all these
e√orts is to demonstrate that U.S. religions are many, not one; that American
religious experience comes in all shapes and sizes; and that the meanings of
each are polysemous and contested. All this local work generally neglects,
however, the national frame: how the new religious realities are transforming
American political and social life, and how activities in the public square are
changing the rules of engagement in the new spiritual marketplace.∞∞
Scholars have also produced good studies of individual conversions—for
example, from Protestantism to Buddhism. They have explored how denominations
such as Soka Gakkai International and congregations such as the
Ganesha Temple in Flushing, New York, have accommodated themselves to
Christian norms and organizational forms. So we understand something of
how the new pluralism has transformed individual immigrants who, like the
earlier immigrants Herberg scrutinized, seem to be making their religious
6 Introduction
congregations the primary context for self-identification and social location.
We know almost nothing, however, about how those individuals and their
congregations are a√ecting politics in the United States and how American
social life is impinging on our newest ‘‘mediating structures’’—the Muslims’
mosques, the Buddhists’ centers, and the Hindus’ temples that now dot this
nation of religions.
Volumes that attend to religion in American public life typically follow the
Judeo-Christian model, focusing on Christians and Jews, while volumes that
deal with religious diversity rarely expand their horizons beyond congregational
life. To put it another way, recent scholarship on religious diversity in
the United States has focused on the cultivation of ‘‘lived religion’’ inside the
domus of families and neighborhoods, for example, or in particular religious
congregations.∞≤
The scholarship in this volume seeks to broaden that field of
vision, scrutinizing the contributions of particular individuals, congregations,
and religious traditions to the polis.
The Politics of Pluralism
This book begins by taking U.S. religious diversity not as a proposition to
be proved but as the truism it has become. Instead of attempting to drive yet
another nail in the co≈n of the old Protestant paradigm, our authors start by
acknowledging religious diversity as an undeniable fact. Our question is not
whether the United States is a Christian or a multireligious nation—it is clearly
both—but how religious diversity is changing the values, rites, and institutions
of the nation and how those values, rites, and institutions are changing
American religions.
Consider for a minute the nation’s ninety-two thousand public schools.
Inaugurated in the early nineteenth century as a way to inculcate in young
Americans both Protestant and civic virtues, public schooling (or ‘‘common
schooling,’’ as it was called at the time) remains an important vehicle for
making and shaping citizens and legitimating the nation-state. The students
in these schools, however, look very di√erent from their predecessors in
the 1850s or even the 1950s. Today in many high schools in Hawaii, Buddhists
routinely outnumber Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Some elementary
schools in California have more Hindus than Baptists, more Sikhs than
Methodists. What myths of America are taught in these schools? What political
values are inculcated? What rites of the nation are practiced?
Imagine that you are a Jewish civics teacher at a high school in Honolulu, a
city that boasts at least forty-five di√erent Buddhist centers. Do you tell your
Introduction 7
students that the God of the Bible set aside the New World as virgin land until
after the Protestant Reformation so that his pure church could be transplanted
here? Do you claim that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation in which
all good citizens bow down before one God? Do you celebrate the Buddha’s
birthday along with the birthday of George Washington?
Now imagine you are an imam in a mosque of the Muslim American
Society, the largest group of African American Sunni Muslims. What do you
tell the young people in your community about the proper relationship between
church and state? How do you reconcile the discrepancies between
Quranic teaching and constitutional law? How (if at all) do you celebrate the
Fourth of July?
Or perhaps you are a counselor at a summer camp for Gujarati American
Hindu students. How do you reconcile the legacy of caste with your commitment
to democracy? What do you say about school prayer or women’s rights?
Finally, consider President George W. Bush’s e√orts to provide faith-based
groups with government funding for social service projects. We know that the
First Amendment prohibits giving preference to Christian or Jewish groups in
the distribution of government funds. However, a poll conducted in 2001 by
the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that while about 75 percent
of Americans favored government funding to faith-based organizations, only
half of those in favor of such funding wanted to see money provided to
mosques or Buddhist temples.∞≥
And recent investigations into the billions of
dollars the Bush administration has allocated to this e√ort have found little
evidence that funds are flowing with any force to groups that fall outside the
‘‘Judeo-Christian concept.’’
Are religions such as Islam and Buddhism making their way into the
American mainstream, or is this integration still decades (or centuries) away?
When will the United States be led by its first Muslim president? Its first
Hindu? Do Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism remain the only three
religious options for Americans? Or is Herberg’s ‘‘Protestant, Catholic, Jew’’
model giving way to something new?
From the White House to public schools in Hawaii, an important contest
is taking shape: the American values of the Enlightenment and the JudeoChristian
tradition are bumping up against the values of Islam, Buddhism,
Hinduism, and Sikhism. Jewish schoolteachers, Hindu camp counselors, and
Muslim imams are weighing American narratives of freedom, equality, and
sacrifice against the teachings of the Quran and the Upanishads, bringing
Abraham Lincoln and Malcolm X into conversation with the Buddha and
8 Introduction
Muhammad. In these many and varied encounters between East and West,
new myths and new rites are taking shape.
The twelve essays in this volume were solicited expressly to examine these
rich encounters from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—to ask first how
religious diversity is changing the values and institutions of the United States
and second how those values and institutions are transforming American
religious organizations and congregations. The lines of influence no doubt
run in both directions—from politics to religion and from religion to politics
—so these essays attempt to explore both dynamics.
Our authors consider, second, whether these new American religions are
working to legitimate the nation-state and cultivate citizenship. Are Hinduism,
Buddhism, Islam, and Sikhism continuing to do the work in the twentyfirst
century that Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism did in the twentieth?
Are they binding together the nation? Or, as some conservative critics
fear, are they undermining American values and institutions, setting the country
up for a Babel-like fall?
Until fairly recently, many scholars believed that religious diversity destabilized
religious faith and with it the social and political order. Only in societies
with a common faith would religion function as a sort of social glue, binding
a nation and its people around shared myths, theologies, and rites. In modern
societies, where religions compete like so many products on a supermarket
shelf, any given religion would su√er from a debilitating crisis of credibility.
Religions can legitimate the state and stabilize the social order only when they
carry with them the transcendent power of the sacred, and they can do that
work only when their reality appears to be given rather than chosen, locked
into the order of the universe rather than patched together willy-nilly by the
individual whims of this citizen and that. Or so the old argument goes. Today,
most scholars of the American scene understand that religious diversity does
not lead inevitably to secularization, that pluralism and plausibility can go
hand in hand and have in fact done so, at least in the United States. Moreover,
some evidence indicates that this view is fairly widely accepted among the
population. For example, in a survey conducted in 2002 for Religion and Ethics
NewsWeekly and U.S. News and World Report, only 13 percent of the Americans
surveyed called ‘‘America’s growing religious diversity’’ ‘‘a threat to individual
religious beliefs.’’ By contrast, 76 percent saw that diversity as ‘‘a source of
strength and vitality to individual religious beliefs.’’∞∂
When Herberg surveyed the U.S. religious and political scene after World
War II, he saw three great religions supporting with one voice the bedrock
Introduction 9
principles of the American way of life. These essays consider how these bedrock
principles are being tested and transformed in the new religious landscape.
How is monotheism faring in the face of growing numbers of Buddhists
who a≈rm no God and Hindus who a≈rm many? How is the growing
presence of Islam testing and transforming the principle of the separation of
church and state? How is the growing presence of Hinduism a√ecting commitments
to the proposition that all people are created equal? Are America’s
newest mediating structures enhancing or undermining civility and democratic
citizenship?
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic Tradition
The past two decades—particularly after September 11, 2001—have seen fitful
e√orts to answer at least some of these questions by updating Herberg’s
thesis. As early as 1988, a spokesperson for the Muslim Political Action Committee
urged his fellow Americans ‘‘to start thinking of the U.S. as a JudeoChristian-Muslim
society,’’ and in 1992 scholar of Islam John L. Esposito
used the phrase ‘‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage.’’∞∑
Today, some see America’s
fundamental tripartite division not in Protestantism, Catholicism, and
Judaism but in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And Americans increasingly
are invoking, however haltingly, an ‘‘Abrahamic’’ or a ‘‘Judeo-ChristianIslamic’’
tradition that undergirds and legitimates American society. U.S. Muslim
groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim
American Society, and the American Muslim Council, have been promoting
this view for some time, and key players in Washington, D.C., appear to be
listening. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore both spoke regularly
during their administration of the important faith-based social work
being done in American churches, synagogues, and mosques. In his January
2001 inaugural address, President George W. Bush invoked this same Abrahamic
structure, remarking that ‘‘church and charity, synagogue and mosque
lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in
our plans and in our laws.’’ After 9/11, he attempted to adopt American
Muslims into the Judeo-Christian family, describing Islam as a ‘‘religion of
peace,’’ visiting mosques, and describing Muslims as partners rather than
antagonists in the war on terrorism.∞∏
Predictably, some observers were alarmed by this new public theology,
which surfaced (among other places) in a December 2001 National Geographic
cover story, ‘‘Abraham: Father of Three Faiths,’’ and in a September 30, 2002,
Time cover story on Abraham. Some Jews were concerned that the demise
10 Introduction
of Herberg’s triple-melting-pot metaphor would take away the status they
gained in American society during and after World War II as the number one
religious minority. On the Christian right, evangelicals such as Billy Graham’s
son Franklin Graham, televangelist Jerry Falwell, and Ted Haggard of the
National Association of Evangelicals argued forcefully that President Bush
had gone too far—that the United States was a Christian country and Islam a
religion of war. Echoing this line, conservative Catholic Richard John Neuhaus
spoke out forcefully in First Things magazine for drawing a line in the
sand at ‘‘Judeo-Christian.’’ Otherwise, people would in no time be talking
blithely about the United States as a ‘‘Judeo-Christian-Buddhist-HinduIslamic-Agnostic-Atheist
society,’’ he remarked.∞π
On the left, mainline Protestants such as Eck insisted that the Abrahamic
canopy was far too skimpy to cover a nation now bulging with Sikh gurdwaras
and Hindu temples, Jain centers and Buddhist retreats. O√ering a multicultural
twist on the metaphor of the ‘‘city upon a hill,’’ a shining example for
all the world to see, they contended that the example America has to o√er the
world is not its crusading Puritanism but its irenic pluralism. America’s destiny,
this line of reasoning goes, is not to purify Protestantism but to manifest
the widest range of religious commitments and thus to o√er the broadest
platform for interreligious dialogue.
This book subjects to scholarly scrutiny the ‘‘new pluralism’’ and the myths
and rites it is producing. Is religious diversity contributing, as Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. intimated in The Disuniting of America (1992), to the splintering of
American public life into ever-smaller, self-interested groups? Are new immigrants
from Asia and the Middle East jettisoning their religious commitments
to become more American? Or are they, like Herberg’s immigrants, locating
themselves in American society largely in and through their religious commitments?
Finally, is there some new American way of life afoot that incorporates
not only Protestants, Catholics, and Jews but also Muslims and perhaps even
Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus?
Muslims-Buddhists-Hindus-Sikhs
To address these questions, this volume gathers an interdisciplinary group
of distinguished scholars in sociology, political science, anthropology, history,
and religious studies. A key focus of the book is religions that originated
in south and east Asia—that is, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. One issue
concerning the adaptation of these religions to U.S. soil is the problem of
God. As the Pledge of Allegiance and the o≈cial motto of the United States
Introduction 11
(‘‘In God We Trust’’) indicate, God is a key national symbol. How do Buddhists,
who have traditionally denied a personal God, negotiate this key element
in the American way of life? Are they accommodating themselves to it by
finding ways to a≈rm a God of some sort? Or are they making e√orts to
modify American conceptions of divinity (to pro√er an impersonal rather than
a personal God)? And if so, how are those e√orts faring? Finally, how are
Hindus, many of whom are polytheistic, navigating their way in a nation that
purports to act under and trust in God? (In a course I teach on Hinduism in
America, my Hindu students routinely inform me that they are monotheists,
not polytheists.)
A second preoccupation of the book is Islam, which by many accounts is
among the fastest-growing religions in the United States and one of the most
resistant to Americanization. Here our authors seek to illuminate to what
extent American political culture is at odds with Islam and to what extent
Islam is becoming an American faith. Is the United States experiencing on its
own soil the battle between Christianity and Islam that Samuel Huntington
foresaw in The Clash of Civilizations (1996)? Or is the United States becoming a
‘‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic’’ nation in which Muslims are partners rather than
antagonists? How do American Muslims accommodate themselves to American
norms and organizational forms? (Do they fly American flags? Piously
recite the Pledge of Allegiance?) How, if at all, are American political institutions
accommodating themselves to Islam?
Ihsan Bagby’s essay, based on a major study of U.S. mosques, explores
three attitudes of American Muslims toward American society—isolation,
insulation, and assimilation—before concluding that Muslims as a whole
strongly favor engagement with American political processes. Bagby’s piece
finds a major racial divide between African American Muslims, on the one
hand, and south Asian American and Arab American Muslims, on the other
hand (plus major di√erences among African American Muslims). Omid Safi’s
chapter on progressive Islam constitutes both an analysis of that movement
and something of a manifesto for it. Surveying part of the ground covered in
Bagby’s essay but from a very di√erent perspective, Safi argues for a modern
understanding of Islam that is critical not only of Islam’s varied fundamentalisms
but also of American colonialism.
Together, these essays on Islam present, not surprisingly, a spectrum of
religious responses to America and a variety of American responses to religious
diversity. There is some consensus among our authors that U.S. Muslims
are both the most politically engaged of the religious traditions we
12 Introduction
considered and the most wary about marking the sacred places and sacred
times of American civil religion with a Muslim stamp of approval. In his study
of Italian Catholics in Harlem, Robert Anthony Orsi observed that Italians
manifested their ambivalence about their new country by seeking ‘‘halfcitizenship’’—applying
to be U.S. citizens but never making it happen. Muslims
seem to be in a similar position today. Rather than seeing Islam as a way
to articulate their American identities, many Muslims seem to be seeing the
Americanization proposition as tantamount to forgetting their faith. Still,
American Islam has produced a number of highly visible political organizations.
During the 2004 presidential election, volunteers from the Islamic Society
of Nevada, for example, attempted to call each and every Muslim in that
battleground state to urge him or her to vote.
As this volume’s three essays on Buddhism make clear, Buddhists are also
active in the public square but are less organized when it comes to political
campaigning. Over the past decade, Buddhists have been most visible on the
issue of Tibetan independence, thanks to some high-profile celebrity activists
(for example, Richard Gere) and to organizations such as Tibet House and
Students for a Free Tibet. The Buddhist Churches of America, the closest U.S.
Buddhism gets to a mainline denomination, has also ventured into the public
square on issues such as school prayer (against) and gay marriage (for). And
during the debate over the Elk Grove v. Newdow Pledge of Allegiance case,
twenty-three Buddhist groups weighed in against the current Pledge on the
grounds that the words ‘‘under God’’ endorsed monotheistic religions and
stigmatized Buddhist schoolchildren as unpatriotic.∞∫
Duncan Ryûken Williams’s historical work on the internment of Japanese
American Buddhists during World War II makes important contributions to
our understanding of this key moment in the life of the nation and the lives
of American Buddhists, focusing on ‘‘modes of accommodation and resistance.’’
Documented with an array of new sources, including interviews, private
papers, letters, and Federal Bureau of Investigation documents, this chapter
concludes with some provocative comparisons between the experiences of
Japanese Americans during World War II and the experiences of Muslims,
Sikhs, and south Asian Americans in the months and years following 9/11.
Hien Duc Do’s case study of a Vietnamese American temple in San Jose,
California, presents a finer-grained study of how one refugee community, led
in this case by a talented and creative nun named Dam Luu, somehow manages
both to replicate key elements of Vietnamese culture in the United States
and to help its members adjust to American culture. A key factor here is inter-
Introduction 13
generational conflict, to which the Perfect Harmony Temple attends (among
other means) by o√ering English language classes to adults and Vietnamese
language classes to children. Finally, Robert A. F. Thurman’s chapter focuses
on the American peregrinations of Tibetan Buddhism—in his words, ‘‘a monastic,
messianic, and apocalyptic tradition that seeks via ethics, religion, science,
and technology to turn an entire culture into a theater for enlightenment.’’
The United States, of course, has thus far resisted becoming that
venue; in fact, many Americans seem to take Tibetan Buddhism more as a
theater for entertainment than a theater for enlightenment (to view the Dalai
Lama as a celebrity more than a bodhisattva). But Thurman’s impassioned
piece challenges readers to understand the ongoing American encounter with
Tibetan Buddhism as the grand civilizational challenge that it is becoming.
According to Thurman, because of its history as a mainstream religious,
cultural, and political force in Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism is particularly well
suited to contribute to America’s ‘‘sacred canopy.’’
On the scale of political involvement, Hindus lag far behind Buddhists.
Though one of the wealthiest and the most highly educated religious groups
in the country (ranking at or near the top, alongside Unitarian-Universalists,
in per capita income and graduate degrees), Hindus are also among the least
mobilized politically. (Tellingly, the first Indian American politician to gain
national prominence—Bobby Jindal, a Republican who narrowly lost a runo√
election for governor of Louisiana in 2003 and then won a seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives in 2004—is a convert to Roman Catholicism.) Hindus
have organized American Hindus against Defamation, an organization
modeled after the Anti-Defamation League that has met with some notable
successes. In 1997, its protesters convinced the rock band Aerosmith to
change the cover of its Nine Lives cd, which had depicted the Hindu god
Krishna with breasts and a cat’s head. More recently, the Indian American
Center for Political Awareness has attempted to mobilize this community’s
electorate. But Muslims and Buddhists have a far more formidable array of
pressure groups, and Hindus contribute very little to political campaigns. So
while imams are invited to the White House and the Dalai Lama receives a
royal welcome when he comes to Washington, D.C., Hindus occupy something
of a political Neverland. Only 30 percent of Indian Americans voted in
the 2004 presidential election, and more than 90 percent of those who did not
vote were not even registered.∞Ω
Prema A. Kurien, a sociologist with an expertise on Hindu organizations in
the United States, explores in her chapter how Hindus responded to the rapid
14 Introduction
legitimation of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in the United States after
the events of 9/11. Hindu Americans are a particularly Web-savvy group, so
Kurien focuses on how the intra-Hindu contest between ‘‘genteel multiculturalism’’
and ‘‘militant nationalism’’ is playing out on Internet groups, Web
sites, and e-zines. More specifically, Kurien explores the ‘‘external negotiations’’
of U.S. Hindus—their ongoing e√orts to gain for Hinduism recognition
(alongside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as a legitimate American
religion. Vasudha Narayanan’s essay, also on U.S. Hindus, transports us from
cyberspace to sacred space, documenting how Hindus are making the American
landscape holy—transforming, by the powers of imagination and ritual,
American rivers into the sacred Ganges and American mountains into the
Himalayan abodes of the gods. Along the way, she includes a wonderfully
creative interpretation of the architecture of the first Hindu temple in the
United States and documents a second form of accommodation—in this case
to the American Protestant Social Gospel tradition, as U.S. Hindus seek not
only to build and consecrate temples but also to feed and clothe the needy.
U.S. Sikhism presents a particularly intriguing case study. More than any of
the other believers surveyed here, U.S. Sikhs are at peace with American values
and institutions; as contributor Gurinder Singh Mann puts it in his essay in
this volume, they are ‘‘at home in America.’’ Perhaps because they have had
relatively little to complain about, Sikhs have remained aloof from politics and
largely absent from the public square. The events of 9/11 shined a glaring
spotlight on their community, however, bringing their leaders out from the
shadows of invisibility. The murder of coreligionist Balbir Singh Sodhi in
Mesa, Arizona, on September 15, 2001 (by an assassin who wrongly believed
that Sodhi was a Muslim), led Sikhs to launch a public relations campaign
outlining the di√erences between Sikhism and Islam. And the spate of interfaith
gatherings that followed brought Sikhs into the public spotlight as never
before, in part because their trademark turbans signified in stark visual form
America’s religious diversity.
The Myth of the Wall
Among the most cherished U.S. myths is the view that church and state are
utterly separate—that Thomas Je√erson’s famous metaphor of a wall of separation
between the two is somehow written into the Constitution and thereby
into American law and life. Yet U.S. presidents from George Washington
forward have placed their hands on the Bible during their inaugurations and
used their bully pulpit to weigh in on matters from the biblical view of slavery
Introduction 15
to the Quranic view of war. Moreover, both congressional legislation and the
courts’ interpretations of that legislation have dramatically shaped the course
of U.S. religious history. As is well known, the signing of the Immigration Act
of 1965 ushered in a new era in American religion. (Life magazine would not
have declared 1968 the ‘‘Year of the Guru’’ without the new measure.) But that
law was necessary only because of the exclusionary acts Congress passed
between 1882 and 1924.
In an e√ort to shed some light on such supply-side e√ects on the spiritual
marketplace, this volume includes two very di√erent essays on what has classically
been termed the church/state question. First, Courtney Bender and
Jennifer Snow examine the circumstances under which Muslims, Buddhists,
Hindus, or Sikhs literally made federal cases out of religion (and in so doing
helped to change the course of U.S. constitutional law). One of the major
themes of this essay is how, even in the post-1965 era, federal judges continue
to define religion largely in Protestant terms. Stephen Dawson has a very
di√erent view of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First
Amendment from that of Bender and Snow. His chapter on Alabama’s Ten
Commandments controversy presents a novel argument for what he calls
agonistic federalism, all in service of what he hopes will be a broader recognition
of religion in the public square. Rejecting a one-size-fits-all approach to
the church/state question, Dawson argues on behalf of the wisdom of a
‘‘plurality of solutions’’—allowing di√erent levels of public recognition of
religion in di√erent states. Both of these thought-provoking essays broaden
the old-fashioned church/state discussion to include a wide variety of religious
congregations. What is the proper relationship between mosque and
state? Temple and state? How has the Supreme Court decided cases involving
the rights of Muslim and Buddhist inmates? The public display of the Ten
Commandments? How should it decide those cases?
The volume concludes with an essay by James Davison Hunter and David
Franz proposing what might be called a natural history of the public lives of
immigrant religions in the United States. Hunter and Franz posit, largely on
the shoulders of prior work on Catholic and Jewish immigration, a four-stage
trajectory among these groups from invisibility to recognition to internal
negotiation (accommodations they make within their community) to external
negotiation (adaptations to the broader society) and finally to establishment
as a ‘‘legitimate’’ American religion. Some of the contributors to this volume
view Hunter’s typology as tilted too heavily toward outmoded assumptions of
assimilation. In an era in which it is not only permissible but in some cases
16 Introduction
cool to be a Buddhist or a Hindu, can we assume that these groups will follow
in the footsteps of Catholics and Jews? And won’t their trek be quite di√erent,
given the realities of transnationalism—the ability of Hindus and Sikhs, for
example, to return repeatedly to India and in fact to maintain India and the
United States as dual homelands? Despite these reservations, many of the
authors whose works appear here found Hunter’s suggestions helpful and
have integrated his insights into their analyses.
To conclude, this volume seeks to subject the cliché of American religious
pluralism to scholarly scrutiny, particularly where it shows its public face. But
the volume does not look at U.S. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in
splendid isolation. As R. Stephen Warner’s essay, ‘‘The De-Europeanization of
American Christianity,’’ shows, the new immigration is in many respects
making the country more rather than less Christian. And Christian norms and
organizational forms repeatedly factor into the accommodations U.S. Buddhists,
Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus are making to American circumstances.
In this way, A Nation of Religions hopes not only to open up the public side of the
new pluralism paradigm but also to bring that paradigm into conversation
with old Protestant-centered narratives.
notes
1. Peter L. Berger, ‘‘Religion and the West,’’ National Interest 80 (Summer 2005):
112–19.
2. Merrill Edwards Gates, ‘‘The Significance of Christianity to the Discovery and the
History of America,’’ paper presented at the Congress of the Evangelical Alliance,
World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, quoted in Judith Snodgrass, Presenting
Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 46.
3. The classic source is Mark Silk, ‘‘Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in
America,’’ American Quarterly 36.1 (Spring 1984): 65–85. Silk traces this tradition to
Christian thinkers. My discussion in American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National
Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 258–61, credits Jewish thinkers with
the genesis of the concept.
4. The full quote is typically given as: ‘‘In other words, our form of government has
no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.
With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all
men are created equal.’’ For a New Testament scholar’s witty take on the vexed transmission
history of these remarks, see Patrick Henry, ‘‘ ‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’:
The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,’’ Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 49.1 (March 1981): 35–49.
5. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 28.
Introduction 17
6. Ibid., 256–57.
7. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965).
8. ‘‘The White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,’’ [http://
www.aapi.gov/resources.htm]; Terrance Reeves and Claudette Bennett, ‘‘The Asian
and Pacific Islander Population in the United States: March 2002,’’ U.S. Census Bureau
(May 2003), [http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20–540.pdf]; Claudette
E. Bennett and Barbara Martin, ‘‘The Asian and Pacific Islander Population,’’ U.S. Census
Bureau, [http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/apipop.html].
9. Ihsan Bagby, Paul M. Perl, and Bryan T. Froehle, The Mosque in America: A National
Portrait (Washington, D.C.: Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2001). See also
Bagby, this volume. For a much lower figure for U.S. Muslims (1.9 million), see
Tom W. Smith, Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States (New York: American
Jewish Committee, 2001).
10. Robert Wuthnow and Wendy Cadge, ‘‘Buddhists and Buddhism in the United
States: The Scope of Influence,’’ Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 43.3 (September
2004): 361–78.
11. Classic examples of the ethnographic turn in the study of American religion are
Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem,
1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama
Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Thomas
A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
12. On congregations, see R. Stephen Warner, Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities
and the New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Helen
Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities
and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2000). See
also a follow-up study by Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion
across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2002).
Another volume with some essays of this sort is Robert A. Orsi, ed., Gods of the City:
Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Less useful is Bruce B. Lawrence’s New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants
in American Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). The Pew
Charitable Trusts have launched a massive Religion and the New Immigrants Initiative
that aims to study the role played by religion in seven urban ‘‘gateways’’—Los Angeles,
San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C. With the
exception of Ebaugh and Chafetz’s work (which focuses on Houston), these studies
are in process, and it remains to be seen how much any of them will attend to the polis.
One new project that does appear to have the public square firmly in its sights is the
Religious Pluralism in Southern California Project, centered at the University of California
at Santa Barbara and funded by the Ford Foundation. According to its Web
site ([http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/projects/newpluralism/project.htm]), this project
seeks to understand ‘‘the impact that religious pluralism is having on civic life in
Southern California.’’
13. ‘‘Faith-Based Funding Backed, but Church-State Doubts Abound,’’ Pew Re-
18 Introduction
search Center for the People and the Press, April 10, 2001, [http://people-press.org/
reports/display.php3?Reportid=15].
14. ‘‘Exploring Religious America, 2002,’’ [http://www.thearda.com/fr—Index.
html?/archive/codebooks/relign02cb.html]. In that same survey, 62 percent of
respondents said that ‘‘having many di√erent religions in the United States’’ did not
‘‘make it harder to keep the country united,’’ while only 29 percent said that religious
diversity did make it more di≈cult.
15. Richard N. Ostling, ‘‘Americans Facing toward Mecca,’’ Time, May 23, 1988, 50,
quoted in Jonathan D. Sarna, ‘‘Jewish Identity in the Changing World of American
Religion,’’ in Jewish Identity in America, edited by David M. Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin
(Los Angeles: University of Judaism, 1991), 97; John L. Esposito, Islam the Straight Path
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), quoted in ‘‘The Judeo-Christian-Islamic
Heritage,’’ [http://www.islamfortoday.com/esposito01.htm].
16. This phrase received a powerful imprimatur when the usage maven William Safire
took it up in his ‘‘On Language’’ column in 1995. Quoting Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Safire wrote, ‘‘It’s now o≈cial. Ours is a Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage’’ (‘‘GooGoo
Eyes,’’ New York Times, May 7, 1995, sm32). See also Russell Baker’s reference to
America’s ‘‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture’’ in his ‘‘Except for the Pentagon’’ (New
York Times, September 24, 1996, a25), and a grateful letter to the editor by M. A.
Cheema, president of the American Muslim Council (‘‘Muslim Music,’’ New York Times,
September 27, 1996, a32). The earliest usage of this neologism that I have been able to
locate came at the Thirty-sixth Annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.,
on May 12, 1988. The speaker was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who, after a≈rming
his belief in both Moses and Jesus, said, ‘‘I would like to commend to this distinguished
gathering this morning that it is long past time to cease talking about just the
Judeo-Christian tradition and make it Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition’’ (134 Cong.
Rec. s 5663). Prince Bandar’s remarks indicate that this may well have been the first
time that a Muslim had been invited to address this gathering. For a related though less
mellifluous neologism, see the Reverend Walter Fauntroy’s reference to ‘‘my JudeoChristian-Muslim
heritage’’ in his May 14, 2002, testimony before the Subcommittee
on Oversight of the Committee on House Ways and Means (supporting an amendment
to the tax code, H.R. 2357, that would permit political activism by tax-exempt religious
organizations).
Referring to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as ‘‘Abrahamic’’ faiths is more common.
In 1990, Aly Y. Massoud, while contending that the National Conference of
Christians and Jews should be renamed the National Conference of Christians, Jews,
and Muslims, referred to Islam as ‘‘the completion of the Abrahamic religions’’ (Ari L.
Goldman, ‘‘No Matter What Americans Think about Going to Church, They Admire
Religious Figures,’’ New York Times, April 7, 1990, 11). In 1995 testimony before the
House Committee on the Judiciary, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri of the American Muslim Council
called Islam ‘‘one of the three Abrahamic religions’’ (‘‘Prepared Statement of Azizah
Al-Hibri,’’ Federal News Service, June 14, 1995). A 1998 Senate concurrent resolution
supporting ‘‘religious tolerance toward Muslims’’ referred to Islam as ‘‘one of the great
Abrahamic faiths’’ (S. Con. Res. 94). O≈cial prayers o√ered in both the House and the
Introduction 19
Senate referred fairly regularly in the early-twenty-first century to ‘‘Abrahamic faith.’’
(See, e.g., 149 Cong. Rec. H. 9823, October 28, 2003).
17. Richard John Neuhaus, ‘‘While We’re at It,’’ First Things 135 (August–September
2003), [http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0308/public.html].
18. The Buddhists’ amicus curiae brief in the ‘‘under God’’ case, dated February 12,
2004, can be viewed at [http://pewforum.org/religion-schools/pledge/docs/Buddhist
Temples.pdf].
19. ‘‘Indian American Political Participation,’’ Hindustan Times, November 24, 2004,
[http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181—900801,001301190000.htm].
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PART I
Muslims
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I H S A N S A G B Y
1
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate
Attitudes of Mosque leaders toward America
American Muslims' attitudes toward the United States and participation
in American society are key factors in determiningtheir future. In
the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the relationship between theAmerican
Muslim community and American society has taken on even greater importance.
What path will that community take as it seeks its place in a culture
that differs dramaticallyfrom [slamic cultures? Will Muslimsseek isolation or
involvement, accommodation or resistance? Peter Berger has argued that religion
historically has served as an effective too! for legitimizing theinstitutions
of a society by bequeathing to them a sacred purpose.1
Immigrant religious
groups such as Catholics and Jewshave struggled for acceptance in the American
mainstream and in so doing carnc to adopt America's patriotic myths,
thereby stretching their sacred canopy over the United States and its political
canopy over themselves. Involvement, therefore, leads to accommodation,
and isolation leads to resistanceandfanaticism.3
This essay explores American Muslim attitudes toward America and involvement
in American society primarilyby using the results from the Mosque
in America: A National Study (MTA), a comprehensive survey of mosque
leaders conducted in 2000.' Analysis of the data has been supplemented
by comments from interviewees at the time of the interviews,follow-up interviews
conducted in 2002 with mosque leaders who participated in the
MIA study, and a review of recent American Muslim literature relevant to
these issues.
Emerging from the data is a picture of a religious community virtually
unanimous in its desire to be involved in society—to be recognized as a
respected part of the mosaic of American life, Muslim leaders clearly have
opted to seek a place in mainstream America rather than to entrench themselves
behind the walls of rejectionism and fanaticism. But as Muslims stand
on this threshold, they harbor doubts and misgivings. Although they accept
23
24 i h s a n b a g b y
the pluralist ideal, they reject much in U.S. society. A palpable tension exists
between the ideals of this self-confident body of believers and (as the Muslims
see it) secular American culture. From the Muslim point of view, involvement
in American society should not entail the surrender or compromise of Islamic
beliefs and practices. Muslims are disquieted by what they see as the immorality
of American culture and its hostility toward Islam and Muslims. In
their minds, secularism, materialism, and an unfair foreign policy remain
unacceptable.
So Muslim leaders are pulled in two directions. They want involvement in
American society but are nervous about the possible erosion of Islamic identity
and practice that might result. This concern is common among faith
groups, who have long weighed the e√ects of a supposedly secular society on
their beliefs and practices. Muslim leaders also want to have a seat at the table
of mainstream America, but many are not comfortable appropriating the
rhetoric and symbolism of American patriotism. The U.S. Muslim community
is changing, however, and 9/11 has propelled it toward a greater commitment
to involvement and accommodation. Since 9/11, the pull of those two forces
has become overpowering.
This position of Muslim leaders—committed to but uneasy about involvement
and accommodation—is captured by an African American Muslim in
Indianapolis who remarks that the Muslim has three choices in facing America:
isolate, insulate, or assimilate. The best choice, he believes, is to insulate
—retain Islamic values and practices as protection against the immorality of
America and anti-Islamic sentiments while remaining active in society. The
metaphor of a coat as protection against wintry weather might be appropriate
—the individual engages the world but is protected from harmful elements.
This approach sees the importance—the necessity, even—of Muslim involvement
in American society yet recognizes the dangers of identity loss such
involvement portends. How else to change negative attitudes toward Islam,
America’s moral standards, and its government’s policies? The middle path of
insulation envisions full partnership with America, but this position implies a
reluctance to embrace fully the patriotic ideals and rhetoric of America—the
faithful hesitate to use Islam to pull a sacred canopy over the nation.
The mia survey asked mosque leaders if they agreed or disagreed with the
statement ‘‘America is an immoral, corrupt society’’ (see table 1.1). More than
two-thirds (67 percent) of the respondents agree that America is immoral.
Mosque leaders clearly are troubled by the U.S. moral climate. When talking
about America’s immorality, they most often refer to the sexual mores and the
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 25
table 1.1 \ ‘‘America Is an Immoral, Corrupt Society’’
(Percentage Giving Each Response; ‘‘Don’t Know’’ Excluded from Percentages)
Strongly agree 28%
Somewhat agree 39
Somewhat disagree 27
Strongly disagree 6
prevalence of alcohol and drug consumption. Muslims feel great tension
between normative Islamic culture and American society, especially in the
arena of popular culture. And no wonder. Normative Islamic culture forbids
premarital sex, dating, casual social interaction and touching between the
sexes, homosexuality, alcohol and drug consumption, and the public show of
a woman’s body. Muslims need to be insulated from America’s immorality.
Muslims’ objections to this perceived immorality are not accompanied by a
hatred and rejection of American society. In this regard, Muslim views resemble
those of Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists who are concerned
about the country’s deteriorating moral climate.
Important gradations of responses exist. Leaders who say that they ‘‘somewhat
agree’’ that America is immoral qualify their response with various
points. The most common qualification is that there are a lot of good, decent
American people—in other words, not all Americans are immoral. Another
qualification is expressed by a Pakistani mosque leader in New York City: ‘‘In
sexual matters, America is much more immoral than the Muslim world, but
when it comes to business, I think America is more moral than Pakistan.’’
Other comments mention that political corruption is worse in Muslim lands—
in other words, not all segments of American society are immoral. Those
mosque leaders who respond that they ‘‘somewhat agree’’ constitute the largest
category—39 percent.
Those who ‘‘somewhat disagree’’ that American society is immoral and
corrupt accentuate the positive about the United States. Most point to the
highly moral people they know through their jobs, their neighborhoods, and
even interfaith activities. This group seems to recognize the darker side of
popular culture but to minimize its scope.
Those who ‘‘strongly agree’’ see immorality throughout America. One
Arab mosque leader (a professional) points to America’s foreign policy (‘‘We
don’t take into account who is hurt’’), high schools and teenage culture
(‘‘Look at the dress code, and then the best thing they can teach in high school
26 i h s a n b a g b y
table 1.2 \ Mosques Grouped according to Dominant Ethnic Groups
(Percentage of Mosques in Each Category)
South Asian 28%
African American 27
Arab 15
Mixed evenly South Asian and Arab 16
All other combinations 14
Note: Dominant groups have 35–39 percent of participants in one group, and all other groups
less than 20 percent; 40–49 percent of one group and all others less than 30; 50–59 percent of
one group and all others less than 40; or any group over 55 percent. Mixed groups have two
groups with at least 30 percent of participants each.
is how to use a condom, and we end up with children with no parents’’), and
business (‘‘When a woman has to go back to work after giving birth, that’s
immoral’’). A full 28 percent of all mosque leaders hold this strong criticism
of American society.
Only 8 percent of mosque leaders ‘‘strongly disagree’’ that America is
immoral. Explaining his response, one leader says that people cannot be
outright condemned as immoral. After a thoughtful pause, possibly realizing
the moral relativism implied in his remarks, the leader explains that what he
means is that people cannot be dealt with e√ectively if they think that they are
being condemned as immoral.
A number of variables will be used to analyze responses. One of the most
important variables is ethnicity. Most U.S. mosques are dominated by one of
three ethnic groups: African American, south Asian, or Arab (see table 1.2).
The large presence of African American Muslims means that the Muslim view
of America is not purely an immigrant view. The di√erences in opinions
between the immigrant and African American leaders are distinct, and because
mosque leaders are not completely isolated in ethnic enclaves, these
di√erences have an impact and influence throughout the Muslim community.
African American mosque leaders are, in general, more critical of America’s
perceived immorality than are immigrants (see table 1.3). In the mia
survey, 70 percent of African American leaders agree that America is immoral;
more significantly, 39 percent ‘‘strongly agree’’ that America is immoral,
compared to 24 percent for all immigrant mosque leaders. The more critical
stance of African American leaders can be explained by the fact that most of
them converted to Islam, often because they were unhappy with American
culture and politics. Most African American leaders, in other words, came to
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 27
table 1.3 \ ‘‘America Is Immoral’’ by Predominant Ethnicity
(Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
Ethnicity of Mosque
African South South Asian All
American Asian Arab and Arab Others
Strongly agree 39% 23% 20% 26% 28%
Somewhat agree 31 42 48 41 39
Somewhat disagree 26 29 24 27 27
Strongly disagree 4 6 8 6 6
Note: N = 402. Not statistically significant.
Islam in part because they were repulsed by the racism they experienced and
the spiritual vacuum that they saw in American society.
The African American Muslim community contains sharp internal di√erences
between the American Society of Muslims (asm), which constitutes
approximately 56 percent of all African American mosques, and the historically
Sunni African American mosques (hsaam), which constitute about
44 percent of African American mosques. The asm follows the leadership of
Imam W. Deen Mohammed, who took over leadership of the Nation of Islam
in 1975 and has transformed it into a mainstream Islamic organization. Imam
Mohammed has come to champion patriotism, interfaith dialogue, and working
within the system. The American flag has appeared on the masthead of the
asm monthly journal since 1975, and in some cities since the late 1980s, asm
mosques have organized ‘‘new world patriotism’’ parades on July 4.
The hsaams are mosques that do not belong to asm—most never were a
part of the Nation of Islam. The hsaams are a fractured group that have
turned away from the syncretism of the Nation of Islam and sought a more authentic,
normative form of Islam. I have used the phrase ‘‘historically Sunni’’
following Muslim leader K. Ahmad Tawfiq, who in the 1960s started using the
phrase ‘‘Sunni Muslim’’ to distinguish between followers of the Nation of
Islam and the African American Muslims who tried to follow the sunna (normative
practice) of the Prophet Muhammad. hsaams are much more critical
of the American political system, and some of them eschew interfaith dialogue
(see table 1.4). They also have been more intent on digesting normative
Islamic practice. Although not united in any one group, the National Umma,
led for many years by Imam Jamil Al-Amin (the former H. Rap Brown), has
previously had the largest group. A new organization, the Muslim Alliance in
28 i h s a n b a g b y
table 1.4 \ ‘‘America Is Immoral,’’ by African American and Immigrant Mosques
(Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
American Muslim Historically Immigrant
Society Sunni Mosques Mosques
Strongly agree 18% 66% 24%
Somewhat agree 42 17 43
Somewhat disagree 36 13 26
Strongly disagree 4 4 7
Note: N = 401 African American mosques, 112 immigrant mosques, and 289 historically Sunni
mosques. Statistically significant at .016.
North America, has recently initiated attempts to unite hsaam mosques and
other indigenous Muslims.
Two-thirds (66 percent) of all hsaam leaders ‘‘strongly agree’’ that America
is immoral, while only 18 percent of asm leaders and 24 percent of
immigrant leaders strongly agree. One hsaam leader remarks in exasperation,
‘‘You can’t turn on the radio, watch a video or tv, and not hear a whole
bunch of cursing and sex. It’s ridiculous.’’ Overall, 83 percent of hsaam
mosque leaders, 60 percent of asm leaders, and 67 percent of immigrant
leaders agree that America is immoral. Of all mosque leaders, hsaam leaders
clearly have the most sharply negative view of America’s morality, and asm
leaders have the least negative view.
Another variable measures the level of conservatism/traditionalism in
mosque leaders. The mia study delineated three categories: (1) those who
interpret texts literally, without necessarily referring to the classical legal
schools, including leaders who follow the highly conservative interpretation
of Salafi thought, which is found largely in the Arabian Gulf region; (2) those
traditionalists who follow one of the classical legal schools (madhhabs); and
(3) those who follow the basic texts of Islam (Quran and sunna) but employ
contextual interpretations, a category that includes a wide spectrum of leaders,
some fairly liberal and a majority who adhere closely to the fairly conservative
classical consensus of the great scholars (see table 1.5).
Thirty-nine percent of mosque leaders who favor a literal approach
‘‘strongly agree’’ that America is immoral, while that number was only 26 percent
for leaders who favor the contextual approach (see table 1.6). Although
the di√erences are not overwhelming, the more conservative mosques are
more likely to be highly critical of American culture.
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 29
table 1.5 \ ‘‘In Trying to Make Islamic Decisions, Which of the Following Do You
Believe Is the Most Proper Approach?’’ (Percentage Giving Each Response)
Refer directly to the Quran and sunna and follow an interpretation that
takes into account its purposes and modern circumstances
71%
Refer directly to the Quran and sunna and follow a literal interpretation 21
Follow the well-established views of a particular madhhab (legal school) 6
None of the above 2
table 1.6 \ ‘‘America Is Immoral’’ by Islamic Approach
(Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
Islamic Approach
Contextual Literal Madhhab
Strongly agree 26% 39% 13%
Somewhat agree 41 33 48
Somewhat disagree 29 16 39
Strongly disagree 5 13 0
Note: N = 390. Statistically significant at .004.
Leaders who follow a traditional madhhab are less likely to ‘‘strongly agree’’
that America is immoral. The madhhabis might be expected, like the conservative
literalists, be more critical of American society. This finding seems to be
an anomaly. Its resolution may lie in the fact that most U.S. madhhabis are
either members of Tablighi Jamaat (a south Asia–based group dedicated to
calling Muslims back to the practice of Islam) or, to a lesser extent, Sufis: both
of those groups avoid harsh rhetoric against the societies in which they find
themselves, focusing on the task of changing the hearts of their people rather
than opposing perceived societal ills.
Mosque leaders who ‘‘strongly agree’’ that America is immoral are the only
leaders more likely to reject participation in American society. This small
group tends to advocate a more isolationist and rejectionist posture. Nevertheless,
the responses to the question of America’s immorality demonstrate
clearly that the vast majority of America’s mosque leaders are not opting for
either isolation or assimilation.
The mia study asked mosque leaders whether they agreed with the statement
that ‘‘American society is hostile to Islam’’ (see table 1.7). A majority
30 i h s a n b a g b y
table 1.7 \ ‘‘American Society Is Hostile to Islam’’
(Percentage Giving Each Response; ‘‘Don’t Know’’ Excluded from Percentages)
Strongly agree 15%
Somewhat agree 41
Somewhat disagree 32
Strongly disagree 12
56 percent) believes that American society in general is hostile to Islam.
Respondents comment on three components of that society: the American
people, media, and government. Those who ‘‘strongly agree’’ that America is
hostile believe that all components of American society are hostile. Mosque
leaders who ‘‘somewhat agree’’ almost invariably argue that hostility is real
but that the American people are good-hearted and reasonable. One leader
explains his answer by saying, ‘‘I think if they are hostile, it is because of lack
of information. They see negative images and think this way. If they knew us,
they wouldn’t believe that. It’s not their fault.’’ From this point of view, hostility
exists but is not intrinsic—there is a hope and expectation that, with
information and contact, the American people’s hostility toward Islam will
evaporate.
Those leaders who ‘‘somewhat disagree’’ that American society is hostile to
Islam feel that the American people are not hostile to Islam. Some add that the
media and government are not entirely hostile. One leader remarks, ‘‘You
can’t say all the media is bad. There’s really an element that is against Islam,
that promotes a bad picture of Islam.’’ Those who ‘‘strongly disagree’’ feel
that, overall, the American people, media, and government are not against
Islam. One leader comments, ‘‘I don’t think they are hostile to Islam. It is all
national interest.’’
Unlike the immorality issue, this question elicits few di√erences among
ethnic groups: African American and immigrant mosque leaders have virtually
the same responses. The only significant di√erences occur among the
hsaam leaders, 30 percent of whom ‘‘strongly agree’’ that America is hostile,
compared to only 8 percent for asm mosques and 14 percent for immigrant
mosques. One hsaam leader remarks, ‘‘Those people know Islam—better
than most of us. And they’re scared to death to see Islam grow in America
because they know that Islam is going to challenge their system.’’
When the responses to America’s immorality and hostility to Islam are
compared to attitudes toward involvement and political and community par-
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 31
table 1.8 \ ‘‘Muslims Should Participate in the Political Process’’
(Percentage Giving Each Response; ‘‘Don’t Know’’ Excluded from Percentages)
Strongly agree 72%
Somewhat agree 17
Somewhat disagree 6
Strongly disagree 5
ticipation, a clear correlation can be seen between those who ‘‘strongly agree’’
that America is immoral/hostile and low levels of involvement and negative
attitudes toward involvement. Greater alienation and tension are thus associated
with a greater degree of isolation and rejection of involvement in America’s
public square. Only a small number (approximately 12 percent) of mosque
leaders strongly agree that America is both immoral and hostile toward
Islam, so the Muslim community at large does not exhibit a high degree of
alienation. Rather, alienation is most typically found in mosques whose leaders
are literalists or African Americans who do not belong to the asm. This
finding is borne out in other measures, to which we now turn.
The mia study asked respondents if they agree or disagree with the statement
that Muslims should participate in the political process (see table 1.8).
Almost 90 percent of mosque leaders agree. America’s Muslims want unequivocally
to be political players. Isolationism and rejection of the U.S. system
are not popular strategies among mosque leaders.
The primary motivation underlying mosque leaders’ desire for political
participation is the protection of Muslim rights and promotion of Muslim
interests. One leader, Ahmad Kobeisy, argues for a paradigm of ‘‘interaction,’’
which he describes as ‘‘the way of protecting the necessities without which
Muslims cannot survive, let alone prosper. These necessities include: proper
representation, protection of civil rights, protection of their Islamic identity,
uplifting society from moral decay (drugs and violence), the elimination of
prejudice and bias against Islam and Muslims, and, finally, the prevention
and delay of the widely publicized and eminent conflict between Muslims and
the West.’’∂
In a Boston Globe article, a reporter describes a lecture encouraging Muslims
to vote:
The Iraqi-born Muslim cleric paces across the university classroom, his
green tunic and black cape sweeping across the floor, as, spicing his
adopted English with phrases from his native Arabic, he urges the students
32 i h s a n b a g b y
to vote. How else can they persuade the U.S. government to reduce its
support for Israel? To halt the alleged singling out of Muslims and ArabAmericans
for interrogation at U.S. airports? To stop the use of secret
evidence to justify the detention of suspected terrorists? ‘‘We should pursue
our rights in a society we choose to live in,’’ said Imam Hassan Qazwini. ‘‘If
I keep myself excluded, I am not influencing anybody.’’∑
This urgent need to protect Muslim civil rights, reduce prejudice against
Muslims, and change American foreign policy drives Muslim involvement and
best explains Muslims’ tendency to be more politically active than other recent
immigrant groups.
Another motivation for political action springs from a religious impulse
found in the Quranic ideals of doing good (2:82), cooperating with others in
righteousness (5:3), commanding good and forbidding evil (3:110), protecting
the weak (107:2), feeding the poor (76:8–9), and standing up for justice
(4:135). Javeed Akhter, a Muslim leader in Chicago, expresses this vision by
saying that Muslims ‘‘must resist the understandable tendency towards self
imposed isolation and avoid a retreat into the mosques and community centers.
Moreover, if they isolate themselves, they will merely succeed in creating
their own ghetto. They cannot ignore the problems around them, hoping to
remain immune to them. Muslims must remember the Quranic injunctions to
be a people of knowledge, compassion and patience, striving for positive
change in the communities in which they live.’’∏
Almost three out of four (72 percent) of all mosque leaders ‘‘strongly
agree’’ that Muslims should participate in politics. Their comments echo the
arguments given earlier. One African American leader o√ers an argument
based on civic responsibility: ‘‘We’re citizens. It doesn’t make any sense for us
to let other people make decisions for us.’’ A few leaders reason that if they
have to pay taxes, they should have some say about how the taxes are used.
Those mosque leaders who ‘‘somewhat agree’’ with Muslim participation
in politics sound a cautionary note regarding the proper place of politics
in Muslim life. One leader agrees with political involvement but thinks
that Muslims should not invest much time and energy in it. Some leaders
worry about usefulness: ‘‘Are we really going to get something out of it?’’
Many leaders, even those who strongly agree with political involvement, express
concerns about the dirtiness of politics—involving their community in a
game that seems to be about buying politicians and making deals with unsavory
people.
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 33
table 1.9 \ ‘‘Muslims Should Participate in the Political Process,’’ by Predominant
Ethnicity (Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
Ethnicity of Mosque
African South South Asian All
American Asian Arab and Arab Others
Strongly agree 66% 76% 82% 68% 71%
Somewhat agree 11 19 16 19 20
Somewhat disagree 10 4 0 10 7
Strongly disagree 13 1 2 3 2
Note: N = 410.
Those who ‘‘somewhat’’ and ‘‘strongly disagree’’ object to political involvement
based on the strong feeling that politics corrupts while religion is pure.
Their arguments will be discussed later in the chapter.
Parsing the responses based on the ethnicity of mosques, virtually all the
ethnic groups agree with political involvement, but a significant minority of
African American mosque leaders objects (see table 1.9). As in the question of
America’s immorality and hostility to Islam, a substantial portion of African
American mosque leaders do not hold a positive view of America. Twentythree
percent of African American leaders disagree with the proposition that
Muslims should participate in the political process.
Looking more closely at the African American Muslim community, the
asm mosques are strongly committed to political participation—90 percent
strongly agree, compared to 74 percent of immigrant mosque leaders (see
table 1.10). The hsaam mosque leaders are much more evenly divided on this
issue—59 percent agree and 41 percent disagree with political participation.
The hsaams have been greatly influenced by the Black Power movement
of the 1960s and deeply distrust politics and politicians. Most of their leaders
became Muslims in the 1960s and 1970s. Many believe that the U.S. political
system is oppressive, suppressing poor and black people and hating Islam for
opposing the ruthlessness of American politics. One leader comments apocalyptically,
‘‘We live in the belly of the beast.’’ From this point of view, politics
has won little for poor people and certainly have not abated the plight of
African Americans. These leaders believe that political involvement represents
compromise and thus corrupts one’s religious principles and human dignity.
The theological objections to participating in a kafir (disbelieving) system have
more resonance in these communities. As one African American imam writes,
34 i h s a n b a g b y
table 1.10 \ ‘‘Muslims Should Participate in the Political Process,’’ by African
American Mosques (Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
American Muslim Historically Immigrant
Society Sunni Mosques Mosques
Strongly agree 90% 37% 74%
Somewhat agree 3 22 19
Somewhat disagree 4 17 5
Strongly disagree 3 24 2
Note: N = 409 African American mosques, 114 immigrant mosques, and 295 historically Sunni
mosques. Statistically significant at .000.
The political parties in America are ‘‘secular’’ and have no interest in any
religious views whatsoever, not to mention the Islamic ones. Their agendas
are mainly ‘‘unfriendly’’ to Muslims by admission of their leaders on daily
basis on T.V. every day. . . . In politics the rule is very clear, ‘‘you scratch
my back and I will scratch yours!’’ The question is how far those ‘‘Muslim’’
leaders are willing to ‘‘scratch the backs of the secular agendas’’ and
weaken their faith by engaging in such un-Islamic behavior before they get
something out of it?π
Most of these African American leaders, however, do not engage in public
polemics against participation. The imams of the National Umma, led by
Imam Jamil, follow his example in refusing to be involved in politics but not
condemning those who do.
In its earlier manifestation as the Nation of Islam, the asm also shared in
the militancy of the 1960s and, like Imam Jamil Al-Amin, helped shape it. But
under the leadership of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, the asm has dropped its
anti-American rhetoric. This is one of a few Muslim groups that has appropriated
some of America’s patriotic symbolism, displaying the U.S. flag and
celebrating July 4, for example. Imam Mohammed does not deny the ongoing
problems of racism and classism in America, but he now advocates unqualified
involvement by Muslims in the American political and social system as the
only solution to these problems.
Mosque leaders’ Islamic approach also a√ects their views on political participation
(see table 1.11). The majority of mosque leaders, regardless of their
approach to interpreting texts, favor political participation. The largest opposition
to political participation, however, is found in the mosques that
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 35
table 1.11 \ ‘‘Muslims Should Participate in the Political Process,’’ by Islamic
Approach (Percentage Agreeing/Disagreeing with Statement)
Islamic Approach
Contextual Literal Madhhab
Strongly agree 79% 60% 46%
Somewhat agree 14 18 38
Somewhat disagree 2 18 8
Strongly disagree 5 4 8
Note: N = 398. Statistically significant at .000.
follow a literal interpretation and those mosques that follow a madhhab—22
percent of literalists and 16 percent of madhhabis oppose political participation,
compared to just 7 percent for contextualists.
The three groups, largely immigrant, that oppose political participation are
the various Salafi groups, Hizb al-Tahrir, and the Tablighi Jamaat. The Salafi
and Tahriri groups object to political involvement on the theory that the
American system is a kafir system. Political participation in the system, therefore,
is tantamount to supporting it, and God forbids the support of kufr
(disbelief ) and zulm (oppression). A flyer entitled ‘‘Register to Vote . . . Register
to Commit Haram!’’ distributed by Hizb al-Tahrir, states,
Whether it is in the Muslim World or the West, the systems implemented
upon the people now are Kufr systems based in beliefs other that Islam. It
is beyond argument that the constitution of the U.S.A. and the laws and
systems emanating from it which are being implemented here are not
Islamic. The rulers have no other role except to implement these manmade
laws i.e. the rulings of kufr. In no uncertain terms Allah forbids that
in the Quran. . . . The verses condemn those who rule with anything other
than what Allah has revealed regardless of their sincerity, piety, intentions
or objectives.∫
Unlike the African American groups that withdraw from politics in stony
silence, the Salafi and Tahriri are vocal in their opposition. Both energetically
distribute literature and both will publicly challenge, especially in the mosque,
expressions of support for political participation. The influence of their rejectionist
views, therefore, extends well beyond the few mosques that they control.
The Hizb al-Tahrir is revolutionary in that it envisions the overthrow of
36 i h s a n b a g b y
current Muslim regimes, but most Salafi groups have no real political agenda.
Their priority is the purification of the faith. The Tablighi Jamaat does not
argue against political participation but simply ignores the issue, which it sees
as irrelevant to its agenda of encouraging Muslims fully to practice Islam.
Resistance to political involvement, like the strong sentiments against
America’s immorality, is found in only a small minority (11 percent) of mosque
leaders—for the most part, African American leaders of hsaam mosques
and mosque leaders who follow a literal interpretation of Islamic texts.
Although mosque leaders and Muslims overwhelmingly support political
participation, trepidation and disquiet nonetheless exist. Most mosque leaders
are motivated not primarily by a wholehearted commitment to and belief
in the American political system (patriotism is not the guiding motivation) but
rather by the necessity of protecting Muslim rights and promoting Muslim
interests. One of the most respected Muslim thinkers in North America, Jamal
Badawi, argues in favor of political participation as a means of bringing
benefit and removing harm: ‘‘Electing or voting for someone who will do less
harm to Muslims obviously would be much better than sitting on the sidelines
and just criticizing both and doing nothing about it.’’Ω
There is also concern that involvement not compromise essential Islamic
beliefs and practices. Badawi reflects on this worry: ‘‘There is a fear also that
you get into a process of gradual concessions after concessions and compromises.
Well, to compromise on something in terms of benefit or something
which is not very essential might be understandable, but the fear here is to
keep pushing, making compromises that really Muslims should draw a line
[on].’’∞≠
Kobeisy also indicates that there is an outer limit that cannot be
crossed. ‘‘We must be cautious not to knowingly or otherwise approve of
any behavior unacceptable to Islam or lifestyles such as freedom of adultery,
homosexuality, same sex marriages, etc.’’∞∞
Most mosque leaders, therefore, approach the political system not to give
reverence to it but to protect their rights and use it to promote policies that
reflect their values and interests. The symbols of patriotism, especially the
flag, have an honored place in few U.S. mosques. July 4 is a holiday in most
Muslim organizations, but little celebration takes place. The tension between
Muslims and the American system regarding moral values and policy issues
remains real. Especially in the area of foreign policy, Muslims are upset with
America’s strong support of Israel, war in Iraq, backing of corrupt regimes in
the Middle East, and neglect of Kashmir and Chechnya. Muslims also have a
pervading sense that politicians are corrupt, which emanates from the disillu-
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 37
sionment of the 1960s among African Americans and immigrants’ disdain for
the autocratic regimes of their homelands. At this point in history, therefore,
most mosque leaders in America seem to be seeking a middle ground, rejecting
isolation and endorsing political participation while fearing compromise
and feeling uneasy about fully legitimating the state. Mosque leaders, in
short, want to be insulated in their political involvement from compromising
their faith and acquiescing to bad foreign policy.
Although most mosque leaders seek a middle ground regarding legitimation
of the state, the Muslim community is in flux, especially after 9/11. Using
the paradigm suggested by James Hunter’s contribution to this book, immigrant
groups in the past have traversed four stages in their relationship to the
mainstream society: introduction, recognition, negotiation, and establishment.
Introduction is a quiet phase, when the immigrant group is largely
invisible. The recognition phase constitutes a time when the religious group
enters the periphery of public awareness and starts making public claims that
are often met with initial hostility. The negotiation phase is a tumultuous time
when the religious group struggles with the larger society for acceptance and
both sides consequently reconfigure their boundaries and perceptions of one
another. The establishment period is when the religious group is accepted as a
full member and partner in American society.
The crucial phase of negotiation, as described by Armand Mauss in his
study of Mormon assimilation, comes when the mainstream society attempts
to domesticate the minority religious group.∞≤
Domestication can include the
religious group’s abandonment of its most threatening characteristics and its
acceptance of the underpinning ideas of a civil society in America. For full
political participation, mainstream society typically requires the legitimation
of the state, including an embrace of patriotic symbolism and rhetoric. The
minority group, conversely, desires to see the religious and political establishment
modify its boundaries to include the minority group in its vision of the
American mainstream. The religious group seeks to maintain its unique identity
while claiming a seat at the table. In this phase, the boundaries of both are
redrawn.
In the 1990s, Muslims entered this negotiation phase. The formation of national
public advocacy groups such as the American Muslim Council (1990),
the Council on American-Islamic Relations (1994), the American Muslim Alliance
(1994), and the Muslim Public A√airs Council (1988), catalyzed the
situation, with these groups fighting discrimination, encouraging Muslim
participation in politics, and demanding Muslims’ full acceptance into ‘‘Abra-
38 i h s a n b a g b y
hamic’’ America. In this phase, Muslims advanced numerous ideas that argue
both for Muslims’ acceptance into the mainstream and for Muslim legitimation
of the state. And Muslims have taken many actions that embody their
commitment to full membership in American society. The overall impression
is that the Muslim community is inextricably moving toward drawing the
sacred canopy over America and that this movement toward legitimating the
state has been accelerated by the 9/11 tragedy.
The most common argument for the inclusion of Muslims in the American
mainstream also serves as an important initial step toward legitimizing the
United States. The argument is simply that Muslims are in fact Americans, are
already acting as full members of this society. Ibrahim Sidicki, a college
student, says, ‘‘I try to tell them that the overwhelming majority of Muslims
living in the United States are Americans and America is now their country.’’∞≥
Another student says, ‘‘We are part of this country. We feel proud of our
American Islamic identity. We want to be part of the mosaic. We don’t consider
ourselves as belonging to the Middle East or to South Asia. Our roots
may be there, but our present and future are here.’’∞∂
Another widespread argument is that ‘‘America is the best place to practice
Islam.’’∞∑
Muslim countries are repressive and corrupt; from this point of view,
therefore, America is more ‘‘Islamic.’’ A related claim is that America contains
much that is good, and Muslims as citizens should celebrate the good and try
to change the bad. Javeed Akhter, a Muslim leader in Chicago, says, ‘‘There is
much good in our country which is good and exemplary and needs to be
preserved. However, there is also much which needs to be altered and improved
upon.’’∞∏
Two other arguments would give full legitimation to the state. One, championed
by Imam W. Deen Mohammed, is that America’s founding documents
are based on Islam and are, therefore, Islamic documents. Imam Fahim
Shuaib, one of the asm’s leading imams, stated that the ‘‘real American values
are Islamic values.’’ He then read the preamble of the Declaration of Independence
and remarked, ‘‘This is Islam.’’∞π
Since 9/11, Muslim organizations increasingly
are advancing this same claim. The Muslim Public A√airs Council’s
‘‘Statement on the Role of Muslims in American Citizenry’’ a≈rmed, ‘‘American
Muslims should find no contradiction between Islamic values and the
American tradition of liberty and democracy enshrined in the Constitution.’’∞∫
The other argument, propounded by Muslim intellectual Robert Crane,
is that Islam is more in line with the Founding Fathers’ vision than are
its present-day secular interpreters. If Muslims join forces with other like-
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 39
minded traditionalists, Crane believes, America can be saved from those who
would subvert its spiritual foundations: ‘‘To be the best Muslim is to be a good
American, and to be the best American is to be Islamic. This should be the
identity of American Muslims. The destiny of Muslims in America is to work
with like-minded traditionalists of America’s other religions in a common
strategy to bring peace through justice both at home and abroad, because this
is the will of God.’’∞Ω
Such thinking, similar to that of fundamentalist Christians
who claim ancestors among the nation’s founders while decrying today’s
politics and culture, would make the Islamic and American identities
inseparable.
Many Muslim leaders also argue that Islam is compatible with the civic
ideal of pluralism. Mohamed Fathi Osman declares, ‘‘The Muslims have the
moral and legal principles of pluralism available in their religious sources and
heritage.’’≤≠
Pluralism can be defined as ‘‘the co-existence with a measure of civic peace
of di√erent groups in one society.’’≤∞
In other words, pluralism demands mutual
tolerance and respect. Muzammil Siddiqi states that pluralism is manifest
when four principles are recognized: ‘‘The dignity of all human beings. The
basic equality of all human beings. Universal human rights. Fundamental
freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Islam recognizes these principles
and encourages Muslims to struggle for them.’’≤≤
Peter Berger’s pluralism does not demand that one relativize one’s truth
claims. A person in a pluralist society does not have to accede that his or her
truth is of equal value as other truths. (Democrats and Republicans certainly
do not go that far.) Muslim advocates of political participation are adamant
about holding fast to that truth. As Siddiqi says, ‘‘Islam does not consider all
viewpoints correct or of equal value, but does recognize that di√erences of
opinion can be a sign of Allah’s mercy.’’≤≥
Various Muslim groups have demonstrated their commitment to political
involvement and their willingness to give a degree of legitimation to the state.
Muslim leaders have o√ered opening prayers in both chambers of the Congress
and most state legislatures, and Muslim chaplains have been inducted
into all branches of the armed forces. Since the early 1990s, Muslim organizations
have conducted major voter registration drives, endorsing political candidates
along the way. In the 2000 presidential election, many Muslim leaders
and groups endorsed George W. Bush, and U.S. Muslims listened, voting overwhelmingly
for the Republican candidate. In 2004, Muslims went the other
way, again in overwhelming numbers, casting their votes for John Kerry (and
40 i h s a n b a g b y
against the Patriot Act and U.S. interventions overseas). The Muslim community
is plainly the most politically active of the recent immigrant groups.
The 9/11 terrorist attack gave greater impetus to Muslims who stress political
involvement and embrace an American Muslim identity. The revulsion at
the hate-filled militancy of al-Qaeda has led some prominent Muslims to call
on their coreligionists to drop their politics of the Other. Muqtedar Khan
writes in ‘‘A Memo to American Muslim Leadership,’’ ‘‘Muslims love to live in
the U.S. but also love to hate it. . . . As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that
no where on Earth, including India, will I get the same sense of dignity and
respect that I have received in the U.S. . . . It is time that we acknowledge
that the freedoms we enjoy in the U.S. are more desirable to us than superficial
solidarity with the Muslim world.’’≤∂
Another prominent Muslim leader,
Hamza Yusuf, has announced that he will drop any strident criticism of America
and will focus more on a message of love and conciliation. At the 2002
Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of North America, which was attended
by thirty thousand Muslims, American flags were prominently displayed
on the platform for the first time in the organization’s history. During a
commemoration of the first anniversary of 9/11 in Toledo, Ohio, a young
Muslim girl wearing the hijab (head scarf ) sang the national anthem. There is
a real possibility that 9/11 will come to be seen as a turning point in the
Muslim community, as the proponents of political participation overcome the
misgivings of many Muslims and the objections of the vocal minority. Increased
scrutiny may spur the community to greater accommodation with the
mainstream.
Muslims’ involvement in politics and engagement in the noisy process of
negotiating their rightful place in America are bringing into being an American
Muslim community at home with the patriotic symbols and myths of
other Americans. Commitment to political involvement has necessarily entailed
both accepting an American identity and engaging in certain public acts
of loyalty to American society. Stepping onto the political playing field requires
one to play as a loyal U.S. citizen. Such acts of engagement entail
crossing the Rubicon of accommodating an American identity and appropriating
the ideals of American civic piety. The tension between American society
and the Muslim community and the mission to relieve that tension is propelling
Muslims to become involved, and that involvement is pushing the Muslim
community into the American mainstream. The opportunity to a√ect change
outside the Muslim community is leading to change inside the Muslim community.
It seems inevitable, therefore, that mosque leaders will eventually
Isolate, Insulate, Assimilate 41
come to embrace fully the American ideals of democracy and to accommodate
a form of patriotism colored and defined by Islamic ideals.
Yet a palpable fear of the contamination of pluralism and the slippery slope
of compromise abides, making Muslims either cautious regarding or contemptuous
of political involvement. The conjunction of both the fear of loss of
identity and the impulse to be involved explains the metaphor of insulation—
Muslims want to be involved, but they also want to be protected from the
possible harmful e√ects of involvement. The challenge, however, of maintaining
one’s faith is the same challenge that all believers face. As Berger stated,
the challenge is to ‘‘hold convictions without either dissolving them in utter
relativity or encasing them in the false absolutes of fanaticism. It is a di≈cult
challenge, but it is not an impossible one.’’≤∑
The Muslim community seems
poised to accept that challenge.
notes
1. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New
York: Doubleday, 1967), 32.
2. Peter L. Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (New York: Free
Press, 1992).
3. The mia study was conducted in conjunction with Hartford Seminary’s Faith
Communities Today study, which brought together virtually all American denominations
and faith groups to devise a common questionnaire and then administer it to
leaders of their congregations. The mia study first identified all the mosques in the
United States. Of the 1,209 mosques discovered, 631 were randomly sampled for the
study. Telephone interviews were conducted from March to September 2000, with 416
leaders responding (a completion rate of 66 percent). The results have a margin of
error of †5 percent. See Ihsan Bagby, Paul M. Perl, and Bryan T. Froehle, The Mosque in
America: A National Portrait (Washington, D.C.: Council on American-Islamic Relations,
2001).
4. Ahmad N. Kobeisy, ‘‘Interaction between Islamic Communities and Their NonMuslim
Neighbors in Syracuse, usa: A Model for the Nation,’’ in Islam in America:
Images and Challenges, edited by Phylis Lan Lin (Indianapolis: University of Indianapolis
Press, 1998), 76.
5. Michael Paulson, ‘‘Muslims Eye Role at U.S. Polls,’’ Boston Globe, October 23,
2000, a1.
6. Asad Husain, John Woods, and Javeed Akhter, Muslims in America: Opportunities and
Challenges (Chicago: International Strategy and Policy Institute, 1996), 81.
7. ‘‘Can They Ever Win in Politics?’’ Unity/al-Wahda: Newsletter of Masjid Darus Salaam,
November–December 2000, 1.
8. Register to Vote . . . Register to Commit Haram! (Walnut, Calif.: Khalifornia, [1999?]).
Haram means ‘‘forbidden’’ or ‘‘prohibited.’’
9. Jamal Badawi, ‘‘Muslim Participation in North American Politics: An Interview
42 i h s a n b a g b y
with Jamal Badawi,’’ Radio Islam, September 22, 2000, [http://www.radioislam.com/
publica√airs/publica√airs.asp].
10. Ibid.
11. Kobeisy, ‘‘Interaction,’’ 77.
12. Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 4.
13. Richard Wormser, American Islam (New York: Walker, 1994), 51.
14. Ibid., 122.
15. Ibid., 54.
16. Husain, Woods, and Akhter, Muslims in America, 89.
17. Fahim Shuaib, untitled speech given at conference on Islam in America: Rights
and Citizenship in a Post-9/11 World, Berkeley, Calif., September 18, 2002.
18. Muslim Public A√airs Council, ‘‘Statement on the Role of Muslims in the
American Citizenry,’’ [http://www.mpac.org/news/newsitemdisplay.asp?id=240&
itemtype=news].
19. Robert D. Crane, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response (Acton, Mass.: Tapestry,
1997), xix.
20. Mohamed Fathi Osman, The Children of Adam: American Islamic Perspectives on
Pluralism (Washington, D.C.: Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, 1996), 42.
21. Berger, Far Glory, 37.
22. Muzammil Siddiqi, ‘‘Religions Have Unity in Diversity,’’ Islamic Horizons 30.5
(September–October 2001): 33.
23. Ibid., 30.
24. Muqtedar Khan, ‘‘A Memo to American Muslim Leadership,’’ Muslim Observer,
October 2001, 21.
25. Berger, Far Glory, 46.
OM i D S A F I
Progressive Islam in America
The catastrophic events of 9/11 catapulted Muslims and Islam into
American public consciousness. Muslims previously entered the spotlight
almost always in response to Middle Eastern political events such as the
Iranian hostage crisis, the first Gulf" war, the rise of the Taliban, and the
ongoing Palestine/Israel tragedy. However, the fact that the devastation of
9/n took place on American soil has resulted in a multiyear gaze at Muslims.
This phenomenon is new and has radical consequences for all Muslims,
including those with commitments to global justice and gender equality who
are the main concern of this essay.
The initial wave of American responses to 9/11 quite naturally focused on
the parties responsible for that atrocity. Never before has a U.S. president so
immediately and urgently pleaded with all Americans and all Muslims to
realize that the "face of terrorism is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what
Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace, they
represent evil and war. When we think of Islam, we think of a faith that brings
comfort to a billion people around the world,"1
Whatever many Muslims,
including this author, may think of the actions that the Bush administration
has taken in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has to be acknowledged that the president's
remarks in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were historic and probably
helped stem the tide of violence against Muslims in America. These closely
watched and often reported remarks represent a direct attempt to engage
Islam as a public American religion, and the fact that this intervention took
place in the midst of our greatest national crisis in two generations only
makes it more significant.
Subsequent months and years have seen attempts to seek out and identify a
wider range of Muslim voices, both in the United States and in places such as
Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Foremost among
these attempts have been efforts to amplify Muslim voices that represent an
alternate vision of Islam to the understanding of those responsible for 9/11.
This search for "moderate" and "tolerant" Muslims—I do not find either
2
43
44 o m i d s a f i
qualifier helpful≤
—has come from the highest ranks of the U.S. government.≥
Given this vicious attack, many observers have expected these missing Muslims
to o√er not only a total dismissal of the perspective represented by alQaeda
but also a wholehearted identification with American national ideals
and policies. But this hope has been frustrated as more and more Muslims
have sought to occupy that contested space in which one assumes a critical
stance vis-à-vis both Muslim extremists and certain U.S. policies. I propose
that much of the confusion among casual observers of Islam in America (and
many journalists) can be traced to a doomed e√ort to collapse the distinctions
between liberal Islam and progressive Islam, distinctions that are vital for
both the American Muslim community and scholars of Islam.
The various understandings of Islam that fall under the ‘‘progressive’’
rubric both continue and depart from the 150-year-old tradition of liberal
Islam.∂
Advocates of liberal Islam have generally displayed an uncritical, almost
devotional, identification with modernity and have often sidestepped the
issues of colonialism and imperialism. Progressive understandings of Islam,
conversely, almost uniformly criticize colonialism both in its nineteenthcentury
manifestations and in its current varieties. Progressive Muslims also
advance unapologetically a ‘‘multiple critique’’ with respect to both Islam and
modernity. That double engagement, plus an emphasis on concrete social
action and transformation, is the defining characteristic of progressive Islam
today. Unlike their liberal Muslim forefathers (and they usually were forefathers),
progressive Muslims represent a broad coalition of female and male
Muslim activists who aim not to develop new and beatific theologies but to
e√ect change in Muslim and non-Muslim societies.
Progressive Muslims adhere to a number of commitments: striving to
realize a just and pluralistic society through critically engaging Islam, pursuing
social justice, emphasizing gender equality as a human right, a≈rming
religious and ethnic pluralism, and acting via nonviolent resistance.∑
I will
come back to a fuller discussion of these broad commitments at the end of
this essay.
It would be a mistake to somehow reduce the emergence of progressive
Islam to a new ‘‘American Islam.’’ Progressive Muslims are found everywhere
in the global Muslim umma. When it comes to implementing a progressive
understanding of Islam in Muslim communities, groups in Iran, Malaysia,
and South Africa lead the United States. Many American Muslim communities
—and much of the leadership represented in groups such as the Islamic Circle
of North America,∏
the Islamic Society of North America,π
and the Council on
Progressive Islam in America 45
American-Islamic Relations∫
—are far too uncritical of Salafi and Wahhabi
tendencies that progressives oppose.
Wahhabism is by now a well known, puritanical reading of Islam that
originated in eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia. Despite their exclusivist ideology
and theology, Wahhabis worked closely with the British and since the
1930s have cooperated with American administrations.Ω
Not until the discovery
of oil in Saudi Arabia did Wahhabism obtain the financial backing necessary
to import its evangelistic mission all over the world, including to the
United States.
Lesser known is the Salafi movement, an important school of Islamic
revivalism. Salafis espouse a ‘‘return’’ to the ways of the first few generations
of Muslims, called al-salaf al-saleh (the pious forefathers). Central to their
methodology is renewed attention to the Quran and the sunna of the Prophet
Muhammad. It is a mistake (though a common one) to describe as Wahhabi
American Muslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America
and the Islamic Council of North America, although it is quite proper to think
of them as Salafi groups. Shiite and Sufi interpretations of Islam are largely
absent from these organizations, whose conservative approach to gender also
reflects a Salafi bent. Many Muslim progressives define themselves in opposition
to both Wahhabism and Salafism.
Finally, one other element that sets almost all progressive Muslims apart
from mainstream American Muslim organizations has been their profound
skepticism toward nationalism in its many forms. As such, they reject the cooptation
of this global movement by those who seek to commodify it into an
‘‘American Islam’’ for worldwide export. The progressives’ critique of neocolonialism
also represents an e√ort to avoid their co-optation by the U.S.
administration, which has used the language of reforming Islam to justify its
invasion of Iraq. (‘‘We need an Islamic reformation,’’ opined Paul Wolfowitz,
‘‘and I think there is real hope for one.’’)∞≠
For many progressives, this sort of
appropriation of the rhetoric of Islamic reform (to say nothing of the pronoun
‘‘we’’) is deeply problematic. Is a reformation of Islam in U.S. interests? What
if such a reformation called into question many U.S. policies as well as the
wealth and privilege currently enjoyed by so many Americans?
Although progressive Islam is a global movement, one must acknowledge
that the North American context has provided fertile ground for its blossoming.
Conversations about progressive Islam begin by refusing to admit
the absolute distinction between the religious and political domains, and
many of the issues that Muslim progressives debate intensely—human rights,
46 o m i d s a f i
state attempts to legislate sexuality and the body, distribution of wealth and
resources, democracy—have explicit political ramifications. Many participants
in this young movement have found a more hospitable environment in the
North America than in Muslim-majority areas. Indeed, a few contributors to a
pioneering collection called Progressive Muslims (2003), which I edited, have
faced harassment and persecution, even bombings, in countries ranging from
Malaysia to South Africa. Even the contested world of post-9/11 America and
the Patriot Act o√ers great possibilities for conducting public conversations
about matters of religion and politics. In preparing Progressive Muslims, participants
exchanged some six hundred e-mails and spent countless hours on the
phone. It would be hard to imagine those critical conversations taking place
freely and openly in many Muslim countries.
One also has to acknowledge the significance of North American educational
establishments. Every contributor to that particular conversation has
some connection to the North American academy. All have received training in
western universities, are currently employed by them, or have published with
western presses. Again, one cannot underestimate the importance of financial
and institutional support for providing a space in which these conversations
can flourish.
The crisis of contemporary Islam is inseparable from the struggle over
defining Islam and questions of religious authority. This struggle, of course,
has antecedents in other religious and civic traditions in America. At one level,
it evokes the ‘‘culture wars’’ model introduced by James Davison Hunter, who
talked about the tensions between ‘‘orthodox’’ and ‘‘progressive’’ elements in
American religions.∞∞
The question of authority in Islam is today and has
always been contested. Islam has no formal church structure, so religious
authority is fluid. However, the lack of a formal structure of authority does not
mean that no religious authority exists. Competing groups claim authority for
themselves by appealing to religious language and symbols. Our concern
here, particularly for the case of American Islam, is examining the basis on
which religious authority is claimed and exercised.
Throughout Islamic history, various communities have claimed religious
authority. Foremost among them have been the religious scholars (¿ulama)
and the mystics (Sufis) of Islam. Both groups have representatives in America.
Mystics historically have claimed considerable religious authority in Muslim
societies.∞≤
Many North American Muslims, steeped in a modernist, rationalist,
and anti-mystical Salafi understanding that in many ways does not reflect
the wide historical spectrum of Islamic thought, do not adequately appreciate
Progressive Islam in America 47
this point. North America has no shortage of Sufi leaders, of course, and
many turuq (Sufi lineages) such as the Mevlevis, Sufi Order International,
Ni¿matullahi, Naqshbandi, Rifa¿i-Ma¿rufi, and others have a prominent presence
in the wider Muslim and American society here. However, Sufism is a
contested category, and many in the Muslim community whose views have
been shaped by a Salafi understanding of Islam view Sufis with skepticism.∞≥
Furthermore, mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations assiduously avoid even
mentioning Sufism. Wahhabi-influenced publishing houses based in America
have deleted references to mystical understandings of Islam from translations
of the Quran (such as the classic work of Abdullah Yusuf Ali). What remains is
a situation in which those who are inclined to Sufism turn to their Sufi
teachers, while the majority of North American Muslims look elsewhere for
leadership.
The majority of the North American Muslim community has turned not to
Sufis but to scholars: the ¿ulama. To understand the ¿ulama, one has to consider
both the form of religious knowledge one claims and from whence that
religious knowledge is obtained. By and large, no credible institutions of
higher Islamic education exist in America.∞∂
There are, of course, secular
American universities in which many have obtained expertise in various aspects
of Islamic thought, history, and practice. Yet given the secular nature of
these institutions, it is unusual for the wider American Muslim community to
receive graduates as members of the traditional ¿ulama class (unless these
scholars have received parallel training in Muslim madrassas). The American
Muslim community may rely on these individuals to act as spokespersons
(particularly with the media and to represent Islam at interfaith gatherings),
yet many community members view these scholars with skepticism.
The vision of Islam espoused by many North American academics is a
more liberal, inclusive, humanistic, and even secular∞∑
interpretation of Islam,
and it is highly skeptical of Islamist political discourse. This skepticism reveals
much about the presuppositions of many American Muslims regarding
the ‘‘purity’’ of Islamic knowledge and its potential ‘‘contamination’’ by western
training. But such a compartmentalized view of knowledge contradicts
both medieval philosophical notions and contemporary rigorous interpretations
of Islam. A ninth-century philosopher, al-Kindi, stated, ‘‘We should not
be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it
comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign
peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than
truth itself; it never cheapens or abases him who reaches for it, but ennobles
48 o m i d s a f i
and honors him.’’∞∏
This epistemological pluralism is also echoed in the
works of contemporary Muslim philosophers such as well-known Iranian
thinker Abd al-Karim Soroush, who states,
I believe that truths everywhere are compatible; no truth clashes with any
other truth. They are all but the inhabitants of the same mansions and stars
of the same constellation. One truth in one corner of the world has to be
harmonious and compatible with all truths elsewhere, or else it is not a
truth. . . . This truthfulness of the world is a blessing indeed, because it
instigates constant search and engenders a healthy pluralism. . . . Thus, in
my search for the truth, I became oblivious to whether an idea originated in
the East, or West, or whether it had ancient or modern origins.∞π
One of the particular contributions of progressive Muslims in the North
American context has been to point out the need among Muslims for greater
epistemological pluralism—an openness to pursuing wisdom, truth, and
beauty in a wide range of religious, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific
discourses as well as to pursuing a fuller spectrum of Islamic sources including
but not limited to ‘‘Quran and sunna’’ (the mantra of Salafi Islam).
Yet another source of authority in North American Islam is the imam
(prayer leader), often imported from one of the various Muslim countries. All
too often, the origin of the imported imam reflects the ethnicity of the community
(or at least those with positions of power in it). South Asian Muslims
look first to Pakistani imams, Iranians to Iranian Shiite imams, Arab Muslims
to Egyptian and Saudi imams, and so forth. A host of problems arise with this
approach. First, one has to deal honestly and openly with the fact that traditional
madrassa institutions in the Islamic world no longer o√er the highest
level of critical thought. Whereas these institutions once attracted the community’s
brightest minds, today they are often a refuge for those who have
been unable to achieve admission to more lucrative medicine, engineering,
and computer science programs. This is not meant as an indictment of all
those who enroll in madrassas, of course, and western media have made far
too much recently about madrassas as havens for terrorism. Furthermore, the
U.S. has many compassionate and pluralistic imams who for decades have led
wonderful interfaith discussions. Still, many graduates of these traditional
educational systems are entirely unprepared to deal with American pluralism
or to undertake serious interfaith conversations with Jews, Christians, Hindus,
and Buddhists. Discussions that pass for ‘‘comparative religion’’ in many
Progressive Islam in America 49
parts of the Muslim world are in reality no more than superficial polemics
against other traditions.
That leaves American Muslims, particularly those inclined to progressive
Islam, in a bind regarding religious authority. The solution for many Muslims
has been a more democratic or even Protestant approach whereby any person
who undertakes a serious study of Islam has the authority to interpret the
tradition. This approach appeals to many American Muslims. It has given
many contemporary Muslims in America—scholars such as Amina Wadud∞∫
and Ebrahim Moosa and writers such as Michael Wolfe,∞Ω
Asma Gull Hasan,≤≠
and Hamza Yusuf≤∞
—a voice in rethinking Islam today.
Other, more controversial thinkers have drawn on postcolonialism and
postmodernism to resist and indeed undermine appeals to ‘‘orthodoxy’’ and
‘‘tradition.’’ In the postcolonial model, which Edward Said has described as
placing oneself among the impure, mixed, and heterodox,≤≤
one begins by
pulling the rug out from under the custodians of orthodoxy. If one does not
identify as ‘‘orthodox,’’ then it is di≈cult for orthodoxy’s guardians to accuse
you of heterodoxy. Yet one has to wonder how many ordinary believers will be
attracted to such intellectual mischievousness.
None of these approaches lacks problems, of course, and American Muslims
need to work out these di≈culties. For example, every community needs
some structure and some system of authority (even if that authority is di√used
among community members). This tendency toward the di√usion of authority
in North American Islam was nicely summarized by Hamza Yusuf, who
noted that nowadays, ‘‘every Tom, Dick, and Abdullah gives fatwas.’’≤≥
This
decentralization of authority was particularly problematic after 9/11, when
American Muslims had to come to terms with the atrocious actions of alQaeda
terrorists.
It is not an exaggeration to state that 9/11 represents one of the greatest
challenges to the status of Muslims in America since the transatlantic slave
trade. The instructions to the nineteen terrorists were steeped in the Quran,
including what Quranic verses and prayers should be recited at each step of
the process.≤∂
It is easy to make too much of this fact, given that some of the
hijackers, including Muhammad Atta, were not particularly observant, as evidenced
by their frequenting of bars. Nonetheless, it is clear that, at a minimum,
9/11’s masterminds attempted to legitimize their terror by appealing to
Islamic symbols and language. Faced with this uncomfortable fact, American
Muslims have responded in three ways.
50 o m i d s a f i
According to the first perspective, the atrocities of 9/11 were not committed
by Muslims. They were part of an elaborate plot by the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency or Israel’s Mossad to discredit and defame Muslims and pave
the way for a brutal attack on Muslim lands.≤∑
This position of denial was
quite popular early on in the Muslim world and spread rapidly throughout the
American Muslim community, particularly via the Internet. It represents a
goodwilled if naive assumption that no Muslim could be involved in such a
hideous act. Yet sticking one’s head in the sand will not do here. Muslims
committed these actions, and these actions were justified based on a reading
(however selective and perverse) of Islam. Sadly, this approach also illustrates
how conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism continue to fuel Muslim paranoia.
When the evidence proved that the actions of 9/11 were indeed committed
by Muslims, the next approach was to ‘‘save Islam’’ by declaring al-Qaeda
beyond the pale.≤∏
In the face of post-9/11 attacks on Muslims, Arabs, south
Asians, and others (even non-Muslims such as Sikhs), this was a reasonable
defensive posture. What is ironic here is that supporters of this approach implicitly
excommunicated members of their own Muslim community: ‘‘These
people are not us!’’ This process of declaring another an infidel is becoming
increasingly popular across the Muslim world and is typically thought to
fester among fundamentalists. But many self-identifying liberal Muslims in
the United States, some of whom have themselves been charged with infidelity
(kufr), are now using the same weapon against the al-Qaeda terrorists.
The third option is likely the most di≈cult for American Muslims, yet in
the end it may prove to be the most intellectually and spiritually fruitful:
acknowledging that there is a spectrum of interpretations of Islam, including
some that attempt to justify violence via Islamic symbols. This situation is not
unique to Islam, of course. Both the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the
Ku Klux Klan justified themselves on Christian grounds. All the major religious
traditions are malleable enough to allow interpreters to justify both
violence and nonviolence. It is not my intention to assert that the kkk and
King possess equally valid interpretations of Christianity. Most observers
would agree that the kkk’s hatred and racism go against the teachings of
Christ, yet one has to recognize that Klan leaders routinely justify their doctrines
by quoting from the Bible. The case of al-Qaeda is no di√erent.
Many scholars of Islam have pointed out that the modus operandi of the
al-Qaeda terrorists violated basic foundational principles of sharia (Islamic
law).≤π
Under sharia, certain guidelines must be followed in undertaking a
war. Civilians cannot be targeted. Women, children, the elderly, and those
Progressive Islam in America 51
‘‘who would not fight’’ cannot be targeted. A well-known hadith of the
Prophet Muhammad recalls him expressing sadness and grief after finding a
woman slain in war. ‘‘She was not one who would have fought,’’ he observed,
intimating that she should not have been killed.≤∫
The victims of 9/11 were
civilians, including many women. Even if one grants al-Qaeda’s claim to be at
war with America, such actions violate basic principles of Islamic law.
After acknowledging that the tactics and aims of al-Qaeda violate Islamic
principles, one is still faced with the responsibility of contesting the group’s
discourse and o√ering viable alternatives. In this approach, one is not simply
attributing the events to Mossad or the Central Intelligence Agency, nor is one
excommunicating the perpetrators. The only viable progressive response to
the tragedy of 9/11 begins when we human beings who are Muslim assume
responsibility for the actions of the terrorists. We must acknowledge that they
have vented their anger and resentment at a civilian target and that they have
sought to justify their actions through Islamic rhetoric. One must then contest
that rhetoric by showing how inconsistent it is with Islamic thought
and practice.
But rather than remaining at the level of theoretical disputations, progressive
Muslims are committed to altering communities and existing social realities.
Here there are a number of possibilities. To begin, one can target the
Wahhabi ideology of xenophobia and exclusivism responsible for cultivating
al-Qaeda’s vision.≤Ω
One can then o√er an alternate vision that is simultaneously
rooted in the foundational sources of Islam and engaged with the
ongoing intellectual, aesthetic, political, and social developments of humanity.
Then, one can realize that although one may not be able to bring peace and
pluralism to the hearts of the Jerry Falwells and Osama Bin Ladens of the
world,≥≠
one can provide alternatives for those who gravitate toward either
fundamentalism. Both in the Muslim world and in this country, one can work
to provide a higher path for young people’s energies, one that brings together
rather than divides people. Many observers have noted that poverty and a lack
of economic opportunity contribute to the appeal of fundamentalism.≥∞
The
unemployment rate among Palestinians is as high as 48 percent (in Gaza).
Many Muslims thus have di≈culty finding a sense of purpose for their lives,
finding a way to bring honor to their families. It is in this context that some
resort to martyrdom through self-sacrifice (suicide bombing), a practice of
dubious Islamic merit that nonetheless brings a certain distinction to the
families involved. Whereas those of us from the outside see only ‘‘terrorists,’’
the families see champions of resistance who bring honor to those around
52 o m i d s a f i
them. The task of progressive Muslims is not merely to engage in disputations
about the merits—or lack thereof—of suicide bombing but also to make sure
that all parties involved in that terrible struggle—both Palestinians and Israelis
—can find some dignity. At least part of that can and must be accomplished
through economic development and political change.
But progressive Muslims in this country also have another responsibility.
Farid Esack, one of the world’s leading voices of progressive Islam, has rightly
pointed out that unlike liberal Muslims, progressive Muslims concern themselves
with the ‘‘non-subjects’’ of history—those who are marginalized, disempowered,
and oppressed. Progressive Muslims in the United States have a
responsibility to serve as social critics of American institutions of power, to
remain engaged with domestic and social issues, and to push for peace and
justice. We are, after all, called to be ‘‘witnesses for God in justice.’’≥≤
Part of
the calling of American Muslims, therefore, is to hold the U.S. government
responsible for policies that put strategic interests before human dignity.
American progressive Muslims also seek to challenge policies that value the
well-being of Americans over that of other human beings.≥≥
Many in the Muslim world gravitate toward anti-Americanism for reasons
that are well known: the U.S. military presence in more than one hundred
countries, American support of undemocratic and antidemocratic regimes,
and the unilateral support of Israel in a conflict where Israel already possesses
hegemonic power over Palestinians. American progressive Muslims have a
moral responsibility to urge other Muslims to realize that even where their
cause is just, their tactics and strategies must also be just. King was right: ‘‘In
the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful
deeds.’’≥∂
At the same time, we have a calling to change American policies
domestically and internationally in accordance with the highest standards of
peace and justice. This double engagement with both Muslims and Americans
is likely to bring discomfort to American Muslims whose survival strategy
post-9/11 has been to wrap themselves in the American flag and the rhetoric of
patriotism and nationalism. Yet as progressives, we place ourselves with those
who follow in King’s footsteps, recognizing America as the ‘‘dream, a dream
as yet unfulfilled,’’≥∑
and working to fulfill it.
Progressive Muslims see themselves as advocates of human beings all over
the world who through no fault of their own live in situations of perpetual poverty,
pollution, oppression, and marginalization. The plight of these people—
mustad¿afun, in the Quranic context—is a key concern of progressive Muslims,
who take it as their charge to give voice to the voiceless and power to the
Progressive Islam in America 53
powerless, to confront powers that disregard the God-given human dignity of
the world’s mustad¿afun. Progressive Muslims draw on the strong tradition of
social justice in Islam—from sources as diverse as the Quran and hadith
(statements of the Prophet Muhammad) to more recent spokespersons such
as Shariati. Quranic verses specifically link fighting in the cause of God (sabil
Allah) with the cause of mustad¿afun. These same verses explicitly identify the
oppressed as a broad group of men, women, and children.≥∏
The methodological fluidity of progressive Muslims is apparent in their
pluralistic epistemology, which freely and openly draws from sources outside
of Islam whenever they might serve as useful tools in the global pursuit of
justice. These external sources include the liberation theology of Leonardo
Bo√, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Rebecca S. Chopp as well as the secular humanism
of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Progressive Muslims are likely to
combine a Quranic call for serving as ‘‘witnesses for God in justice’’ (42:15)
with Said’s call to speak truth to power.≥π
The question of whether progressive Muslims reflect or initiate larger social
processes of transformation is a nonstarter because it is premised on a
dichotomy between intellectual pursuit and activism that progressives do not
accept. Whereas many (though not all) of the previous generations of liberal
Muslims pursued a purely academic approach, progressive Muslims fully realize
that the social injustices around them are reflected in, connected to, and
justified in terms of intellectual discourse. They are, in this respect, fully
indebted to Said. Progressive Muslims are concerned not simply with laying
out a fantastic, beatific vision of social justice and peace but also with transforming
hearts and societies. A progressive commitment implies a willingness
to engage issues of social justice as they unfold on the ground.
Progressive Muslims follow in Bo√ ’s footsteps, deeming theology devoid
of real commitment to the oppressed ‘‘radically irrelevant.’’≥∫
Bo√ recognized
that liberação (liberation) links together the concepts of liber (free) and ação
(action):≥Ω
There is no liberation without action. Therefore, ‘‘vision and activism
are both necessary. Activism without vision is doomed from the start.
Vision without activism quickly becomes irrelevant.’’∂≠
This informed social activism is visible in many progressive Muslim organizations
and projects, ranging from the work of Chandra Muza√ar with the
International Movement for a Just World in Malaysia∂∞
and the e√orts of Farid
Esack to help HIV-positive Muslims in South Africa∂≤
to the work of recent
Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi∂≥
with groups such as the Iranian
Children’s Rights Society.∂∂
54 o m i d s a f i
At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation is a simple yet radical
idea: every human life, female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor,
‘‘northern’’ or ‘‘southern,’’ has exactly the same intrinsic worth. The essential
value of human life is God-given and is in no way connected to culture,
geography, or privilege. This value derives from the fact that each of us has the
breath of God coursing through our being: ‘‘wa nafakhtu fihi min ruhi’’ (Quran
15:29 and 38:72). This identification of all human beings with the full human
being amounts to nothing short of an Islamic humanism.
An increasing number of those who advocate such a humanistic framework
within the Islamic context have self-identified as progressive Muslims.
‘‘Progressive’’ refers here to a relentless striving toward a universal notion of
justice in which no single community’s prosperity, righteousness, or dignity
come at the expense of another’s. Progressive Muslims, therefore, conceive of
a way of being Muslim that engages and a≈rms the humanity of all human
beings, that actively holds all of us responsible for a fair and just distribution
of God-given natural resources, and that seeks to live in harmony with the
natural world.
Progressive Muslims insist on a serious engagement with the full spectrum
of Islamic thought and practices. There can be no progressive Muslim movement
that does not engage the textual and material sources of the Islamic
tradition, even if some participants debate which sources matter most and
how they ought to be interpreted. Progressives generally hold that it is imperative
to work through inherited traditions of thought and practice; Sunni,
Shiite, Sufi, juridical, philosophical, theological, mystical, poetical, folk Islam,
and oral traditions all must be engaged. Progressives might conclude
that certain interpretations now fail to o√er su≈cient guidance. However,
they cannot faithfully claim that position before a serious engagement with
the tradition. The way beyond problematic past interpretations of Islam is
through them.
Justice lies at the heart of Islamic social ethics. Time and again the Quran
talks about providing for the poor, the orphaned, the downtrodden, the wayfarers,
the hungry. Progressive Muslims believe that it is time to translate the
social ideals in the Quran and Islamic teachings into contemporary terms.
Muslims retain a vibrant memory of the Prophet repeatedly talking about a
real believer as one whose neighbor does not go to bed hungry. Progressives
hold that in today’s global village, it is time to think of all of humanity as
our neighbor.
Progressive Muslims also believe that the Muslim community as a whole
Progressive Islam in America 55
cannot achieve justice unless justice is guaranteed for Muslim women. In
short, there can be no progressive interpretation of Islam without gender justice.
Gender justice is crucial, indispensable, and essential. As Ebadi has repeatedly
stated, it is imperative to conceive of women’s rights as human rights.
Progressive Muslims strive for pluralism both inside and outside of the
umma. They seek to open up a wider spectrum of legitimately Muslim interpretations
and practices and follow many paths in pursuing knowledge
and truth. In their interactions with other religious and ethnic communities,
they seek to transcend arcane notions of ‘‘tolerance,’’ striving instead to engage
both the commonalities and the di√erences that they have with those
communities.
The term ‘‘jihad’’ has become so misused and misunderstood that one may
legitimately ask whether it is redeemable. Part of the problem is that the term
is used by both Muslim extremists and western Islamophobes to mean a literal
holy war. On the Muslim side, one can point to this public statement (fatwa)
signed by Bin Laden: ‘‘In compliance with God’s order, we issue the following
fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—
civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in
any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa
Mosque and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip.’’∂∑
Scholars of Islamic law have been quick to point out that this alleged fatwa,
especially the call to kill civilians everywhere, violates both the letter and the
spirit of Islamic law. This violation must be stressed.∂∏
At the same time, one
must acknowledge that Bin Laden clearly legitimizes his own recourse to
violence through the discourse of jihad.
This same sentiment is reflected in western Islamophobia. Many recent
books on Islam approach their subject via jihad. Michael Sells, a leading
scholar of Islam, has noted that the Islam section of many bookstores should
really be renamed the ‘‘jihad and terrorism’’ section, since that subject predominates
there. One might add the writings of Christian evangelicals and
fundamentalists who are resurrecting centuries-old polemics against Islam in
a new guise. These come from prominent preachers, including Jerry Falwell,
Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham,∂π
and Jerry Vines∂∫
and even from former
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.∂Ω
In this cauldron of recriminations, is there any possibility of recovering the
term ‘‘jihad’’? Is jihad bound to be a call for blood, for an eternal struggle
between Islam and the rest of the world, as Princeton Islamicist Bernard Lewis
would have us believe? Progressive Muslims say no, insisting that the root
56 o m i d s a f i
meaning of jihad is not holy war or violence but rather resistance and struggle.
From this perspective, jihad reminds us nonviolently to confront injustice
and inequality. Here, progressive Muslims are the heirs of both Muslim visionaries
such as the great mystic Rumi, who stated, ‘‘Washing away blood
with blood is impossible, even absurd!,’’∑≠
and recent exemplars of nonviolence
such as Gandhi, King, and the Dalai Lama. Their notion of jihad moves
them to resist entrenched systems of inequality and injustice through nonviolent
conflict. The goal is peace rooted in justice. Or, as the Dalai Lama put it
in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, ‘‘Peace, in the sense of the absence
of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold.
Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are
fed, and where individuals and nations are free.’’∑∞
Many progressive Muslims are also inspired by King’s e√orts to speak for
universal justice from inside a faith community. His words about peace provide
the clearest example of the progressive Muslim path:
The leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we
drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently
about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant
goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not
merely the distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at
that goal.
Now let me say that the next thing we must be concerned about if we are
to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent a≈rmation
of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he
is a child of God.∑≤
Progressive Muslims are often asked whether their project constitutes an
‘‘Islamic reformation.’’ The answer is both yes and no. It is true that the
Muslim world has serious economic, social, and political problems that need
urgent remedying. Much of the Muslim world is bound to an economic structure
in which it provides oil and other natural resources to the global market
while remaining dependent on western labor, technological know-how, and
staple goods. This economic situation is exacerbated in many parts of the
modern Muslim world by human rights violations, crumbling educational
systems, and stagnant economies. Most progressive Muslims support the
reform of all these institutions.
However, the term ‘‘reformation’’ carries considerably more baggage than
Progressive Islam in America 57
that. In speaking of an ‘‘Islamic reformation,’’ many people have in mind the
Protestant Reformation. This analogy makes many progressive Muslims uneasy.
They do not seek a ‘‘Protestant’’ Islam distinct from a ‘‘Catholic’’ Islam.
In fact, most insist that they are not looking to split the Muslim community as
much as to transform it.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the emerging global Muslim progressivism
is that progressives everywhere are seeking one another out, reading each
other’s work, collaborating with one another’s organizations. Much of this
cross-pollination is taking place via e-mail and Internet messaging. We are
clearly in the initial stages of a movement that has the promise to usher in a
paradigm shift in the relationship of Muslims to both Islam and modernity. To
the extent that an important part of this unfolding is taking place in the
United States, Americans are sure to change and challenge both the future
practice of Islam and the ‘‘dream as yet unfulfilled’’ that is America.
notes
1. ‘‘Bush: U.S. Muslims Should Feel Safe,’’ September 17, 2001, [http://www.cnn.
com/2001/US/09/17/gen.bush.muslim.trans/].
2. I will explain in the discussion of pluralism why the term ‘‘tolerance’’ is inherently
problematic. The term ‘‘moderate’’ prompts the question of moderate with respect
to what extremes. If on one side moderate is defined against the Islamic terrorism
of 9/11, what is on the other side? Total secularism? Alas, moderate Islam seems to
be an ill-defined term—a shorthand for Muslims who oppose 9/11 but never oppose
the actions of the U.S. government.
3. ‘‘Wolfowitz Appeals to Muslim Moderates to Oppose Terrorism,’’ U.S. Department
of State, May 3, 2002, [http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/ar/mexico/02050308.
htm].
4. See Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998).
5. For an anthology of progressive Islam, see Omid Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims: On
Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford, Eng.: Oneworld, 2003).
6. [http://www.icna.com].
7. [http://www.isna.net/].
8. [http://www.cair-net.org/].
9. See Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications
International, 2002).
10. David Ignatius, ‘‘The Read on Wolfowitz,’’ Washington Post, January 16, 2003,
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/a4023-2003Jan16.html].
11. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic
Books, 1991).
58 o m i d s a f i
12. Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Jo-Ann Gross, ‘‘Authority and Miraculous
Behavior,’’ in The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn (London:
knp, 1992), 159–71; Richard Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978).
13. Carl W. Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 199–228.
14. There are educational organizations such as the International Institute of Islamic
Thought and the Zaytuna Institute, and e√orts have been made to establish a
Crescent University outside New York City, but none of these has yet succeeded in
answering the call for Islamic higher education.
15. ‘‘Secular’’ is of course a contested term. When I use the word, I am talking about
a model of social relations in which the boundaries between religious discourse and
political legitimacy are not to be collapsed (as opposed to a model in which the
religious is exiled entirely from the public domain).
16. See R. Walzer, ‘‘Islamic Philosophy,’’ cited in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim
Sages (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan, 1964), 11.
17. See Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, translated and
edited by Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 21.
18. Amina Wadud, Qur¡an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
19. See Michael Wolfe, The Hadj: An American’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (New York: Grove,
1993). Wolfe also produced the pbs program on the Prophet Muhammad. See [http://
www.pbs.org/muhammad/].
20. Asma Gull Hasan, American Muslims: The New Generation (New York: Continuum,
2000).
21. For information on Hamza Yusuf ’s Zaytuna Institute, see [http://www.zaytuna.
org/].
22. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xxv.
23. Cited in Laurie Goodstein, ‘‘A Nation Challenged: The Role of Religion; Scholars
Call Attacks a Distortion of Islam,’’ New York Times, September 30, 2001, 1b6.
24. ‘‘Translation of Letter Left by Hijackers,’’ [http://ict.org.il/documents/docu
mentdet.cfm?docid=57].
25. For an insightful bbc commentary on the appeal of conspiracy theories, see
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1561199.stm].
26. For such reactions by Muslim scholars worldwide, see [http://www.unc.edu/
&kurzman/terror.htm]. For the responses of the American Muslim community, see
[http://groups.colgate.edu/aarislam/response.htm].
27. See Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘‘Terrorism Is at Odds with Islamic Tradition,’’
[http://www.muslim-lawyers.net/news/index.php3?aktion=show&number=78].
28. Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Wiener,
1996), 33.
29. For a devastating critique, see Algar, Wahhabism.
Progressive Islam in America 59
30. I draw this analogy only at the level of Falwell’s and Bin Laden’s dichotomous
worldviews, not in terms of their usage (or nonusage) of violence.
31. Although most al-Qaeda leaders and the 9/11 terrorists came from middle-class
backgrounds, Bin Laden is notoriously wealthy.
32. Quran 42:15: ‘‘I believe in the scripture which God has sent down, and I am
commanded to establish justice among you.’’
33. This ‘‘Americanism’’ is so deeply embedded in the nation that it is impossible to
localize. It characterizes many mainstream news presentations, most notably that of
Fox News. In ‘‘Skip the Liberal Spin, Report the News Fairly,’’ New York Daily News,
June 9, 2003 ([http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas—opinions/story/90651p-
82430c.html]), conservative demagogue Bill O’Reilly criticizes Walter Cronkite’s perspective
on the Iraq war since ‘‘the former cbs News anchorman was coming at it
from an internationalist point of view, putting the objective and policies of foreign
countries on the same level as those of the U.S.A. In this age of terror, when we are
under attack, that attitude just doesn’t cut it.’’
34. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘‘I Have a Dream,’’ in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 218.
35. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘‘The American Dream,’’ in ibid., 208.
36. Quran 4:75. This aya provides another a≈rmation that the struggles for gender
justice and children’s rights are part and parcel of the quest for global justice. Justice
remains indivisible.
37. Edward Said died on September 25, 2003. For an archive of tributes by the many
progressive Muslims who were influenced by Said, see [http://www.edwardsaid.org].
38. Leonardo Bo√ and Clodovis Bo√, Introducing Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis, 2001), 9.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Omid Safi, ‘‘The Times They Are a-Changin’: A Muslim Quest for Justice, Gender,
Equality, and Pluralism,’’ in Progressive Muslims, edited by Safi, 6–7.
41. [http://www.just-international.org/].
42. [http://www.positivemuslims.org.za/].
43. [http://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000242.php].
44. [http://www.iranianchildren.org/index.html].
45. [http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm]. The Arabic
original of the fatwa, published in al-Quds al-¿Arabi, can be found at [http://www.
library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/fatw2.htm].
46. For two exhaustive lists of Muslim scholars condemning Bin Laden, see [http://
www.unc.edu/&kurzman/terror.htm] and [http://groups.colgate. edu/aarislam/re
sponse.htm].
47. Franklin Graham, contesting President Bush’s characterization of Islam as a religion
of peace, stated that Islam is an ‘‘evil and wicked religion’’ ([http://www.cnn.
com/2003/allpolitics/04/18/graham.pentagon/]). After making these remarks,
Graham was invited to Good Friday services at the Pentagon on April 18, 2003. Such
60 o m i d s a f i
juxtapositions of evangelical arrogance with military might rightly arouse Muslims’
suspicions of a new crusade.
48. Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a board
member of Falwell’s Liberty University, stated that the Prophet Muhammad was
a ‘‘demon-possessed pedophile’’ ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/
A14499-2002Jun19?language=printer]).
49. John Ashcroft stated in an interview with Carl Thomas, ‘‘Islam is a religion in
which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which
God sends his son to die for you’’ ([http://www. beliefnet.com/story/101/story—
10140—1.html).
50. Mawlana Jalal al-Din Balkhi Rumi, Masnavi-yi Ma¿navi, edited by R. A. Nicholson
(Tehran: Intisharat-i Nigah, 1371/1992), 532. This passage is found in the third
book of the Masnavi, line 4726 of the Nicholson Persian edition.
51. Sidney Piburn, comp. and ed., The Dalai Lama, A Policy of Kindness: An Anthology of
Writings by and about the Dalai Lama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion, 1990), 17.
52. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘‘A Christmas Sermon on Peace,’’ in Testament of Hope,
edited by Washington, 255.
PART II
Buddhists
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D U N C A N R Y U K E N W I L L I A M S
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11
Lessons from the Internment of Japanese American Buddhists
Buddhist priests, classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) as potentially the most dangerous Japanese aliens,were among the first
groups arrested bygovernment officials following the bombing of Pearl Harbor
on December 7, 1941.1 Shmobu Matsuura's husband, the Reverend Issei
Matsuura, was one such Buddhist priest. He was taken by the FBI in the early
hours of the morning and did not know if or when he would see his family
again. As she recalled, "February 18, 1942, early morning,still in our nightclothes
and huddled by the heater, we listened grimly to the news over the
radio. There was a loud rapping on the back door. Three men stood there.
They were the FBI. 'We came to arrest &ev.Matsuura,' said one, as they came
through the door. ... I was instructed to pack a change of clothing for my
husband. Hurriedly, I put his underwear and toiletries in a bag. Separately, I
wrapped his koromo and kesa, sdten and Kanmiiryojukyo sutra."J
Japanese American Buddhist priests of all denominations, along with
Shinto priests, were sent to "alien enemy" camps established by the U.S.
Department of Justice in Santa Fe, New Mexico;and Crystal City, Texas. Unlike
Japanese American Christian priests and ministers. Buddhist priests were
closely associated with Japan and thus with potentiallysubversiveactivity. As
Bob Kumamotohas noted, "The 'peculiarity'of Eastern languages,religions,
customs, and physicalappearance had always separated the Japanese from the
mainstream of American society. Once considered inferior and insignificant,
these ethnic distinctions were now considered by the government as antiAmerican,
potentially subversiveand somehow threatening to American se-
curity."J
This perception that Buddhists (in contrast to Christians)were more
Japanese than American was held not only by the FBI and the WartimeRelocation
Authority(WRA) but also by the public at large, including some members
of the Japanese American community. The history of Japanese American
3
63
64 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
Buddhism during World War II, in fact, centers on this question of identity,
both ethnic and religious.
This chapter explores the modes of accommodation and resistance that
first-generation Japanese Americans (issei) and their children (nisei and kibei)
expressed through their Buddhist identity in the days following Pearl Harbor
and in the years of their incarceration in detention camps. The chapter also
includes preliminary observations about these processes of religious identity
among members of minority religions in America, especially during wartime,
by comparing Japanese American Buddhist experiences with the changing
landscape for Muslims, Sikhs, and people with ethnic heritages from south
Asia and the Middle East after the terrorist incidents of 9/11.
The first Japanese Buddhist priests arrived in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland
in the 1890s to minister to the first-generation issei. Most issei were Buddhists
who had initially immigrated to Hawaii to work on plantations and to the
mainland as contract laborers for railroad, lumber, mining, and cannery companies
as well as on farms. In 1900, the Japanese immigrant population had
risen to 24,326, most of them transient men. In 1930, however, the Japanese
American population had grown to 138,834 and increasingly was composed
of families with stable jobs and even small businesses.∂
By the eve of the war,
Buddhist temples functioned as both religious and community centers in all
areas where Japanese Americans were concentrated, especially in California.
Buddhist priests of the Jôdo, Jôdo Shin, Nichiren, Shingon, and Sôtô Zen
sects were sent by their respective headquarter temples in Japan to serve as
‘‘missionaries’’ in the United States.
The fbi’s targeting of Buddhist priests as potential subversives had little
to do with the fact that Buddhist temples, especially those of the Jôdo Shin
tradition, had participated in fund-raising campaigns for the Imperial Japanese
Army in Manchuria.∑
Japanese American Buddhist ties to Japanese military
or intelligence agencies, according to fbi surveillance records, were
fairly tenuous. Alan Hynd’s ‘‘exposé’’ of the Japanese-German spy network in
the years immediately preceding the war, Betrayal from the East: The Inside Story of
Japanese Spies in America, could cite only one incident. The fbi apparently
suspected the Los Angeles Kôyasan Buddhist Temple of holding spy meetings
with members of the Japanese consulate, with Sachiko Furusawa (an adviser
to the Temple’s Women’s Society and wife of a doctor who apparently had ties
to German spies), and with other unidentified figures. At one particular meeting,
the fbi suspected that the participants had discussed placing detonation
devices on American naval ships.∏
In reality, however, the fbi had only unsup-
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 65
ported notions that Buddhist priests were more pro-Japan than other members
of the Japanese American community; nevertheless, the fbi regarded the
priests as ‘‘known dangerous Group A suspects,’’ along with employees of the
Japanese consulate, fishermen, and influential businessmen.π
The fbi’s decision
to target Buddhist priests can be traced primarily to the conflation of
Buddhism with state Shinto, which emphasized worship of the emperor as a
deity and loyalty to the Japanese imperial empire. Not until the postwar period
would Americans see Japanese Buddhism as a distinct tradition.
Newspaper editors and members of Congress accused all Japanese, including
Japanese American children, of being loyal to the Japanese government
and called for their removal from the West Coast. After their priests were
taken away to ‘‘enemy alien’’ camps, the remaining members of Buddhist
temples tried their best to continue religious services as well as community
a√airs. For example, the wives of priests and nonordained temple leaders took
on duties that priests previously had performed exclusively.∫
By February 1942, the U.S. government set in motion the large-scale incarceration
of the broader Japanese American community. On February 19, 1942,
President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ultimately led to
the designation of restricted military zones on the West Coast and the subsequent
removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from those areas. In the
ensuing months, the atmosphere in the community was one of anxiety, uncertainty,
and fear. Immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Buddhist
Mission of North America (the predecessor of the Jôdo Shin Buddhist
Churches of America) sent a notice to its members:
Sirs, register for civilian defense—Buddhists! Your loyalty and
devotion to the cause of the United States of America in her war against
aggressor nations of the Axis, must be translated into action. Do your part
unflinchingly in the defense of the stars and stripes. Acquaint yourself
with Air Raid Rules! Mobilize your energies to facilitate America’s
purpose! Pledge your services unreservedly to the o≈cials and authorities
of our country, the united states of america. With the blessings of
Buddha, Rev. K. Kumata (Buddhist Mission of North America).Ω
The major Buddhist organizations tried to provide leadership and convey a
strong sense of loyalty to the United States. They urged Japanese Americans to
cooperate with the authorities when rumors circulated about forcible removal
from the West Coast: ‘‘Buddhists with citizenship in America: Remember the
spirit of loyalty to your country and filial piety which you have learned through
66 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
the teachings of the Buddha. . . . Young Buddhists in Prohibited Areas: Cooperate
with your local J[apanese] A[merican] C[itizens] L[eague] Chapter in all
problems pertaining to the evacuation. With the Blessings of the Buddha, Rev.
Kumata (Buddhist Mission of America).’’∞≠
During this period of war hysteria, some Buddhists converted to Christianity,
while others burned Japanese-language books and other personal Japanese
cultural artifacts in an attempt to destroy, literally and symbolically,
their Japaneseness while simultaneously demonstrating their Americanness.∞∞
Mary Nagatomi, for example, remembers her parents telling her to go to the
wood stove used for the family bath to burn everything in the household with
‘‘Made in Japan’’ on it, including her favorite traditional Japanese doll set. The
one item the family members could not bring themselves to burn was a set of
Buddhist sutras, which the father buried after wrapping the scriptures in
kimono cloth, placing them in a metal rice-cracker box, and using a backhoe
to dig a hole for them on the family farm. These sacred texts remain buried
somewhere in central California, a silent testimony to the enduring Buddhist
identity of one family, testimony that could not be completely obliterated
despite the seeming necessity of doing so.∞≤
The rush to Christian conversion, ironically, could be part of a Japanese
tradition of subsuming religious identity under political or national identity.
But conversions were also born of fear of persecution by neighbors and the
government, and many converts returned to the Buddhist fold during the
camp years.
When stories began to circulate throughout the community that Buddhists
would be treated more harshly than Christians, Buddhist leaders sent out
a letter:
And contrary to all rumors, those in o≈cial positions have assured us that
unreasonable persecution shall never be brought against Buddhism or
Buddhists. It is with great sorrow then that there have been noted several
cases of inferiority complexes, brought about by false tales, wherein Buddhist
religious organizations have been disbanded and Buddhists have destroyed
or hidden family altars while others have withdrawn from church
membership. . . . Buddhists! With true Faith in the Buddha, let us serve our
country, the United States of America, in silence. With the Blessings of the
Buddha, Rev. Kumata (Buddhist Churches of America).∞≥
Buddhists experiencing internal conflict regarding their identity and loyalty
soon had to face the reality that they were going to be uprooted from their
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 67
communities. Japanese Americans in the restricted zones would receive a
number at one of the sixty-four Civil Control stations; they then would have
between seven and ten days to sell or store their property. They could take only
what they could carry by hand to the camps. Without due process of law, more
than 110,000 Japanese Americans ultimately were herded to ‘‘assembly centers’’
before being imprisoned at one of ten so-called permanent relocation
centers:
Arise, Arise, all Buddha’s soldiers true, and take your stand upon the
rock of Truth!
The Holy Law by Lord Buddha taught everyone to endure
And all who journey by its Light shall reach Nirvana’s shore
In love we stand, by Truth set free, Brothers of Him who found true
liberty.∞∂
Japanese American Buddhists faced a crisis of identity and faith as they
endured a harsh journey to the internment camps and the realities of the
desert heat, coupled with the knowledge that they were prisoners in their own
land. Within the camps, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, arose
the question of what it means to be simultaneously American and Buddhist.
What is an American Buddhist?
Buddhist life in the camps revolved around the barrack ‘‘churches,’’ which
held religious services and education classes (in some cases in mess halls
and recreation buildings), especially on Sundays. According to the Reverend
Arthur Takemoto, a young man during the internment period, Buddhist
teachings such as those on su√ering and patience helped alleviate the pain
and confusion that many residents faced: ‘‘Understanding the basic tenets of
Buddhism orients people to understand the reality of life, that things don’t
go the way we want them to go. This becomes dukkha, su√ering and pain.
To be able to accept a situation as it is means we could tolerate it more.’’∞∑
The wra forced various Buddhist sects to cooperate with each other, which
meant that doctrinal di√erences were often ignored in favor of a shared,
transsectarian Buddhism. At times, this process involved finding common
ground in areas such as chanting ‘‘Namu Butsu’’ (Homage to the Buddha)
instead of the various sects’ unique chants: ‘‘Namu Amida Butsu’’ (Jôdo Shin);
‘‘Namu Daishi Henjô Kongô’’ (Shingon); and ‘‘Namu Myôhô Renge Kyô’’
(Nichiren).∞∏
While this phenomenon represented, as Stephen Prothero has
suggested, more of an ‘‘ecumenism of circumstance’’—reflecting the lack of
facilities and government categorization for religious worship rather than
68 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
a conscious choice—this transsectarianism nevertheless reflects an impulse
within Japanese American Buddhism, exemplified by priests such as Yemyô
Imamura, toward a form of American Buddhism that transcends Japanese
sectarian factionalism.
The Buddhist churches in the camps held annual festivals and services for
events such as Obon, Higan, and the Buddha’s birthday as well as funerals,
memorial services, and weddings for Buddhist families. The traditional ritual
life of Japanese Buddhism continued in the camp. Having left behind family
Buddhist altars (butsudan) enshrining their ancestors, Buddhists resorted to
collecting odd pieces of wood in the desert to make altars.∞π
The lack of
o≈ciants to carry out funerary and memorial services forced Buddhist priests,
regardless of sect, to maintain all family necrologies and bestow posthumous
names traditionally given to the dead at funerals, two crucial aspects of funerary
Buddhism focused on the ancestors in traditional Japanese Buddhism. For
example, when a Jôdo Shin priest, Nagatomi Shinjô, conducted the funeral
for the father of the Tayama family, Sôtô Zen Buddhists at the Manzanar
Camp, he entered the deceased’s posthumous name in the family necrology
with this note:
Date: 1942, Dec. 24 (deceased)
Dharma Name: shaku Saishô’in Hôden; Given Name: Tayama Saki
Age at death: 61
Present address: Death Valley cc; Former address: Los Angeles; Place of
death: Manzanar
Japanese Place of Origin: Yamaguchi Pref.
O≈ciant: Nagatomi Shinjô; Head Mourner: Tayama Suguru; Notes:
Zenshû (Sôtôshû) believer.∞∫
The importance of maintaining the Japanese custom of ancestral veneration
was so strong that sectarian concerns for each family, while normally crucial
for the proper performance of the traditional funeral and the selection of the
posthumous name, were set aside in this time of crisis. What mattered was
simply to provide funerary rites. In this way, Buddhism not only provided a
spiritual refuge for internees but also served the social function of maintaining
family and communal cohesion through ancestral and life-cycle rituals
and traditional Japanese festivals and ceremonies.
While Buddhism was, in this sense, a repository of Japanese traditions, it
was also forced to operate in the context of an Americanization program
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 69
promoted by the wra. This program was organized to assimilate the Japanese
and allow them to demonstrate loyalty to the United States.∞Ω
According
to the Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States (1943)
prepared by the Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Special
Committee on Un-American Activities, camp administrators should promote
recreational activities such as baseball and basketball as well as encourage
internees to join groups such as the Boy and Girl Scouts and the ymca/
ywca.≤≠
Being Buddhist obviously was not listed as a method of demonstrating
loyalty, but Buddhist groups made their own attempts at Americanization.
In May 1944, the name of the largest Buddhist organization in the Topaz
Camp was changed from the Buddhist Mission of North America (bmna) to
the Buddhist Churches of America (bca) to give the organization a more
Christian-sounding name. The camp experience, however, only accelerated an
assimilation process that had already begun prior to the war.≤∞
The swastika
symbol, often used on Buddhist temple stationery or on temple equipment
prior to the internment, disappeared and was replaced almost universally by
the dharma wheel. In addition to increased use of English at the barrack
churches, new hymnals (the most widely used of which was A Book of Ceremonies
for Use of Buddhists at Gatherings) were created with the assistance of several
Euro-American supporters outside the camps, including American convert
Julius Goldwater, to lend the bca a more Christian (and thus American) format
for services. By singing gathas as hymns, including Dorothy Hunt’s ‘‘Onward
Buddhist Soldiers’’ (a section of which was quoted earlier), Buddhists
within the camp created a new medium for Americanizing Buddhism. They
did so, however, in a way that honored their Buddhist traditions while simultaneously
demonstrating loyalty to the United States. The young members of the
community, having studied the Buddhist ‘‘Junior Catechism,’’ for example,
used a Christian medium to maintain Buddhist identity. Many of these elements
constitute what might be called the Protestantization of Buddhism,
which Prothero has identified as parallel to the process of Americanization.≤≤
America was also inscribed into the Buddhist iconographical landscape
when members of the Oregon Buddhist Church recarved their temple’s main
altarpiece, Mount Sumeru (the axis mundi of Buddhist cosmology that lies
below a Buddha figure in traditional Jôdo Shin temple altars), to resemble
nearby Mount Hood. Here, Buddhists sacralized the American landscape by
a≈rming their home state’s symbol as their true home as Oregonians. Such
actions function in a way similar to Hindus’ identification of the Mississippi
70 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
River as the Ganges, a method that, as Vasudha Narayanan argues in her
chapter in this volume, makes America ‘‘home’’ both geographically and
religiously.
Most importantly, the Young Buddhist Association (yba) supported the
all-nisei 100th/442nd Combat Regiment, in which second-generation Japanese
Americans fought in Europe to demonstrate their loyalty to America.≤≥
As
David Yoo has suggested, the nisei ‘‘embraced the very markers of racial and
religious di√erence used against them. The faith of their mothers and fathers
enabled the second generation to a≈rm their ancestry and, at the same time,
lay claim to their status as Americans. No single definition emerged, but
religion o√ered Nisei Buddhists (also known as Bussei) valuable space to
become ethnic Americans.’’≤∂
These volunteers were encouraged by many
Buddhist priests and the ybas as well as by army-recognized Buddhist chaplains.
(Buddhist chaplains were not allowed in the field in Europe but were
permitted in the boot camps before the soldiers were deployed.)
Nevertheless, many Japanese American soldiers had a hard time grappling
with the issue of identity, faced as they were with the irony of fighting for a
country in the name of freedom while that same country deprived their parents
and siblings of the same freedom. One such Buddhist soldier wrote to his
parents in broken Japanese the night before leaving boot camp for the European
front:
Dear Mama and Papa. It’s me. Tonight, I’m finally being sent to the
front. Thank you for loving me all these years. Mama, and Papa too, there’s
no need to worry. I’ll be back soon. I’ll rush back to where you are just as
soon as I get back. Both of you stay in good health till then, all right? Since
everything’s set to go, I’ve got nothing else left to say except good-bye.
Take care, Mama and Papa. Good-bye, good-bye. Oh wait, I’d forgotten,
there is something else, Mama. That story, you know, the one you used to
tell me all the time when I was a kid. The story about the Buddha. I
remember that really well, so you can put your mind at ease. The Buddha
will always be with me, even when I’m sent to the front. I’m not sad at all
because the Buddha will protect me. Mama and Papa, don’t worry about
me because I remember that story really well. Well, I’ve got to be o√, so you
two take care of yourselves. Good-bye.≤∑
This letter, given to a Buddhist priest by the parents for safekeeping, reassured
them that their son remembered his Buddhist roots and the power of
the Buddha to protect believers. The power of the Buddha thus extended ever
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 71
eastward, across the Pacific from Japan to America, and then east again,
across the Atlantic, from America to Europe.
When the war ended and the internees began reintegrating into American
society, Buddhist temples such as the Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles
and the San Jose Buddhist Church continued the work of the dharma by
serving as hostels for those who could not immediately find housing and jobs.
The second-generation nisei of the bca also organized a Golden Jubilee
Festival in 1948 to celebrate the fifty years since the founding of the organization.
As Michael Masatsugu has noted, the celebration, which would
gather thousands to formalize the changes that had taken place in the camp,
emphasized the struggle of issei Buddhist pioneers and the sacrifices of the
nisei Buddhist war heroes.≤∏
Inscribing their forefathers into the landscape of
the American West and honoring their brethren who had died in war to prove
American loyalty, the organizers managed not only to solidify a new vision of
what it meant to be an American Buddhist but also to garner mainstream
media attention. Life magazine devoted several pages to the jubilee, with
photos of two Buddhist priests in front of the Buddhist altar at the San
Francisco Buddhist Church, a Bon Odori (a summertime Buddhist dance to
placate and honor the spirits of the ancestors) at San Francisco’s civic center,
and a Caucasian convert cleric, Frank Udale, dressed in his priestly garb.≤π
As Buddhists attempted to find a place in mainstream American society,
the English-speaking nisei also worked to gain a place for American Buddhism
in the public sphere. They organized two closely related campaigns to
remember the lives and sacrifices made by the many nisei servicemen who had
served in the 100th/442nd in Europe or as translators and intelligence gatherers
in the Pacific Theater’s Military Intelligence Service. A war veteran and
devout Buddhist, Tad Hirota, led a B for Buddhism campaign to have the army
o≈cially recognize Buddhists in the armed services by creating a B designation
on dog tags. (During World War II, the military had only three o≈cial
preferences: P for Protestant, C for Catholic, and H for Hebrew.) Coordinated
with endorsements from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
and the Republican delegate from the territory of Hawaii, Joseph R. Farrington,
Hirota contacted the army’s chief chaplain, Major General Luther C.
Miller. After some deliberation, a compromise was reached in 1949 that designated
X to be used on dog tags for anyone not of the existing three religious
preferences. Furthermore, an additional dog tag could be supplied by the
soldier’s church or temple that would positively identify his religion. The
National Young Buddhist Coordinating Council subsequently campaigned for
72 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
a Buddhist symbol to be placed on the headstones of Buddhist veterans at
national cemeteries. After petitions were sent to Secretary of Defense, Louis
Johnson, the army agreed late in 1949 to inscribe the ‘‘Buddhist emblem’’ for
American soldiers of the Buddhist faith. These two campaigns represent an
important legacy of the camps, testing both Japanese American Buddhist
loyalty to America and America’s loyalty to its Buddhist citizens.
Postwar Japanese American Buddhism was clearly marked by the Buddhism
of the camps. Wartime Buddhism functioned both as a repository of
Japanese cultural traditions and as a vehicle for becoming American. As Ihsan
Bagby suggests in his chapter in this volume, wartime may clarify the stakes
involved in articulating to the nation one’s religious and ethnic identity as well
as accelerate the processes of Americanization. Lacking significant postwar
migration from Japan, the Japanese American community, especially in California,
has diminished in size as outmarriage and other assimilative factors
have increased. With many fourth- and fifth-generation Japanese Americans
unable to speak Japanese or uninterested in Buddhist temple life, Buddhist
temples have had to find new ways to maintain membership. The paradoxical
task of maintaining religious identity through di√erence—both ethnic (Japanese)
and religious (Buddhist)—while simultaneously developing an American
identity was sharpened by the wartime incarceration but continues today.
The legacy of the camps lives on.
While the long history of the Japanese American Buddhist experience obviously
holds lessons for more recent Asian American immigrant Buddhist
groups, one wonders if the war and incarceration experience cannot also
inform and illuminate the recent unfolding of a ‘‘new religious America,’’ as
Diana Eck puts it.≤∫
In particular, one wonders whether the targeting and
harassment of Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and those who may look
like those who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks (such as Sikhs and other
south Asians) parallels the Japanese American experience following Pearl
Harbor.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was tracking
anti-Muslim incidents long before 9/11, cases of discrimination and attacks
have soared since that event.≤Ω
Ethnic and religious profiling at airports
and workplaces as well as physical violence (including the shooting of Balbir
Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona) recall the hate crimes
and discrimination faced by Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Just as
Japanese American Buddhist temples were vandalized and ancient Buddhist
symbols, such as the swastikas (manji) that hung at temple doors, were rid-
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 73
dled with shotgun fire by angry white neighbors,≥≠
one saw an angry mob of
three hundred people chanting ‘‘U.S.A., U.S.A.’’ and marching on a mosque
in Bridgeview, Illinois, right after 9/11. Whether it was the vandalizing of a
Muslim bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 12, or someone
shooting into a Dallas-area mosque, the Islamic Center of Irving, Islamic
symbols quickly became targets for those caught up in war hysteria. ‘‘Visible
religion,’’ whether in dress or looks, combined with ethnic profiling has once
again proved to be a factor in how American religious pluralism and tolerance
are defined.
Just as hundreds of Buddhist priests were picked up by the fbi and hysterical
claims were made that Buddhist bells were going to send Morse code
messages to the Japanese navy, the post-9/11 period has seen its share of
indiscriminate arrests of thousands of young Muslim ‘‘enemy aliens’’ as well
as the targeting of Muslim charitable organizations accused of having terrorist
links. Many have developed the same kind of loyalty strategies as Japanese
Americans did following Pearl Harbor: calls by organizations such as the
American Muslim Council to cooperate with the fbi and support the president
or drives to donate blood for the victims of the World Trade Center.
While the rush to conversion, a strategy followed by some Japanese American
Buddhists, is not an option for many Muslims, not only Muslims but also
Sikhs and Hindus have sought ways of demonstrating loyalty to America, such
as flying American flags or toning down religious or ethnic di√erences.
Despite these parallels, the di√erences between Pearl Harbor Buddhists
and 9/11 Muslims are striking. Following 9/11, the federal government did not
adopt a policy of mass incarceration of Muslims. In the Japanese American
case, not only ‘‘enemy aliens’’ but also Japanese Americans citizens—more
than 110,000 of them, including babies at orphanages—were imprisoned
without trial for the duration of the war as a national security threat. Indeed,
President George W. Bush’s September 17, 2001, speech at the Islamic Center
of Washington, D.C., where he announced his dismay at harassment of Muslims,
represented a clear attempt to disentangle American Muslims from the
actions of individual terrorists. ‘‘Women who cover their heads in this country
must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover
must not be intimidated in America,’’ Bush stated. ‘‘That’s not the America I
know. That’s not the America I value.’’≥∞
While the president’s anti-hate-crime
message must also be understood in the context of international politics (that
is, the imperative that the U.S. ‘‘war on terrorism’’ not be anti-Islamic), his
comments set the tone for a government stance against intolerance.≥≤
Indeed,
74 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
within days of 9/11, both the House and the Senate passed resolutions condemning
bigotry and violence against Arab Americans, American Muslims,
and Americans of south Asian origin and calling for the protection of their
civil rights and liberties.≥≥
Such o≈cial proclamations of religious tolerance
were not forthcoming in 1940s America.
In the sixty years since Pearl Harbor, America has changed dramatically
for Japanese Americans. In a June 2000 White House ceremony, President
Bill Clinton bestowed the military’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, on
twenty-two Asian American war veterans. Japanese American veterans of the
442nd Regimental Combat Unit and the 100th Battalion, such as Senator
Daniel Inoue (D-Hawaii), were honored for their valor in war. This action
clearly signaled that Japanese Americans are no longer seen as foreigners. The
ceremony, which also honored veterans posthumously, included the Reverend
Shojo Honda, a Buddhist priest from Kyoto who recited Buddhist scriptures
for the dead soldiers in front of the president and the army brass. The Buddhist
priest, once o≈cially classified as disloyal to his country, can now appear
in public as a legitimate religious figure.
Among those in the army hierarchy present at that ceremony was four-star
general Eric Shinseki, who had assumed the U.S. Army’s top job, becoming
chief of sta√ in 1999. Japanese Americans such as General Shinseki,
along with Norman Mineta, who in his capacity as secretary of transportation
worked to secure aviation safety after 9/11, have been among the Bush administration’s
faces in the ‘‘war on terrorism.’’ Japanese American and Buddhist
occupation of such high-profile public positions demonstrates a significant
shift in America’s religious, social, and political life. In addition, a traditional
Japanese Obon ceremony, an annual event to honor the recently deceased as
well as one’s ancestors who are believed to revisit the living, was held at
Ground Zero. It represented once more an increased Buddhist presence in the
American religious imagination. Organized by the Reverend T. Kenjitsu Nakagaki
of the New York Buddhist Church and other Buddhist priests, the HatsuBon
Memorial Service honored the roughly twenty Japanese and Japanese
Americans who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.≥∂
While the camp experience appears to have accelerated these types of postwar
assimilationist tendencies—wanting to belong and to appear loyal—a lingering
suspicion of mass incarceration and the denial of civil liberties for
Muslim Americans remains strong among Japanese Americans, especially
after the fbi brought in five thousand men, primarily of Arab and south Asian
descent, for questioning in the domestic ‘‘war on terror.’’ Within two and a half
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 75
weeks of 9/11, two New York Times articles, ‘‘War on Terrorism Stirs Memory of
Internment’’ and ‘‘Recalling Internment and Saying ‘Never Again,’ ’’ chronicled
what many Japanese Americans felt was a special responsibility to guard
against ethnic scapegoating.≥∑
Proclaiming that ‘‘we need to do everything that
we wish good Americans had done 59 years ago,’’ the executive director of the
San Francisco Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Paul Osaki,
was one of many community leaders speaking out against violence and discrimination
against Muslim Americans.≥∏
On September 19, Japanese American
leaders coordinated an unprecedented gathering of ethnic and religious
leaders, including those from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,
the American Muslim Council, and the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, to meet at the National Japanese American Memorial in Washington,
D.C., and call for law enforcement o≈cers and others to adequately
address hate violence against religious and ethnic minorities.
Invoking the memory of the World War II incarceration experience, other
leaders, such as the executive director of the Japanese American National
Museum, Irene Hirano, have also been deeply involved in e√orts to reach out to
Arab and Muslim Americans, including the construction of a new Arab American
national museum. Although the mass incarceration of Arab and Muslim
Americans seems unlikely, on July 19, 2002, a member of the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights raised the specter of internment camps for Arab Americans if
additional terrorist attacks were to occur on American soil.≥π
Despite the
religious and political motivations for some Sikh and Hindu organizations to
distance themselves from Muslims—itself reminiscent of the attempts by
Koreans and Chinese to distance themselves from the Japanese during World
War II—Muslim Americans have found allies in many quarters, including
among Japanese Americans. The irony here is that the Japanese American
Buddhist camp experience, which shaped the impulse to demonstrate loyalty
as well as to remain on the outside as a critical voice of injustice in the American
project of democracy, has made many Japanese American Buddhists feel excluded
from the post-9/11 religiopolitical reality. President George Bush’s
language of the ‘‘Abrahamic faiths’’ of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that
form the ‘‘sacred canopy’’ of America, coupled with the snubbing of Buddhist
representatives at o≈cial 9/11 memorial services, has rolled back decades of
e√orts to root Buddhism more firmly in the American religious landscape.
Many Japanese Americans took on the conflicted identity of being a Japanese
American Buddhist in the crucible of war. One wonders if 9/11 will
also turn out to be similarly significant for Muslim Americans as they struggle
76 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
with Americanization and resistance to it in their ethnic and religious identity
formation.
notes
1. Both Buddhist and Shinto priests were classified in the A (most potentially
subversive) ‘‘known dangerous’’ category of the fbi’s ‘‘abc list’’ of aliens targeted for
arrest in case of war. See Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), 22.
2. Shinobu Matsuura, Higan: Compassionate Vow—Selected Writings of Shinobu Matsuura
(Berkeley: Matsuura Family, 1986), 63.
3. Bob Kumamoto, ‘‘The Search for Spies: American Counterintelligence and the
Japanese American Community, 1931–1942,’’ Amerasia Journal 6.2 (Fall 1979): 45–75.
4. For more on the demographics of the early immigrants, see Paul R. Spickard,
Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group (London: Prentice
Hall, 1996), 33.
5. See the O-Series: Correspondence, Buddhist Churches of America Archives, San
Francisco (hereafter cited as bca Archives), letters regarding and receipts of the
donations collected by Japanese American temples for the Imperial Japanese Army.
6. Alan Hynd, Betrayal from the East: The Inside Story of Japanese Spies in America (New
York: McBride, 1943), 21, 130–36.
7. For more on the fbi classification lists, see Kumamoto, ‘‘Search for Spies,’’ 58.
8. On the ‘‘deputation’’ of Buddhist ministers’ wives and others to serve as o≈ciants,
see Deborah Malone, ‘‘Documents from bca Archives Vital for Redress Case,’’
Wheel of Dharma, May 1997, 3.
9. bca Archives, Box 1b (Letters—‘‘Register for Civilian Defense,’’ December 12,
1941).
10. bca Archives, Box 1b (Letters—‘‘Evacuation of Aliens,’’ February 9, 1942).
11. For these phenomena, see Stephen Fujita and David O’Brien, The Japanese American
Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 79.
12. Mary Nagatomi, interview by author, June 5, 2002.
13. bca Archives, Box 1b (Letters—‘‘Serve in Silence,’’ March 5, 1942).
14. Young Buddhist Association of Butte Camp, ed., Gathas and Services (Rivers, Ariz.:
yba, 1944), 9–10.
15. Quoted in Susan Davis, ‘‘Mountain of Compassion: Dharma in American Internment
Camps,’’ Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 2.4 (Summer 1993): 49.
16. Bunyû Fujimura, Though I Be Crushed (Los Angeles: Nembutsu, 1995), 95. An
exception to this nonsectarian Buddhism occurred in Manzanar Camp, where the main
Buddhist church was led by a Jôdo Shin priest while a separate Nichiren Buddhist
church existed for believers in that sect.
17. On collecting wood in the desert to make Buddhist altars, see Akemi Kikumura,
Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman (Novato, Calif.: Chandler
and Sharp, 1981), 52–53. Davis has also noted that ‘‘in response to the lack of Buddhist
articles in some camps, people carved Buddha statues and shrines from scrap wood
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 77
and sagebrush found in the desert. At the North Dakota camp, Arthur Yamabe, who
later became a minister, once carved a figure of baby Buddha from a carrot’’ (‘‘Mountain
of Compassion,’’ 49).
18. This necrology is held at Zenshûji Temple in Los Angeles.
19. On the Americanization program and religion, see Gary Okihiro, ‘‘Religion and
Resistance in America’s Concentration Camps,’’ Phylon 45.3 (Third Quarter 1981):
220–33.
20. For a glimpse into the government’s thinking on Americanization, see House of
Representatives, Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities,
Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States (78th Cong., 1st sess.,
1943), 21. For the Buddhist basketball team, see ‘‘Basketball Title at Hand,’’ Sangha
News 1.2 (February 13, 1944): 1.
21. In July 1944, the bca ratified at a Salt Lake City conference a new constitution
that adopted English as its primary language. See Kenneth Tanaka, ‘‘bca: The Lotus
That Bloomed behind Barbed Wire,’’ Turning Wheel, Spring 1993, 41.
22. See Stephen Prothero, ‘‘Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism,’ ’’ Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 63.2 (Summer 1995): 281–302.
23. For yba activities, see articles from the Rohwer camp’s Buddhist newsletter:
‘‘yba Girls Help Red Cross,’’ Sangha News 1.2 (February 13, 1944): 1; ‘‘Bussei Hostesses
Serve Local uso,’’ Sangha News 1.4 (March 12, 1944): 1.
24. David Yoo, ‘‘Enlightened Identities: Buddhism and Japanese Americans of California,
1924–1941,’’ Western Historical Quarterly 27.3 (Autumn 1996): 281. For more
on the ethnic and religious identities of second-generation Japanese American Buddhists
and Christians, see David Yoo, Growing up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture
among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2000), 38–67.
25. Kihara Jôin, Arashi No Nakade: Kaisen To Spai Yôgi (Kyoto: Nagata Bunshôdo,
1985); translation by the author.
26. This section on postwar nisei work on the 1948 Golden Jubilee celebration, the
B for Buddhism campaign, and the headstone marker campaign depends heavily on
the research of Michael Masatsugu, ‘‘Reorienting the Pure Land: Buddhism, Beats, and
Japanese Identities in Cold War America, 1945–67’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Irvine, 2002), chap. 2.
27. See ‘‘1948 Buddhist Golden Jubilee Celebration,’’ Life, September 1948, 76–77.
28. Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s
Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
29. See ‘‘Bias Incidents against Muslims are Soaring, Islamic Council Says,’’ New
York Times, May 1, 2002, a22.
30. The Fresno Buddhist Church, for example, was vandalized in this way. I owe
this account to Nagatomi, interview.
31. For a transcript of the president’s remarks, see [http://www.adc.org/action
2001/17september2001v002.htm].
32. On the context of Bush’s mosque visit, see Dana Milbank and Emily Wax, ‘‘Bush
Visits Mosque to Forestall Hate Crimes,’’ Washington Post, September 18, 2001, a1.
78 d u n c a n r y û k e n w i l l i a m s
33. House Bill hr 227 was introduced by Representatives David Bonier and Tom
Davis; the Senate resolution, sjr 23, was introduced by Senators Orrin Hatch, Tom
Harkin, Russ Feingold, and Patrick Leahy.
34. See ‘‘N.Y. Buddhist Rite Remembers 9-11 Dead,’’ Japan Times, July 18, 2002, 2.
35. William Glaberson, ‘‘War on Terrorism Stirs Memory of Internment,’’ New York
Times, September 24, 2001, a18; Evelyn Nieves, ‘‘Recalling Internment and Saying
‘Never Again,’ ’’ New York Times, September 28, 2001, a16.
36. Nieves, ‘‘Recalling Internment,’’ a16.
37. Robert E. Pierre, ‘‘Fear Permeates Arab Enclave near Detroit, Muslim Americans
Say Terror War Targets Them,’’ International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2002, 4.
H I EN O U C DO
Reproducing Vietnam in America
San Jose's Perfect Harmony Temple
On u cold and windy Saturday, April 3, 1999, more than four
thousand people paid their final respects to the Venerable Thich Dam Uni
(Buddhist name, Thich Dieu Thanh), a Vietnamese American Buddhist nun
who had died of cancer at the age of sixty-seven. She had arrived as a refugee
from Vietnam in 1980 with nothing but her clothes and her devotion to
Buddhism. Ten years later, with money saved from recycling aluminum cans
and offered as donations, she had founded Chua Due Vien (the Perfect Harmony
Tempie) in San Jose, California. At nine thousand square feet, this
is one of the largest Vietnamese American Buddhist temples in the nation
and one of the few run bynuns. Monks and nuns from various Buddhistsects
had been at Dam Luu's side during the days before her death, and the funeral
procession included not only local Buddhists but also the mayor of San Jose,
the VenerableThich What Hanh, and thousands of Buddhists from across the
United States and around the world. All paid their respects not only to Luu
but also to the vibrant temple community she created and sustained, a community
that serves the religious, social, and educational needs of nearby Vietnamese
Americans even as it helps them negotiate the difficult process of
acculturation.
As I.u and the Perfect Harmony Temple indicate, Vietnamese Buddhism
has come to the United States. Understanding its development, however,
requires considering in some detail the broader story of Vietnamese immigration.
That history is generally divided into two periods, each with several
waves. The first period ran from April 1975 through 1977 and included three
waves ofVietnamese refugees to the United States.
The 6rst of those waves, involving some ten to fifteen thousand refugees,
began at least a week to ten days before the collapse of the South Vietnamese
government. The second and probably largest wave included some eighty
thousand people who were evacuated by air during the last days of April 1975.
4
79
80 h i e n d u c d o
These refugees were relatively well educated, came from urban areas, spoke
some English, had some marketable skills, and were moderately westernized.
Most members of these two waves were Vietnamese who worked either for the
South Vietnamese government or for American businesses or government
entities. All were relatively well prepared for American life on the basis of their
education, socioeconomic background, and contact with Americans and/or
the U.S. government.
The final wave during this initial period involved approximately forty to
sixty thousand Vietnamese who left in small boats and ships and commandeered
aircraft during the first two weeks of May 1975. They were later picked
up by the U.S. Navy or cargo ships standing o√ the coast of Vietnam and
transferred to Subic Bay and Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and
Guam.
The second major period of Vietnamese refugee migration began in 1978
and continues today. Since the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, many Vietnamese
have tried to escape the oppression of the Vietnamese communist
government. Although the influx continues steadily, the numbers are no longer
as large as they once were. A significant characteristic of this period,
especially between 1978 to 1980, was the large number of ethnic Chinese who
migrated out of Vietnam and Cambodia.
Refugees from this second period have been called boat people because
most of them escaped in poorly constructed boats and other homemade
vessels. As a consequence of the lack of sophistication of their crafts (which
could not long withstand the forces of nature), their scant navigational skills,
limited provisions, and attacks by Thai sea pirates, the death rate of these boat
people was very high. Verbal testimony from survivors in refugee camps fixes
that figure as high as 50 percent, while Bruce Grant and Barry Wain have
placed it at 10 to 15 percent.∞
A precise percentage, however, will never be
calculated, since there is no way of knowing how many refugees left Vietnam.
Owing in equal parts to the chaotic nature of the war and the extreme secrecy
employed by those who left Vietnam, the Vietnamese communist government
did not keep track of émigrés. Only the survivors have been counted.
The exodus of Vietnamese refugees to the United States was a di≈cult
process. Regardless of when they came, the journey to America left a lasting
impression. It was easier for those who were young or were able to leave
earlier, when governmental restrictions were not as severe. For others, the
journey was more traumatic because of di≈cult family circumstances or because
they were detained by the government and sent to prison. Still, the
Reproducing Vietnam in America 81
uncertain and dangerous passage across a vast ocean to an unknown destination
made it a di≈cult journey for all.
The Vietnamese exodus and resettlement in the United States could not
have come at a worse time in American history. The Vietnam War divided
the nation deeply. O≈cial totals list 57,692 American men and women as
having been killed in the war and 2,500 more as missing in action or prisoners
of war.≤
In fact, the American public’s general attitude toward Vietnamese refugees
at the end of the war was hostility. A May 1975 Gallup Poll showed ‘‘54 percent
of all Americans opposed to admitting Vietnamese refugees to live in the
United States, and only 36 percent in favor (12 percent were undecided).’’≥
One common concern was economic self-interest—a fear of having jobs taken
away and needing to provide public assistance and welfare to the refugees.
During this time, the U.S. economy was in a recession, with an unemployment
rate of 8.3 percent.∂
In fact, on April 27, 1975, more than sixty thousand
unemployed union members filed into Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington,
D.C., to protest the lack of employment opportunities. The May 12,
1975, issue of Newsweek quoted California Congressman Burt Talcott as saying,
‘‘Damn it, we have too many Orientals already. If they all gravitate to
California, the tax and welfare rolls will get overburdened and we already have
our share of illegal aliens.’’ In the same issue, an Arkansas woman said, ‘‘They
say it’s a lot colder here than in Vietnam. . . . With a little luck, maybe all
those Vietnamese will take pneumonia and die.’’ Even liberal Democrats such
as California Governor Edmund Brown and Senator George McGovern said
negative things about Vietnamese refugees. Several studies documented that a
substantial number of Americans preferred to exclude the Vietnamese from
the United States.∑
Vietnamese refugees arrived, therefore, in a hostile United States. Most of
the hostility was racially and economically based.∏
Still, many Americans extended
humanitarian aid and sponsored families from refugee camps, working
hard to welcome the newcomers.
When Vietnamese refugees first arrived in April 1975, the U.S. government
organized four temporary refugee camps to streamline the refugees’ transition
into American society or to find third-country sponsors. All the camps
were on military bases, which provided the labor and space needed to accommodate
large number of refugees. The first to open was Camp Pendleton in
southern California, followed by camps at Fort Cha√ee in Arkansas, Eglin Air
Force Base in Florida, and Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.
82 h i e n d u c d o
To minimize the social impact of this large influx of Vietnamese refugees,
the U.S. government adopted a refugee dispersion policy that had four purposes:
(1) to relocate refugees as quickly as possible so that they could achieve
financial independence; (2) to ease the economic impact of a large influx of
refugees on any given community; (3) to make it easier to find sponsors; and
(4) to prevent the development of an ethnic ghetto.π
Given the U.S. political
and social climate at the time, the factors leading to this policy were primarily
political and financial, not social.∫
The policy sought to encourage Vietnamese
refugees to assimilate quickly into American society by finding work as soon
as possible after leaving refugee camps.
The federal government’s Interagency Task Force contracted with nine voluntary
agencies to handle the resettlement of the refugees in the United
States: United Hebrew Immigration and Assistance Service, the Lutheran Immigration
and Refugee Service, the International Rescue Committee, the
Church World Service, the American Funds for Czechoslovak Refugees, the
U.S. Catholic Conference, the Travelers Aid International Social Service, the
Tolstoy Foundation, and the Council for Nationalities Service. Each refugee
family chose or was assigned to a resettlement agency.Ω
These agencies sought
primarily to find sponsors who could fulfill both financial and moral responsibilities
as well as to match sponsors and refugees. These responsibilities
included providing temporary food, clothing, and shelter; assisting in the
search for employment or job training for the head of the household; enrolling
children in school; and providing ordinary medical care.∞≠
In other words,
the sponsors would serve as a resource to support refugees until they could
become self-supporting. The refugees had four ways in which they could leave
these temporary refugee camps and enter American society: (1) by resettling in
a third country; (2) by repatriating to Vietnam; (3) by demonstrating proof of
financial independence; or (4) by finding a sponsor through the voluntary
agencies.∞∞
Although the U.S. government encouraged third-country resettlement, this
option was rarely used. Very few countries o√ered such assistance unless the
refugees were professionals, had in-country relatives, or could speak the native
language.∞≤
Only a small number of refugees chose to return to Vietnam:
‘‘by October 1975, repatriation had been granted to 1,546 refugees by the new
government of Vietnam.’’∞≥
The majority of these repatriates were military
men who had been forced to leave their families behind at the time of their
evacuation. Demonstrating financial independence was also di≈cult. Accord-
Reproducing Vietnam in America 83
ing to Gail Paradise Kelly, ‘‘the Task Force required a refugee family to show
proof of cash reserves totaling at least $4,000 per household member.’’∞∂
Not
many could do so. In addition, few refugees reported their financial savings to
the authorities because of their understandable fear of governments. Thus,
Vietnamese refugees entered American society almost universally through the
family sponsorship method.
The sponsors found by voluntary agencies consisted of church congregations,
parishes, or a≈liates; individual families; corporations; and companies
with former Vietnamese employees. In addition, if the refugees had relatives
who fulfilled the same requirements, those relatives could also serve as sponsors.
Kenneth A. Skinner, however, reports that only fifteen thousand Vietnamese
lived in the United States prior to 1975,∞∑
and most of these individuals
were students staying temporarily on visas or wives of U.S. soldiers. In
short, because the Vietnamese lacked an established community in the United
States, this method was seldom available to the first waves of refugees. However,
Vietnamese from the first several waves more frequently used the family
sponsorship method to sponsor relatives and friends who entered after 1975.
After living for a time with their sponsors and adjusting to the new environment,
many Vietnamese refugees began to relocate throughout the United
States. Many reasons led them to leave their original resettlement sites. Family
reunification was an important variable, as was the desire to live close to
people who were similar to them. Job availability and climate also contributed
to this secondary migration. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census indicate that the
states most populated with Vietnamese Americans were California, Texas,
Louisiana, Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida. In short, the
original resettlement pattern and the secondary migration combined to produce
Vietnamese American communities throughout the United States. These
communities made possible the establishment of religious communities.
The two largest religions in the Vietnamese American population are Roman
Catholicism and Buddhism. Approximately 30 percent are Catholics, and
Catholicism is especially strong among those who were originally from North
Vietnam and those who emigrated in 1975. The rest of the community tends to
be Buddhist because of the region’s religious history. No matter which religion
people claim, however, they also are strongly influenced by the Tam Giao
(Three Religions): Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. This does not
mean that Vietnamese Americans actively practice these three religions but
rather that they incorporate components of these religions (often unwittingly)
84 h i e n d u c d o
into their daily lives. They were and are socialized into these values and norms
through proverbs, folk sayings, songs, family rituals, and cultural festivals. In
other words, the Tam Giao constitute part of being Vietnamese.∞∏
Although no agreement exists regarding how Buddhism entered Vietnam
(perhaps through China, perhaps through Indian traders), scholars have concluded
that Buddhism in Vietnam is ultimately derived from India. Since its
introduction, Buddhism has been an important institution in Vietnamese
history. It was one of the forces that unified the Vietnamese in their various
fights for independence from the Chinese. In recent times, Buddhism acted as
a protector of traditional culture when the French seized colonial control in
the nineteenth century. During the Vietnam War, Buddhism was again seen as
the national conscience when monks and laypersons protested American intervention.
One of the conflict’s most enduring images is the self-immolation
of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in protest of the war. During the course
of Vietnamese history, therefore, Buddhists have preserved traditional culture,
transmitted Buddhist doctrines and values, and struggled against foreign
domination.
One of the advantages enjoyed by Vietnamese Americans is a relatively
tolerant U.S. social and political climate. Although Vietnamese refugees have
felt tremendous pressure to assimilate economically, there has been, in this
post-civil-rights-movement era, far less pressure to assimilate socially and
religiously. One major government concern has been to quash public criticisms
of too much aid to these refugees, so the refugees have been expected to
become self-su≈cient very quickly. Moreover, they were allowed to practice
their religions without the kind of interference they might have met earlier in
American history.
Another advantage for these new immigrants was that Buddhism was no
longer a new form of religion in America in the mid-1970s. Many Americans
were familiar with at least the religion’s basic features.∞π
Moreover, the practice
of Buddhism in Asian American communities had already been adapted to
Christian norms.∞∫
However, Americans’ familiarity with Buddhism varied
considerably by region: someone from a California city was far more likely to
be familiar with Buddhism than someone from rural Kansas.
The Vietnamese American Buddhist community did not have an established
temple or national organization, so no support was available from that
source to assist the new arrivals in negotiating the complexities of American
life. Vietnamese Catholics, by contrast, could practice their religion more
quickly and easily because the United States had an established Catholic
Reproducing Vietnam in America 85
Church; furthermore, the church was one of the voluntary agencies that resettled
Vietnamese refugees.
The Buddhists also had some advantages, however. Because no community
preceded them, they did not have to follow rules, procedures, and policies
dictated by a larger group. They could choose where to form temples, including
in some cases in garages and private homes. They also did not have to
be involved in the often divisive political struggles of a national religious
community.
Although the Venerable Dam Luu passed away on March 26, 1999,
her life and legacy, epitomized by Chua Duc Vien and her disciples, demonstrates
how a Vietnamese American Buddhist temple has struggled to balance
new life in the United States with the traditions of Vietnam. San Jose is no
Vietnamese American backwater. In fact, Santa Clara County, where San Jose
is located, has the second-largest Vietnamese American population in the
United States, with more than 110,000 inhabitants.
According to the Venerable Thich Minh Duc, the Venerable Dam Luu lived
an unusual life even before her arrival in northern California.∞Ω
At age sixteen,
she had been among the first Buddhist nuns ordained in Vietnam. In her
youth, formal education was not a requirement for monastic training. In fact,
Buddhist monks and nuns rarely possessed any education, since they basically
just followed the instruction of their teachers, reciting the sutras and conducting
rituals.≤≠
Dam Luu’s teacher, however, wanted her students to have a
deeper understanding of Buddhism and thus encouraged them to become
more educated. As a result, Dam Luu was also one of the first nuns in Vietnam
to pass the national exam for a high school diploma.
Dam Luu was later assigned to Phuoc Hoa Temple in Saigon (now Ho Chi
Minh City), and although she wanted to devote her life to Buddhism, she
could not escape the impact of the Vietnam War. At this time, President Ngo
Dinh Diem persecuted many Buddhist practitioners for their religious beliefs
and their opposition to the war. Alongside others who protested the war and
demanded religious freedom, Dam Luu participated in several political demonstrations
against the government, and in 1963, she was jailed for these
activities. Later that year, she was released when Diem was overthrown by a
coup d’état.
In 1964, the societal upheaval caused by the war led the United Vietnamese
Buddhist Church to recognize the need for members to participate in more
86 h i e n d u c d o
secular professional fields. Consequently, Dam Luu was among a handful of
people sent abroad to study. She spent five years in Germany, where she
received a master’s degree in social work. She returned to Vietnam in 1969 to
become the director of the newly established Lam Ty Ni orphanage. This
orphanage, operated with the help of the local Buddhist community, cared for
children who either were victims of the war or could not be cared for by their
families for other reasons. It was dissolved after the communist victory in
1975. In 1976, Dam Luu was pressured to make false accusations against a
monastic friend. When she refused, the government harassed her. With some
help from her lay disciples, she made plans to escape from Vietnam. This
exodus was much more di≈cult than she anticipated: four attempts to leave
failed. Finally, in late 1978, disguised as a layperson, she managed to escape
via a small fishing boat.≤∞
On this escape she saw the desperation of those refugees who fled with her
but was troubled by their willingness to blame others for their su√ering.
While in a refugee camp in Malaysia, she helped others with what little she
had. Instead of waxing philosophical, she worked on a practical level to
alleviate pain and su√ering, providing food and clothing for those who were
in need and o√ering guidance to those who had lost hope. She practiced and
taught her religious beliefs without preaching. In short, she continued to live
her life as a Buddhist nun.
Dam Luu arrived in the United States in 1980 at age forty-eight and started
a new life with less than twenty dollars. Thanh Cat, a monk in East Palo Alto,
California, sponsored her resettlement. One of her first acts was to found the
Perfect Harmony Temple.
The Perfect Harmony Temple began modestly. With the help of another
Buddhist monk, Dam Luu rented a small house on the east side of San Jose
and started a ‘‘home temple.’’≤≤
As with all home temples, the entire house
represented a larger temple. She used the living room as the Buddha’s hall,
and a tent in the backyard served many di√erent functions, including as a
dining hall, a lecture hall (for dharma lessons), a school where children
learned Vietnamese, and, on occasion, a bedroom for overnight guests. Following
Vietnamese practice, Dam Luu received donations from the small
Buddhist community immediately surrounding her. These donations, however,
were not enough to cover the rent and other expenses, so she had to find
other ways to earn money that did not interfere with her religious commitments.
After attending to her religious responsibilities at the temple during
Reproducing Vietnam in America 87
the day, she used her free time to collect aluminum cans and newspapers to
redeem for small change.
Although she did this work quietly and without fanfare, word began to
spread about a Buddhist nun who collected recyclables, and Buddhist women
and children consequently joined in the e√ort. Between the late 1980s, when
the recycling e√ort began, and the mid-1990s, Dam Luu saved enough money
to start a temple fund. Eventually, with the help of her three thousand disciples
plus donations from other Vietnamese American Buddhists in the Bay
Area, Dam Luu raised four hundred thousand dollars (about 30 percent of it
from recycling) to build a new temple. Construction on the Perfect Harmony
Temple began in 1995, and most of it was completed three years later. It
features a main hall, dining hall and classrooms, kitchen and eating areas,
and sleeping quarters for thirteen resident nuns.
The temple was designed and furnished in the traditional Vietnamese style,
with symbols quite di√erent from those in Chinese temples. Dam Luu wanted
the temple to reflect the architecture of ancient temples in Vietnam and
worked with an architect specifically to assure this fidelity to the tradition. The
vast majority of the statues and religious figures were shipped from Vietnam.
Although the temple is located in a bustling urban area and faces a busy road,
one enters it through a peaceful garden that provides a spiritual respite from
metropolitan life.
As the abbess of the home temple, the Venerable Dam Luu observed the
challenges faced by Vietnamese refugees as they adjusted to life in America.
She noticed that one of the most pressing issues was the generation gap
between grandparents, parents, and children. Temple members lamented that
the older generation had a di≈cult time communicating with the younger
generation in America. Since children can learn language at a faster rate and
are socialized in school, they began to speak English more and more and
Vietnamese less and less to their parents and grandparents. Dam Luu addressed
this problem by advising older Vietnamese to learn English so that
they could develop an understanding of what was happening around them.
English literacy, in short, would make their lives easier. She also argued that
speaking their children’s language would enable better communication. Conversely,
she also advocated having children learn their parents’ and grandparents’
language and began to provide Vietnamese language classes for the
younger generation at the temple.
The idea at first encountered some resistance. Parents complained that
88 h i e n d u c d o
they were already too busy adjusting to a new life and that these classes would
only add to their already busy schedules (which often included multiple jobs).
With the help of some volunteers, the temple began to o√er free lunches to the
students. This was an important incentive for the parents, since it gave them
time to complete other errands while the children were at the temple. Language
instruction also exposed children to Buddhism, not only through the
Sunday school curriculum (which typically concludes with a half hour of
Buddhist teachings in stories or songs) but also through participation in
annual musicals and skits performed during festivals celebrating, for example,
the Buddha’s birthday.
Because of the large demand and the lack of classroom facilities, the
temple currently o√ers classes on Sunday mornings (9:00 a.m.–noon) and
afternoons (1:00–4:00 p.m.). Each session has roughly fifteen to eighteen
classes with about twelve to fifteen students per class. The temple thus serves
between three hundred and four hundred students each year. The students pay
a small fee (fifty dollars annually) to help defray the costs of course materials.
There are about sixty teachers and helpers, all volunteers. Students are assigned
to classes according to their Vietnamese language abilities.
The curriculum is designed by the teachers and revised yearly. Before becoming
a teacher, each volunteer receives training. Some of the teachers are
quite familiar with the curriculum, having gone through it themselves. Students
and their families still receive free vegetarian lunches after the morning
session. There is no formal recruiting process; most students are the children
of temple members. As a matter of fact, the nuns report that many students
are turned away each year because the temple cannot accommodate all of the
requests from families in the community. Temple leaders and the volunteer
teachers constantly struggle to find ways to provide this service to all students,
but limits on space and resources prevent the temple from o√ering additional
classes.
In addition to language courses, the temple provides a wide range of other
activities. Monday through Saturday, chanting and sutra sessions are o√ered
in the morning from 5:30 to 7:00 and again from 9:00 to 11:00. Afternoon and
evening sessions are also held at 3:00–4:00, 5:30–6:30, and 7:00–8:00. On
Sunday there is chanting and Buddhist teaching from 10:00 a.m. until noon
and from 3:00 until 4:30 in the afternoon. Buddhist classes for adults take
place on Mondays from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. and for young children on Saturdays
from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Many special events are also celebrated throughout
the year, including the Buddha’s birthday, the Lunar New Year, the First
Reproducing Vietnam in America 89
Full Moon Festival, the Elder Festival, the Buddha Sakyamuni’s birthday, the
Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva Celebration, the Ullambana Festival, the Ksitigarbha
Bodhisattva Celebration, the Tenth Full Moon Festival, the Buddha
Amitabha’s birthday, the End of the Year Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival.
All of these activities are free and open to the public: everyone, regardless
of religion, race, or class, is welcome to attend and participate. Although most
participants are Vietnamese Americans, a few non-Vietnamese also participate.
The temple holds no celebrations of American festivals (for example,
Thanksgiving or Christmas).
The two largest festivals, each attended by hundreds, are the Buddha’s
birthday and the Lunar New Year. The rituals, chanting, and celebrations take
place almost entirely in Vietnamese and involve not only religious but also
cultural practice. For example, during the Buddha’s birthday celebrated on
May 6, 2001, the temple was filled with members and nonmembers alike: all
the parking lots were full, and cars were parked throughout the surrounding
neighborhood. Several volunteers in front of the temple discouraged people
from jaywalking, and signs asked people to use the crosswalks. The San Jose
Police Department provided several o≈cers to help with tra≈c.
The day began very early. By 7:00 a.m., the temple was bustling with
people setting up. Parents, grandparents, and children lined up to burn incense
in honor of Buddha and their ancestors. The o≈cial event began at
10:00 a.m. in the main hall with an hourlong session of chanting and reciting
of sutras led by resident nuns. All the nuns and monks were dressed in formal
Buddhist attire, while participants wore their best clothes. A dharma talk by
the Venerable Thich Minh Duc followed.
Nuns and monks concluded the o≈cial service by leaving the temple in a
single line. A Su Co, a Buddhist nun, led the procession with a small bell that
she rang at regular intervals. The clerics exited through the main hall and then
proceeded through the garden to the back of the temple.
The temple later was transformed into a musical celebration of the Buddha’s
birth. The production was organized, rehearsed, and performed by
students and teachers from the Vietnamese language classes. Songs, performances,
and short plays depicted the birth of the Buddha and the subsequent
joys and celebrations. The musical production alone lasted a little more than
an hour, and, with the exception of a ten-minute dharma discussion in English,
all of the day’s events took place in Vietnamese.
This festival demonstrates Vietnamese Buddhists’ desire to maintain as
much of their cultural heritage as possible. It remains to be seen, however,
90 h i e n d u c d o
how long these Vietnamese Buddhists will be able to hold back the forces of
Americanization.
The Perfect Harmony Temple also serves as the first Vietnamese nunnery in
the United States. Dam Luu trained between fifteen and twenty nuns. Resident
nuns live at the temple year-round, with the exception of several months
during the summer when they are sent around the world to learn other Buddhist
doctrines and practices. In more recent years, the temple has been training
nuns sent by sister temples in Vietnam. After completing their studies, the
nuns are expected to return to Vietnam to help develop temples there. The
Perfect Harmony Temple also educates monks. Many have become dharma
teachers throughout the United States, Europe, and Vietnam.
One other distinguishing mark of this temple has been the abbess’s openness
to other Buddhist sects and practices. Dam Luu encouraged her students
to learn about other Buddhist practices. Tibetan monks have visited and have
o√ered Dharma talks. On many occasions, the temple has also hosted members
of other Buddhist sects, and its members have taken part in the annual
ecumenical pilgrimage to the Land of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern
California.
One of Dam Luu’s other innovations was the creation of her own Vietnamese
prayer book. While living in a refugee camp in Malaysia, she noticed
that the behaviors of many Vietnamese who claimed to be Buddhists did not
reflect the teachings of the Buddha. She wanted to provide people with the
opportunity to understand, learn, and practice Buddhist principles. As a result
of China’s influence on Buddhism, however, Vietnamese prayer books were
generally written in ancient Chinese, and most Vietnamese did not understand
the meanings of the sutras they were chanting. By changing the prayers
from Chinese to Vietnamese, she hoped to o√er practitioners a better understanding
of the prayers. Furthermore, she wanted these prayer books to include
passages applicable to people’s daily lives. This change, which mirrors
the shift into the vernacular in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth
century, created some controversy within the temple. Although younger Vietnamese
Americans welcomed the shift, many older members were unhappy.
They felt Dam Luu was departing too much from their tradition, and some
threatened to withhold financial support. But this threat did not deter the
abbess from doing what she thought was right, and her idea of chanting
Buddhist scriptures in Vietnamese has now gained wide support at many U.S.
temples. In fact, many temples now use the chants that Dam Luu and her
disciples translated.≤≥
Reproducing Vietnam in America 91
One factor underlying the success of the Perfect Harmony Temple is volunteers’
tremendous devotion. Countless volunteers run the temple’s many activities.
For example, a large group of older women prepares free meals for
several hundred people after Sunday services. These women also cook vegetarian
food that is sold to raise funds for the temple. A cleaning crew composed
mostly of young and middle-aged men sets up tables and chairs before
meals and washes dishes and pots. An army of mostly young adult male and
female teachers volunteers to teach Sunday school. Since San Jose is in the
heart of Silicon Valley, some volunteers have the technical skills necessary to
record lectures, to videotape important celebrations, to duplicate cassettes
and cds, and to develop and maintain the temple’s Web site. A group of
middle-aged men nicknamed the Fix-It Crew is responsible for all temple
repairs, including donated odds and ends. It seems as if nothing is thrown
away; everything possible is recycled. Broken items eventually are fixed or
somehow recycled. A nun is responsible for the garden, but she is supported
by a group of volunteers who maintain it, tend to the temple’s flower arrangements,
and grow plants and flowers sold to support the temple’s activities.
The life of Dam Luu and the establishment of the Duc Vien Temple provide
a good case study for examining the acculturation process of one refugee
group to the United States. As a result of the relatively tolerant social, political,
and religious climate since their arrival in 1975, Vietnamese American Buddhists
were able to build the Perfect Harmony Temple and have used it to
preserve and reinforce key Vietnamese cultural traditions. But the temple,
while traditional in many respects, does far more than the typical temple in
Vietnam, since it takes as one of its key tasks helping its members adjust to
life in the United States.
One way the Perfect Harmony Temple di√ers from a typical temple in
Vietnam is by providing Vietnamese language classes to the younger generation.
This may be the most important way in which temple leaders are attempting
to ensure that their children and grandchildren see the importance
not only of Buddhism but also of their Vietnamese heritage. The temple also
attempts to address some of the intergenerational conflicts that bedevil all
Asian American groups, providing a forum where youth can begin to understand
their parents’ and grandparents’ values and beliefs (even as those parents
and grandparents learn English). The language school is tightly integrated
into the planning and production of the large festivals held annually at
the temple, thereby encouraging young people to participate and giving them
a sense of ownership of the temple. With respect to the older generation, by
92 h i e n d u c d o
o√ering religious and social guidance (for example, by translating the prayer
book from Chinese to Vietnamese and including some passages addressing
struggles in daily life), the temple has also provided a place where members of
that generation can continue to practice their traditions and a≈rm their values
even as they adjust to American circumstances. Members of the older generation
are particularly active as volunteers and are heavily invested in the temple.
Even inside this fairly traditional temple, Americanization is at work in
plain view. Sunday schools are an American tradition, not a Vietnamese one.
And trends such as Anglicization and congregationalism, discussed in other
chapters in this volume, are also at work here.
notes
1. Bruce Grant, The Boat People: An ‘‘Age’’ Investigation (London: Penguin, 1979); Barry
Wain, The Refused: The Agony of the Indochina Refugees (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1981), 70–73.
2. Walter Capps, The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience (Boston:
Beacon, 1982), 1.
3. Thomas Gri≈th, ‘‘The Final Commitment: People,’’ Time, May 12, 1975.
4. Gail Paradise Kelly, From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of Vietnamese Immigration to
the United States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1977).
5. Angus Deming, ‘‘The New Americans,’’ Newsweek, May 12, 1975, 32.
6. Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991);
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Sandy Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese
Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Ronald Takaki,
Strangers from a Di√erent Shore (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).
7. William T. Liu, Maryanne Lamanna, and Alice Murata, Transition to Nowhere:
Vietnamese Refugees in America (Nashville, Tenn.: Charter House, 1979), 66–68.
8. Kelly, From Vietnam to America, 159.
9. Liu, Lamanna, and Murata, Transition to Nowhere, 157.
10. Ibid., 157.
11. Kelly, From Vietnam to America, 129–36.
12. Ibid., 130.
13. Darrel Montero, Vietnamese Americans: Patterns of Resettlement and Socioeconomic
Adaptation in the United States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1979), 27.
14. Kelly, From Vietnam to America, 129.
15. Kenneth A. Skinner, ‘‘Vietnamese in America: Diversity and Adaptation,’’ California
Sociologist 3.32 (1980): 104.
16. Hien Duc Do, The Vietnamese Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999),
6–9.
17. See Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Eck, New Religious America.
Reproducing Vietnam in America 93
18. Carl Becker, ‘‘Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in Christian America,’’ Buddhist
Christian Studies 10 (1990): 143–56.
19. Thich Minh Duc, ‘‘Dam Luu: An Eminent Vietnamese Nun,’’ in Ky Yen Su Ba Dam
Luu (San Jose: Van Boi, 2000), 139–41.
20. Cong Tu Nguyen and A. W. Barber, ‘‘Vietnamese Buddhism in North America:
Tradition and Acculturation,’’ in Faces of Buddhism, edited by Prebish and Tanaka,
129–46.
21. Minh Duc, ‘‘Dam Luu,’’ 141–43.
22. Chloe Breyer, ‘‘Religious Liberty in Law and Practice: Vietnamese Home Temples
in California and the First Amendment,’’ Journal of Church and State 35.2 (Spring
1993): 367–402.
23. Minh Duc, ‘‘Dam Luu,’’ 147–48.
R O B E R T A , F . T H U R M A N
5
Tibetan Buddhism in America
Reinforcing the Pluralism of the Sacred Canopy
To understand Tibetan Buddhism in America, we have to consider
what Tibetan Buddhism lias been at its originationin India and duringvarious
periods in Tibet. Only then can we see how Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism came
to be perceived in America, how the first Tibetan Buddhists to live in the
United Stares laid the foundations for its American transformations, and how
these U.S. forms differ from the Buddhisms of other countries. Then we can
evaluate the immense impact of His Holiness the Dalai Lama during more
than two decades of visitingand writing in this country, a period duringwhich
Tibetan Buddhism became a movement with national and international visibility.
Finally, we can survey rhe present state of Tibetan Buddhism in the
Unired States.
This story has not yet been properly told, since the Tibetan Buddhism
described in previous surveys is only a ghost of the real thing. Tibetan Buddhism
has often been called Vajrayana Buddhism orTantric Buddhism.It is
thereby distinguished first from the Hinayana orTheravada Buddhism (or, as
1 prefer to call it, Monastic Buddhism) of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and
Kampuchea and second from the Mahayana (I call it Messianic) Buddhism of
China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. According to this account, what distinguishes
Tibetan Buddhism from other Buddhisms is that Tibetans practice
the Buddhist Tantras. They seek Buddhahood in a single life and to do so
engage in ritual, magical, yogic, devotional, and contemplative practices that
are supposedly unique. These practices revolve around the powerful, charismatic,
and authoritative figure of the lama, more or less a guru, which explains
why people used to and sometimes still do call Tibetan Buddhism
Lamaism, This tetm seals the idea that Tibetan Buddhism is only Buddhism
by ptoxy—that it amounts in the last analysis to indigenous Tibetan shamanism.
This view informs many accounts of the history of Tibetan Buddhism in
America, including the most sympathetic and well researched.
94
Tibetan Buddhism in America 95
This view provides the conceptual foundation of Asian Buddhists’ basic
attitudes toward Tibetan Buddhism: as a rule, Asians Buddhists do not identify
Tibetan Buddhists as fellow Buddhists, preferring to think of them as
grisly, yak-meat-eating shamanists who have only the most tenuous link with
real Buddhism. This negative attitude helps to explain the lack of interest in
the Chinese communist destruction of Tibet or in the e√orts of His Holiness
the Dalai Lama to combat it. When Asian Buddhists holding these stereotypes
meet a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, they always seem pleasantly surprised to
encounter living elements of monastic self-restraint, philosophical depth, and
contemplative practice with which they can identify. Such personal contacts
help to undermine the stereotypes, but those stereotypes remain nonetheless
retrenched. The powerful Buddhist institutions of east and south Asia still
place a higher priority on relations with the communist Chinese government
than they do with their oppressed coreligionists in Tibet or the Tibetan government
in exile. The notable exception to this rule has been Japan’s Shingon
Buddhists, who have interacted generously and respectfully with the Tibetans
during their ordeal but have not succeeded in getting the Japanese government
to stand up to the Chinese.
A quick look at the evidence will dispel the misperception that Tibetan
Buddhism is merely Vajrayana Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism, or Lamaism. Before
the 1950 Chinese invasion, the 6 million Tibetans honored and supported
between one-tenth and one-fifth of their population—between six hundred
thousand and 1.2 million people—as religious renunciants. Tibetan Buddhist
mendicant monks and novice nuns (bhikshu/shramaneri) as well as ordained
laypersons (upasika/upasiki) took the monastic vows of the Mulasarvastivada
Vinaya, a form of Theravada discipline di√ering only in the most miniscule
details from the Vinaya discipline maintained by the monks (there were no
ordained nuns in recent centuries) of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, and
Kampuchea. Thus, before 1950, Tibet was the biggest Theravada or Monastic
Buddhist country in the world, since the combined monastic populations of
the main Theravada countries or even of all the other Buddhist countries in
twentieth-century Asia did not reach such numbers.
But these Tibetan Buddhist Theravada monks and nuns did not just maintain
the Vinaya discipline: they also studied and contemplated Mahayana Buddhist
sutras. So we are compelled to describe Tibetan Buddhism as a combination
of Theravada, or Monastic Buddhism, and Mahayana, or Messianic
Buddhism, with the majority of Tibetan Buddhists having only slight knowledge
of Tantric Buddhist thought or practices. Most Tibetan Buddhists re-
96 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
spected Tantric Buddhist texts, institutions, and teachers as the advanced
products of the Mahayana movement, however, so we should not ignore the
Tantric element in Tibetan Buddhism.
We cannot speak accurately about Tibetan Buddhism, therefore, as Vajrayana
Buddhism or Lamaism even though some nonmonastic Tibetan Buddhists
may call themselves by such names. Even these nonmonastics, however,
cannot deny that before one can adopt and maintain any Tantric Buddhist vow,
one must adopt at least some form of the Theravada layperson’s (upasika/
upasiki) vow as well as the Mahayana bodhisattva’s vow. Therefore, it is impossible
in Tibetan Buddhism to be a Vajrayana Buddhist without also being a
Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist.
Even a cursory survey of the history of Indic Buddhism shows that the form
of Buddhism practiced in India from the latter half of the first millennium
c.e. until the west and central Asian invasions destroyed the key Buddhist
monasteries of India corresponds most closely to Tibetan Buddhism. Monastic
Buddhist vows were taken and maintained. Mahayana Buddhist texts and
doctrines were taught, studied, debated, and contemplated. And some individuals
pursued Tantric studies and practices both inside and outside monastery
walls. Not everyone did all three of these practices. Much controversy and
some divisions existed; it was a pluralistic form of Buddhism. But Indian
Buddhist civilization was systematically transplanted into Tibet beginning in
the seventh century, complete with huge libraries of Monastic, Messianic, and
Tantric texts and traditions of monastic vows, university curricula, communal
rituals, esoteric contemplations, and yogas. Over centuries, this civilization
gradually enveloped Tibetan culture, taming its violence and transforming it
into a shrine for the preservation and elaboration of the multitraditional
Buddhism of late classical India.
After that full-blown Indian Buddhism was destroyed in its original sites, a
reaction occurred in Sri Lanka, and the Mahayana and Tantric elements of its
Buddhism were suppressed, leaving only the monastic traditions supported in
the Pali Suttas. As a result, south Asian Buddhists today find it hard to see
themselves reflected in Tibetan Buddhism. In east Asia, by contrast, monastic
and messianic elements were preserved, but the esoteric elements were mostly
overlooked (except by Chinese esoteric Buddhists and Japanese Shingon Buddhists),
and Tibetan Buddhism was thought of as aberrant.
Of course, recognizing Tibetan Buddhism as the continuation of the final
form of Indic Buddhism does not by itself cleanse the image of Tibetan
Buddhism from its distorting aura of corruption. It remains to consider the
Tibetan Buddhism in America 97
history of Buddhism in India, to suggest an alternative to the prevailing perception
of gradual decadence and decline, again as a result of the misunderstanding
of Mahayana devotionalism and Tantric esotericism as popular corruptions
of pristine Buddhism:
Indian Buddhism’s first five hundred years [were] primarily monastic,
solidifying the extra-social society of the Sangha, providing the educationally
oriented individual an asylum from all economic, social, political,
and religious demands. We see its next five hundred years as incrementally
messianic, moving aggressively outward from a solid monastic base in the
economy, society, and culture (already changed by five centuries of feedback
from the thriving educational community) to tackle the more violent
aspects of the ordinary society and teach a social ethic of love and compassion.
We see its last five hundred years as culminatively apocalyptic:
insisting on a more evolved level of behavior in the developed society,
Buddhists moved out aggressively into the marginal areas of society among
the lower castes, tribals, and foreign neighbors, such as the Tibetans.
They used magical and charismatic means to teach people who could not
be approached within the literate conventions of the by now highly refined,
urbane, peaceful, civilized, and pluralistic Sanskrit Hindu-Buddhistic
society.∞
In sum, we can see the three vehicles or styles of Buddhism as products of
a developing process of gradual improvement of an entire civilization that
evolved over many centuries from a militaristic and dynastic culture into a
nonviolent nation-state founded on what I have called ‘‘inner modernity.’’≤
The distinguishing mark of Tibetan Buddhism that emerges in this account
is its totalizing transformation of Tibetan civilization into an environment
that optimizes the individual’s opportunities to become a Buddha.
Tibetan Buddhism, in other words, is a monastic, messianic, and apocalyptic
tradition that seeks via ethics, religion, science, and technology to turn an
entire culture into a theater for enlightenment. This is the same pluralistic
civilization we see developing as a counterculture in India over fifteen hundred
years, then in Tibet for a thousand years. Finally, inner modernity ensues
when, perhaps for the first time in Buddhist history, a counterculture goes
mainstream.
Two important, interrelated elements of this mainstreaming of Buddhism
in Tibet are (1) the integration of monastic institutions and governmental
institutions and (2) the development of the social institution of reincarnation
98 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
out of the age-old doctrine of rebirth. The former seems at first glance to
resemble church/state fusion on the European model until we remember that
Buddhist monasticism in both India and Tibet was the cornerstone of social
pluralism. The Tibetan expression for this mainstreaming is ‘‘coordination of
dharma and life in the world [chos srid zung ¿brel],’’ where ‘‘dharma’’ means not
just religion but reality and the teaching of enlightenment and ‘‘life in the
world’’ means individual existence in culture and society. This expression
indicates, therefore, not domination by one religion (defined as dogmatic
belief system or creedal institution) over other religions through the coercive
powers of a state but rather that the monastic institutions facilitating the
teaching and practice of the evolutionary ethic leading to individual enlightenment
finally eliminate altogether their age-old rivalries, military institutions,
and the militaristic state. In so doing, the monastic institutions absorb the life
energies of the entire population into the teaching and practice of enlightenment
and regulate the minimal institution of the former state through a
bureaucracy that coordinates the shared activities of educated monastic clerks
and former warlord nobles. That Buddhism was countercultural in other
Asian cultures meant that it was always subordinate to a monarchical state
based on military forces obedient to the king, with an entire national culture
dedicated to legitimizing that king and army and with the king’s support for
the countercultural monastic community serving as an important if paradoxical
element of his legitimacy. Tibet’s historical achievement was thus unprecedented
in that it ended the military institution once and for all, allowing the
dharmic principle—that evolution and liberation are the overriding aims of
living—to seep into all corners of Tibetan life. This society in which Buddhism
was mainstream and individual liberation maximally central is thus utterly
mislabeled when conflated with an Abrahamic ‘‘theocracy,’’ where a monotheistic
belief system becomes totally identified with a militaristic monarchy,
leading to a totally authoritarian social order with no room for individual
liberation.
The key institution that enabled the Tibetans to transform their previous
militaristic, imperial order into a nonviolent, dharmic one was the formal
recognition of the reincarnation of its most revered exemplars. Beginning in
the thirteenth century with the Second Karmapa Lama, Tibetans began to
experience the return of beloved leaders as brilliant, gifted children who
became recognized a short time after their passing away in a previous body.
These children proved their former lives by remembering people, events,
possessions, and insights of their former embodiments and then by relearn-
Tibetan Buddhism in America 99
ing their former wisdom and behaving compassionately. It all fit, of course,
not only with the now matter-of-fact belief in the continuity of lives but also
with the semi-esoteric Mahayana understanding of the possibility for advanced
bodhisattvas to choose the circumstances of their future lives. From
the turn of the fifteenth century, the culture became pervaded by these concrete
instantiations of the Tibetan belief in omnipresence of enlightened beings,
further confirming the Tibetan sense of the possibility of each individual’s
attainment of an exalted level of being, limitless in its present and future
blissfulness and inexhaustible in its capability to e√ect the liberation from
su√ering of others. No wonder Tibetans thought it preferable to delegate
political authority to such beings, taking it away from egotistical warlords and
turning personal ambitions away from external conquest and toward an inward
horizon.
By the end of the inwardly modern period in the 1950s, four or five thousand
reincarnate lamas existed, mostly men and mostly monks but including
some women and laypersons. Their presence is a clear sign of the totalizing,
mainstream presence of Buddhist culture in Tibetan civilization.
Tibetan Buddhism is thus is not just a bunch of Tibetan lamas teaching
esoteric Tantric or Vajrayana practices, though this is one manifestation of it.
The encounter between Americans and Tibetan Buddhism can only be understood,
therefore, as the first western engagement with the full panoply of Indian
Buddhist institutions, doctrines, and practices. Before the 1960s, Americans
had encountered Buddhism as a world religion through the writings of
D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus’s Buddhist Bible (1932). They had learned of Zen
through the teachings of Zen masters from Japan. They had encountered the
religions of Pure Land Buddhism, a Japanese institution organized around
faith in the savior-godlike Buddha Amida of the western paradise, and Lotus
Sutra Buddhism, another Japanese movement, based on Nichiren Shonin’s
realization of the importance of the Lotus Sutra revelation by Shakyamuni
Buddha. They had encountered a few Buddhist monks who served various
Asian ethnic communities in seemingly priestly capacities. Some popular
books had appeared, though Vedantic Hinduism and yoga were somewhat
better known. Buddhism was thought of as ‘‘Eastern mysticism,’’ as ‘‘meditation,’’
or as an ethnic Asian religion. A number of recent works have exhaustively
chronicled this history.≥
A key point is that various Buddhisms from various Asian countries entered
America by intersecting with various American countercultures, which was
natural, since those Buddhisms had never gone beyond countercultural insti-
100 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
tutional settings in their home countries. Thus, the first Americans to take a
personal interest in Buddhism were mystics, poets, philosophers, and sympathetic
neighbors of oppressed immigrant communities. Today, to be a convert
Buddhist means to adopt countercultural status.
As Tibetan Buddhism first began to become known, it was like something
mysterious, perhaps monstrous, perhaps magnificent, heaving into sight on
the horizon. The team of Kazi Dawa Samdrup, a Sikkimese schoolteacher, and
W. H. Y. Evans-Wentz, a folklorist and yogin, led o√ with translations of The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927), The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954),
and the life of Tibet’s great yogi, Milarepa. Each of these works was remarkable,
each of interest in its own way, but in the light of our redefinition of
Tibetan Buddhism, we can now see that they conveyed to western readers an
impression of a di√erent civilization, a civilization that had its own science of
mind, its own view of the meaning and purpose of life, that presented a fullscale
alternative to the modern, western, materialistic, industrial, postcolonial
worldview. It was not just an alien religion, a yoga, a meditation practice, an
esoteric cult, something exotic that could be fit neatly into a countercultural
niche. It was an entirely new way of looking at life, a way that challenged the
‘‘American way.’’ This eruption occurred at a time when World War I had
shaken the West’s imperial self-confidence, relativistic and quantum physics
had shaken scientific absolutism, modern art had shattered the substantiality
of the observed object, Freud had shaken the purity and independence of the
conscious subject, Marx had challenged the classless sovereignty of the western
capitalistic individualism, and Darwin had shattered the plausibility of
Creation itself. James Hilton’s romantic novel Shangri-La and the Frank Capra
film of the same name preached on the popular level the image of Tibet as a
faraway world that had already resonated among the artistic and literary cognoscenti
thanks to Samdrump and Evans-Wentz. The Americans who came
to a dawning awareness about this civilizational alternative were either attracted
or repelled, longed to escape into it or felt impelled to discredit it.
Americans in general tended to think of it as a lost world or lost civilization
that had existed everywhere in more Edenic days, akin to Arthurian or Egyptian
legends. No one consciously thought of it as a contemporary alternative
civilization; rather, it was used as a screen on which to project romantic
images of some golden era assumed in the West’s past.
During the 1950s, Lama Anagarika Govinda, a German-Bolivian expatriate
scholar and spiritual seeker, began to publish the fruits of his research and
practice first as a monk in a Sri Lankan Buddhist order and then as a lay lama
Tibetan Buddhism in America 101
in the Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism. His Psychological Attitude of Early
Buddhist Philosophy (1961) and especially his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism
(1959) presented the first clear and scholarly account of Buddhist scientific
psychology and Tibetan contemplative practice. At roughly the same time,
Heinrich Harrer’s best selling Seven Years in Tibet (1953) presented the flavor,
beauty, and quirkiness of Tibetan society. French journalist, artist, scholar,
and spiritual seeker Alexandra David-Neel provided a colorful and sometimes
fanciful information about the mysteries of Tibet, though her harrowing
journey in disguise to Lhasa added an air of paranoia to the perception of the
Tibetan people, due to her living in fear of discovery by the xenophobic
Tibetan, British, and Chinese authorities.
At the same time, the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet and Tibet’s involvement
in the anticommunist struggle of the cold and hot wars began to impinge
ever so slightly on the popular mind, though the Tibetan catastrophe
was obscured behind the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and global U.S.-Soviet
competition. British and American leftist writers during this period, shifting
their utopian hopes from the discredited Stalin to the unknown Mao, wrote
glowingly of the Chinese revolution and used distorted information from an
older layer of anti-Tibetan, Christian missionary writings to add to the Chinese
communist propaganda against Tibet, portraying Tibetan Buddhism as a
diabolical, oppressive, feudal system of superstitious rituals and bloody sacrifices
used to torment simpleminded ‘‘serfs.’’ This wave of propaganda went a
long way toward forming the negative stereotype about Tibet and its Buddhism
that is only now and with great di≈culty being dislodged.
To summarize, since Tibetan Buddhism is a matrix containing in some
form all the elements of late Indian Buddhism, it presents to the West for the
first time a Buddhist civilization in its entirety, an alternative civilization to
both Christendom and modern, materialist, secular industrialism. It thus
impacts not only religion (as another world religion) but also and perhaps
more importantly contemporary psychology and philosophy, presenting alternatives
to both. It challenges the sciences, especially in presenting its mind
science as a complement to the physical sciences; medicine, by presenting a
Buddhist empirical as well as intuitive healing science and art; ethics and
governance, by presenting complementary perspectives, especially on individualism,
education, altruism, and nonviolence; and aesthetics and art, by contributing
an enlightenment-oriented perspective to the enterprise of awakening
new visions and insights in creation and performance.
Previous waves of Buddhism from other Asian countries made significant
102 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
contributions in most of these directions. But in India Buddhism made its
most totalistic contributions as a countercultural movement, and in Tibet—
and subsequently Mongolia—Buddhism developed from a countercultural
movement to a mainstream civilization. The Indo-Tibetan current, therefore,
brings the results of that full movement to America and into modern
awareness.
The main pioneers who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the United States
were the Venerables Geshe Wangyal (1901–83), Deshung Rinpoche (1906?–
87), Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–87), Tarthang Tulku (b. 1935), Kalu Rinpoche
(1905–89), and Lama Thupten Yeshe (1935–84). They were a≈liated with the
four main orders of Tibetan Buddhism. Because their stories have been often
told, I will not rehearse them in detail here. Still, some discussion is in order.
Geshe Wangyal arrived in 1955 and built a small center in New Jersey;
Deshung Rinpoche arrived in 1960 and built a small center in Seattle. Each
taught many individuals in secular professions, including academics, through
whom they di√used a broader knowledge of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism to
U.S. students. Settling in America when they did (before the post-1965 immigration
boom) and coming from the older generation, they kept a low profile,
and their centers remained modest. They did not grant Tantric initiations
except in the rarest circumstances, and they encouraged the study of the
Tibetan language as well as important philosophical texts of the monastic
curriculum. They also refrained from ordaining American monks, sending
a few of the most determined to Tibetan teachers in India to be evaluated
for ordination.
Trungpa Rinpoche was an incarnate lama of the Kagyu order who came to
America in 1970 after seven years in Great Britain, where he had built a
monastic center in Scotland and developed quite a following. He had abandoned
his monastic ordination some time earlier, and in the West he initially
adopted a kind of ‘‘wild man’’ approach. This ‘‘crazy wisdom,’’ as some of his
American followers dubbed it, involved the use of alcohol and psychedelics
as well as sexual openness and generally unconventional behavior. Trungpa
also worked closely with various Zen masters, notably the Venerable Shunryu
Suzuki Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center. Trungpa incorporated elements
of Zen meditation and Japanese aesthetics into his curriculum and attracted
many Zen practitioners as students. He wrote inspiring books, which
were distributed by Shambhala Publications, which itself grew from a small
Berkeley, California, bookstore into a nationally prominent publisher. He
attracted a large following and began to open centers, most notably Naropa
Tibetan Buddhism in America 103
University in Boulder, Colorado, the core institution in what quickly grew into
an alternative community that survives to this day in Boulder and Halifax,
Nova Scotia, called Shambhala International. By the end of the 1970s, Trungpa
had become much less wild, and his organizations were becoming more
established and conservative in outlook as well as more energetic in preserving
Tibetan traditions. Until his premature death in 1987, Trungpa Rinpoche
epitomized the totalizing tendency of Tibetan Buddhism to absorb all aspects
of the social world, creating not only religious institutions but also educational
facilities, communities, businesses, aesthetic styles, and cultural
forms in its drive to transform the environment into a support system for
individual liberation.
Tarthang Tulku was a reincarnation in the Nyingma order. Like Trungpa,
Tarthang had learned something of the wildness of countercultural youth,
though his involvement was with traveling hippies in India. He was much
more reclusive than Trungpa, however, and settled down in 1969 in Berkeley,
California, where he established the Nyingma Meditation Center and Dharma
Publications. Through astute business management, Tarthang developed the
press and soon raised enough money to purchase a large coastal property in
Sonoma County, where he began to build an extraordinary complex of Tibetan
buildings, beautiful in their architecture and sumptuous in their appointments.
The complex was a shrine to his devotion to the Nyingma order’s Guru
Padma Sambhava, who brought Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings to Tibet in
the eighth century and still lives mystically in Tibetan myth and imagination.
In this case, we see the Tibetan Buddhist attempt to create an alternative
world, a celestial architecture, and an intentional community.
The Venerable Kalu Rinpoche opened many Kagyu meditation centers
throughout the United States. Originally visiting at the invitation of Trungpa’s
organization, Kalu quickly attracted a strong following of his own as a result
of his special ability to teach meditation. Practitioners who learned from
him found they made quick progress and naturally became highly devoted to
their teacher.
Lama Thupten Yeshe was a member of the Gelukpa order, from Sera Monastic
University near Lhasa. He began teaching Americans at the end of
the 1960s at a monastery he founded in 1969 in Kopan, Nepal, near the
Boudhnath stupa outside of Kathmandu. He soon began traveling around the
world, creating with an associate, the reincarnate Lama Zopa Rinpoche (b.
1946), the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. In
America during the 1970s, Lama Yeshe founded a number of centers, the most
104 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
important of which was the Vajrapani Retreat center near Santa Cruz, California.
He too founded a successful publishing arm, Wisdom Publications,
which moved to America from England in the 1980s. Lamas Yeshe and Zopa
were the first to ordain American, European, and Australian monks and nuns,
and today they constitute the backbone of his worldwide community, though
the number of monasteries (as opposed to lay-oriented dharma centers) is
relatively small. After he died, Lama Yeshe was recognized as reincarnated in a
Spanish family and has been brought up as a reincarnate lama, thus beginning
a trend that may prove to be a watershed in the transmission of Tibetan
Buddhism in the West.
During the 1970s, as the publications, teachings, and meditation centers
grew, the founders of these centers began to invite the heads of their respective
orders to tour America, give talks, and meet local dignitaries. During
these visits, the training of American followers was put to the test. These
followers made donations to the visiting lamas, labored hard to follow traditional
Tibetan customs, and carefully attended to the extensive public relations
surrounding the visits. The Nyingmapas invited His Holiness Dudjom
Rinpoche, the Kagyupas invited His Holiness Karmapa Rinpoche, the Sakyapas
invited Sakya Trichen Rinpoche, and the Gelukpas invited the Ganden Tri
Rinpoche. When these distinguished lamas came, they met celebrities, senators
and members of Congress, church and academic leaders, and the parents
of followers.
This founding period was characterized by competition among the various
orders and centers within orders, which caused a sort of sectarianism to arise
among American followers. In Tibet, orders traditionally had competed for
resources and followers, but the competition was clearly always political or
economic. There was no sense of sectarian conflict—‘‘Your religion is inferior
to mine!’’—so Tibetan orders are not properly called sects.
Another important factor in this period was the development of relationships
between Tibetan Buddhists and followers of other Buddhist denominations,
most importantly Zen and Theravada Buddhism. As mentioned earlier,
Trungpa Rinpoche had made initial connections with Zen Buddhist practitioners,
and the familiar sitting practice was integrated into most Tibetan
Buddhist centers. The Pure Land and Lotus Sutra traditions, mainly still the
province of Japanese American Buddhists, had little connection with the burgeoning
Tibetan centers.
During this period, Theravada centers underwent major changes since
American practitioners of vipassana meditation were returning from practicing
Tibetan Buddhism in America 105
in India, Thailand, and Burma and began to teach European and African
Americans in a culturally neutral way. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and
Jack Kornfield founded the Barre Insight Meditation Center in 1971, and the
number of meditators there increased dramatically. This growth paralleled
that of Tibetan centers during that decade. Therefore, in addition to competition
among Tibetan Buddhist centers, competition existed between Zen,
Vipassana, and Tibetan Buddhist groups. Conversely, e√orts to bridge gaps
were made, with sitting practice serving as the main point of connection.
In fact, the Burma-based vipassana practice strongly resonated with Tibetan
lhaktong (critical wisdom practice), and the emphasis on mindfulness was
common to both. The Tibetan zhinay practice, one-pointed calming of mind,
resonated strongly with Japanese Zen, Chinese Ch’an, and Vietnamese Zen.
The critical insight dimension of Zen, the cultivation of doubt through focused
but critical concentration on a koan puzzle or paradox, also resonated
with vipassana/lhaktong, and during this time the teaching of American Zen
progressed beyond its simplistic beginnings in no-thought meditation to
include more study and some Buddhist aesthetics.
Notably absent from this pattern of visits by the heads of di√erent orders
was His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who is not the head of the Gelukpa order
but the head of the Tibetan ‘‘Buddhocratic’’ government and honorary head of
all the orders of Tibetan Buddhism. Geshe Wangyal’s followers and other
groups tried periodically to invite the Dalai Lama to visit the United States, but
the Chinese government sought to block his access to political leaders, seeing
him as an embarrassment to them and a threat to their control of Tibet. The
Indian government, internally supportive of the Dalai Lama and his community,
was reluctant to let him loose on the world, wary of Chinese pressure.
And the U.S. government, mindful of the alliances President Richard Nixon
and his adviser Henry Kissinger had made with China against Russia, was
unwilling to grant the Dalai Lama a visa, fearing that his presence would
strain U.S.-China relations. This situation finally changed in 1979, when President
Jimmy Carter normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China
and a politically engaged student of Geshe Wangyal, Joel McCleary, got Carter
to agree to a purely religious visit by the Dalai Lama.
In 1979, the Dalai Lama landed in New York, eventually visiting Massachusetts,
Virginia, and Washington, D.C. This put Buddhism on the national
agenda and prompted some students to found the nation’s fourth
major Tibetan Buddhist press, Snow Lion Publications of Ithaca, New York.
The visit proved to be the first of more than twenty to date, most two or three
106 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
weeks long. The Dalai Lama’s stance during these visits was complicated. He
was not visiting as a head of a religious order, since his primary responsibility
was to represent the Tibetan people as head of the Tibetan government in exile
in Dharamsala, India. So he formally eschewed all missionary aims, accepting
invitations to teach Buddhism within Buddhist organizations but insisting in
public appearances that his message was ‘‘the common human religion of
kindness and compassion,’’ which followers of any religion (or no religion at
all) could pursue. This stance had the salutary e√ect of defusing worries
inside leading Christian and Jewish organizations that the Dalai Lama might
become a pied piper leading away the younger generation. Also, when His
Holiness visited Buddhist centers, he always taught with the stated intention
of helping practitioners succeed with their personal brand of Buddhism, stating
his firm belief in the equal value of all forms of Buddhism (and even all
forms of religion) and urging his listeners to make their lives conform increasingly
to whatever religious ideals they held. This had the salutary e√ect of
defusing competition and sectarianism among Buddhist groups.
A second complication surrounding the Dalai Lama’s activities was the
issue of the tragedy of Tibet. During the first visits, in the early 1980s, he
talked on a universal and spiritual level, rarely mentioning the travails of his
people. His meetings with political figures were private. This time coincided
with a series of active negotiations between the Tibetan government in exile
and the administration in China of Deng Xiaoping, and observers hoped that
Deng would relax Mao Tse-tung’s destructive policies and o√er a pragmatic
new start for the Tibetan people. By the mid-1980s, however, Deng had purged
Hu Yaobang, citing as one reason the latter’s softness on Tibet. In 1987
and 1988, therefore, the Dalai Lama went to the U.S. Congress and the European
Parliament to present his famous Five-Point Peace Plan for Tibet, declaring
his wish that it become again a fully demilitarized ‘‘zone of ahimsa [nonviolence]’’
and asking for a withdrawal of Chinese occupation troops, an end
to the civilian Chinese population transfer policy intended to colonize Tibet,
genuine respect for Tibetans’ basic rights and freedoms, the restoration of
Tibet’s natural environment and protection of wildlife, the cessation of nuclear
waste dumping, and the commencement of earnest negotiations between
Chinese and Tibetans on the future of Tibet. He presented this plan
while declaring his willingness to accept Tibet’s formally becoming a part of
China if these conditions were granted and guaranteed by international plebiscite.
These peaceful overtures won the Dalai Lama the 1989 Nobel Peace
Prize, though the Chinese under Deng never engaged in serious negotiations
Tibetan Buddhism in America 107
with the Tibetans. The situation has subsequently worsened despite the example
set by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In fact, the vision of the first
communist empire falling apart and allowing its captive nations to regain
their freedom frightened the Chinese leadership and caused them to intensify
their e√orts to finish the Tibetan genocide and to assimilate whatever remained
into the Chinese motherland.
This political history matters for students of Tibetan Buddhism in America
because the emergence of the Tibet cause in public consciousness brought
an enormous amount of publicity. In the late 1980s, Tibet House U.S. was
founded to preserve Tibetan culture and di√use knowledge about it, drafting
Richard Gere and other celebrities as high-profile supporters of the Tibetan
cause and practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. The International Campaign
for Tibet was founded in 1988, and its overtly political agenda quickly won
support from the human rights community and from congressional leaders
on both the right and the left, even during President George H. W. Bush’s
strongly pro-China administration. The steadily increasing visibility of Tibet
culminated in 1997 with the release of two major motion pictures on Tibet,
Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, written by
Melissa Mathison of et fame. These films finally made Tibet a worldwide
watchword, and all forms of Buddhism were dragged into the limelight with
it. That fall, Time ran a cover story on Buddhism in America, with a picture of
Pitt (not a Buddhist) wearing a Tibetan jacket. More coverage accompanied
the success of the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness (1998), which sat for
more than ninety-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
In sum, after more than two decades of sustained work, the Dalai Lama
placed Buddhism on the map of American culture, with Tibetan Buddhism
gaining recognition as the living storehouse of all varieties of Buddhism that
flourished in the golden pluralistic phase of Indic Buddhism. Although this
rising popularity has alarmed fundamentalists of various persuasions, the
Dalai Lama’s careful adherence to his political responsibility as leader of the
Tibetan people enabled him to avoid being perceived as a guru or cult leader
and allowed him to develop a large following yet retain the respect of most
U.S. authorities.
But the Dalai Lama is not the only story here. American scholars and
translators have produced a mountain of publications, not only from the four
big Buddhist presses but also from mainstream presses and newer, smaller
upstarts. The result has been an unprecedented wealth of information on
Tibet, Tibetan history, Tibetan Buddhism, and Buddhism in general. An en-
108 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
terprising student can now study with considerable sophistication Buddhist
ethics, psychology, meditation, philosophy, and history. Naropa University,
founded in the 1970s by Trungpa Rinpoche, has persisted, and students now
can receive advanced degrees in Buddhist studies as well as Buddhist-inspired
training in a variety of humanistic disciplines.
The Internet o√ers a wealth of information on Tibet—a recent Google
search for ‘‘Tibetan’’ came up with nearly 5 million Web sites. When in 1991–
92 Tibet House U.S. worked with the Tibetan government in exile to sponsor
an International Year of Tibet focusing on Tibetan culture, the list grew to
seven thousand di√erent events in thirty-five countries, including more than
four thousand in the United States alone. These events ranged from an international
exhibition of Tibetan fine art, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred
Art of Tibet, to a major dog show of Tibetan Lhasa apsos, terriers, and
masti√s.
Under their own natural momentum as well as with encouragement from
Tibetan Buddhists, American converts to other Buddhisms in America have
become more engaged with the ethical, cultural, and intellectual components
of their traditions. Because of an almost myopic focus on meditation maintained
in earlier decades, many convert Buddhist groups experienced di≈culties
in their communities—most notably, ugly blowups caused by misbehaving
teachers.
Asian American Buddhist communities have been delighted with the increased
visibility of Tibetan Buddhism, which has in turn o√ered them greater
respect. Thus, the much-discussed divide in American Buddhism between
Asian American ethnic Buddhists and European and African American convert
Buddhists has begun to be bridged. For example, every time the Dalai
Lama teaches in any American city, a regional committee of Buddhist groups
is formed to invite him for some special event. Such events inevitably cut
across the ethnic/convert line.
A new wave of lamas has been rolling across the country, founding still
more centers. Most prominent among these have been Sogyal Rinpoche,
Penor Rinpoche, and Chagdud Rinpoche of the Nyingmapa order; Lama Zopa
Rinpoche and Gelek Rinpoche of the Gelukpa order; Tai Situ Rinpoche and
Chetsang Rinpoche of the Kagyupa order; and Sakya Trichen Rinpoche, the
head of the Sakyapa order.
Sogyal Rinpoche’s Rigpa Foundation has mustered a large international
following; his book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992) has had a farreaching
impact, selling nearly a million copies worldwide. He has hosted
Tibetan Buddhism in America 109
teachings of numerous senior lamas, beginning with the Year of Tibet ‘‘Nature
of Mind’’ teachings in New York in 1991. Most of his energies have gone into
Europe thus far, but he is beginning to turn his attention to America.
Chagdud Rinpoche has founded centers in California, has trained several
prolific translators, and has established a publishing house. Leaving other
lamas in charge of his many followers, he has recently ‘‘retired’’ to Brazil,
where he is building up another large community.
Penor Rinpoche became the head of the Nyingmapa order with the deaths
of Dudjom Rinpoche and Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche and has taught widely
throughout America. He has recognized Americans as reincarnations of Tibetan
lamas, most notably Catherine Burroughs, whom he recognized formally
as the reincarnation of the Tibetan woman teacher Akhon Lhamo. She
founded a large meditation center in Maryland known as Kunzang Palyul
Choling and has developed a stable, flourishing community there. Penor
Rinpoche also stirred considerable controversy when he recognized screen
actor Steven Seagal as the reincarnation of a Tibetan ‘‘wild’’ lama.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is a reincarnate lama from the Sherpa Tibetan community
in Nepal who took over responsibility for the Foundation for the
Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition after the death of Lama Thupten
Yeshe, building numerous centers in the United States as well as India, Europe,
South America, and Australia and continuing to expand Wisdom Publications.
Lama Zopa found the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe in a Spanish boy,
now named Osal Tenzin, who is being brought up in Nepal and Spain. This
recognition was somewhat trendsetting, since Lama Yeshe was not previously
a reincarnate, and his apparent choice to be reincarnated in a western body
was perceived as innovative. Lama Zopa often invites senior lamas and scholarly
geshes, including the Dalai Lama, from the Gelukpa order to teach at these
centers and has educational, psychological, and prison reform programs.
Gelek Rinpoche founded the Jewel Heart center in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
with branches in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Lincoln, Nebraska.
His group is steadily growing and has a number of celebrity followers.
Tai Situ Rinpoche is the most well known surviving member of the Karma
Kagyupa regency leadership, charged by H. H. Gyalwa Karmapa Lama to
discover his reincarnation and keep the order developing. The Tai Situ presided
over considerable expansion of the order during the 1980s, especially
the multi-million-dollar construction of a traditional Tibetan monastic temple
in Woodstock, New York, called Karma Triyana Dharmachakra. In the 1990s,
the Tai Situ rediscovered the Karmapa Lama as a boy from eastern Tibet,
110 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
though the recognition was marred by a challenge from another regent, the
Zhamar Rinpoche, who backed a di√erent boy from Lhasa. After a half a
decade of conflict, the Tai Situ’s choice, Urgyen Thinley Dorjey, has emerged
as the candidate accepted by the majority of Tibetan and western followers of
the Karma Kagyupa tradition, although the minority faction shows no signs
of giving in. The succession was more or less brought to a head and then
settled by the spectacular and dangerous midwinter escape from Tibet of the
young Ugyen Tinley Dorjey during the 2000 New Year’s celebration.
Chetsang Rinpoche, head of the Drigung Kagyyupa order, has a knack for
teaching Americans, since he spent some of his teenage years as an unknown
refugee in Texas, where he learned to speak perfect English. During his numerous
trips to the United States since the mid-1990s, he has taught many
disciples and founded numerous centers, the most important of which is in
Washington, D.C. His main building activity, however, has been in India,
where he has constructed an impressive complex in Dehra Dun, with a monastery,
temple, school, research library, and school of sacred art.
Finally, Sakya Trichen Rinpoche has traveled tirelessly to the West, and
the Sakyapas have brought a large group of practitioners into the advanced
stages of practice of their trademark Lamdrey ‘‘path and fruition’’ teachings.
The Venerable Deshung Rinpoche has been recognized as reincarnated in a
Tibetan American boy and is currently being educated in a monastery in
Nepal. The Sakyapas are improving a large property in Massachusetts, where
they horrified some of their environmentally minded neighbors by re-creating
the treeless landscape of southwestern Tibet where the Sakya monastery is
located. The site will eventually house a monastery with bountifully replanted
trees.
Many Tibetan centers have built impressive facilities in India as well as
America. Among important monasteries in India, the Namgyel monastery,
originally in Potala in Tibet and now the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery in
Dharamsala, has established a thriving institute (loosely a≈liated with Cornell
University) in Ithaca, New York, where students can study the tradition
with authentic teachers. And the Drepung Loseling Monastery, a college of the
world’s largest monastic university, originally from Lhasa and now still more
than four thousand strong in Mundgod in Karnataka in south India, has
established an Emory University–a≈liated branch in Atlanta. Loseling also
has several traveling tour groups of chanting and dancing monks that have
performed in more than five hundred cities and towns throughout the United
States and Canada, raising awareness of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan
Tibetan Buddhism in America 111
cause as well as substantial funds to support monks and build the monastery
in India.
Another mark of the most recent period in Tibetan Buddhism in America is
the emergence of Euro-American lamas. These practitioners comprise two
main types: those from the Nyingmapa and Kagyupa orders who have accomplished
the Tibetan three-year retreat and have begun to give teachings and
found centers, and those from the Sakyapa and Gelukpa orders who have
been monks or nuns for some time, have completed the Geshe degree or other
advanced studies, and/or performed shorter or longer retreats on specific
practices. Lamas Sara Harding and Surya Das are the most notable examples
of the first category (though more than two hundred Americans have graduated
from the three-year retreats conducted at the Nyingma retreat centers
in France), and Geshes George Dreyfus and Michael Roach are examples of
the second.
Various professions—medical, psychological, political, religious, educational,
and commercial—are beginning to find uses for elements of Buddhist
civilization, either through Tibetan Buddhism or through other Asian Buddhisms
now available to them.
In sum, the great event touted by Arnold Toynbee in a speech at Wellesley
College toward the end of his career—that is, the full encounter between
Buddhism and the West—is now fully under way. But what exactly is this
Tibetan Buddhism that has taken root in the United States? Tibetan Buddhism,
I have argued, is the totalizing form of Buddhism elaborated in India,
with monastic, messianic, and apocalyptic dimensions. While it remained
countercultural in India and in almost all other settings throughout Asia, it
became mainstream in Tibet, constituting the ‘‘sacred canopy’’ of Tibetan
civilization by supplanting the pre-Buddhist Tibetan ethos and sacralizing
the lifeworld of Tibet in Buddhist terms. It shared this totalized form with
the Mongolian nations and highly influenced the Manchu elite of Ching Dynasty
China.
Tibetan Buddhism has come to assume a much larger role in America than
the relatively small U.S. Tibetan population would warrant. One reason for
this outsized role may be the fact that Buddhism in other Asian countries has
remained essentially countercultural. That is, the ideology, ethos, and institutions
of Buddhism o√ered a liberation-seeking elite an alternative from a
mainstream royal, militaristic, and theistic culture.
Tibetan Buddhism, in contrast, took over all of Tibet’s mainstream ideas,
institutions, and ethical traditions, ‘‘taming’’ (in Buddhist parlance) the tribal
112 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
and national deities and eventually demilitarizing the entire nation, leaving it
tragically vulnerable to aggressive neighbors, as the ongoing genocide there
has demonstrated. But this history equips Tibetan Buddhism to supply the
pluralistic, eclectic American sacred canopy with an ideology, an ethos, and
institutions that countercultural forms of Buddhism are not as well suited
to supply.
For example, in ideology, Buddhism generally does not accept the existence
of a monotheistic Creator deity. Buddhists often will say that they are atheists,
a stance that has caused them to die in large numbers at the hands of jihadists
and crusaders of various kinds and to be aligned subliminally with communists
and secular humanists. However, Tibetan Buddhists reawaken the
Buddhist traditions that, far from denying the existence of tribal and national
deities (for example, Indra and Brahma) present them as disciples of
the Buddha and omnipotent creators. Tibetan Buddhists, in short, are not
atheists: they simply do not accept the hegemony of any particular divine
being. This stance enables Tibetan Buddhists to get along with Christian
mystics, Sufis, Vedantists, and other nonliteralistic theists, finding a≈nities
with believers who a≈rm that ‘‘God is love’’ and take seriously the prohibition
against idolatry.
In issues of ethos, most Buddhist peace activists are accustomed to working,
countercultural style, in protest movements. They point to Siddhartha’s
leaving his throne, his ceding his royal responsibilities and military leadership
to the higher ethic of the Buddhist monastic, his teaching of nonviolence,
tolerance, dialogue, and reconciliation. Tibetan Buddhists agree wholeheartedly
with these principles. However, they also bring forward the complexities
that arise in practice and were carefully considered over centuries in Indian
Buddhist reflection. For example, the ethics chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattva
Stages states that the bodhisattva (a messianically committed Buddhist)
should break the general prohibition against killing if it would save more lives
in the long run and should revolt when a tyrant is oppressing the people. So the
Tibetan Buddhist might be more flexible in understanding the di≈culties of a
government with the responsibility of rule and the concerns of foreign policy,
public health, and population control.
When it comes to institutions, many Buddhists consider general education
to be samsaric, concerned with developing mastery of worldly matters and reinforcing
the egotistical drives and ambitions of the ignorant being in the
world. When people drop out, go to a monastery or retreat center, and learn
techniques of contemplative withdrawal, they are on their way to learning what
Tibetan Buddhism in America 113
matters for liberation. The monastery and the university, therefore, are considered
quite opposed. But Tibetan Buddhists can point to India’s great monastic
universities of Nalanda, Kanchi, Vikramashila, Vallabhi, and Takshashila and
can understand at least the ‘‘liberal’’ elements of mundane education as parallel
to if not in ultimate harmony with the aim of enlightenment education.
Tibetan Buddhists can also take pride in Tibet’s vast monastic establishment—
the great universities of Drepung, Sera, Ganden, Tashi Lhunpo, Labrang Tashi
Kyil, Dagyab, Kumbum, Sakya, Tsurphu, Minling, and Rebgong. In fact, at
one time, sparsely populated Tibet had 6,254 teaching monasteries and monastic
universities. Education was the country’s key industry.
When it comes to American values such as equality, progress, and pluralism,
most Buddhists emphasize the hopelessness of the samsaric world system
and the general inadequacy of biological life, stressing their quest for
nirvana. Therefore, they tend to tolerate the inequalities of the various caste
systems, even reproducing social hierarchies within their sanghas (monastic
bodies). Tibetan Buddhism allowed the sangha’s influence on the originally
militaristic and hierarchical Tibetan society to be gradual and cool, rather
than sudden and disruptive, but over time Tibetans cultivated a sense of social
mobility through the monastic career ladder (even though opportunities were
not equal and hierarchies existed within the monastic system). The great
turning point in Tibetan social history was the advent in the thirteenth century
of the Tulku (reincarnation) system, which enabled the son or (mainly in
theory) daughter of the most humble peasant family to be recognized as the
reincarnation of a highly developed and respected spiritual teacher and social
leader—to be elevated from infancy to a high social position, to be educated by
the best tutors in the most sophisticated curriculum, and to assume a role of
respect and responsibility (thereby elevating the child’s birth relations). This
is a kind of Asian analogue of the ‘‘log cabin to White House’’ ideal, e√ected
in this case not through luck and pluck but through the biological cosmology
of karmic evolutionary action, reincarnation, and Tantric yoga. In short, at
least in its Tibetan form, karmic theory is highly individualistic in e√ect and
strongly supports American egalitarian ideals. The poorest child, we might
say, could be the reincarnation of a past president, chief executive o≈cer,
spiritual virtuoso, or concert pianist.
As far as an ideal of progress goes—an ideal that is being challenged by
conservative Christian notions of an impending apocalypse—most Buddhists
adopt the Brahmanical Kaliyuga idea that things are going to the dogs, so it
is better to progress individually toward liberation rather than to concern
114 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
oneself with social progress. The Tibetan Buddhist, however, clings to the
Kalachakra Tantra’s prophecy of Shambhala, a kind of Armageddonish apocalypse
and golden age narrative that sees this world, under the evolutionary
aegis of the wonder-working compassion of Shakyamuni Buddha in his
Kalachakra (Time Machine) Buddha form, as moving toward a great fulfillment
in the near future. So, while the imperative to individual spiritual development
remains primary, another dimension sees individual spiritual development
as contributing to planetary change that will bring all others into
liberation.
Finally, in regard to pluralism, the cornerstone of American civil religion,
the greatest threat today comes from fundamentalist movements. Buddhists,
by contrast, are in an excellent position to reinforce this ideal. Fundamentalists
undertook an e√ort to use born-again President George W. Bush
to break down church-state separation and hand government resources to
‘‘faith-based’’ initiatives, but these e√orts stalled when backers realized that
it might also be necessary to enrich non-Protestant groups. Ironically, each
of the religious institutions seeking funding—many wanting in their own
ways to convert others, many intolerant of alternatives—had to reassert some
sort of pluralist ideal to prevent the others from gaining advantage. Only the
nonliteralist, nonmissionary Buddhists have reasons to sacralize secularity,
not just to accept it temporarily as a necessary evil to prevent other religious
movements from advancing but to consider it a spiritual necessity, a
sacred norm, as evidenced in the edicts of the Emperor Ashoka (c. third
century b.c.e.).
If the sacred canopy over America is in fact a communally created patchwork
quilt—the pluralistic product of a giant quilting bee of the sacred traditions
of immigrant cultures from all over the world—Buddhists must be credited
for, among other accomplishments, finding something sacred in it.
appendix
Vehicles or Styles of Buddhism in India
A. Individualistic Style, Monastic Buddhism, dominant ca. 500 b.c.e.–0 c.e.
1. Emphasizes monasticism, as necessary for individual liberation.
2. Socially revolutionary, stressing ethical dualism, though antitheistic.
3. Ideal of monks and nuns is arhat (sainthood).
4. Lay community pushed toward tenfold path of good and bad evolutionary
action.
5. Reversal of warrior training produces person free of wild egocentric drives.
Tibetan Buddhism in America 115
6. Social result: tamed warrior society with values supporting urban, merchant
classes.
7. Spread outside of India, mainly to Sri Lanka, Central Asia, Iran, and West
Asia.
B. Universalistic Style, Messianic Buddhism, dominant ca. 0–500 c.e.
1. Incorporating core monasticism, reached out nondually into lay society to
transform social ethic through love and compassion.
2. Socially evolutionary: monasteries develop into universities.
3. Ideal of bodhisattva, hero/ine who aims to liberate all beings from su√ering
and transform universe into Buddhaverse; doctrine of Three Bodies of
Buddha: Truth, Beatific, Emanation.
4. Nondualism of nirvana/samsara undergirds nonduality of wisdom and
compassion, and of monastic sangha and lay society.
5. Conscious adoption of process of evolution, embarking on career of
millions of future individual lives to evolve to Buddhahood.
6. Social result: moved society toward a more universalistic orientation, freed
popular imagination to envision infinite Buddhaverse.
7. Spread wherever monastic style spread and to China, Mediterranean.
C. Apocalyptic Style, Esoteric, Magical Buddhism, dominant ca. 500–1000 c.e.
1. Monastic universities reach out beyond the literate state into marginal areas.
Unpacks furthest implications of messianic style.
2. Ideal of Mahasiddha, female or male Great Adept, the ‘‘psychonaut’’ of
Indian inner science, actual perfect Buddha maintaining ordinary human
form in history, latent kingship of individual explicated ritually and
artistically.
3. Nondualism elucidated to include everything from sexuality to death;
wisdom-compassion union becomes wisdom-bliss union; Buddhahood as
male-female-sexual-union-orgasmic reality.
4. Apocalyptic insistence on accelerating history and evolution, realization of
individual Buddhahood and universal Buddhaverse preferably in this
lifetime, through magical, high-tech means.
5. Social result: elevation of women, expansion of culture to marginal low
castes, tribals, aliens, permeation of high culture with aesthetic values,
loosening of rigidities, living beyond this-worldly identities, unilateral
disarmament.
6. Spread everywhere the monastic and messianic styles went, though in subtle
streams, reaching Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and Tibet; uniquely kept in total
integration with two previous styles in Tibet and later Mongolia.
The first of these five-hundred-year periods, the Monastic Buddhist period, made
its main foothold outside of India in Sri Lanka, where it continues today. The second,
the Messianic Buddhist period, also spread to Sri Lanka but opened up new territory in
Central Asia and China as well. The third, the Apocalyptic Buddhist period, integrated
116 r o b e r t a . f. t h u r m a n
with both monastic and messianic institutions, spread throughout the Buddhist world
in small streams but then transplanted itself wholesale into Tibet, especially because
of the Islam-driven cultural transformation of Indian Buddhism from the eleventh
century forward. After the loss of Buddhist India—the matrix civilization within which
the three styles or vehicles were nested—Sri Lanka rejected the apocalyptic and messianic
styles and became a bastion of the monastic style alone, East Asia emphasized
the monastic and messianic styles, allowing only a trickle of the apocalyptic to survive,
while Tibet alone attempted to incorporate all three styles in their originally
integrated pattern.
notes
1. This quotation paraphrases a chart I made for the introduction to my Essential
Tibetan Buddhism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 17.
2. For vehicles or styles of Buddhism in India, see the appendix to the chapter.
3. See, e.g., Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism
in America (Boston: Shambhala, 1992); Emma Layman, Buddhism in America (Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1976); Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds., The Faces of Buddhism
in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Thomas A. Tweed, The
American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
PART III
Hindus
& Sikhs
This page intentionally left blank
PR EM A A. K U R I E N
Mr. President, Why Do You ExcludeUs from Your Prayers?
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism
The title of this essay is taken from a petition sent by the Hindu
International Council against Defamation (HICAD) and several hundred individual
Hindus to President George W. Bush following the events of September
n, 2001.!
It refers to the fact that Bush included Muslim, Christian, and
Jewish leaders in his national prayer service on September 16 but excluded
Hindus. In the days following 9/11, numerous interfaith services were organized
in different parts of the country. These services, formerly JudeoChristian
affairs conducted by Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and Jewish
rabbis, now typically included Muslim clerics, who repeatedly emphasized
that they were part of the same tradition as Christians and Jews, saying,
"We worship the same God as you do." Almost overnight, America's JudeoChristian
sacred canopy seemed to stretch into an Abrahamic one that included
Muslimsas well.
The Clinton administration had already recognized the need to include
Muslims, "the fastest growing religious group in the U.S.," within the fabric
of American religions, but only in the wake of 9/11 did this initiative bear fruit,
with the term "Abrahamic" entering public discourse.2
Hindu Americans,
however, viewed this reconfiguration of American religion with alarm, fearing
that itwouid further marginalize nonwestern religions such as Hinduism.
The HICAD petition is a modified version of a post-o/ii letter written to
President Bush by an liuro-American Hindu and subsequently posted on a
Hindu Internet discussion group. The petition later circulated on several Indian
American Internet sites and was widely discussed in laudatory terms.
Several Indian American newspapers also carried the letter. (For the full text,
see the appendix.)
Three aspects of the petition merit analysis. l:
irst and most obviously, the
petition calls attention to the fact that Hindus constitute a numerically signifi-
6
119
120 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
cant portion of American society. Second, the petition describes U.S. Hindus
as model Americans:
We are a hard working people who contribute to the American society,
economy, education and quality of life, in a proportion much larger than
our numbers. . . . Non-violence, pluralism, and respect (not just tolerance)
of other traditions of worship to the One Almighty God, are integral parts
of [Hinduism’s] basic tenets. We are a family oriented people, with very
low divorce rates. We are frugal, save for our children’s education, and
support our elders and extended families. Because of these beliefs, HinduAmericans
are called ideal citizens.
Finally, the petition draws attention to the di√erences between Hinduism and
Islam.≥
While the petition does so subtly, the original letter stresses that Bush
needs to help educate Americans to the fact that ‘‘Hinduism is very, very
di√erent from Islam . . . the opposite in fact, in many integral ways.’’ Emphasizing
the distinction between Hinduism and Islam becomes prominent in the
post-9/11 public statements of many representatives of American Hindus.
For some years, groups of Hindu Americans have challenged the portrayals
of Hinduism prevalent in the wider society and have worked to ensure that the
religion is recognized as an important contributor to the American religious
mosaic. Here, I focus on some of these e√orts, particularly the di√erences
between such strategies in the pre-9/11 and immediate post-9/11 periods.
Before 9/11, Hinduism’s promoters extolled its virtues (antiquity, tolerance,
pluralism, and nonviolence) as well as its theological and scientific sophistication.
Hinduism’s defenders also contested negative American stereotypes
of the religion—for example, that it is polytheistic (explaining the petition’s
reference to ‘‘the One Almighty God’’), idolatrous, caste ridden, and misogynistic
(hence the petition’s claim that ‘‘Hindus are a family-oriented people
with very low divorce rates’’).
Immediately following 9/11, however, many Hindu spokespersons went on
the o√ensive, publicly attacking Islam, emphasizing the di√erences between
Hinduism and Islam, and taking a strong anti-Pakistani position. These
spokespersons also criticized scholars of religion and organizations such as
the Academy of American Religion for allegedly being anti-Hindu and proIslamic.
This anti-Islamic, Hinducentric platform was not just a post-9/11
development. The two faces of American Hinduism that I describe as ‘‘genteel
multiculturalism’’ and ‘‘militant nationalism’’ have long coexisted.∂
But in the
past, Hindu nationalist attitudes were confined largely to intragroup discus-
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 121
sions and presentations, while Hindu American spokespersons publicly projected
the kindly visage of genteel multiculturalism. After 9/11, however, antiIslamic
Hindu nationalism emerged publicly for the first time. In addition,
many more members of the Hindu American community were galvanized to
defend Hinduism and India.
Most adults of Indian origin in the United States today are immigrants who
arrived after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. The
2000 census found 1,678,765 Asian Indians living in the United States. They
were also one of the fastest growing communities in the 1990s, with a growth
rate of 106 percent. Key to this explosive growth has been the influx of computer
data programmers (on h-1b visas) and their families. Indians have
become prominent in the field of information technology and are now important
players within the American computer industry. Although their numbers
are relatively small, Indian Americans wield disproportionate influence because
they are among the country’s wealthiest and most educated foreignborn
groups.∑
No o≈cial figures exist on the religious distribution of U.S. Indians. According
to Indian census figures, Hindus constitute more than 80 percent of
the population in India.∏
Hindus likely constitute a much smaller proportion
of Indian Americans, since Indian religious minorities, particularly Sikhs and
Christians, are present in much larger numbers in the United States. Estimates
of the proportion of Indian Americans from a Hindu background range
from 45 to 76 percent.π
While ‘‘upper’’ castes form around 25 percent of the
Indian population, given the elite character of the immigration to the United
States, most Indian Americans tend to be drawn from this background.
My findings here draw on an eight-year study and book in progress on the
new forms, practices, and interpretations of Hinduism in the United States.
As part of this research, I studied twelve Hindu organizations representing the
five major categories of Hindu organizations in the U.S.: satsangs (local worship
groups), bala vihars (educational associations for children), temples, student
organizations, and umbrella groups. In addition to participating in the
activities and programs of the organizations, I conducted detailed interviews
with leaders and many of the members (more than 120 first- and secondgeneration
Hindu Indian Americans in all). I have also followed the activities
of the Hindu Indian community around the country by reading several
Indian American newspapers (India West, India Post, India Journal) and the international
magazine Hinduism Today, published in Hawaii. This chapter, however,
is based primarily on analysis of discussions posted on four Internet
122 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
groups as well as articles and discussions on several Web sites and Internet
magazines devoted to Indian or Hindu related topics.
Since 2000, the Internet has become a major site of Hindu American activity.
Given the educational and occupational profile of Indian Americans, it is
not surprising that they have such a large Internet presence. The Internet enables
Indian Americans to disseminate information around the world within a
matter of minutes and provides a forum for discussion, agenda planning,
group mobilization, and the rapid formulation of responses. Through the
Internet, even isolated individuals and small groups can be closely networked
to provide support for people and issues outside of the mainstream. The four
discussion groups I studied consisted of between 150 and 900 members each.
Anywhere from five to fifty messages were posted daily. The postings included
(1) news items and articles from a variety of sources (newspapers, magazines,
other Internet sites, and books); (2) commentary and discussion about
current and future events; and (3) reports on actions that individuals and
groups had taken or were going to take in support of Hindu and Indian causes
(for example, copies of letters sent to newspapers, politicians, and other organizations;
speeches given or to be given; and notices of meetings and
conferences).
As sociologist R. Stephen Warner points out, immigrants held onto their
religious identity and practices even during the assimilationist era of American
history, since Americans have traditionally viewed religion as the most
acceptable and nonthreatening basis for community formation and expres-
sion.∫
In a now classic formulation of the patterns of European immigration
to the United States at the turn of the century, Will Herberg writes,
Of the immigrant who came to this country it was expected that, sooner or
later, either in his own person or through his children, he would give up
virtually everything he had brought with him from the ‘‘old country’’—his
language, his nationality, his manner of life—and would adopt the ways of
his new home. Within broad limits, however, his becoming an American
did not involve his abandoning the old religion in favor of some native
American substitute. Quite the contrary, not only was he expected to retain
his old religion . . . but such was the shape of America that it was largely in
and through his religion that he, or rather his children and grandchildren,
found an identifiable place in American life.Ω
Writing about contemporary immigrants from India and Pakistan, Raymond
Williams makes the same claim: ‘‘In the United States, religion is the
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 123
social category with clearest meaning and acceptance in the host society, so
the emphasis on religious a≈liation is one of the strategies that allows the
immigrant to maintain self identity while simultaneously acquiring community
acceptance.’’∞≠
The literature on immigrant religion in the United States
indicates that religious organizations become the means of maintaining and
expressing ethnic identity not just for non-Christians like the Hindus but
also for groups such as Chinese Christians, Korean Christians, and Maya
Catholics.∞∞
Because religion in the United States defines and sustains immigrant ethnic
life, religion and religious institutions come to be more important in the
immigrant context than in the home country. Thus, Williams indicates, ‘‘Immigrants
are religious—by all counts more religious than they were before
they left home—because religion is one of the important identity markers that
helps them preserve individual self-awareness and cohesion in a group.’’∞≤
A multicultural society pressures immigrants to create a public rather than
purely private ethnic identity. Because of the importance of religion and ethnicity
in defining Americans’ personal identities, immigrants frequently must
explain the meaning of their beliefs and practices not only to their own children
but also to American friends and coworkers. Thus, religious doctrines
have to be recast to fit American circumstances. Often, non-Christians find
themselves having to legitimize their religion by drawing parallels to Christian
concepts and practices. Religious beliefs also have to be simplified and
summarized to be presented in ‘‘sound bite’’ versions. In addition, immigrants
have the burden of having to confront the negative stereotypes and to
correct prevailing misrepresentations of their culture and religion.
Thus, serving as the repository of ethnicity leads to profound transformations
in immigrant religions.∞≥
Immigrant religions experience changes in
organization and in interpretation. Because religious institutions generally
become the primary ethnic and community centers for immigrants, they increasingly
manifest congregationalism and lay leadership.∞∂
As de facto ethnic
institutions, most immigrant religious organizations also develop regional
and national associations to unify the group, define members’ identities, and
represent their interests.∞∑
Armand Mauss points out that new religions in the United States have
always had to maintain a delicate balancing act between assimilating to established
American patterns of religious organization and expression (a strategy
of accommodation) and maintaining separateness and distinctiveness (a
strategy of resistance).∞∏
Too much accommodation jeopardizes distinctive-
124 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
ness and risks a complete disappearance. Too much distinctiveness or militancy,
however, incurs hostility and repression. According to James Davidson
Hunter’s essay in this volume, leaders of religious organizations have accomplished
this dance between assimilation and resistance through a variety of
internal (intragroup) and external negotiations.
After briefly describing the types of internal negotiations taking place
within the Hindu American community, this chapter focuses on the external
negotiations in which Hindu American leaders have engaged over the past few
years. Now that the religious traditions of post-1965 immigrants have become
institutionalized, they are increasingly making public claims—demanding
recognition and acceptance as American religions. Public acceptance of Judaism
as an American religion (along with Christianity) after World War II
radically transformed the country’s religious landscape and with it the selfdefinition
of the American nation. We seem to be at a similarly historic point
now. Following 9/11, there have been attempts to refashion America’s JudeoChristian
religious identity into a tripartite Abrahamic model inclusive of
Muslims as well as Christians and Jews. This attempt is being challenged by
groups such as Hindus and Buddhists who argue that it is too narrow and
conservative Christians who see it as too broad.∞π
While it is too early to gauge
the relative success or failure of the Abrahamic model, the public arguments
made by critics as well as supporters bear watching.
Religion seems to have become more important for Hindus as a marker of
identity in the United States. Many of the Hindu immigrants I interviewed
mentioned that they had become more religious in this country. In India, they
generally took Hinduism and their identity as Hindus for granted, whereas in
the United States they had to think about the meaning of their religion and
religious identity for the first time. Other Hindu immigrants claimed that they
were not especially religious but nevertheless participated in Hindu organizations
for social and cultural reasons and ‘‘for the sake of the children.’’
Unlike many other established religions, Hinduism lacks a founder, a
central authority, and a single canonical text or commentary. Consequently,
Hinduism in India consists of an extraordinary array of practices, deities,
texts, and schools of thought. Some observers even question whether one
unitary religion called ‘‘Hinduism’’ exists at all, arguing instead that ‘‘what we
call ‘Hinduism’ is a geographically defined group of distinct but related reli-
gions.’’∞∫
So the nature and character of Hinduism varies greatly by region,
caste, and historical period.
For all these reasons as well as the tendency among Hindus to emphasize
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 125
orthopraxy over orthodoxy, the average Hindu immigrant is often unable to
explain to curious Americans the meaning of Hinduism and its central tenets.
In the words of Vasudha Narayanan, a Hindu, ‘‘We are forced to articulate over
and over again what it means to be a Hindu and an Indian to our friends and
our children, and one feels ill-equipped for the task. [In India] one was never
called upon to explain Deepavali or Sankaranti [festivals], and least of all,
‘Hinduism.’ ’’∞Ω
Hindu American organizations seek to fill this need.
Leaders of Hindu American organizations have been trying to recast and
reformulate Hinduism to make it a suitable vehicle for Hindu Americans to
use for assimilating into multicultural America. These leaders have taken
upon themselves the task of simplifying, standardizing, and codifying the
religion to make it easier to understand, articulate, and practice. Hindu Web
sites summarize the ‘‘central beliefs’’ of Hinduism or the ‘‘basic principles of
Hindu dharma.’’ Speakers at Hindu student organizations give talks about the
‘‘essence of the Gita’’ (which is generally defined in the United States as the
central Hindu text). This process creates a capsulized, intellectual Hinduism
that di√ers substantially from the diversity of ritual practices and caste observances
that characterizes everyday Hinduism in India.
Interpretations of Hinduism in the United States explicitly compare and
contrast it with Abrahamic religions (the term ‘‘Abrahamic’’ was being used
in some Hindu American Internet discussion groups long before 9/11). Many
Hindu American leaders are interested in transforming Hinduism into a
global, universal religion instead of an ethnic religion tied to India and to
the Indian people. In this regard, there have also been attempts to institutionalize
conversion practices and ceremonies and to provide support to Western
converts.
When I refer to the development of an American Hinduism, I mean the
many modifications of Hinduism that have taken shape as Hindu immigrants
and their children have developed an ethnic identity and community in the
United States. As Mauss points out, some of these modifications represent the
outcome of attempts to accommodate to the American environment by making
Hinduism more compatible with American culture and society.≤≠
Others
arise out of the struggles of being nonwhite immigrants and religious minorities
in the United States and out of trying to resist assimilation by emphasizing
the distinctness of Hinduism and Indian culture. The contradiction
between these two intertwined strategies is embedded in the emerging American
Hinduism. One manifestation of these contradictions can be seen in the
two sides of ‘‘o≈cial’’ American Hinduism, by which I mean the articulation
126 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
of Hinduism by spokespersons of Hindu American umbrella organizations.≤∞
(This I contrast with ‘‘popular’’ Hinduism, or the beliefs and practices of the
Hindu masses in the United States.)
Hindu American leaders promote a genteel multiculturalism that emphasizes
the tolerance and pluralism of Hinduism and its contributions to American
society and to solving global problems. Many leaders, however, simultaneously
support a militant Hindu nationalism replete with diatribes against
Muslims, Christians, and secular Hindus. Several scholars have argued that
Hindu nationalism has more support among Hindus in the United States than
in India, since it resonates more in the diaspora, where Hindus are a racial
and religious minority.≤≤
Although the two sides seem very di√erent, they
are linked. The same people often promote both facets, albeit in di√erent
contexts.
Jews, for example, are used as a model in both cases. In multiculturalist
discourse, Jews are emulated as a highly successful group that has integrated
into mainstream American society while maintaining its religious and cultural
distinctness, close community ties, and connections with the home country.
Militant nationalists, in contrast, emphasize a Hindu holocaust (at the hands
of the Muslims) and the need for Hindus to have a religious homeland like
Israel. Right-wing Hindu nationalist groups have links to extremist Jewish
groups, joining together against a common Muslim enemy.≤≥
The two different
self-representations grow out of the contradictions of being part of a
professionally successful but racialized minority group in a multicultural society.
Both are strategies to obtain recognition and validation within American
society, one drawing on a model-minority discourse celebrating the achievements
of Hindu culture and Hindu Indian Americans and the other drawing
on an oppressed-minority discourse that highlights a history of victimization
and the need for recompense and self-determination.≤∂
The United States has several types of Hindu umbrella organizations. Some
—for example, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (vhpa), the Hindu
Swayamsevak Sangh, and the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party—
are branches of Hindu organizations based in India. Others, such as the
southern-California-based Federation of Hindu Associations and the New
Jersey–based Infinity Foundation, are independent, regional, American organizations.
These latter organizations sometimes have informal links with the
other groups.
In 1970, the vhpa, a branch of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in India, was
founded in New York. It is the oldest Hindu American umbrella organization
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 127
established in the United States. According to its Web site, the vhpa was
founded to support Hindu American families facing the challenges of living
in a new country.≤∑
In 1987, however, the vhpa reached out to students,
forming the Hindu Student Council, which regularly organizes campus events
open to non-Hindus and showcasing various facets of Hindu life.
At these and other public events, Hindu American leaders characterize
Hinduism as the only world religion that is truly tolerant and pluralistic. A
verse from the Rig Veda, ‘‘Truth is one, sages call it by di√erent names’’
(1.164.46), is constantly reiterated in support of this claim. According to
the Federation of Hindu Associations, Hinduism is the most suitable religion
for the twenty-first century because the modern pluralistic world ‘‘requires
all religions to a≈rm [the] truth of other traditions to ensure tranquility.’’≤∏
Only Hinduism fits the bill. Therefore, the Federation of Hindu Associations
takes as its mission the safeguarding of Hinduism ‘‘for our children, for the
world.’’≤π
Many Hindu American leaders also refer to Hinduism as sanatana
dharma (eternal faith), reinforcing the point that it is the most ancient and
universalistic of all religions.
Hindu umbrella organizations articulate the content and meaning of Hindu
American identity. According to the leaders of these groups, they are the proud
descendants of the world’s oldest living civilization and religion. Hindu Americans
are characterized as a group that has maintained the balance between
materialism and spirituality, adapting to American life without losing their
inner values and cultural integrity. These Hindu organizations also counter
negative American images of Hinduism by arguing that it is very sophisticated
and scientific. Hindu American publications and Web sites make this point
through many examples, such as the Hindu view that the universe is billions of
years old and the sophisticated level of ancient Indian knowledge regarding
astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, and physics.
Hindu American leaders explicitly appeal to the ‘‘model minority’’ label, as
in the petition to George W. Bush. They attribute the success of Hindu Americans
to their religious and cultural heritage, which, the leaders argue, gives
Hindu Americans a special aptitude for science and math and makes them
adaptable, hardworking, and family oriented. Community spokespersons indicate
that these qualities, together with a√luence and professional expertise
(particularly in the fields of computers, medicine, and engineering), make
Hindu Indian Americans a group with an important leadership role to play in
twenty-first-century America.
In 1997, the vhpa spawned American Hindus against Defamation
128 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
(ahad), perhaps the first Hindu umbrella group explicitly aimed at American
society at large. ahad seeks aggressively to defend Hinduism against defamation,
commercialization, and misuse. According to Ajay Shah, the group’s
convener, ‘‘In seeking the honor of Hindus and demanding they not be ridiculed,
. . . we are being good Americans. In our fight for Hindu dignity, we are
championing American pluralism.’’≤∫
The organization has helped organize
several protest campaigns against the use of Hindu deities, icons, and texts by
American businesses and the entertainment industry. For example, ahad
and other Hindu organizations launched protest campaigns against the Gap
clothing store’s Om line of perfume, a cd cover released by Sony Music
featuring a distorted image of a Hindu deity, an episode of The Simpsons on the
Fox network caricaturing the Hindu god Ganesh, a Xena: Warrior Princess episode
in which Lord Krishna was a character, the use of a verse of the Gita as
background music during an orgy scene in the film Eyes Wide Shut, and a shoe
company and a company making toilet seats that used pictures of Hindu
deities on their products. In all of these cases, ahad persuaded the companies
in question to withdraw or modify the o√ending products. ahad’s
success was followed by the formation of several other antidefamation groups
around the country, including hicad, based in New Jersey, which organized
the petition drive targeted at George W. Bush.
Other Hindu organizations have focused on the portrayal of Hinduism
within academia. This is the central concern of the New Jersey–based Infinity
Foundation. In 2000, Infinity founded the Educational Council of Indic Traditions
and an associated Internet discussion group. The council seeks to ‘‘be
involved in the process of conducting independent research to (a) document
the contributions by India to world civilization, and to (b) ascertain the degree
to which Indic traditions and their contributions are accurately and adequately
portrayed in contemporary American society. Preliminary findings indicate
that Indic traditions, which include Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism,
have been and continue to be misrepresented, stereotyped, or pigeonholed
both in academic institutions and by the mass media.’’≤Ω
This mission
statement made clear that the term ‘‘Indic’’ excluded religions that had been
‘‘imported’’ into India, such as Islam and Christianity. Furthermore, although
the term ‘‘Indic traditions’’ was defined to include Buddhism, Sikhism, and
Jainism, the foundation has in practice focused largely on Hindu traditions
and culture.
One of the Educational Council of Indic Traditions’ first activities was to
send a letter to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which had
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 129
funded a project to train high school teachers to teach the Ramayana. The
letter protested the inclusion of one lesson (out of a total of around forty) in
which the author, anthropologist Susan Wadley, had used a contemporary
Dalit (lower caste) song critical of the Ramayana to make the point that caste
ideology was contested in India.≥≠
Describing the Dalit author of the song as
an ‘‘anti-Hindu activist,’’ the letter argues that many Americans are Hindus
and that teachers and scholars therefore have a responsibility to be sensitive
about how they represent the religion in a multicultural classroom context:
This complaint is on behalf of United States citizens and parents of school
children. Hinduism and Sikhism are no longer merely about a far away
exotic land that Americans have little to do with. We have Hindus and Sikhs
right here in our classrooms today, amongst our o≈ce co-workers and as
our neighbors. It is irresponsible for any multicultural school to introduce
a protest song against Hindus and Sikhs that includes hate speech. . . .
What does this do to foster mutual respect and understanding among
di√erent ethnic and religious communities in America’s sensitive tapestry,
now represented in classrooms? Should Government funds be used to
create such racially and religiously inflammatory teaching materials, denigrating
to one’s classmates’ sensitivities, ironically in the name of multiculturalism?
. . . [S]uch bias . . . would lead to a warped understanding of
others’ history and religions and to unintended consequences, including
stereotyping and hatred of minority groups.≥∞
Before 9/11, the president of the foundation, Rajiv Malhotra, spoke and wrote
publicly about Hinduism’s tolerance, pluralism, and dynamism.≥≤
He emphasized
that many Hindu ideas had influenced important Western thinkers
(such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Jung). He also noted that Hindu concepts
and practices had been incorporated into quantum mechanics, meditation,
yoga, and herbal medicine, while lamenting that Hinduism’s contributions to
these areas have not yet been acknowledged.≥≥
Malhotra began contracting
sympathetic scholars to write papers and books documenting ancient Indian
contributions to mathematics, science, technology, philosophy, and psychology
as well as organizing conferences to bring together such scholars.
Several other Hindu leaders around the country also spoke against what
they felt were fundamental misrepresentations of Hinduism within American
society. These e√orts focused on three central issues: Hindu conceptions of
the divine, the nature of the caste system, and the position of women in Hindu
society.
130 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
Many American Hindu spokespersons objected to their religion being
characterized as ‘‘polytheistic’’ and ‘‘idol worshipping.’’ They pointed out that
although the Hindu pantheon consists of an array of deities, many Hindus
believe that all of these deities are di√erent forms manifested by one Supreme
Being. They argued that most Hindus worship a primary deity and that some
traditions (such as Vaishnavism) acknowledged the existence only of that
primary deity. On this basis, these representatives claimed that Hinduism was
in fact a monotheistic religion. Others maintained that essentially western
categories such as monotheism and polytheism are inappropriate to describe
Hindu notions of the divine. Similarly, most American Hindu leaders found
the English term ‘‘idol’’ o√ensive, since it carried the negative connotation
that the worshipper considered the graven image to be divine. They preferred
the term ‘‘icon’’ or ‘‘image’’ and argued that these images were intended only
to represent the idea of the divine and to provide the worshipper with a
tangible mental focus.
Hindu Indian American leaders also maintained that the caste system was
never religiously sanctioned by Hinduism and thus was not central to Hindu
practice.≥∂
The absence of immutable birth-based caste groups in the Rig Veda
along with Lord Krishna’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘‘The four orders
of men arose from me, in justice to their natures and their works’’ (4:13), were
often cited in support of the argument that the varna system described in
Hindu scriptures was based on occupation and individual qualities, not birth.
They argued that manuals such as the Laws of Manu that emphasized caste
prescriptions and proscriptions were not part of Hindus’ sruti, or primary
scriptural corpus (which is believed to contain revealed wisdom), but were
part of the smriti, or secondary scriptures (which are not considered divinely
ordained).
The position of women within Hinduism was another sensitive issue addressed
by Hindu American leaders, who argued that Hinduism gave women
and men the same rights and that gender equality and respect for women
therefore constituted integral parts of the Hindu tradition. To support their
arguments, these leaders pointed to the presence of several powerful goddesses
in the Hindu pantheon. Furthermore, these leaders contended that
women were held in great esteem in ancient Hindu India. Many of these
leaders claimed that the Muslim conquest of India was responsible for the
subsequent decline in the status of women.
Other umbrella groups focused on attaining public acknowledgment of
Hinduism as an American religion. In September 2000, despite some opposi-
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 131
tion from conservative Christians, Indian American lobby groups persuaded
Congress to allow a Hindu priest to open a session of Congress for the first
time (the occasion being an address by Indian prime minister to a joint session),
an achievement reported with great pride by Indian American newspapers
and Web sites. A second indication of Hindu Americans’ recognition
by Washington came a month later, when President Bill Clinton issued a
proclamation from the White House wishing Indian Americans a happy Diwali
(an important Hindu festival). In return for Silicon Valley’s contributions
to the Democratic Party for the 2000 elections, Indian American computer
professionals had requested that the White House o≈cially recognize the
festival. The Indian American India Post reported that Indian Americans were
jubilant when Clinton issued the greeting, since this ‘‘is a symbolic gesture
that speaks volumes to the fact that Indian culture is accepted as part of
America’s overall fabric.’’≥∑
As will be discussed later in this chapter, the tolerant and pluralistic tone of
the public voice of Hindu Americans changed overnight with the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. The militant anti-Islamic, Hinducentric side,
previously hidden from public view, suddenly emerged. Many Hindu Indian
Americans bombarded their politicians and the media with anti-Pakistani
and anti-Islamic propaganda filled with quotations from the Quran and called
radio and television talk shows to criticize Islam. (One Internet group even
circulated talking points for Hindu Americans to use while calling such
shows.) Others spoke up at town meetings to condemn the treatment of
minorities in Muslim countries and to challenge Muslim speakers’ positive
portrayals of Islam. Members of one Internet discussion group shot o√ letters
to the president of the American Academy of Religion, Vasudha Narayanan,
demanding that the organization sponsor panels on Islamic fascism and on
‘‘Jihad: God as Weapon of Mass Destruction’’ at the group’s upcoming annual
meeting. Such gestures, they claimed, would counterbalance the organization’s
excessive focus on Hindu fascism. Another member of the same group
documented Hinduism scholars’ alleged contempt for Hinduism and Hindus
by compiling a list from the Internet Archives of Religions in South Asia and
from the Internet archives of the Society for Hindu-Christian studies. This
putative evidence was then sent to the president of the American Academy of
Religion as well as to several Internet discussion groups. Some Hindu Americans
also sent e-mails and letters to ‘‘south Asian’’ groups to press a point that
they had been making all along: India has nothing in common with Islamic
countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh and should therefore not be
132 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
lumped together with them. Groups such as the Global Organization of Persons
of Indian Origin were also criticized for trying to create a pan-Indian
platform including both ‘‘Indic’’ and ‘‘non-Indic’’ members.
In the weeks immediately following 9/11, the Infinity Foundation’s Malhotra
was invited to several universities to speak about the unfolding events from
a Hindu perspective. In light of the post-9/11 backlash in the United States, ‘‘a
lot of Hindus suddenly have started realizing they better stand up and di√erentiate
themselves from Muslims or Arabs,’’ journalist Sarah Wildman quotes
Malhotra as saying.≥∏
In his talks at American University and Princeton University,
he took the o√ensive against Islam, accusing its leaders of ‘‘duplicity’’ for
projecting a face of peace and tolerance in the United States while promoting
fundamentalism at home. In an American University presentation titled ‘‘The
Gita’s Perspective on the War against Terrorism,’’ he rejected an antiwar stance
and argued that the Gita supported ‘‘dharmic’’ or just wars to combat global
evil provided that they did not occur merely in self-interest and were carried out
ethically, without colluding with evil.≥π
Malhotra thus publicly articulated a
Hindu argument against U.S. alliances with Pakistan or Saudi Arabia in the
fight against the Taliban. He took the opportunity to expound on some of his
favorite themes, arguing that the post-9/11 situation should lead the United
States to ‘‘introspect about its chauvinism towards non-western cultures’’
more generally. Malhotra also promoted the idea that Indian traditions of
debate would allow for ‘‘equal self-representation by all major civilizations in
the modern discourse’’ (as opposed to the reigning Eurocentric model).≥∫
During a presentation at the annual American Academy of Religion meetings
in November 2001 (where he had again been invited as a representative of
‘‘practicing Hindus’’), Malhotra criticized what he characterized as the ‘‘five
asymmetries in the dialog of civilizations’’ and accused American scholars of
Hinduism of ‘‘denying agency and rights to non-westerners’’; of ‘‘academic
arson,’’ or the ‘‘age-old ‘plunder while you denigrate the source’ process’’;
and of engaging in ‘‘intimidating name-calling to a√ect censorship,’’ concluding
with the demand that Hindus in the diaspora be included as ‘‘dialog
representatives’’ in a joint study of the tradition.≥Ω
Hindu Americans were also more willing to mobilize in support of Indian
and Hindu causes in the post-9/11 period. A petition charging cnn with proPakistani
and anti-Indian bias (based on allegations in an article by Malhotra
published on Sulekha.com) obtained fifty-five thousand signatures. Such an
outpouring of support compelled cnn executives to meet in Atlanta with representatives
of the Indian community during February 2002.∂≠
Several Hindu
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 133
American groups also mobilized to protest the planned February 2002 screening
of two films critical of Hindu nationalism by the New York–based American
Museum of Natural History as part of an exhibit titled Meeting God: Elements
of Hindu Devotion.∂∞
A petition (again sponsored by hicad) sent to
museum authorities had an introduction similar to the Bush petition, pointing
out that the large number of Hindus living in the United States constitutes
a visible and very productive American community. The petition continued,
In the post 9-11 tragedy, we need to develop a greater understanding and
appreciation for diversity in our society. We must educate the cosmopolitan
population of the greater New York area and the rest of the usa to respect
all our neighbors who might be following diverse religions and traditions.
. . . The screening of these anti-Hindu movies will be considered by
Hindus in the usa and all over the world as an insult to their faith. As an
analogy, please consider if it would be appropriate to stage a documentary
on Osama bin Laden and the destruction of the World Trade Center in an
exhibit on the elements of Islamic devotion; or a documentary on slavery,
colonialism, Christian crusades, white supremacy, Holocaust, Auschwitz,
or killings of native Americans, in an exhibit on the Elements of Christian
Devotion.
The petition concludes, ‘‘We the undersigned, being practicing Hindus and a
religious minority in the United States, fear that the screening of these antiHinduism
movies . . . would promote disrespect, bias and hatred against our
religion in the general American populace. We, therefore, urge the American
museum of Natural History to drop these movies from the exhibition.’’∂≤
The
showing of the films was initially canceled, allegedly because of the threat of
violence. Later, when the films were shown at a di√erent venue, many aggrieved
Hindus reportedly turned out. Later in 2002, at the showing of another
film critical of Hindu nationalism (this time at Barnard College at Columbia
University in New York City), Hindu protesters apparently grew so unruly that
the organizers had to be whisked away in a van under police protection.∂≥
Although Hindu American spokespersons’ genteel multiculturalism and
militant nationalism appear to be very di√erent, they are in fact intertwined.
Nazli Kibria argues that Asian Americans are a ‘‘transgressive’’ group insofar
as their experiences merge those of European ‘‘ethnic’’ immigrants who assimilated
into the mainstream and those of racialized minorities whose racial
identities have hampered societal integration. She points out, however, that
‘‘precisely this transgressive aspect’’ makes their experience ‘‘valuable as a
134 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
source of clues to the puzzle of new immigrant integration.’’∂∂
Similarly, the
transgressive nature of the Hindu American experience has, when combined
with the unique features of Hindu history, given rise to the two contradictory
sides of American Hinduism. As successful ethnics, Hindu Americans embrace
a genteel multiculturalism, while their racial and religious marginality
pushes them toward militancy and ethnic nationalism.
What explains the turn toward militant mobilization strategies following
9/11? The literature provides two explanations for expatriate nationalism: (1) it
is a product of immigrant marginalization; and (2) it is a strategic response to
gain resources in multicultural host societies. The public emergence of Hindu
nationalism in the post-9/11 period probably has to do with a combination of
factors: genuine fears about the further marginalization of Hindus if Muslims
were included under the American sacred canopy, resentment and worry
about the sudden U.S. rapprochement with Pakistan, and an attempt to exploit
the rise of anti-Islamic sentiments in the United States to obtain the
recognition and support Hindus had long been seeking.
James Davison Hunter seems to imply that the militancy of new religious
groups in the United States is temporary, lasting only until they have been
‘‘established’’ as American religions.∂∑
This leads to two questions: Will Hinduism
be included within the American sacred canopy? If so, will Hindu
American militancy then disappear? Only time can provide the answers.
appendix
A Petition from American Hindus to President Bush
Subject: Why do you exclude Hindus from your prayers?
Dear Mr. President,
Last Sunday, during the prayer for the victims of the horrific terrorist attacks, you
included Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Many American Hindus lost their lives during
these attacks. These citizens of Hindu faith were conspicuously omitted from your
prayer services. Hindu Americans feel slighted and wonder: Why do you exclude
Hindus from your prayers? Why didn’t you ask a Pundit (Hindu priest) to join you,
along with the Muslim cleric, the Priest, the Minister, and the Rabbi?
As our national leader, you have repeatedly urged respect for America’s pluralistic
and multi-cultural traditions. Yet, you have repeatedly excluded Hindu-Americans from
your prayers and recognition. There are over 800 Hindu temples in North America,
including every major city. All of them had organized prayers to mourn the loss of all
those who perished or su√ered in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and
plane crashes.
Hindus are very much a part of our nation. We are hard working people who
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 135
contribute to the American society, economy, education and quality of life, in a proportion
much larger than our numbers. Hindus are highly visible in this country: in
schools, colleges, universities and research institutions; hospitals and healthcare industry;
computer, info-tech and telecom industries; banks, law, accounting and investment
firms; hotels, motels and restaurants; small businesses, . . . and many other
walks of life. And yet, we are omitted from your prayers. Our temples of worship are
excluded from your references to the religious traditions practiced in this country. Such
conspicuous exclusions can easily be interpreted as a hidden code by the forces of
bigotry and extremism. It is unfortunate that some tele-evangelists who thrive on
defaming our all-inclusive Hindu faith in their tv and radio broadcasts, have already
started their ‘‘sly evokings’’ (as William Safire puts it) by blaming the ‘‘pagans’’ as the
cause of these terrorist acts. Please, Mr. President, there must be a Hindu Pundit beside
a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a Rabbi and a Muslim cleric, when Americans
are asked to pray for peace.
Mr. President, Hindus are a peace-loving people. We never threaten violence against
our host country. There is no world-wide Hindu network of terrorists. There are almost
a billion Hindus living on Earth. They practice the world’s oldest religion (over 8,000
years old.)
Non-violence, pluralism, and respect (not just tolerance) of other traditions of
worship to the One Almighty God, are integral parts of its basic tenets. We are family
oriented people, with very low divorce rates. We are frugal, save for our children’s
education, and support our elders and extended families. Because of these beliefs,
Hindu-Americans are called ideal citizens. American Hindus are highly educated and
skilled people, striving to make the us a better place to live for everyone. We deserve
inclusion in your public prayers for the nation.
In the aftermath of the heinous terrorist attacks, Hindu-Americans and Hindu
places of worship have become the target of xenophobic rage in some parts of North
America. This is because many Americans do not know the di√erence between Hinduism
and Islam; they lump them together as foreign religions. Your help in bringing the
recognition to Hindus as a peace-loving people who are an integral part of our society,
would go a long way in educating Americans about Hinduism. Please help Americans
understand these issues by including Hindus in the fold of the President’s well wishes
and prayers.
In the U.S.A., there are two million people who identify themselves as Hindus, and
another 20 million who practice Hindu traditions such as Yoga and Meditation. Lawmakers
and o≈cials in Washington do include Hindus when they pray. We urge you to
henceforth include Hindus when you list the religiously pluralistic traditions of our
country and include Hindu Temples on your list of places of worship in our great
nation. God bless America!
notes
1. This petition originally appeared at [http://www.hicad.org/bush/htm] but is no
longer available. A modified version appears at [http://www.hrk.org/articles/0901/
114.html].
136 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
2. See Stephen Prothero, ‘‘Love Bombs at Home: A New Holy Trinity Tradition:
Judeo-Christian-Islamic,’’ Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2001, w21.
3. See the reference to the fact that ‘‘there is no world-wide Hindu network of
terrorists’’ as well as the passage that reads, ‘‘Many Americans do not know the di√erence
between Hinduism and Islam; they lump them together as foreign religions. Your
help in bringing the recognition to Hindus as a peace-loving people who are an integral
part of our society, would go a long way in educating Americans about Hinduism.’’
4. These terms and the general argument are from Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after
Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 267.
5. According to the 1990 census, the median family income of Indians in the United
States was $49,309, well above that for non-Hispanic whites ($37,630). See Mary
Waters and Karl Eschbach, ‘‘Immigration and Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the
U.S.,’’ in Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life, 6th ed.,
edited by Norman R. Yetman (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 315. The census showed
that 43.6 percent of Indians in the United States were employed either as professionals
(mostly doctors and engineers) or as managers, and 58.4 percent had at least a bachelor’s
degree. See Larry Hajime Shinagawa, ‘‘The Impact of Immigration on the Demography
of Asian Pacific Americans,’’ in The State of Asian Pacific America: Reframing the
Immigration Debate, A Public Policy Report, edited by Bill Ong Hing and Ronald Lee (Los
Angeles: leap Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and ucla Asian American
Studies Center, 1996), 113, 119.
6. This figure is based on Indian census reports that count Dalits (formerly called
Untouchables) and tribals as Hindu. Many members of these groups object to their
inclusion within Hinduism.
7. S. K. Hofrenning and B. R. Chiswick, ‘‘A Method for Proxying a Respondent’s
Religious Background: An Application to School Choice Decisions,’’ Journal of Human
Resources 34.1 (Winter 1999): 193–207; 2002 Britannica Book of the Year and
2000 World Almanac figures obtained from [www.pluralism.org/resources/statistics/
tradition.php#Hinduism].
8. R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological
Study of Religion in the United States,’’ American Journal of Sociology 98.5 (March
1993): 1058.
9. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, 2nd
ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 27–28.
10. Raymond Williams, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in
the American Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 29.
11. For Chinese Christians, see Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion,
Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999); for Korean Christians, see Won Moo Hurh and Kwang Chung Kim,
‘‘Religious Participation of Korean Immigrants in the United States,’’ Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 29.1 (March 1990): 19–34; for Maya Catholics, see Nancy J.
Wellmeier, ‘‘Santa Eulalia’s People in Exile: Maya Religion, Culture, and Identity in Los
Angeles,’’ in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, edited
Hindus Challenge American Pluralism 137
by R. Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1998), 97–122.
12. Williams, Religions of Immigrants, 11.
13. Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘‘Transformations in New Immigrant
Religions and their Global Implications,’’ American Sociological Review 66.2 (April 2001):
269–88.
14. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New
Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Creek, Calif.:
AltaMira, 2000); Prema A. Kurien, ‘‘Becoming American by Becoming Hindu: Indian
Americans Take Their Place at the Multi-Cultural Table,’’ in Gatherings in Diaspora,
edited by Warner and Wittner, 37–70; R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Work in Progress,’’ and
‘‘Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States,’’ in Gatherings in Diaspora,
edited by Warner and Wittner, 3–34; Yang and Ebaugh, ‘‘Transformations.’’
15. Prema A. Kurien, ‘‘Religion, Ethnicity, and Politics: Hindu and Muslim Indian
Immigrants in the United States,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 24.2 (March 2001): 263–93.
16. Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
17. See Prothero, ‘‘Love Bombs.’’
18. Heinrich von Steitencron, ‘‘Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term,’’
in Hinduism Reconsidered, edited by Gunther Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New
Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 11–28.
19. Vasudha Narayanan, ‘‘Creating the South Indian ‘Hindu’ Experience in the
United States,’’ in A Sacred Thread: Modern Transmission of Hindu Traditions in India and
Abroad, edited by Raymond Brady Williams (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima, 1992), 147–
76.
20. Mauss, Angel and the Beehive.
21. See Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns (London: Routledge,
2000).
22. For this argument, see Vinay Lal, ‘‘The Politics of History on the Internet: CyberDiasporic
Hinduism and the North American Hindu Diaspora,’’ Diaspora 8.2 (Fall
1999): 137–72; Biju Mathew, ‘‘Byte-Sized Nationalism: Mapping the Hindu Right in
the United States,’’ Rethinking Marxism 12.3 (2000): 108–28; Biju Mathew and Vijay
Prashad, ‘‘The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 23.3 (May
2000): 516–34.
23. See Dean E. Murphy, ‘‘Two Unlikely Allies Come Together in Fight against
Muslims,’’ New York Times, June 2, 2001, b1; Kurien, ‘‘Religion, Ethnicity, and Politics.’’
24. See Prema A. Kurien, ‘‘Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic
Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism,’’ Social Problems 51.3 (August
2004): 362–85.
25. See ‘‘History of vhpa,’’ [http://www.vhp-america.org/whatvhpa history.
htm].
26. Prithvi Raj Singh, ‘‘Discussing Religious Role Models’’ (letter to the editor),
India Post, March 14, 1997, a26.
27. Prithvi Raj Singh, interview by author, February 9, 1997.
138 p r e m a a . k u r i e n
28. Arthur J. Pais, ‘‘A First Line of Defense,’’ [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/
57/story—5743.html].
29. See ‘‘Mission Statement,’’ [http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ecitmission
frame.htm].
30. The Ramayana Project, chapter 5, unit 25, lesson 2, 335–37, cited in ‘‘Complaint
against Anti-Rama Song in Secondary Schools,’’ [http://www.infinityfoundation.com/
ecitnehletterframe.htm].
31. See ‘‘Complaint against Anti-Rama Song.’’
32. See, e.g., ‘‘The Hindu View of Others,’’ [http://www.NorthJersey.com].
33. See, e.g., the interview with Rajiv Malhotra on the radio program Tapestry, October
22, 2000, [http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ ecitnprinterviewframe.htm];
see also Rajiv Malhotra and David Gray, ‘‘Global Renaissance and the Roots of Western
Wisdom,’’ ions Review, [http://www.noetic.org/Ion/publications/r56Malhotra.
htm].
34. See, e.g., ‘‘Hindu Philosophy Has No Place for Caste System Says fha,’’ India
Post, March 17, 1995.
35. V. E. Krishnakumar and L. Prashanth, ‘‘Clinton Wishes Indians First Ever Diwali
Greetings,’’ India Post, November 3, 2000, 22.
36. Sarah Wildman, ‘‘All for One,’’ New Republic, December 24, 2001, [www.thenew
republic.com122401/diarist122401.html].
37. In the aftermath of 9/11, several Hindu Americans argued that emphasis on
ahimsa (nonviolence) should be dropped in favor of various examples from the Hindu
epics showing the Hindu gods willing to go to war when necessary.
38. The texts of these talks were posted on the Internet discussion group associated
with the Infinity Foundation on September 25 and October 4, 2001, and were later
combined and archived by hicad as Rajiv Malhotra, ‘‘Lessons from Gita on Fighting
Terrorism,’’ [www.hicad.org/gita.htm]. A modified version, ‘‘Gita on Fighting Terrorism,’’
was also posted on the Infinity Foundation Web site: [www.infinityfounda
tion.com/mandala/s—es/s—es— malho—gita.htm].
39. Material for this paragraph was taken from an Internet report on the panel (including
the papers presented): John Stratton Hawley, ‘‘Defamation/Anti-Defamation:
Hindus in Dialogue with the Western Academy,’’ [http://www.web.barnard.columbia.
edu/religion/hindu/malhotra—defam ation/html].
40. Reported at [http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/s—es/s—es—rao-r
—govt.htm].
41. One was on a Dalit critique of the Ramayana, and the other was on a critical look
at the Hindu nationalist movement in India.
42. [http://www.petitiononline.com/amuseum.htm] (accessed January 23, 2002;
no longer available).
43. This information is based on eyewitness reports by people who attended the
film showings.
44. Nazli C. Kibria, Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean
American Identities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3.
45. See Hunter, this volume.
VAS U OH A N A R A Y A N A N
Sacred Land, Sacred Service
Hindu Adaptations to the American Landscape
Hindus living in India have had the comfort and luxury of having
their religion, ethnicity, and culture come together on the south Asian subcontinent.
Religious concepts, philosophies, social relationships, and sacred
geography are embedded in and articulated through the performing arts.
Vegetables, lentils, and spices are connected with notions of orthopraxy.Every
religious ritual framed by Brahmanical Sanskritverses begins with a recitation
of tile geography of the sacred land in which the observant resides. But what
happens when Hindus migrate to a different continent, removed from the
sacred territories? Mow do they see themselves as connected with the new land
they call home?
This chapter examines how post-igGj immigrant Hindus are accommodating
to the United States in two important ways. The first is by transforming
the land, in some cases making places in America sacred by associating them
with Hindu geography and mythology. The second is by seizing on a quintessentially
American activity—voKmteerism—and making it a part of the individual
Hindu's duty and the Hindu temple's mission. The American spiritual
landscape plainlyhas been transformed by the addition of Hindu temples to a
nation of church spires, synagogue domes, and mosque minarets. But the
United States is also changing the Hindu tradition.
l:
or several millennia, Hindus have considered the land of India to be
sacred. They think of specific villages, mountains, lakes, and rivers as infused
with holiness. In fact, several sacred texts strongly disapprove of living outside
this sacred land. Nonetheless, Hindus have been migrating for more than
two thousand years, first to southeast Asia and then to other parts of the
world. Every migration has entailed negotiations between host cultures and
the Hindus' heritage as they struggled to maintain their identity on foreign
soil. Hindus' survival and success in any new country depends on their being
recognized as part of the new landscape; Hinduism's success and survival
7
i?9
140 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
have depended on its creative ability to devise out of its large library of stories
and memories a continuum of architecture that somehow fits in the new
environment while remaining connected with the past. Several thousand years
of sacred texts, commentaries, myths, stories, songs, dances, and symbols in
Sanskrit as well as various vernacular and elite structures serve as a vast
reservoir of resources from which Hindus can draw as they find ways to fit
into American communities with di√erent histories and di√erent dreams. For
example, in Sanskrit prologues to U.S. Hindu rituals, some Hindus now see
America as a continent within the traditional mythical landscape of Hinduism;
some Hindus have reinterpreted the American eagle as Garuda, the eagle
vehicle of the Hindu god Vishnu; and some Hindus understand working in
soup kitchens during the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend as participating in
meritorious acts of food giving during the festival of Sankaranti, which falls
close to the U.S. public holiday in mid-January.
While temple building has been an immediate imperative for newly settled
U.S. Hindus, many Hindu immigrants to Europe set up spiritual shop in
warehouses, garages, or the upper floors of shops and only later built more
traditional temples. On this basis alone, Hinduism in the United States differs
from Hinduism in other places (with the possible exception of Canada).
In the United States, citizens are more open and accepting of immigrant
customs and traditions. Here it is not considered archaic to go regularly
to houses of worship. Religion is not state mandated. And economic institutions
will lend money to build temples. So Hindu temples are rising all over
the map. Depending on a community’s means, these structures range from
renovated airport hangars, gymnasiums, and Eastern Orthodox churches to
majestic buildings with carved towers resembling eleventh-century south Indian
temples. The United States has more Hindu temples than any country
except India.
Literally thousands of songs and dances glorify India or speak of the sacrality
of Indian land. Do Hindus in America think of themselves as being in exile
and away from the holy land? Far from it.
Hindus have made portions of the United States sacred and to some extent
contiguous with India in at least four ways: (1) by composing songs and pious
Sanskrit prayers extolling the U.S. state in which a particular temple is located;
(2) by adapting the classic cosmology of the Puranas to identify America
as a specific dvipa (island/continent) mentioned in those sacred Sanskrit
texts; (3) by physically consecrating the land with waters from a combination
of sacred Indian rivers and American rivers; and (4) by literally re-creating in
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 141
U.S. locations the physical landscape of certain holy places in India. In addition,
Hindus co-opt land or shrines held sacred by Americans, layering motifs
and meanings on U.S. sacred spaces.
Many Hindu legal codes speak of parts of the Indian subcontinent as holy
ground fit for religious rituals. Indeed, some of these codes say that all of
India is holy; ritual actions bear fruit here. The description of the sacrality of
the land was confined to the northern part of India, however, when some of
the codes of righteousness (dharma sastras) were composed around the beginning
of the Common Era. Manu says,
That land, created by the gods, which lies between the two divine rivers
Sarasvati and Drishadvati [is] Brahmavarta . . . the tract between those two
mountains which extends between the eastern and western oceans, the
wise call Aryavarta (the country of the noble ones). . . . The land where
the black antelope naturally roams, one must know to be fit for the performance
of sacrifices; [this land] is di√erent from the country of the
barbarians.∞
In time, this concept extended beyond the land between the Himalaya and
Vindhya Mountains to cover the whole subcontinent. India itself became a
divine mother (Bharata Mata).
Now almost every village in India has a story of divine manifestation—a
legend of a hierophany. In many parts of India, the name of one’s village is
part of one’s o≈cial name. Families periodically trek back to their ancestral
villages to worship the family deity; they frequently send money back to
hometown temples in acts of mail-order piety.
Still, people from the subcontinent have been migrating to practically every
part of the world since the early centuries of the Common Era. They settled
and built temples in many places, including the grand monuments of southeast
Asia. But immigrants to the United States have had several advantages
that their ancestors did not have. At least after 1965, U.S. immigrants enjoyed
economic prosperity and with it the luxury of going back regularly to their
mother country. They also enjoyed religious freedom, which they exercised
first and foremost by building temples and raising their children in Indian
religion and culture.
In 1986 the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, issued a
cassette of popular devotional songs (bhajans). In it, the Pittsburgh-area devotees
praise Lord Venkateswara (Lord of the Venkata Hills), a manifestation
of Lord Vishnu:
142 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
America vasa jaya govinda
Penn Hills nilaya radhe govinda
sri guru jaya guru, vithala govinda
[Victory to Govinda who lives in America;
Govinda who with Radha resides in Penn Hills.
Victory to Govinda, Vithala, the sacred Teacher.]≤
This song hails Vishnu as Govinda (one of his many names). Glorifying
Vishnu as abiding in a particular place is a way that devotees consecrate that
deity in a temple and bring him or her alive. All temples conduct formal
ceremonies of vivification with pitchers of sanctified waters, promulgating the
sacredness of the land in song and making a particular deity accessible in a
particular place. Thus, the deity Venkateswara is believed to be present in Tiru
Venkatam in Tirupati, India. But this deity now also abides in local shrines at
Penn Hills, Malibu, Chicago, Dayton, and Atlanta, among many others. The
devotees in Pittsburgh believe that their lord resides with them, sanctifying
the land where they live.
Singing about the deity in a particular location helps mark the sacrality of
that spot. Thus, in the Sri Vaishnava tradition—an important faith and one of
many Hindu communities—poet-saints who lived between the eighth and
tenth centuries c.e. sang in praise of Vishnu in 108 places. They sang about
the particular manifestation of Vishnu in a specific town or village and described
the surroundings—the tall citadels, the terraced houses and palaces,
the expanses of crops, the trees, the sea, and other relevant details of the
landscape. These 108 sites are called the ‘‘divine places’’ (divya desa) and are
hallowed in the Sri Vaishnava tradition. While other temples are also very
prominent, they are not considered among these special 108 because the early
poet-saints did not sing about these temples. Singing about a place, therefore,
not only articulates its sacrality but makes it holy.
Understanding this context is crucial to any consideration of the popular
song declaring ‘‘Victory to Govinda who lives in America’’ and of a more recent
poem, ‘‘Sri Venkatesha America Vaibhava Stotram’’ (Praise of the Appearance
of Lord Venkatesha in America). The latter is a stately piece of literature
composed by Dr. J. Sethuraman, professor of statistics at Florida State University
in Tallahassee and an erudite scholar of Sanskrit. Sethuraman’s poem
glorifies Lord Vishnu in his manifestation as Venkatesha (Venkateswara) in
many American towns and states. Most Hindus in south India do not worship
generic deities such as Vishnu and Lakshmi; instead, they call these gods
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 143
a√ectionately by the particular name by which they are known in a nearby
temple. Venkatesha is a well known and popular manifestation of Vishnu, and
the temple in Penn Hills is devoted to him. Sethuraman’s poem describes the
di√erent places in the United States where Venkatesha is enshrined.
‘‘Sri Venkatesha America Vaibhava Stotram’’ is written in classical Sanskrit,
in the style of a traditional kavya (poem), replete with exquisite literary devices
and ornate verses. It starts o√ with the idea that Sri Venkatesha (Vishnu),
Lakshmi (the goddess of good fortune), and the Earth Goddess have come to
America to remove the devotees’ miseries. The poem then proceeds, using a
time-honored Sanskrit literary strategy, to describe the characteristics of this
Lord Venkatesha (‘‘Such a Sri Venkatesha has arrived here.’’). The Venkatesha
who has graced this country, says Sethuraman, is the supreme deity spoken of
in the scriptures, the glorious one who is so hard to comprehend and reach.
And yet, this majestic, supreme being (brahman), to make itself accessible,
comes as Venkatesha with Lakshmi and the Goddess Earth to be close to his
devotees: ‘‘Such a Sri Venkatesha has arrived here—the very Brahman—the one
who has to be understood from the Vedas, and one with the brilliance of a
thousand rising suns—in whom a large assembly of yogis have placed their
minds . . . and are rejoicing day and night.’’≥
The poet or person who recites this
prayer then places his soul at the feet of the Lord and seeks him as a refuge (9–
16). The poet then glorifies this manifestation and the many incarnations of
Vishnu (17–19). Then comes the ‘‘Description of the Grand Tour of Sri Venkatesha
in America’’ (Sri Venkatesha Amerika Vaibhava Sthala Varnanam).
The first place to be glorified, the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh, is
the first large temple in America devoted to Venkatesha. It is followed by New
York (Flushing) and Boston. In each case, Sethuraman begins the relevant
verses with the phrase, ‘‘Such a Venkatesha,’’ harking back to the first verse
introducing this deity. In a manner reminiscent of the best of the classical
Indian poets, he describes the surroundings for every city and state. The
first two verses o√er a taste of his style, replete with ‘‘decorative’’ Sanskrit
embellishments:
Venkatesha, the ocean of nectar of kindness, has come to [the] hill top at
the well known city of Pittsburgh, surrounded by the three rivers, Allegheny,
Monongahela, and the Ohio, to remove the miseries of the people.
Venkatesha, the ocean of nectar of kindness, has indeed come to the place
known as Ashland, Massachusetts (near Boston) which is purified by the
waves of the Atlantic ocean, to remove the miseries of the people.∂
144 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
The refrain that this Venkatesha, ‘‘an ocean of the nectar of kindness,’’ comes
to ‘‘remove the miseries’’ of the people is repeated in the descriptions of
twenty-one other places. The list grows when new temples to Venkatesha are
added to the American map.
The descriptions are both generic and specific. The cold waves of the
Pacific Ocean purify Malibu and San Diego, California; the forests on the
banks of the great Mississippi River are near Jackson, Mississippi; and Dayton,
Ohio, is purified by the Stillwater, Red, and the Great Miami Rivers. A
special touch is added to Venkatesha’s manifestation in Houston. This city is
now well known among south Indian Hindus in America for its magnificent
temple of Meenakshi (the local name of the Goddess Parvati in Madurai, south
India). In south India, the popular imagination considers Meenakshi to be the
sister of Vishnu. Thus, Sethuraman says that Venkatesha/Vishnu comes to
Houston (‘‘in the great state of Texas garlanded by the Rio Grande River’’) to
be near his sister, Sri Meenakshi.
Sethuraman also renders some names in Sanskrit: the Pacific Ocean is
called santyabdi (24, 25); the Stillwater River is santambu nadi, and the Red
River is sindura nadi (34). Riverdale (near Atlanta) is translated as nadisu tira
(29), and Bridgewater, New Jersey, is setunira (31). These geographic names
thus become part of the Hindus’ liturgical map. The poem also features
several patterns of ‘‘ornamentation’’ that would delight the hearts of Sanskritists.
The poem ends with a petition: the poet asks God to grant a calm mind,
free of raging desires, to anyone who repeatedly thinks of all these divine
residences (New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, and so forth), anyone who contemplates
Venkatesha’s divine form and praises him with this poem.
This poem makes sacred the towns and states of America where Vishnu
has come to reside. India’s villages and towns are sacred because the poets
have glorified the supreme being who has come to reside there as a god or
goddess. Now the same deity resides in America.
At the beginning of all traditional Hindu rituals (weddings, ancestral rites,
naming ceremonies, and so on), the o≈ciating priest and his attendants
formally declare the coordinates of the land and the time in which the rite
takes place. These words are part of the sankalpa (declaration of intention) to
do the ritual. Such coordinates are in cosmic frameworks; the sacred space is
identified with one of the dvipas in Puranic cosmology, and the sacred time is
parsed in millions of years.
Classic statements of intention identify India as the most fortuitous of land
masses—the Jambu Dvipa (Island of Rose-Apple Fruit) located to the south of
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 145
the mythical Mount Meru, which rises at the center of the universe. Hindu
religious texts give a range of between four and thirteen for the number of
such islands, which are located like the petals of a lotus flower around Mount
Meru. The islands are said to be separated by oceans of water, milk, sugarcane
juice, and so forth. The Bhagavata Purana, a text ascribed to the first millennium
c.e., identifies seven such islands with the names of various subdivisions.
In India, the performer of the ritual further specifies that he or
she is in the ‘‘division of the world’’ (varsha) called Bhaarata in that ‘‘fragment’’
(khanda) of the land named Bharata. The Bhagavata Purana names nine
varshas, or continents. No serious attempt seems to have been made in the past
to identify any other actual continent or land mass with any of these traditional
mythical names.
In summary, then, some of the Puranas give details of seven cosmic islands
divided into various provinces. The sacred land of India is declared to be in the
Island of Rose-Apple Fruit (Jambu Dvipa); the land mass is called Bhaarata
(bharata varsha), and the country is Bharata (bharata khanda). The whole area is
considered to be south of the mythical Mount Meru. Thus, Hindus in India
begin almost all religious rituals with the intention to perform that rite, which
includes the line, ‘‘in this Island of Rose-Apple Fruit, in the land of Bharata, in
the fragment of land [country] called Bharata, south of Mount Meru [Jambu
dvipe Bharata varshe bharata khande, Mero dakshine parsve].’’
The rituals in the United States have new parameters and new names.
Almost all temples (with the exception of the one in Bu√alo, New York) follow
the formulaic statement that America is located in the Krauncha (Heron)
Island west of Mount Meru. While it is not clear where these phrases were first
modified to fit North America, priests’ accounts indicate that the change
probably happened in the early temples in Pittsburgh and Queens, New York,
around 1975. In the ritual intention stated in the Pittsburgh Venkateswara
Temple, elaborated in the many temples of America, and repeated in the
beginning of every wedding, death, or other ritual, a new cosmology is in
place. We are no longer operating on the Rose-Apple Island; we are now in
America, the Island of the Heron.
Krauncha is the fifth of the seven land masses in Hindu cosmology. Scholars
do not agree on where Krauncha is located: some see it as purely mythical,
some as another planet, some as another continent in this world, and others
as a spiritual state. Nevertheless, the ritual specialists who composed the
groundbreaking rites for the first temples in America came to call their new
land Krauncha. According to the Vishnu Purana, a text composed in the first
146 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
few centuries of the Common Era, all the continents are insular; another text,
the Bhagavata Purana (composed 100–600 c.e.), says that the Krauncha dvipa
is surrounded by an ocean of milk and that it is free from fear because it is
guarded by the god Varuna.∑
There is some variation in the identification of both the continent and its
subdivisions. In general, two versions prevail: Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and some
others identify this land as the golden continent (hiranyaka varsha), and the
temple is in the part called ‘‘the sacred place of cattle-herds’’ (go tirtha khanda).
The word tirtha in Sanskrit indicates a holy place, a place of pilgrimage; use of
the term for the American subcontinent asserts its sacrality.∏
In the second version, used in Chicago, Jacksonville, and other places,
America is described as the ‘‘delightful, pleasant’’ part (ramanaka khanda) of
the ‘‘delightful’’ continent (ramanaka varsha), still in the island of Krauncha.
Combinations of the two statements are seen in various parts of the United
States, with minor variations. The second version also mentions the ‘‘sacred’’
rivers in the United States.
A declaration of intention in Tallahassee, Florida, began,
In this island of Krauncha, in the delightful continent, in the sacred province
of the cows that is west of the Mississippi River, in the sacred land
[punya kshetra] called Tallahassee . . .π
In Jacksonville, Florida, by contrast, a fuller version of the declaration of
intention was used:
In the Krauncha island,
in the golden continent,
in the pleasant land that is west of Mount Meru,
in North America,
where there are rivers like the Mississippi, Kansas, Alabama, Illini
[Illinois], Ohio, Hudson, St. John, etc., teeming with various forms
of life in them,
surrounded by mountains like the Rockies and the McKinley,
in the midst of the great oceans like the Prashanta [literally, ‘‘peaceful,’’
here referring to the Pacific] and the Atlantic,
in the city of [Jacksonville],
in the presence of all the divine beings, Brahmans et al.
I am performing [this ritual].∫
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 147
Several variations on this theme exist, but in all these formulaic salutations,
worshipers place themselves in a land both pleasant and part of Puranic
geography. It is a bold move. It is not that America is some o√shore colony to
Bharata or India: instead, America is identified as a specific part of the Sanskrit
textual cosmology, and this recognition is fitted seamlessly into the
rituals.
One way American places can be brought under the sacred canopy of
Hindu cosmology is by the mixing of sacred waters. In Walden, in a passage
penned at the end of a winter spent with the Hindu holy book the Bhagavad
Gita, Henry David Thoreau reports seeing workers cutting the ice on Walden
Pond into large chunks for export to India:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the
gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and
its literature seem puny and trivial. . . . I lay down the book and go to
my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahman . . . come
to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in
the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of
the Ganges.Ω
Thoreau could scarcely have imagined that within 150 years of his meditations,
the waters of the Ganges (referred to henceforth by the Indian name
‘‘Ganga’’) would be brought to Massachusetts to a temple of the Goddess
Lakshmi in Ashland (not far from Walden Pond) and to dozens of other U.S.
temples, then mingled with the waters of local rivers to make those spaces
sacred.
Hindus think of rivers as liquid purifiers, capable of spiritually cleansing all
who bathe in them. But why should they be mingled with the waters of the
Mississippi and the Suwanee?
On the simplest level, there is a powerful notion of contagion—the idea
that the sacrality attached to the Ganga and other rivers will physically attach
itself to whatever rivers it touches. In fact, this is what many Hindus attending
the rituals will tell you. The waters of the Ganga are, as it were, contagiously
purifying. That is why, when a person dies, sacred water is sprinkled on the
body and even poured into the mouth. This is why the impure ashes of the
cremated are immersed in sacred rivers.
When water is not physically present, it is possible to project the presence
148 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
of sacred rivers spiritually into the local waters. In a prayer that is often used to
consecrate the waters to be used in a religious ritual or even daily before
bathing, the Ganga is invoked by its popular names—Nandini, Bhagirathi,
Jahnavi. The river goddess is requested to come and abide in the waters one
will be using. Thus, in Hindu weddings in Gainesville, Florida; in temple
consecrations in Houston or Chicago; or before bathing in India, the Ganga is
ritually invoked even when there is no water present. And India’s other rivers
are petitioned to come in spirit and reside in that water. All of India’s rivers—
the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Godavari, the mythical Sarasvati, the Narmada,
the Sindhu (Indus), and the Kaveri—are said to pool in the ritual jar wherever
the rite takes place.
But there is more going on here than just spiritually or physically inviting
holy Indian rivers into local liquid. It is simply not the case that the water of
the Suwanee is a passive holder for the sacred energy of Indian water. As
noted earlier, during the intention to perform any ritual, the names of American
rivers—the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Suwanee, and so on—are mentioned.
And they would not appear in this litany if they were not already sacred
in some intrinsic way. Rivers nourish crops and feed human beings—they are
‘‘mothers.’’ And while the biological mother from India is special, one learns
to revere one’s adoptive mother too. In this way, American rivers become part
of the sacred geography of Hinduism’s mother.
Finally, one may meditate on the patterns of a pilgrimage described in
Sanskrit texts and done regularly in India, a ritual with some bearing on the
mingling of sacred waters. In a practice described in a medieval text, the
Adhyatma Ramayana (a version of the Ramayana epic), pilgrims go to the
seaside town of Rameswaram, located near the subcontinent’s southern tip
and sacred to the gods Rama and Shiva. The pilgrims bathe in the Bay of
Bengal, take sand from the beach, and carry it to either the city of Kasi
(Banaras) or Prayag (Allahabad). The Ganga flows through Kasi; in Prayag,
there is an auspicious confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the (mythical)
Sarasvati, which is said to flow underground. The pilgrims dissolve the
sands from Rameswaram in a holy river in northern India. Then they carry
some water from these northern rivers back to the southern town of Rameswaram
and use it to bathe the image of Shiva there. Physical elements from
two distant parts of India are thus united in the ritual of pilgrimage. Therefore,
in U.S. rituals used to consecrate the land by mingling waters from two
continents, devotees are adapting rituals that go back to the Puranas.
Hindus from many philosophical communities believe that the supreme
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 149
being makes itself accessible through incarnations on earth. But landscapes
can be incarnated, too, and can take on new forms. Some American temples
now try either to recognize resemblances between an American landscape and
distinctive sacred spots in India or to re-create such similarities. The earliest
attempt to recognize a geographical similarity came with the building of the
Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh, which, as this 1986 statement indicates,
many devotees likened to India’s Prayag, another site where three rivers join
together:
Pittsburgh, endowed with hills and a multitude of trees as well as the
confluence of the three rivers, namely, the Allegheny, the Monongahela,
and the sub-terranean river (brought up via the 60 foot high fountain at
downtown) to form the Ohio river is indeed a perfect choice for building
the first and most authentic temple to house Lord Venkateswara. The evergrowing
crowds that have been coming to the city with the thriveni Sangama
of the three rivers to worship at the Temple with the three vimanas
reassure our belief that the venerable Gods chose this place and the emerald
green hillock to reside in.∞≠
To understand temple building in the United States, it may be helpful to recall
a Hindu tendency that Kees Bolle calls ‘‘topographical religiosity.’’ Bolle’s
comments in ‘‘Speaking of a Place’’ are particularly relevant: ‘‘Naturally, some
of the temples are more famous than others; one might say that they are more
tangibly the real residence of God. But unless one understands the primacy of
the place, the nature of the sacred in most of Hinduism remains incomprehensible,
and the plurality and variety of gods continues to form an unsolvable
puzzle. God is universal because he is there.’’∞∞
In being ‘‘there’’ at Penn Hills,
Pennsylvania, and Poughkeepsie, New York, this universal God becomes particular,
this land, holy.
There are now at least two Kasis (Banarases) in the United States: the Western
Kasi Shiva Temple (Paschima Kasi Viswanatha Temple) in Flint, Michigan,
and the Kashi Ashram (hermitage) in Sebastian, Florida. But some of the most
intriguing attempts to re-create the landscape—to make it mirror an Indian
site—have come in Barsana Dham, near Austin, Texas, and in the Iraivan
Temple in Kauai, Hawaii.
In Hawaii, not only are the names reminiscent of India (the Path of the
Nayanmars, San Marga Path, Rishi Valley, Rudraksha Forest, and so forth),
but in each environment ‘‘pilgrims enjoy groves of plumeria, konrai forest hibiscus,
fragrant vines, lilikoi, native Hawaiian species, ferns, bubbling water-
150 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
falls, ponds and more.’’∞≤
Thus, the physical environment of India meshes
with the local Hawaiian land to create a unique milieu.
Barsana Dham has been made to resemble Barsana in northern India, said
to be the hometown of Radha, the beloved of Lord Krishna. At Barsana Dham,
all the important landmarks of Braj, the area in northern India where Krishna
and Radha lived, have been re-created: ‘‘This beautiful 230-acre property is a
representation of the holy land of Braj in India where Shree Radha Rani and
Shree Krishn appeared 5,000 years ago. Areas of Barsana Dham have been developed
to be places for devotional inspiration and meditation. All the important
places of Braj like Govardhan, Radha Kund, Prem Sarovar, Shyam Kuti,
Man Mandir and Mor Kuti, etc. are represented in Barsana Dham where the
natural stream named Kalindi represents the Yamuna river of Vrindaban.’’∞≥
Thanks to these similarities, Barsana in Texas is, according to its champions,
fated to become a key pilgrimage site for those who cannot go to India:
‘‘Barsana Dham will be a place of pilgrimage for millions of Indians living in
the Western world. There are thousands of people who desire to go to Braj, the
birth place of their beloved Lord Shree Krishn, but they cannot go for the lack
of time or for any other reason. They all can easily come to Barsana Dham and
have the same spiritual feelings as though they were in Braj in India.’’∞∂
In a
parallel situation in Hawaii, Dr. Sambamurthi Sivachariya, who came from a
large temple in Madras, India, to preside as chief priest for two days of
ceremonies, said, ‘‘I am too old to go on pilgrimage to the holy sites in the
Indian Himalayan mountains, where, according to Hinduism, God Himself
resides and gives His grace to pilgrims. That was a life-long dream of mine.
But now that I have come to the most beautiful place in the world, Kauai, to
this sacred land, I feel my dream has been fulfilled. I have come to the home
of God.’’∞∑
One of the smallest public Hindu shrines in this country is in the register of
tourist attractions in the Hawaiian island of Oahu. This little place of worship,
now run by Hindus from India, is a small street-side shrine in Wiahiawa
dedicated to Viswanatha (a form of Shiva). Local devotees translate
Viswanatha as ‘‘Lord of the Universe,’’ and the organization that initially
oversaw it was called the Lord of the Universe Society (lotus). The shrine
contains two conical stones regarded as ‘‘healing stones’’ in traditional Hawaiian
religion but revered by Hindus as a manifestation of Shiva. Hindus
believe that the main stone here is a linga (a manifestation of Shiva); in indigenous
religion, that stone embodies the Hawaiian priest-healer god Lono.
According to another local myth, this stone represents two sisters from Kauai
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 151
who were turned into rocks. Regular Hindu worship at this shrine, located not
far from Pearl Harbor, is conducted on the third Sunday of every month.
Hindus plainly have co-opted the Hawaiian deity. As one south Indian there
told me, ‘‘Lord Shiva has manifested himself here.’’
On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, an existing Hindu temple is gradually
being replaced by a larger one being carved in India and transported overseas
in segments. This stone temple, which devotees say will last for 1,001 years,
is designed by Sri Ganapati Sthapati, an important sculptor and architect
of temples from India. The current temple on the site was built in 1970 by
Swami Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, who was born in America and initiated in
Sri Lanka. Gurudeva (‘‘the divine or respected teacher’’), as he is popularly
known, says that in 1975 Shiva appeared to him in three visions, inspiring him
to locate the temple there: ‘‘I saw Lord Siva walking in the meadow near the
Wailua River. . . . His face was looking into mine. Then He was seated upon a
great stone. I was seated on His left side. . . . An inner voice proclaimed, ‘This
is the place where the world will come to pray.’ ’’∞∏
This vision has only
rea≈rmed, in Hindu terms, the indigenous holiness of the site, which lies at
the foot of Mount Waialeale near the sacred Wailua River. The ancient Hawaiians
are said to have called it Pihanakalani, ‘‘where heaven touches Earth.’’
In fact, one of the ancient Hawaiian temples allegedly was located here. The
ritual to lay the foundation incorporated rites from Hindu and local Hawaiian
traditions: ‘‘A series of fire ceremonies were performed over a 48-hour period
to purify the site and to invoke the blessings of God, gods and the local
Hawaiian and Hindu guardian spirits. On the first day, April 4th, specially
invited local guests joined the proceedings at the usually cloistered monastery.
They included the Honorable Maryanne Kusaka, Mayor of Kauai, Hawaiian
priestess Leimomi Mo’okini Lum, . . . former Kauai mayor Joanne
Yukimura.’’∞π
While it seems both natural and practical to honor Hawaiian traditions in
the consecration of a Hindu temple in Hawaii, this is not an interfaith or
syncretic temple, of which there are many in America. In fact, it is not even a
pan-Hindu temple. Most American temples (there are a few exceptions) are
home to multiple deities. The Kauai temple, however, is unambiguously sectarian.
Dedicated to the god Shiva, it has a large dancing Shiva in the middle.
Toward the front is a nonanthropomorphic form of Shiva, the linga, a conical
piece of crystal rock. In 1987, a rare six-sided quartz crystal Shiva linga was
said to have been discovered and brought to Kauai from Arkansas. It is significant
that this crystal is American born. But while the manifestation of
152 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
Shiva as this crystal lingam is American and the land is American territory, the
temple itself will be carved in India. The ritual landscape will be rea≈rmed in
terms of Puranic geography, and consecrating waters will come from both
India and America.
Is the American land holy? It is important to note that there was no concerted
Hindu e√ort, no grand strategy by religious leaders, and no commission
to discuss this question in the wave of the post-1965 immigration. The
Hindus who settled here and the priests who came from India worked with
traditional cultural tropes, ritually consecrating and praising the land they
were inhabiting, formally glorying it in song.
Hindus have drawn several other homologies to show how this land is
sacred and to make it so. The American eagle, for example, has been compared
to Vishnu’s mount, Garuda. In fact, many Hindus find this an obvious
comparison. In an e-mail posted on December 31, 2000, on a listserv run by
members of the Hindu Sri Vaishnava community, a writer wished the moderator
a happy new year in English and Tamil. ‘‘America now seems to be the
place of Sri Maha Vishnu,’’ he wrote. ‘‘This is a land with devotion to God; this
is a land of tranquility [amarikkai in Tamil, a pun] Is not their national bird
[the] eagle—Garudan? May your spiritual work continue to spread our sampradaya
[tradition]. May Sri Maalolaa [another name of Vishnu] bless you all with
long life, excellent health and prosperity.’’∞∫
While it has largely been post-1965 Hindus who have sacralized the land
while building their temples, attempts to mimic the Indian landscape in their
new country can be seen as early as 1905 in California. Hindu temples—at
least those founded by immigrants from southern India—ordinarily resemble
in some respect the medieval temples of south India. But the first Hindu
temple in this country imitated not only temple towers from the Indian state
of Bengal but also Muslim and European architectural tropes. It also explicitly
incorporated American symbols. And a pamphlet issued at the consecration
pointed out these features in case the reader missed the symbolism.
One of the teachers in the Vedanta Society (the leading American Hindu
group during the first quarter of the twentieth century), Swami Trigunatita,
oversaw the construction of what he called ‘‘the First Hindu Temple in the
Whole Western World.’’∞Ω
Sister Gargi, his biographer, notes, ‘‘To Swami
Trigunatita the first Hindu temple in the whole Western world would be a vital
piece of India planted on American soil. The Temple represented the influx of
India’s great spiritual wisdom into the culture of the West—there to grow and
flourish.’’≤≠
But although he pronounced this structure a Hindu temple, he
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 153
said that it was for Americans. ‘‘In actual fact, the Temple was not in any sense
Hindu,’’ Sister Gargi notes—‘‘not in organization, activities, membership,
architecture, or decor.’’≤∞
The temple’s five towers resemble onion domes and call to mind the Kremlin’s
bulbous towers. Swami Trigunatita, however, specifically designed the
architecture to resemble various cultural forms. As a Vedanta Society pamphlet
notes, ‘‘The Temple may be considered as a combination of a Hindu
temple, a Christian church, a Mahommedan mosque, a Hindu math or monastery
and an American shrine.’’≤≤
So the tower over the main entrance to the
auditorium was supposed to look like the bell tower of a church as well as
resemble the Taj Mahal. The first tower from the west was an exact miniature
of a temple in Benares, except it had a weathervane on top. The second tower
was like the Shiva shrine in the Kali temple in Dakshineswar (Calcutta). This
tower has three symbols on top, representing the three Hindu spiritual paths,
as well as a crescent—a ‘‘Turkish or Mahomedan emblem’’—at the bottom.≤≥
The crescent was also said to be sacred to a group of Vaishnavas (Vishnu
followers) who believed that it expressed ideas of softness, love, and a√ection
associated with the moon—in short, the path of devotion. The second symbol
looks like the sun, which is needed to grow and work and thus depicts the
path of karma. The third symbol on this tower is a trident, representing the
scepter of Neptune and Shiva. A symbol for the destruction of ignorance, it
represents the path of knowledge. The northeast corner—traditionally the
most important in any Hindu building—has a tower that resembles the Hindu
god Shiva. The tower on the southeast corner was said to resemble European
castles and to stand for ‘‘the great strength of character and spiritual
culture.’’≤∂
The rampant symbolizing did not stop there, however. The building also
integrates elements from Indian yogic practice. The canopy over the mosaic
and marble entrance represents the thousand-petaled lotus, which certain
schools of Indian thought believe lies in the brain. In yogic anatomy, a subtle
passage called the sushumna is said to go up the spinal cord to this lotus. On
either side are two auxiliary passages, known as the ida and pingala. The
tubular lights on both sides of the canopy represents these two passages.
Moving from the yogic to the patriotic, at the head of the canopy—the one
that represented the thousand-petaled lotus on the crest of the sushumna tube
—was an eagle. As the explanatory pamphlet put it, because the structure was
America’s first Hindu temple, ‘‘honor and appreciation have been shown by
carrying in the architectural art of the temple, the Sushumna—the main chan-
154 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
nel of spiritual illumination—up to an American eagle.’’≤∑
Lest this patriotism
be lost on anyone, under the wings of this eagle were painted American flags.
Even the colors of the American flag were said to be echo sentiments sacred to
the Hindu—red was the color of Brahma (a minor Hindu creator deity), white
of Shiva, and blue of Lord Vishnu. Further, red was the color of rajas (passion),
white of sattva (purity), and blue of tamas (inertia).≤∏
Boldly and with considerable creative synergy, Swami Trigunatita designed
this building in the first few years of the twentieth century. We see in this
process an important trend: the ability of creative Hindu thinkers to harmonize
diverse thoughts and material forms, variant cultures and religions, and
disparate philosophical and patriotic traditions. In fact, one would be hardpressed
to find a better example of this kind of syncretic creativity than this
pioneering temple.
Members at this first temple reached out to their fellow Americans through
talks on Vedanta—its nondualistic philosophy, meditations, and yogas. The
post-1965 immigrant community has discovered di√erent ways to reach out to
its neighbors. One key strategy is engaged Hinduism.
The western model of interreligious dialogue is heavily slanted toward the
Protestant preoccupation with beliefs. Hindus, by contrast, have typically
focused their piety on ritual action, particularly in the sphere of dharma.
Dharma means ‘‘duty’’—doing what is right. When combined with another
key concept, that of detached action, dharma yields one of the major emphases
of the Hindu tradition. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the importance of
doing one’s duty without expectation of reward or punishment.
In this sphere of righteous and detached action, U.S. Hindu institutions are
finding common ground with volunteer organizations around the United
States. Many American temples, including the Hindu Temple of Atlanta, conduct
regular blood drives. This may not seem unusual, except that in the
Hindu ritual context, the shedding of blood is highly polluting. Nonetheless,
blood drives—almost entirely unknown in India—take place regularly in U.S.
Hindu temples, typically in downstairs halls and often in conjunction with the
American Red Cross. The Hindu temple in Tampa encourages not just blood
donations but also organ donations. Its temple magazine speaks about donating
organs as doing one’s dharma.
The context in which this social engagement takes place is, of course,
significant. Many of the trustees, founders, and major donors to U.S. temples
are physicians with an acute awareness of the importance of blood and organ
donations. Through their encouragement, these drives have become quite
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 155
prominent in many temples. Physicians also help organize regular templebased
health fairs. Major health care companies set up booths and health
screening stalls and sometimes pay the temple a modest fee for that privilege.
Even more striking are the e√orts of Hindu temple participants to work
alongside people of other faiths to help the less fortunate. In November 1998,
volunteers from the Kalamazoo, Michigan, temple worked at the Gospel Mission
to provide food for the homeless during Thanksgiving time. Under the
headline ‘‘Thanksgiving Dinner for the Homeless,’’ the newsletter reports
that under the temple’s auspices, ‘‘on Nov, 15, 1998, a dinner for 110 homeless
people was prepared and served at the Gospel Mission’s kitchen and dining
facilities. It was coordinated by the SHAKTI committee.’’≤π
Shakti, in Sanskrit,
is power and energy, frequently conceptualized as a goddess. While Hindus
laud the donation of food (Sanskrit, anna dana), only a few temples in India do
it and then only under specific ritual conditions. For example, this kind of
donation also traditionally occurs in memory of one’s ancestors.
Temples with more volunteers, such as the Hindu Temple of Atlanta, now
have volunteer programs in the soup kitchens of the Atlanta Union Mission
and other evangelical churches. The mission has no connection with the
Hindu tradition except perhaps one that happened felicitously and by chance
—it is known by its acronym, aum, which is the traditional spelling for the
sacred sound of ‘‘om’’ in India. On its Web site, the aum describes itself as ‘‘a
non-denominational Christian ministry that brings Christ’s healing power to
any person in crisis through programs of rescue and recovery.’’≤∫
The mission is explicitly evangelical, yet members of the Hindu temple
work there in common cause. Ravi Sarma, the former chair of the temple’s
Community Services Committee, observes,
Four years ago, we started a holiday food drive and Toys for Tots program
to participate in the needs of the community. Last year, Seshu Sarma
started a semiannual blood drive for the local chapter of the American Red
Cross. This year, we sponsored two days of meals served at the Atlanta
Union Mission, which provides food and shelter to local homeless and
indigent population. We chose January 15 and 16 to commemorate Martin
Luther King’s birthday as well as Sankranthi. Community members provided
funds in memory of loved ones who passed away (as anna dana). Our
volunteers also provide sta≈ng for the soup kitchen one weekend a month
as part of our ongoing work with the aum.
We also support the Atlanta Community Food Bank by collecting non-
156 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
perishable canned food and money. In 1998, we provided 890 pounds of
food. (The local Swaminarayan Temple provided 1,800 pounds of food.)
We were the top two religious institutes in their holiday food drive. I am in
the process of putting together a summer internship program with temple
youth to provide help with the food bank’s assembly line, where they sort
out donated items and get them ready for distribution. . . .
We consider this seva [community service], and our motto is, ‘‘Serving
with devotion, the volunteers of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta.’’ Our hope is
that our community realizes the value of and need for service.≤Ω
The dates the Atlanta temple chooses for its cooperative ventures with the
aum are noteworthy. One such period was January 15–17, 1999, which coincided
with both the Hindu festival of Pongal and Martin Luther King Jr.’s
birthday. The south Indian festival of Pongal, or Makara Sankaranti, ordinarily
observed at the winter solstice, is a time of thanksgiving; it is also an especially
meritorious time to make donations.
So why do the Hindu temples cooperate with evangelical groups such as
the Gospel Mission in Kalamazoo and the aum? It might be simpler for them
to associate with mainline Protestant churches or even secular institutions.
One very pragmatic reason is that Hindu temples lack the financial or human
resources to mount these operations on their own and find it easier to plug
into existing organizations.
The other reasons are more interesting. First, evangelical churches have a
history of running outreach programs in these communities. They have already
identified basic needs and are meeting them. Second, these are not the
kinds of religious institutions that would in the ordinary course of events
engage in conversation with Hindus. Some temples seek such institutions out
for precisely this reason. With evangelicals, there is no push for interreligious
dialogue, though the ad hoc conversations that happen in the course of volunteer
activities may bring these people together and foster better understanding.
One Hindu told me that mainline Protestants focus too much on dialogue
and that meetings with them often achieve nothing more than making the participants
feel good about themselves. In soup kitchens, real work gets done.
Based on the need issue, the Hindu temple of Atlanta also takes the time to
volunteer for children who have at least one parent a√licted with aids. A
December 27, 1998, e-mail bulletin from the temple says, ‘‘The Community
Services (Humanitarian Activities) Committee of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta
is pleased to inform that the 1998 Holiday Food and Toys Drive has been suc-
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 157
cessfully completed. Nearly $600 dollars worth of new toys were gift wrapped
and delivered to aid Atlanta, for children with aids or children of parents
with aids. Several hundred pounds of canned food and a check are being
presented to the Atlanta area Community Food Bank.’’≥≠
According to Sarma,
‘‘We hope to continue that activity. . . . Our plans include: working in shelters
for women and children in some of the counties of Atlanta. Since Atlanta is
very big now, we want to provide volunteer help in several areas in the metro
area, near where people live.’’≥∞
This seva is karma yoga, or action without
expectation of reward; this is engaged Hinduism; this is American volunteer
activity. In calling it seva or connecting it with the act of anna dana, we have an
American activity explained through a traditional Hindu idiom.
Many narratives describe Hindus transforming, transmitting, and jettisoning
traditions from India in the American landscape. Certain deities—village
goddesses, for example—are not brought to the United States, and the phenomenon
of Hindu goddesses possessing devotees is not common here, as it
is in India. Performing arts serve as e√ective ways of transmitting religion and
culture. In a wide assortment of areas, we see the transformation of existing
customs as well as the development of new ones. Thus, Hindu temples have
now introduced new worship services to mark graduation exercises in school;
newsletters announce that, on Mother’s Day weekend, the Goddess Lakshmi
will be worshipped in the Ganesha Temple in Nashville. By introducing these
new customs, Hindus are participating in American civic life, reiterating their
Indian American status.
But Hindus are also transforming Hinduism and America with a their new
understanding of the American landscape. Hinduism, as a religion, is closely
tied to land in the Indian subcontinent and is very territorial. The immigrants
ordinarily view Puranic cosmology and Hindu stories in a nonliteral sense, yet
it is ceremonially necessary to locate oneself in the correct part of the universe
at the right moment of time. To transform and in some way acknowledge the
American land—the land that the Native Americans held sacred, the land on
which the early Christians built their churches—as sacred is a bold, innovative,
and perhaps necessary act of being Hindu on foreign soil. It is a form of
internal negotiation within Hinduism to adapt to a new environment. It is an
Americanization of the Hindu tradition. Landscape patterns of traditional
sites are recognized in the American geography; the familiar holy spots are recreated.
From such acts of whimsical recognition, some people move into a
state of awe at a divine teleology. Manu, in the first century c.e., said that the
holy territory in India was the land where the black antelope freely roamed.
158 v a s u d h a n a r a y a n a n
The Hindus in America have traded it for the land where the deer and the
antelope play.
But there is also external negotiation—that is, with the Gospel Mission,
evangelical churches, and the like. One can think of several kinds of external
negotiations: between individuals, between civic institutions and individuals,
between religious institutions and individuals, between religious institutions
and civic institutions, and between religious institutions and other religious
institutions. When members of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta work with the
town authorities to have a statue of Mahatma Gandhi erected at the Martin
Luther King Jr. Center, when they collect blood for the Red Cross, we have
external negotiations between a religious (Hindu) institution and a civic one.
However, when the Kalamazoo temple works alongside members of a Gospel
Mission soup kitchen or the Hindu Temple of Atlanta collaborates with the
Atlanta Union Mission, we have members of one Hindu institution negotiating
their space in America with members of an external religious institution.
Members of both institutions are negotiating their connection with the other
in the simple act of serving food for the homeless; members of both religions
are changed through this interaction.
In the late seventh century, Parsis—that is, Zoroastrians from Persia—came
to India for refuge and wanted to remain in the new country. They petitioned a
local ruler for permission to stay. Worried about a drain on his resources, the
ruler replied with a symbolic action. He sent his chief minister to the head of
the Parsis with no verbal message. The chief minister was to show the potential
immigrants a glass of milk, filled to the brim. This would indicate that
there was no more room in the country. It was all filled up.
The head of the Parsi delegation got the message. Silently, he took the glass
of milk, stirred in a spoonful of sugar and sent it back to the king, asking him
to taste it. The Parsis, he alleged by this action, would not take up much room
but instead would add flavor to the land and its people. The king smiled and
allotted the land to the fledgling immigrant community. And indeed, over the
centuries the Parsis have added to India’s intellectual, cultural, and political
strengths. So too, say the Hindus who tell and retell this story, will every new
immigrant, every new religious and ethnic group that gets the privilege of
calling America home.
notes
1. Law of Manu, 2:17–23; adapted from The Laws of Manu, translated by Georg
Buhler (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975).
Sacred Land, Sacred Service 159
2. Transcript of devotional song from Bhajans at Sri Venkateswara Temple, Sri Venkateswara
Temple, 1986.
3. J. Sethuraman, ‘‘Sri Venkatesha America Vaibhava Stotram,’’ 8; all translations by
Sethuraman.
4. Ibid., 20, 22.
5. Vishnu Purana, translated by H. H. Wilson (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1961), 2:2;
Bhagavata Purana, translated by Ganesh Vasudeo Tagare (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1978), 20, 18–19.
6. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New York: Knopf, 1982), 34–36.
7. Recited by Sethuraman during a ritual in Tallahassee, Florida, July 1999.
8. Sri Nathamuni, Jacksonville Temple, personal communication, September 1999.
9. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, edited by Joseph Wood Krutch
(New York: Bantam, 1981), 324–25.
10. ‘‘Kavachas for the Deities,’’ Sri Venkateswara Temple, Penn Hills, 1986.
11. Kees Bolle, ‘‘Speaking of a Place,’’ in Myths and Symbols: Essays in Honor of Mircea
Eliade, edited by J. M. Kitagawa and C. M. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), 128–29.
12. See [http://www.himalayanacademy.com/hawaii/iraivan/iraivan—temple.htm l].
13. [http://www.barsanadham.org].
14. Ibid.
15. ‘‘San Marga Foundation Stones’’ (press release), April 9, 1995, quoted at
[http:// www.hindunet.org/alt—hindu/1995—Apr—1/msg00001.html].
16. ‘‘Mystical Master,’’ Hinduism Today, April–June 2002, [http://www.hinduism
today.com/archives/2002/4-6/26-33—mystical—master.shtml].
17. ‘‘San Marga Foundation Stones.’’ According to this press release, ‘‘It was Leimomi’s
ancestor, Kuamo’o Mo’okini, who founded this very temple in 480 c.e.’’
18. Letter from Sri Anbil Ramaswami, forwarding a letter from Sri K. Devanathan
Swami, posted on the Yahoo listserve SriRangaSri, December 30, 2000, [http://
groups.yahoo.com/group/SriRangaSri/message/26].
19. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Trigunatita: His Life and Work (San Francisco: Vedanta
Society of Northern California, 1997), 175.
20. Ibid., 170.
21. Ibid., 169.
22. Ibid., 198, 368.
23. Ibid., 198.
24. Ibid., 203.
25. Ibid., 369.
26. Ibid.
27. Kalamazoo (Michigan) Indo-American Cultural Center and Temple Newsletter, December
1998, 2.
28. [http:www.aumcares.org/AboutUs.htm].
29. Ravi Sarma, conversation with author, November 1999.
30. Hindu Temple of Atlanta, e-mail to members, December 27, 1998.
31. Ravi Sarma, personal communication, November 1999.
G U R I N D E R S I N G H M A N N
8
Making Home Abroad
Sikhs in the United States
Beginning with the first wave of Sikh migration to the United
States in 1900, the Sikh tradition has become part of the American religious
landscape. While Sikh men, women, and children have adapted their traditions
to this new land, American society has only slowly come to accept their
presence. The most recent and most explicit recognition of the Sikh community
manifests in the respects paid to Sikhs by President George W. Bush on
the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of the community,
on November/, 2003,'
Unfortunately, the press concerning Sikh beliefs and practices has not
always been positive. In light of the attacks of September n, 2001, and given
the similarities in appearance between Sikh males who mark their faith with
distinctive dress (turbans and beards) and al-Qaeda leaders, tbe U.S. media
took pains to explain why Sikhs look the way they do and thereby to protect
them from bigotry and hatred. But happier stories have also been heard,
including a greater acceptance of religious diversity, as evidenced by a 2003
New York Times editorial endorsement of "the scarf of a Muslim woman, the
skullcap of an observant Jew and the turban of a Sikh" as exercises in "freedom
of conscience."'
This chapter begins with a brief introduction to basic Sikh religious beliefs
and history. It then traces Sikh immigration to the United States, analyzes
the current composition of the Sikh community,and examines Sikh negotiations
with American culture by focusing on the establishment in the United
States of a key Sikh institution, the ,gurdu;ara (house of the guru, or Sikh
temple). A brief concluding section argues that the Sikh community's interactions
with American society, both historically and currently, have not only
introduced a new faith to American society but also helped the evolution
of the Sikh tradition. This creative interaction has forged a tradition of Sikhism
that may have lasting implications for the future of the Sikhcommunity
160
Making Home Abroad 161
both in its homeland in the Punjab in northwest India and in other areas
around the globe.
There are currently some 23 million Sikhs—17 million in the Punjab, 4
million in other parts of south Asia, and 2 million in southeast Asia, east
Africa, Europe, and North America.≥
Their history starts with Guru Nanak,
who founded the community in the central Punjab in the 1520s. His writings
emphasize the unity of God (Vahiguru, the Great Sovereign), who runs the
world with the twin principles of justice and grace. Guru Nanak believed in a
life oriented around the values of personal purity, charity, hard work, service,
and social and gender equality. Liberation, understood as attaining a place of
honor in the divine court, is presented as a collective responsibility. The heart
of Sikh piety comprises congregational prayer in which men, women, and
children gather together and sing praises (kirtan) of the divine.
After Guru Nanak’s death, a line of nine continuous successors provided
leadership. As the fledgling group expanded and its influence grew in the
central Punjab, problems with the ruling Mughal administration arose. Guru
Arjan (1581–1606) and Guru Tegh Bahadur (1666–75), the fifth and the ninth
Sikh gurus, respectively, were executed as political threats. With the o≈ce of
the personal guru under constant attack, Guru Gobind Singh (1675–1708),
the tenth guru, declared in the late 1690s the Sikh community to be the Khalsa
(the pure). Sikhs now understood themselves to be a special people accountable
only to God.
In addition to values promulgated in early Sikh history, the use by men of
external symbols such as kes (unshorn hair), kanga (comb), kirpan (sword),
karha (steel bracelet used to protect the wrist), and kaccha (breeches worn by
warriors) became the markers of loyalty to the Khalsa. While the unshorn hair
and comb were rooted in Sikh belief in keeping the body in its pristine form,
the sword, steel bracelet, and breeches represented Sikh readiness to confront
injustice. Guru Gobind Singh’s declaration of the Khalsa was thus both religious
and strategic, as it ultimately prepared the way for the discontinuation
of the personal authority of the living guru, provided the community with a
visible identity, and established a well-defined political agenda of establishing
Sikh sovereignty, the Khalsa Raj, by supplanting the unjust Mughal Empire.
Guru Gobind Singh also elevated the Sikh scriptural text to the status of
the Guru Granth (the guru in book form). As the repository of revelation,
the Guru Granth serves as the ultimate source of Sikh belief and practice.
Punjabi, the language of the text, and Gurmukhi, its script, are deemed sacred,
and the Sikh community as a whole, collectively referred to as the Guru
162 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
Panth, has the authority to interpret its text. The tradition thus does not
require ritual specialists to provide religious instruction; instead, a handful of
Sikhs can establish and run a congregation. This development allows Sikhs to
reconstitute authority wherever the Guru Granth is present, making the tradition
transportable.
Sikhs believe in divine immanence, so they consider the whole world to be
sacred. But the gurdwara and other places of worship (dharmsals) have long
been regarded as particularly sacred. When the Guru Granth replaced the
personal guru, its text was displayed in all places of worship, turning them
into gurdwaras. The Darbar Sahib (honorable court) in the town of Amritsar,
India, emerged as the center of Sikh sacred geography and the focal point of
Sikh pilgrimage.
Sikh insistence on the fundamental purity of creation and individuals on the
one hand and charity, service, and philanthropy on the other manifested in the
practiceoflangar(sharingoffood),aninstitutionthattheSikhsborrowedfrom
the Sufis and turned into a key gurdwara and community activity.∂
Finally, the
Nishan Sahib, a triangular sa√ron flag, marked the sovereignty of the gurdwara.
While the traditional gurdwara building is an architectural design of domes,
arches, and open space, its three essential elements—the Guru Granth, the
langar, and the Nishan Sahib—are easily transported to new contexts.
The Sikhs’ belief in the sacrality of all creation has had major ramifications
for Sikh migration outside the Punjab.∑
In fact, the tendency to emigrate in
search of new opportunities has been pronounced since the inception of the
Sikh community. Apart from the travels of the Sikh gurus, Sikh traders began
to move to major centers of commerce in south and central Asia toward the
end of the sixteenth century. A larger wave of emigration began with the
British arrival in the Punjab in the mid–nineteenth century. During this period,
Sikhs joined the British Army in large numbers and traveled to the far
reaches of the British Empire. Throughout the twentieth century the Sikhs had
opportunities for emigration, and at present they constitute the largest single
group to have moved out of the subcontinent.
After Guru Gobind Singh’s declaration of the community as the Khalsa, the
Sikh tradition became largely nonproselytizing, and Sikh numbers consequently
have remained small. At the peak of Sikh political power in the Punjab
during the early nineteenth century, they numbered less than 5 percent of a
local population that comprised Muslims (48 percent), Hindus (45 percent),
and a much smaller group of Jains. Yet this historical experience as a minority
group among much larger religious communities has provided the Sikhs with
Making Home Abroad 163
survival techniques and has helped shape their expectations in the new lands
and societies to which they later migrated.
Finally, the Sikh experience of working closely with the British (1849–1947)
resulted in their introduction to print culture and western systems of administration,
education, and justice. The Sikhs were open to incorporating modern
ideas while maintaining their religious heritage. The Guru Granth was
first printed in 1865, and the Khalsa College, intended to prepare Sikh students
in the sciences and English literature while keeping them immersed in
Sikh heritage, was established in 1892. In the early 1920s, the Sikhs worked
with the British to create the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee
(Supreme Gurdwara Management Committee), an elected body in which both
Sikh men and women voted and whose primary responsibility was managing
historic gurdwaras. The Sikhs were thus already exposed to modern western
institutions before their arrival in the United States at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
The earliest reference to the landing of the Sikhs on the West Coast appears
in the April 6, 1899, San Francisco Chronicle. E√ectively navigating their way
through racial and legal discrimination (the Alien Land Law of 1913, the
Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, and the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924), Sikhs
continued to immigrate to the United States, and their numbers reached
around seven thousand by the 1920s. The early community was overwhelmingly
male and came by and large from the rural Punjab. Amazed by California’s
open and fertile land, they became farmers and worked hard to establish
themselves quickly. A 1920 report listed eighty-five thousand acres in the
Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and thirty thousand acres in the Imperial
Valley under Sikhs’ control.∏
This first phase of settlement was followed by a 1924 U.S. government ban
on Asian immigration, which resulted in a significant decrease in the immigrant
Sikh community. While some Sikhs stayed on and found ways around
legal restrictions on landowning, some chose to go back to the Punjab, and by
the mid-1940s only about 1,500 Sikhs remained in the United States. With the
passage in 1946 of the Luce-Celler Act, which opened the door to Indian
immigration and naturalization, the Sikh community began to grow once
again, increasing over the next twenty years to about 6,000 members. The
current phase of expansion began with the 1965 immigration liberalization,
and the Sikh community now comprises approximately 250,000 persons—
about 100,000 on each coast and the remainder in the Midwest.
The oldest segment of today’s Sikh community consists of descendants of
164 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
the early immigrants who, prompted by a sense of adventure and the pursuit
of the American dream, came from small landowning families in the Punjab.
They worked as laborers, used local resources such as banks, bought land,
and began to farm. Many of them married Mexican women, and their descendents
are settled on the West Coast.π
Another segment came in pursuit of higher education beginning in the
1910s. While some of these immigrants returned to India, others stayed on
after completing their studies, with many of these garnering white-collar jobs.
Even when they had the opportunity to work in the states in which they went
to school, many moved to the West Coast to be nearer to other Sikhs.∫
They
worked closely with Sikh leadership in the middle decades of the twentieth
century, and, though some married Caucasian women, they continued to play
an important role in Sikh community life.
The most prominent segment of the Sikh community consists of men and
women who came to the United States after 1965. This group includes professionals
with advanced degrees obtained in the Punjab in medicine, engineering,
and other fields. From both rural and urban backgrounds, they arrived in
large cities, reoriented themselves to American work demands, and relocated
wherever jobs in their areas of expertise were available.
More recent arrivals include families who have come to the United States as
a result of political persecution. These are divided into two groups. The first
comprises those who fled political persecution in east Africa. Their ancestors
had arrived in Kenya and Uganda at the turn of the twentieth century to work
in the British-run railway system. Political upheavals in these countries during
the 1970s forced these families to leave their homes.Ω
In addition, a number of
Sikh traders who had lived in Afghanistan for several centuries left when war
broke out there in the late 1970s. Members of both groups arrived in the
United States with considerable business experience and quickly put down
roots in large urban centers such as New York City. The second group came
directly from the Punjab. During the 1980s, the Indian government’s use of
force to bring the political situation there under control prompted large-scale
flight of rural Sikh youths (most of them college graduates) to western countries.
After gaining legal residence essentially as political refugees, these men
brought their wives and children over and settled down during the mid-1990s.
The Sikh community in the United States also includes a small group of
Euro-Americans who converted to Sikhism beginning in the 1970s. They took
up the Sikh path under the spiritual guidance of Harbhajan Singh Yogi, a
Punjabi Sikh who had arrived in the United States in 1968.∞≠
They constitute a
Making Home Abroad 165
small but visible segment of the community and are sometimes called American
Sikhs, an epithet now increasingly used by all Sikhs living in the United
States. This is a rare case of a non-Punjabi group joining the Sikh community.
How did the early Sikh immigrants respond to arrival in the United States?
They interpreted their migration generously—as ‘‘taking the Sikh beliefs’’ to
the farthest corners of the divinely created world and as a major opportunity in
Sikh history.∞∞
California’s natural beauty fascinated the Sikhs, and they had
no inclination to interpret it in metaphors of either conflict (dar-ul harb) that
must be brought under control or impurity that must be sanctified (as was the
case with some Muslims and Hindus, respectively).∞≤
The Sikhs seemed confident that their belief in one God, the possession of
a sacred book, and a life oriented around human equality, congregational
worship, and social responsibility placed them closer than other Indians to
the world of the Christian West. The Articles of Incorporation of the Pacific
Coast Khalsa Diwan Society, the first U.S. Sikh organization, created in 1912 in
Stockton, California, open with an assertion of Sikh belief in the ‘‘Fatherhood
of God and Brotherhood of Man’’ and may have been crafted to explain
Sikhism to Americans. The British provided the Sikhs with respectful treatment
that seemingly reinforced the perception that Sikhs’ Aryan roots related
them racially to Europeans.
Once in the United States, the Sikhs did not see themselves as travelers
interested in making money to send home, a perception often associated with
new immigrants. Instead, they wanted to put down new roots in new soil.
Following or circumventing the law as needed, they began to buy or lease
agricultural land. It should come as no surprise that some Sikhs considered
joining the U.S. Army, continuing a long and honorable tradition of fighting
for their country.
Incidents of racial violence caught the Sikhs unawares, but they defused
these situations—from Bellingham, Washington, in 1907 to Marysville, California,
in 1915—largely by retreat.∞≥
Unable at first to understand the cause of
this discrimination, the Sikhs made sense of their mistreatment by tying it to
the fact that they were subjects of a British colony. Some Sikhs even decided to
return to India to fight for its freedom.∞∂
By the early 1920s, however, this
movement fizzled, and the Sikhs began to focus their energies on their American
lives. They benefited from new attitudes regarding race and civil rights
and by and large have not nursed any major complaints regarding their overall
treatment in the United States.
In its century-long history, the American Sikh community has worked the
166 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
U.S. political and legal system with a reasonable degree of success. The community
has remained small, but individual Sikhs have taken to the courts
when necessary. In the 1920s, Bhagat Singh Thind, a veteran of the U.S. Army,
fought for citizenship (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923) all the way to
the Supreme Court. In the 1940s, Jagjit Singh worked closely with Congressman
Henry Luce, paving the way for the Luce-Celler Act, which opened citizenship
rights to U.S. Sikhs and arranged for a quota of immigration for
their relatives from India.∞∑
With the newly acquired citizenship, Dalip Singh
Saund, a Sikh from Imperial Valley, California, made it to Capitol Hill as a
three-term member of Congress between 1957 and 1963.∞∏
He was the only
south Asian to achieve that honor until Bobby Jindal was elected to represent
Louisiana’s First Congressional District in 2004.
Tensions between local norms and the Sikh insistence on wearing religious
symbols has surfaced repeatedly. The turban was deemed to clash with the civil
norms of removing hats at restaurants. It was also said to be unsafe as a replacement
for hard hats at construction sites. And Sikhs with turbans are not
currently permitted to join the U.S. Army. The kirpan, or ceremonial sword, has
been interpreted to be a weapon not permissible in schools, courts, and during
air travel. Some fast food chains do not allow their Sikh workers to wear the
steel bracelet, or karha, on the grounds that it is a health hazard. It has been
di≈cult to transplant these Sikh symbols onto American soil.∞π
While Sikhs have arrived in the United States eager to fit in, wanting to
settle down and be productive citizens, their religious symbols have clashed
regularly with U.S. norms. Sikhs, however, have shown an openness to adapt
religious symbols to local realities. For example, in light of post-9/11 restrictions
on air travel, Pashaura Singh, a leading scholar of Sikhism in North
America, has argued that a ‘‘mini sword’’ hanging on a chain is an appropriate
substitute for the traditional kirpan. Not every Sikh agrees with this arrangement,
but it is a significant adjustment and falls in line with the adaptations
the minority Sikh community has made throughout its history.∞∫
Still, Sikhs’
adjustments do not seem to reach far enough to satisfy all concerned.
An examination of the history of the gurdwara in the United States sheds
important light on the nature of the Sikh community’s attempt to integrate
into American society while simultaneously maintaining a religious identity.
This complex is manifested on the exteriors of gurdwara buildings and includes
the architecture and activities of its essential components—the congregation
hall with the Guru Granth at its head, the langar, and the Nishan
Sahib hoisted in its precinct.
Making Home Abroad 167
Ad hoc arrangements for congregational worship were made as soon as
the Sikhs began to arrive in the United States, and discussions regarding the
establishment of an actual gurdwara started in 1907. The Pacific Coast Khalsa
Diwan was incorporated as a nonprofit organization under California law on
May 27, 1912. That same year, the first U.S. gurdwara was built in Stockton,
California.∞Ω
That place of worship remained the nucleus of the U.S. Sikh
community during the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks to increased
immigration after 1965, the United States now has more than two hundred
Sikh societies, half of which have built gurdwaras.≤≠
The title ‘‘Sikh Temple’’ was inscribed in large letters on the front of the
Stockton gurdwara, but no e√ort was made to introduce external features
associated with traditional gurdwara architecture. Faithfulness to the California
landscape was considered in line with the Sikh spirit. After all, the traditional
gurdwara architecture did not mandate any orientation toward a particular
direction, as in the case of a mosque, nor did it follow elaborate beliefs for
selection, sanctification, architectural design, and the establishment of an
icon, as in a Hindu temple. Because the gurdwara is the house of the Guru
Granth, California gurdwaras are often designed to be impressive versions of
surrounding residences.
After 1965, rising demand for new gurdwaras was met by remodeling
churches and large houses and by creating new buildings specifically for this
purpose. The largest gurdwara on the East Coast, located in Richmond Hill,
New York, was originally a Methodist church.≤∞
After its purchase in 1972, no
e√ort was made to change its exterior. Until its destruction by a fire in 2001,
stained-glass windows depicting Gospel scenes continued to enliven the sacred
space inside the building.
In the case of new buildings, Sikhs have consciously incorporated the latest
innovations in U.S. architecture. The most creative such e√ort is a gurdwara in
Palatine, Illinois. Amarjit Singh Sidhu, a student of famed architect Louis
Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, designed this building on a thirteenacre
lot. Built ten feet above ground, the gurdwara blends with its surroundings;
a landscaped earth berm on the street side physically connects it to the
neighborhood.≤≤
Sidhu also believes that his design blends Sikh beliefs with
Kahn’s emphasis on ‘‘keeping things what they want to be,’’ as in the case of
the structure’s interior (discussed later in the essay).
Some tendency exists to introduce traditional gurdwara styles into the designs
of new buildings. The features often associated with gurdwara architecture
include a dome at the center, arches at the doors and windows, and a
168 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
congregational hall with doors opening in all four directions. In El Sobrante,
California, Sikhs bought a hilltop lot, and construction of a gurdwara started in
the late 1970s. Though some of those involved in the e√ort wanted to incorporate
traditional Sikh designs, no attempt was made to bring builders from the
Punjab. Instead, Ajit Singh Randhawa, a University of California at Berkeley–
trained architect, and J. P. Singh, an engineer educated at the same school,
created the final design. A set of domes and curved arches provide the building’s
exterior with a distinctly Sikh look, but the circumstances of the site
necessitated the repositioning of the central dome and limited the doors in the
congregation hall to three.≤≥
While significant adaptations appear in American gurdwaras’ exteriors, the
tradition of hoisting the Nishan Sahib, the Sikh flag, as an insignia of charity,
justice, and divine victory (degh tegh fateh) is strictly followed. The fact that it is
a symbol of Sikh religiopolitical sovereignty and therefore may be in conflict
with the strictly religious and social mission of these U.S. societies posed a
problem from the start. With the passage of time, two solutions arose. First,
the Nishan Sahib was increasingly interpreted in purely religious terms, shorn
of all political connotations. Second, while that flag alone adorns the gurdwara
precinct, in public Sikh processions an American flag invariably accompanies
it. The two flags together represent the Sikhs as both a religious community
and a part of the American nation.
The buildings’ interiors largely maintain the traditional layout of Sikh
sacred space. At Stockton, the top floor is allocated to congregational worship.
Close to the wall facing the entrance, a small stage stands with four pillars at its
corners and the text of the Guru Granth placed on a raised platform at its
center. As tradition dictates, the Guru Granth is enclosed in the regalia of a
canopy, a throne, and silken robes. In a traditional gurdwara setting, the Guru
Granth is placed more toward the center of the hall, which provides the
congregation a feeling of closeness and enables people to circumambulate the
text, but this arrangement wastes space behind the sacred text. So Stockton
Sikhs chose to create more seating by moving the text closer to the wall.
All members of the congregation take o√ their shoes before entering the
presence of the Guru Granth. Men sit on one side of the carpeted floor and
women on the other. Sikhs married to local women often sit with their wives,
which would not be regarded as an anomaly even in the Punjab, given the
doctrinal emphasis on gender equality. The worship service is held in Punjabi,
and in both content and form the devotional practices largely follow what
Making Home Abroad 169
these Sikhs knew in the Punjab.≤∂
The new placement of the Guru Granth,
however, is now followed in most U.S. gurdwaras.
The Palatine gurdwara o√ers an interesting example of traditional Sikh
elements interpreted in contemporary architectural idioms. The structure has
is a square congregation hall with the Guru Granth placed closer to the center,
as is traditional. Four sets of concrete columns hold exposed wood tresses,
which structurally frame the roof; four skylights, placed where the columns
meet, focus on the Guru Granth underneath. The traditional four doors are
repositioned at the corners of the building, where they also serve as mandated
fire exits. Other than the supporting columns, the entire four sides of the
square, beginning two feet above the sitting level, are made of glass.
Sidhu argues that U.S. gurdwaras should incorporate local norms while
evoking the timeless Sikh spirit. For him, the exposed concrete columns and
the rugged wood planks framing the ceiling represent the Sikh emphasis on
honesty and truthfulness. The natural light falling on the Guru Granth and
the audience’s close visual contact with the landscape blend Sikh devotional
experience with nature, a theme that often appears in Guru Nanak’s writings.
The Stockton gurdwara is useful for a discussion of the langar. The traditional
Sikh doctrine of social equality via the sharing of food, charity, service,
and philanthropy continued to shape the langar, but its external forms
underwent important changes. Food was served on a table placed next to the
kitchen, and the devotees helped themselves (bu√et style) to their meals,
eating at dining tables instead of sitting, as Punjabis traditionally do, on
the floor.
In one corner of the Stockton gurdwara’s ground floor, which is allocated
for the langar, a place was created for people to sit and chat, and stacks of
books were placed in another corner. This collection included books and
periodicals published in the Punjab as well as basic volumes on American
history, law, and English grammar. O≈ce space and restrooms were also
added on this floor. Not all gurdwaras built after 1965 follow the tradition of
eating langar on chairs and tables, but they typically add amenities such as
o≈ces, classrooms, libraries, rooms where senior citizens can meet, residences
for custodians and visitors, and parking lots, none of which figure in
traditional gurdwara design.
The rituals and ceremonies enacted inside American gurdwaras show many
local impacts. For example, in a traditional Sikh setting, parents are responsible
for selecting their children’s marriage partners, and an elaborate system
170 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
of social di√erentiation has shaped this matchmaking process. Following
American cultural norms, however, many young Sikhs have rejected arranged
marriages. Furthermore, young Sikh women have shown an inclination to
walk alongside the groom while circumambulating the Guru Granth. (Traditionally,
the bride followed the groom.) Punjabi cultural resistance to this
change may exist, but Sikh doctrine does not oppose this practice. Because
there is no Sikh priestly class, anyone can perform the wedding ceremony, and
Sikh women have begun to do just that. Not surprisingly, the American work
schedule dictates that weekends matter at the gurdwara. Sunday is a busy day,
and marriages normally take place on Saturdays.
Sikh mortuary rites have also changed under American pressures. In keeping
with tradition, many Sikh families continue to take the cremated remains
of the deceased to Kiratpur in the Punjab, but the rituals associated with the
bathing of the body, putting it on the pyre, and cremating it have all been
modified to conform to the norms and requirements of U.S. funeral homes.
Given work demands, there is no provision for the traditional practice of
several days of public mourning.
The American setting has also greatly expanded the list of Sikh festivals. To
the birth and the death anniversaries of the gurus and the declaration of the
Khalsa, a new year celebration has been formally appended. A prayer is offered
at midnight, and the congregation is welcomed into the year ahead.
After the 9/11 tragedy, a special reading of the Guru Granth was performed at
several gurdwaras, along with a prayer for the peace of humanity. Celebrations
of Thanksgiving and Christmas also take place in many Sikh homes.
Except for the consumption of tobacco, Sikhs have few food-related taboos.
There is no doctrinal restriction against eating meat. However, Sikhs
follow the Indian cultural practice of slaughtering animals with a single stroke
and not eating beef. Sikh literature bans eating meat where the animal is
slaughtered the Islamic way (halal)—that is, slowly bled to death. Though the
general avoidance of eating beef continues in the United States, few Sikhs
insist on distinguishing among the di√erent methods of slaughter practiced in
the United States. The ban on tobacco, however, is maintained.
Coming from a tradition that recognizes separate seats for religion (the
Darbar Sahib) and politics (the Akal Takhat) in Amritsar, Sikhs have little
di≈culty understanding the constitutionally mandated church/state split in
the United States. Sikh leaders have taken pains to ensure that gurdwaras are
managed in accordance with the law and that political activity supporting the
freedom of India in the first half of the twentieth century and Sikh e√orts to
Making Home Abroad 171
help create a sovereign state of Khalistan in the 1980s were kept separate from
the gurdwara activities and accounts.
In early 1910s, the Guru Nanak Dev Hostel arose in Berkeley as a place
where Sikh and other Indian students at the University of California could live
free of charge. To help these students further, Sikh philanthropists established
the Guru Gobind Singh Educational Scholarship and placed it under
the stewardship of two professors at the school. These e√orts sought to
prepare Sikh students to play the role of Sikh ambassadors to American
educational institutions. The Stockton gurdwara also made donations to the
Stockton Community Chest and contributed fifty dollars annually to the local
hospital beginning in the mid-1930s. Sikhs were proud and gratified when
some Americans stopped by to partake in langar.
Recent decades have seen the expansion of these e√orts to reach out to
mainstream Americans. Sikh leaders at the Richmond Hill gurdwara often
invite local political figures to visit, and the dignitaries who have accepted
these invitations have included senators, members of Congress, New York’s
governor, and several New York City mayors. The gurdwara leaders encourage
Sikhs to participate in fund-raising dinners for both Democratic and Republican
candidates and argue that Sikh visibility at these public functions is
important.
The teaching of Sikhism and the Punjabi language in leading American
universities is another way to manifest a Sikh presence in the United States.
The Richmond Hill gurdwara sponsored a Sikh studies program at Columbia
University from 1988 to 1999. Sikhs elsewhere have backed programs at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1992–), the University of California at
Santa Barbara (1999–), and Hofstra University on Long Island (2001–). Conferences
on Sikhism held at these universities have resulted in new studies and
interpretations. They have also helped to disseminate information about the
Sikh tradition among American students and through them to society at
large.≤∑
Sikh-initiated programs at the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco
and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., have had similar
e√ects.
Other outreach e√orts include Sikh Day parades, which are now organized
in many U.S. cities. The Richmond Hill gurdwara helped to start the Vaisakhi
parade in New York in 1988.≤∏
This is now an annual event, with more than
twenty thousand Sikhs gathering in Times Square and parading down to
Madison Square Park with more than thirty floats representing di√erent facets
of Sikh life and history. Over the years, the parade has become Americanized.
172 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
In 1988, for example, several women sought a place among the five leaders at
the head of the parade but were denied. More recently, however, women have
received these prime spots.
In addition to increasing visibility, such parades o√er opportunities for
Sikh leaders to work with city administrators. And these events provide opportunities
for Sikhs to educate other Americans about Sikhism. Floats representing
important facets of the Sikh tradition, embellished with American
symbols, manifest the Sikh belief in being a good citizen of one’s country.
Sikhs also enjoy explaining to American passers-by the significance of langar,
inviting them to share food.
Gurdwaras are also involved in interfaith activities. The Sikhs use these
occasions to present their beliefs and practice. The gurdwara at Palatine, for
example, played an enthusiastic part in the 1993 Parliament of World Religions
convened in Chicago. Sikh leaders nationwide also work with other
groups to address mutual social concerns such as discrimination, racially
motivated violence, and hate crimes. The Richmond Hill gurdwara holds blood
and food drives.
All of these activities have helped Sikhs attain recognition in their new
home. Sikh leaders used their political ties to brief President George W. Bush
on September 26, 2001, about their post-9/11 concerns. In California, the
courts have recognized Punjabi as one of the languages for which interpreters
will be provided. Classes in Punjabi are available at high schools in Queens,
New York; and Fresno and Yuba City, California. In April 2001, the Civil Rights
Division of the U.S. Department of Justice circulated a Punjabi version of a
statement regarding federal protection against discrimination based on national
origin. A wide array of governmental and nongovernmental institutions
is thus beginning to take notice of the Sikh presence in the country.
A broad consensus currently exists among Sikhs worldwide that the United
States is the best country in which Sikhs can make their homes. Many Afghani,
east African, and even Punjabi refugees know how harsh life can be in
those places, and they are grateful to have arrived here. Sikhs also believe that
American society is far more open and respectful of diversity than is Australia,
Great Britain, or Canada, and they encourage Sikhs living in these countries to
come to the United States, which Sikhs, like many immigrants before them,
continue to regard as a land of unique opportunities.
The Indian government’s squelching of Sikh political aspirations and violent
crushing of the Sikh secessionist e√ort to create an independent Khalistan
(Land of the Khalsa) has resulted in profound alienation of the Sikhs from
Making Home Abroad 173
the government. The 1984 killing of several thousand Sikhs by a Hindu mob
after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh
bodyguards eroded any identification U.S. Sikhs may have had with the Indian
nation. Unlike other immigrant Hindu groups, Sikhs plainly do not see India
as a second home.
Moreover, the Punjab is thoroughly immersed in corruption. Contemporary
Punjabi Sikh leaders have shown little willingness to address the problems
confronting the broader Sikh community, preferring to expend their
energies on parochial, even personal, squabbles. This situation makes it impossible
for American Sikhs to consider relocating to the Punjab. The ‘‘myth
of return’’ often associated with first-generation immigrants is nonexistent
among U.S. Sikhs today.
These international circumstances have solidified Sikh identification with
the United States. The American flag often appears on Sikhs’ cars and houses,
and the shirts worn by young Sikhs in parades often boast, ‘‘Proud to be
American.’’ In the past decade, Sikhs have attempted to win election to school
boards and city councils, and a Sikh candidate ran in California’s 2003 gubernatorial
election. Sikhs enjoy basking in the glory of being part of the world’s
only superpower.
Sikhs born and brought up in the United States are taking a more proactive
stand in asserting Sikh identity than did their parents. In 1996, a group of
young Sikh graduate students at American universities created the Sikh Mediawatch
and Resource Task Force (smart). This apolitical Washington,
D.C.–based Sikh advocacy group began as a cyberspace organization with the
primary objective of providing mainstream American media with accurate
information on various aspects of Sikhism. In recent years, the group has
expanded its range of activities to include working with civic, governmental,
and law-enforcement associations as well as informing Sikh Americans about
their constitutional rights. This step in the direction of advocacy marks a new
level of confidence within the American Sikh community.≤π
Representations of Sikhism are in flux. In this new land, new questions
regarding Sikh beliefs and practices have been asked and are being answered.
While U.S.-based Sikh architects are creating new gurdwara designs, American
scholars have o√ered postmodern and feminist interpretations of Sikh history.
Sikh migration to the Unites States has thus resulted in a reinterpretation
of Sikh ideas.
For example, since its inception, the Sikh community has been associated
with the land of the Punjab. The gurus sang about the beauty of the land and
174 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
the sanctity of the town of Amritsar in contradistinction to the decadence of
the Mughal center at Lahore. Because the gurus’ lives unfolded there, the
Punjab is sacred land for the Sikhs. During the eighteenth century, Sikh blood
was spilled in the creation of the Khalsa Raj, further sanctifying the land.
Within the thinking of the U.S. Sikh community, a new distinction has recently
emerged between the sacred land (the Punjab), where one may go for
pilgrimage when the time and money permit, and the homeland (the United
States). Furthermore, places in the homeland itself are acquiring their own
history and traditions; the Stockton gurdwara will be a century old in 2012.
Other reinterpretations concern the issue of religious authority. In the late
1920s, a debate regarding the Stockton congregation’s relationship with the
Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee broke out. Some members of
the Stockton congregation argued that Sikh doctrine supported the autonomy
of each congregation, while others thought that the Stockton gurdwara represented
a satellite community beholden to Amritsar. In 1931, the purchase deed
of the gurdwara was deposited in the committee’s o≈ces, but a few years later,
authorities in Amritsar returned the document, asserting the independence of
the Stockton gurdwara.≤∫
American Sikhs continue to debate issues of polity. A consensus seems to
be emerging around the view that the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee
represents the symbolic authority to be consulted on doctrinal details,
but the final decision in day-to-day a√airs should ultimately lie with local
gurdwaras. One issue is clear: no authority in Amritsar can dictate terms to U.S.
Sikhs.
Since their community’s founding, Sikhs have been proud of the fact that
their literature is written in Punjabi and the Gurmukhi script. Sikhs historically
have insisted on understanding these sacred writings in their original
form even while conceding that the contents of those sacred texts must be
translated into local languages and individual circumstances. With increasing
numbers of Sikhs born in the United States, however, the insistence that
religion must proceed in the vernacular has had radically new implications.
Sikhs are beginning to accept the Guru Granth transliterated in Roman script
or even in English translation in place of or in addition to the original text. A
new edition of the Guru Granth with the original text in Gurmukhi, its Roman
transliteration, and translation in English was created in the early 1990s and is
now in use within the U.S. Sikh community.≤Ω
Relatively little resistance to replacing Punjabi cultural norms with American
ones has arisen, and it is not unimaginable that vegetarian burgers and
Making Home Abroad 175
other local food items will eventually replace the Punjabi meal served in the
langar. There is also an increasing awareness that American soil may well be
more fertile than the Punjab for the flourishing of the Sikh doctrine of social
and gender equality.≥≠
These challenges are not unique to U.S. Sikhs, of course. All Sikh communities
that have settled outside the Punjab confront similar challenges. The
composition of Sikh society—which includes those trained at American universities,
professionals trained in the Punjab, and the highly educated children
of immigrants—makes for a formidable group grappling with these issues.
Furthermore, the intellectual and cultural ferment experienced in the United
States is far more intense than that of any other country, making it a more
conducive setting for resolving these problems.
Finally, the Sikh community in the United States includes some of the
richest individuals in the world. Some American Sikhs entertain Sikh political
and religious leaders from the Punjab during their visits to the United States
and send money for communitarian causes there, ensuring that their voices
are heard in the Punjab and their version of Sikhism is taken seriously there.
For example, in 1996, Sikh women from the United States demanded that they
be allowed to participate in the ritual washing of the floor of the Darbar Sahib
in Amritsar. This has traditionally been a male privilege, but their wishes were
granted.≥∞
U.S. Sikhs have been forced unexpectedly into a historic role. Time alone
will tell the nature of the imprint they will leave in the evolution of the Sikh
tradition.
notes
I am grateful to Ami Shah and Gurdit Singh for their helpful comments on earlier
drafts of this paper.
1. The following was the text of the president’s recent letter:
The White House
Washington
November 7, 2003
I send greetings to those celebrating the 534th anniversary of the birth of Guru
Nanak. As the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak taught the ideas of interfaith
acceptance and meditation. Through their dedication to service, humility, family,
and equality, Sikhs enrich communities across America and worldwide. This celebration
helps Sikhs pass on values and customs to future generations.
As Americans, we cherish our freedom to worship freely, and we remain committed
to welcoming individuals of all religions. By working together, we help
176 g u r i n d e r s i n g h m a n n
advance peace and mutual understanding around the world and build a future of
promise and compassion for all.
Laura joins me in sending our best wishes for a memorable celebration.
George W. Bush.
2. ‘‘Muslims in European Schools,’’ New York Times, October 8, 2003, a30; see also
Laurie Goodstein, ‘‘At Camps, Young U.S. Sikhs Cling to Heritage,’’ New York Times, July
18, 1998, a1.
3. For more details, see my Sikhism (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004);
W. H. McLeod, Sikhism (New York: Penguin, 1997); J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
4. The Sikh belief in sharing food completely rejects the notions of purity and
impurity around which the Hindu caste hierarchy is constructed.
5. Whereas many Hindu communities have traditionally believed that travel entailed
a loss of caste identity, the Sikhs have had no reluctance to travel to new lands.
6. Excellent studies of Sikh migration include Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India:
Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Bruce
La Brack, The Sikhs of Northern California, 1904–1975 (New York: ams Press, 1988).
7. For an important study of Sikh Mexican families, see Karen Isaksen Leonard,
Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1992).
8. Concerning this period, see D. S. Saund, The Congressman from India (New York:
Dutton, 1960).
9. P. Bhachu, Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain (New York: Tavistock,
1985).
10. S. K. Khalsa, The History of the Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere (Espanola,
N.M.: Sikh Dharma, 1995).
11. Teja Singh, Raj Jogi Sant Attar Singh (Barhu Sahib: Kalagidhar Trust, 1996).
12. For Hindu and Muslim attitudes, see Narayanan, this volume; Bagby, this volume.
13. ‘‘Bellingham, Washington’s Anti-Hindu Riot,’’ Journal of the West 12.1 (January
1973): 163; ‘‘White Residents Have No Love for Hindus,’’ Marysville (California) Evening
Democrat, July 7, 1915.
14. See M. Juergensmeyer and N. G. Barrier, eds., Sikh Studies (Berkeley, Calif.:
Graduate Theological Union, 1979), 179–90.
15. Robert Shaplen, ‘‘Profiles: One Man Lobby,’’ New Yorker, March 24, 1951, 33–55.
16. Saund, Congressman from India.
17. Details of these cases appear at [http://www.sikhcoalition.org/LegalCenter. asp].
18. Pashaura Singh has taken this stand in several court cases and confirmed
this position in a telephone conversation with the author on November 13, 2003. In
the middle decades of the twentieth century, Kapur Singh, another major scholar of
Sikhism, took the same position regarding adjustments in the use of the kirpan. See his
Parasaraprasna (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1989), 108. Sikhs traditionally
carried a sword with a thirty-six-inch blade; to conform to the British Arms Act of 1912,
the size was reduced to nine inches.
Making Home Abroad 177
19. The community bought a large lot for thirty-four hundred dollars, and a new
two-story building cost around twenty thousand dollars. See Anne Louise Wood, ‘‘East
Indians in California, 1900–1947’’ (master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1966).
This excellent piece of research was based on firsthand accounts of the people involved
and the society’s records.
20. For these societies, see [http://www.pluralism.org./directory/index.php].
21. I am grateful to Harpreet Singh Toor, the president of the Richmond Hill
gurdwara, for providing a copy of the purchase deed.
22. I am grateful to Amarjit Singh Sidhu for a detailed discussion of this subject.
23. I am grateful to J. P. Singh for his help regarding the history of this gurdwara.
24. During the 1930s, it was suggested that chairs be brought into the congregational
hall. Sikh scholars in Amritsar, recalling prior debates regarding how Sikhs
should respond to the forces of modernity, posed no objection to this action as of April
25, 1935. But this did not resolve the debate among Stockton Sikhs. Not until 1946
were chairs were finally moved into the congregation hall, beginning a new way of
worship. Respect for the Guru Granth was obviously maintained, but its formal details
were interpreted in more Christian terms; keeping shoes on and sitting on chairs while
praying in the presence of the Guru Granth became the norm. After 1965, when new
immigrants came from the Punjab, this practice was discontinued.
25. This method of outreach to the American public has not gone entirely smoothly.
Debates about university programs are ongoing, and many questions have been raised
about the value of examining Sikh beliefs via such disciplines as history and anthropology.
These tensions erupted in a controversy around doctoral work completed at the
University of Toronto by Pashaura Singh, who was called before the Akal Takhat to
justify his research results and was forced to perform religious penance (Indian Express,
June 28, 1994).
26. ‘‘Spare Times,’’ New York Times, April 24, 1988, E40.
27. For more information, see [http://www.sikhmediawatch.org/].
28. In a significant development, the Sikh community in England has recently
designated the Akal Takhat and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee to
inherit all gurdwara properties worth over £25 million in case the Sikhs are ousted from
that country (‘‘uk Gurdwaras to Form Council,’’ Chandigarh [India] Tribune, November
4, 2003, [http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20031104/punjab1.htm]).
29. See P. S. Chahil, Sri Guru Granth Sahib (New Delhi: Crescent, 1995).
30. Whereas Punjabi Sikhs are trying to draw boundaries between Sikh beliefs and
Punjabi culture (to leave the cultural dimension behind), Euro-American Sikhs prefer
to tie together religion and culture. They have built a school in Amritsar, where they
feel that Sikh children can be best educated.
31. Another example of this influence can be seen in the advocacy of Ganga Singh
Dhillon, a Sikh leader based in Washington, D.C., area, which resulted in the Pakistan
government’s decision to create a gurdwara committee to oversee the buildings and
properties in Pakistan. This major development could have significant implications for
the Sikh community living in the diaspora.
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PART IV
Church,
Mosque,
Temple,
& State
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C O U R T N E Y B E N D E R & J E N N I F E R S N O W
From Alleged Buddhists to Unreasonable Hindus
First AmendmentJurisprudence after 1965
After the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, religiousdiversity
in the United States began to expand beyond the scope of Protestant-CatholicJew
and the occasional new religious movement to include adherents from
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other religious traditions. This
chapter investigates how this new religious immigration has changed and
challenged First Amendment jurisprudence. How are the courts responding
to this new religiousdiversity and, in particular,to the claims of adherents of
Asian religious traditions? What impact are Asian religions having, in practical
or theoretical terms, on First Amendment jurisprudence?
To answer these questions, we first sketch some of the broad changes in
First Amendment jurisprudence in the post-ig&5 period. We then review cases
in this period wherein adherents of Islam, Buddhism,Hinduism,or Sikhism
have made Free Exercise or Establishment Clause claims. We assess the kinds
of actors most prominent in these cases as well as the venues and areas of
public life where religious free exercise and establishment appear most pressing
for Asian religious actors. Wethen address how the judiciary'sexplicit and
tacit definitions of religion influence these decisions. Cases involving First
Amendment issues regularly require judges to analyzethe "religiousness" of
certain symbols or acts to a "reasonable observer," the "centraiity" of a practice
to a religious adherent, or the "sincerity" of an adherent in his or her
"belief." Given these we11-documented requirements, we show how Asian
religions have presented new challenges to the judiciary's operative definitions
of religion, particularly those that rely on tacitly Protestant notions of
the scope and impact of religion in American public life.
As legal scholar Kent Greenawalt notes, it is easy to summarize the U.S.
Supreme Court's pre-ig6os views on free exercise, given that the Court did not
say very much.1
Reynolds v. Unitd State (1879) established a distinction between
belief (or conscience) and action, finding that the Free Exercise Clause
181
9
182 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
protected religious belief in polygamy but not actually living in polygamous
marriages. This belief/action distinction was not successfully challenged until
1940 when, in Cantwell v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that distributing
religious literature was protected religious activity and thus was not subject to
the same restrictions as nonreligious solicitation. Further shifts away from
the belief/action distinction came in the 1960s as the Warren Court expanded
both the scope of protected religious action and the legal definition of ‘‘religious.’’
In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Supreme Court established a test that
placed a burden on the government to demonstrate a ‘‘compelling interest’’
when enforcing generally applicable laws that infringe on individuals’ religious
practices. In this case, it determined that a Seventh-Day Adventist who
was fired for refusing to work on Saturday (her Sabbath) could receive unemployment
benefits.≤
A few years after Sherbert, the Court ruled in United States v. Seeger (1965) that
its definition of religion would not require belief in a Supreme Being, e√ectively
determining that ‘‘religion’’ included many personally held matters of
conscience.≥
Asian religions played an important role in this broadening definition,
as the Court felt compelled to recognize both the legitimacy of nontheistic
religions (for example, Buddhism) and the unconstitutionality of defining
religion in such a way that required theistic beliefs.
These Free Exercise decisions (and the increasing separation of church and
state developing in Establishment Clause decisions) made clear the judiciary’s
view of itself as an active protector of minority religions, a position that Justice
Robert Jackson had earlier stated was the Court’s fundamental purpose: ‘‘The
very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the
vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities
and o≈cials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the
courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press,
freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be
submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.’’∂
This view did
not pass unnoticed; the number of Free Exercise cases expanded notably into
the early 1990s. Between 1963 and 1990, the Supreme Court heard and decided
17 Free Exercise cases (compared to 12 in the preceding forty years) and
declined to hear numerous others. The growth of Free Exercise cases was more
apparent in the federal appellate courts, which decided 22 cases between 1963
and 1970, 62 between 1971 and 1980, and 110 between 1981 and 1990.∑
Such
cases continued to mount even after it became clear that the courts usually did
not rule in favor of expanding American citizens’ Free Exercise rights.∏
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 183
Some judges expressed disapproval of these trends in Free Exercise jurisprudence,
especially as these changes threatened to overburden the courts
with claims. In his dissent to a 1969 appellate court decision that Muslim
prisoners were entitled to one pork-free meal daily, Judge Edward Tamm
stated, ‘‘The court having opened this Pandora’s Box must not hereafter complain
about hornets.’’π
In ensuing years, Tamm’s statement would prove to be
prophetic, particularly in predicting how some justices on the Supreme Court
would view Free Exercise claims.
The door that Sherbert and Seeger opened for Free Exercise claims closed
abruptly when, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court held
that drug counselors fired for ingesting peyote in a religious service were
lawfully denied unemployment benefits. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin
Scalia rejected the Sherbert balancing test, arguing that the government
need not demonstrate a ‘‘compelling interest’’ for generally applicable laws to
be constitutional. Such laws, he claimed, should not be subject to the vicissitudes
of individual conscience, lest the country devolve into anarchy and
lawlessness. Recognizing the burden that this decision placed on religious
minorities, Scalia nevertheless considered it the lesser of evils: ‘‘It may fairly
be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a
relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in;
but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred
to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which
judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious
beliefs.’’∫
Many lawyers, legal scholars, pundits, and religious groups
strenuously objected to Employment Division’s insensitivity to religious minorities.
In her partially concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
dismissed Scalia’s references to anarchy and lawlessness as a ‘‘parade of
horribles’’ that represented more a rhetorical scare tactic than anything else.
Nonetheless, in the years leading up to the 1990 Employment Division decision,
the number of free exercise cases brought to the court had jumped, as had the
range of religious actors making those claims. And, as Nancy Rosenblum
suggests, ‘‘The combination of religious pluralism and government activism
spurred Justice Scalia . . . to take a strong stand against what he portrayed as
an avalanche of religious opt-outs from civic obligations . . . into ungoverna-
bility.’’Ω
Scalia makes it clear that he expects the courts to have little further
role in adjudicating requests from actors seeking exemptions from general
laws. Responding to O’Connor’s complaints in a footnote, Scalia replied, ‘‘It
is a parade of horribles because it is horrible to contemplate that federal
184 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
judges will regularly balance against the importance of general laws the significance
of religious practice.’’∞≠
As he would have it, the courts—and American
society —would not be undone by religious diversity.
The public controversy following Employment Division exposed the di≈culties
involved in balancing Americans’ collective conviction that the judicial
branch is charged with protecting religious minorities against the courts’
increasing resistance to enforcing those protections. Many legal scholars,
pundits, and religious leaders were outraged by the decision, and public
outcry led to the passage in 1993 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(rfra), which essentially wrote the Sherbert test into federal law.∞∞
The Supreme
Court struck down the rfra in Boerne v. Flores (1997) on the ground
that Congress had overextended its powers to enact federal laws (by dictating
how to interpret them).∞≤
Since 1997, many state legislatures have passed
‘‘baby-rfras’’ that require state courts to adopt ‘‘compelling interest’’ tests.
While Employment Division severely curtailed the prospects of those seeking
federal protection for religious actions, the Rehnquist Court’s Establishment
Clause rulings e√ectively weakened the ‘‘wall of separation’’ set in place during
the Warren Court. Legal scholar Ira Lupu notes that Employment Division
‘‘invited a new and wider scope of permissive accommodation by the political
branches, and hinted that courts might tolerate such activity more than prior
establishment clause opinions would otherwise suggest.’’∞≥
Others have noted
that the court has used Establishment rather than Free Exercise cases to finetune
the line ‘‘between impermissible state action and permissible collective
private action’’ in public life, arguing that this shift could potentially benefit
all religious actors.∞∂
The Rehnquist Court favored less separation of church and state in its
establishment rulings. While the Warren Court’s decisions sharply limited
publicly funded displays of religion and religious activities, the Rehnquist
Court loosened up on such displays. The move toward what Justice Stephen
Breyer calls an ‘‘equal opportunity’’ approach to religious establishment contrasts
with earlier ‘‘neutrality’’ approaches. ‘‘Equal opportunity’’ means, for
example, that public schools must allow Bible study clubs to meet in public
school buildings after hours if the schools also allow nonreligious groups to
meet and that public universities cannot deny funds to student-run religious
groups if funds are provided to nonreligious groups. In Zelman v. SimmonsHarris
(2002), the Supreme Court upheld an Ohio school voucher law that
allows students to use public funds to attend private schools, including religious
schools. Such judgments demonstrate the majority’s opinion that the
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 185
government should not actively restrict government funding of an enterprise
merely because it is religious; if the state funds other private activities of a
similar kind, it can likewise support religious ones.∞∑
Sociologist Phillip Hammond argues that Chief Justice William Rehnquist
and those who join him in these decisions have been ‘‘less bothered than
some others on the Court by the vestiges of ‘establishment’ left over from a
time when governments did indeed sponsor or endorse religion, often unwit-
tingly.’’∞∏
That indeed appears to be the case. One possible consequence of a
weakened ‘‘wall of separation’’ is the development of a tacit religious establishment
or civil religion. As Thomas Curry argues, ‘‘The very argument that
the government can be nondiscriminatory in its sponsorship of religion is a
violation of the First Amendment in that it advances the belief that government
can know what is evenhanded in religious matters.’’∞π
If the past is any guide, there is reason to consider whether recent Establishment
Clause rulings might be used to such an end. As Philip Hamburger
documents in Separation of Church and State, Je√erson’s metaphoric wall first
entered the Supreme Court’s lexicon in the twentieth century. Justice Hugo
Black, a one-time Klansman committed to maintaining Protestant hegemony
against a rising tide of Catholics and other immigrants, introduced the metaphor
in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).∞∫
While historical precedent suggests that ‘‘equal opportunity’’ models may
veer toward endorsement of some religions over others, recent decisions may
lead to other unintended consequences. Equal opportunity does not prima
facie exclude school vouchers being sent to Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, or any
religious primary schools. In other words, recent equal opportunity decisions
can be read in such a way to encourage minority religious groups to vie for
such resources.
This prospect worries some judges and scholars. While Hammond and
Curry express concern that equal opportunity will support the establishment
of one position, others, including Breyer, worry that equal opportunity will
lead to increased religious and sectarian strife. In his dissent in Zelman v.
Simmons-Harris, Justice Breyer asked how the equal opportunity principle
would work in a nation of ‘‘Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and
Sikhs.’’ This trend, he argued, would require the courts to play a more active
role in religious matters. ‘‘Just how is the State to resolve the resulting controversies
without provoking legitimate fears of the kinds of religious favoritism
that, in so religiously diverse a Nation, threaten social dissension?’’∞Ω
Therefore,
although the equal opportunity interpretation holds out the possibility of
186 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
magnifying the public voice of religious minorities (and tempering some of
the e√ects of Employment Division), it has not yet presented the rules and tests
needed to keep public religious conflict at a minimum.
This cursory survey of the past forty years of First Amendment jurisprudence
underlines a substantial shift in the Supreme Court’s interpretations of
the appropriate space of religion in public life during the period of the new
religious immigration. The Warren Court, cognizant of the variety of religions
present in American life, expanded the lists of constitutionally protected religious
actions. It also insisted on greater separation between government and
religion, e√ectively excluding many public displays of religious symbols and
government funding of religious activities. In short, it acted on the vision that
religion was a private matter of individual conscience. In contrast, the Rehnquist
Court curtailed federal judicial protection of religious exercise and reinterpreted
the Establishment Clause to allow for equal opportunity for religious
groups in public life. The Rehnquist Court rejected the view that
religion should be relegated to individual expression alone and was more
willing than the prior Court to sacrifice the activities of religious minorities to
the greater good of a well-functioning society.
We now ask what role Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists have played
in these shifts and assess how these groups have fared during this period. Do
religious actors who bring complaints based on Free Exercise issues to the
courts fare well? Who are these actors? What arenas or public issues seem
most important to them, and why?
Post-1965 Asian immigration came during an era of judicial expansion of
religious protections. This expansion placed new religious immigrants in a
di√erent relation to American society than that experienced by nineteenthcentury
Catholics and Jews. Even if Asian immigrants faced religious discrimination
in daily life, the courts were a potentially powerful avenue for redress.
The shift toward increased judicial protection for religious minorities was
prompted largely by claims made by sectarian Christians and Jews; in general,
cases involving Asian religions have di√ered little from those involving such
groups. Nonetheless, over the past forty years, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
and Sikhs have exercised their First Amendment rights by bringing grievances
to federal courts. Most such cases that have reached the appellate level concern
one of three venues: prisons, public schools, or municipal zoning. Here we
survey these venues, the individuals or groups who bring cases to court, and
the success or failure of their claims. Most of these cases deal with Free Exercise
rather than Establishment issues, a pattern that mirrors larger trends,
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 187
where religious actors are three times more likely to bring Free Exercise cases
than Establishment cases to court.≤≠
We concentrate on U.S. Supreme Court
and federal appellate court opinions between 1963 and 2000.
Of all Asian religions, Islam has had the greatest presence in the courts.
According to John Wybraniec and Roger Finke’s 2001 statistics, more than 4
percent of all court cases on religion between 1981 and 1996 (including more
than 7 percent of all Free Exercise cases) were brought by Muslims, even
though during this period only about 0.5 percent of the U.S. population was
Muslim.≤∞
Almost all of these cases were brought by inmates, many of whom
converted (or became actively religious) during incarceration, and many of
whom are African American.≤≤
Far fewer cases were brought by immigrant or
second-generation Muslims or, for that matter, by Buddhists, Hindus, or
Sikhs. (In fact, Wybraniec and Finke do not include any of those groups
as independently significant in their survey of more than twenty-one hundred
cases.)
Until the late 1990s, most First Amendment cases involving Asian religions
were brought by Euro-American converts rather than by immigrants or their
children.≤≥
Several factors may account for this. Compared with their immigrant
coreligionists, ‘‘twice-born’’ converts generally have less di≈culty in
establishing legal residency in the United States and likely have more access to
the social and economic resources required to press such claims. Converts
also may be more likely to see themselves as religious minorities with rights
and the courts as a place where those rights might be protected.
Converts have also figured in many of the most prominent cases dealing
with Asian religions. These cases have not always put the best face on Asian
religions: when Timothy Leary’s lawyers argued that smoking marijuana was
an integral part of his experience as a Hindu, the circuit court analyzed the
role of marijuana in Hindu religious doctrine (or lack thereof ) and found for
the United States.≤∂
Judges still cite this case when seeking ballast against
those who mount frivolous religious claims to justify criminal acts. Other
cases brought by converts to Asian religions (or Asian-influenced ‘‘new religious
movements’’) stretched the limits of ‘‘real’’ religion (as opposed to
cultlike activity).
Still, the U.S. Supreme Court took seriously the self-identity of Cassius Clay
(Muhammad Ali) as a Muslim and included a lengthy discussion of the meaning
of ‘‘jihad’’ in its per curiam report. After determining that it is indeed
possible for a practicing Muslim to be a conscientious objector much in the
same sense that a Catholic would be, the court overturned Ali’s criminal
188 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
conviction for draft dodging and remanded the case of his conscientious
objector status to the appellate court. Likewise, the Supreme Court determined
in Cruz v. Beto (1972) that a Buddhist convert was impermissibly denied
the right to exercise his religion. The Court found that a man’s unconventional
beliefs should not exclude him from practicing his religion: ‘‘If Cruz
was a Buddhist and if he was denied a reasonable opportunity of pursuing his
faith comparable to the opportunity a√orded to fellow prisoners who adhere
to conventional religious precepts, then there was palpable discrimination by
the State against the Buddhist religion, established 600 b.c., long before the
Christian era.’’ The court continued, ‘‘Opportunities must be a√orded to all
prisoners to exercise the religious freedom guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth
Amendments without fear of penalty.’’≤∑
Despite these decisions, many judges evince lingering doubts as to the sincerity
of religious converts, particularly those who converted while in prison.
Because the courts have determined that religion is a matter of individual
conviction, many of these cases turn on the issue of a petitioner’s sincerity. In
his dissent to Cruz v. Beto, Rehnquist called into doubt Cruz’s sincerity, noting
that if courts could construe ‘‘every inmate’s complaint under the liberal rule’’
that protects religious free exercise, they would be without ‘‘the latitude necessary
to process this ever-increasing species of complaint.’’ He closed by
urging courts to resist hearing First Amendment cases from inmates such as
Cruz who have ‘‘nothing to lose from a complaint stating facts that he is
ultimately unable to prove.’’≤∏
Free Exercise cases also require judges to determine the centrality of a
religious practice to the believer’s faith, another issue that takes on a particular
cast within the prison system. Prisoners retain constitutional rights despite
their status as criminals or accused criminals. At least theoretically, their
rights to exercise religion freely cannot be abridged; prison authorities cannot
establish religion in the prison or discriminate among religions in prison
policy. In practice, however, prison authorities have wide latitude to restrict
religious practice; the courts generally permit restrictions as long as authorities
can show a governmental interest in doing so. So although prisoners
bring a high proportion of cases, they seldom succeed.
One factor is the matter of the centrality of a religious practice. Whereas
mainstream western religions have few daily constraints that are not already
absorbed into or accommodated by American culture, Asian religions often
appear to demand special requirements—clothing, hairstyles, diet, holidays,
and sexual modesty concerns—that do not fit the majority’s cultural frame.
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 189
Some of these di√erences are more easily accommodated than others. Prison
authorities understand that Muslims, like Christians, worship communally,
so they permit Friday j’umma (although not always to the satisfaction of Muslim
prisoners). They also allow visits from local imams, who bear functional
similarities to Christian clergy.
Such accommodations, however, do not necessarily o√er a Zen Buddhist
convict his full measure of religious freedom. Buddhist meetings do not
require a spiritual leader, so some prison authorities have refused to allow
them, citing policies that require an outside minister. Religiously based dietary
codes create other challenges, as they require o≈cials (and judges) to
determine whether fasting for Ramadan, for example, is a practice central to
Islam. The accommodation cases are legion: Muslims ask to be able to follow
the commandment to give alms; Sikhs refuse to cut their hair or take o√ their
turbans; Muslim converts demand that they be addressed by new Muslim
names. In the mid-1990s, a Sikh prisoner complained that being assigned to
share a cell with a smoker forced him to break a religious law against smoking
tobacco; the prison authorities and the courts refused to accommodate him.≤π
One conceptual roadblock to accepting practices as central is a Protestant
heritage that sees practices as peripheral to the central religious concerns of
belief and speech. Judges have seen such ‘‘externals’’ as theologically and
legally less important than the beliefs that supposedly prompted them. Likewise,
while most American judges have little di≈culty recognizing the centrality
of the Eucharist or even the rituals of foot washing or laying on of
hands, jurists run into di≈culties with Asian religious rituals. Judicial determinations
of centrality are further complicated by the fact that practices
essential to one believer may not be central to another. (Not all Sikh men
wear turbans.)
To summarize, most Free Exercise claims made to date by adherents of
Islam or Asian religions have come from converts or convicts. It is hard to
imagine that this fact has not negatively impacted courts’ views of Asian
religions. Converts may be deemed overzealous and their claims overdrawn.
Convicts (as Rehnquist made clear) may be deemed prevaricators who use
religion as an excuse for special treatment. In either case, the centrality of
any religious practice and the sincerity of the practitioner may be called into
question.
Although Asian religious immigrants have rarely pressed Free Exercise
claims, the cases they have brought have gravitated toward two key issues:
zoning and religious expression in public schools. In the courts, Asian re-
190 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
ligious actors press for rights that are often (though not always) given without
question to Christians and Jews. Such claims expose the inequities of religious
protections a√orded by U.S. jurisprudence.
Very few laws in the United States have explicitly prohibited religious free
exercise; those that have (such as a city ordinance that explicitly outlawed
animal sacrifice) have usually been dispatched as unconstitutional.≤∫
More
often, religious free exercise collides with generally applicable rules. Cases of
solicitation by Hare Krishnas (discussed later in the chapter) provide one
example: solicitation ordinances meant to apply to Fuller Brush salespeople
and Greenpeace fund-raisers also apply to religious groups that go door to
door. And, at least until 1990, judges needed to decide whether these general
ordinances placed a substantial burden on religious exercise.
Zoning for worship buildings has become a particular point of concern for
Asian religious groups, especially as local ordinances have been used from
time to time to restrict these groups from meeting. In 1984, the Islamic Center
of Mississippi successfully argued before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
that the city of Starkville, Mississippi, unconstitutionally limited its members’
free exercise by enforcing zoning laws in a discriminatory fashion. Starkville’s
o≈cials had repeatedly denied the group’s requests to rezone buildings on the
market for worship and, when the center finally purchased a house on the edge
of a university campus, threatened the group with further sanctions unless it
held its worship services elsewhere. The city’s argument that it was not required
to guarantee meeting space for religious groups within its limits was
dismissed by the appellate court as ‘‘reminiscent of Anatole France’s comment
on the majestic equality of the law that forbids all men, the rich as well as the
poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’’ Noting
the meager financial resources of the (mostly) student group, the court stated,
Laws that make churches, synagogues, and mosques accessible only to
those a√luent enough to travel by private automobile obviously burden the
exercise of religion by the poor. . . . And a city may not escape the constitutional
protection a√orded against its actions by protesting that those who
seek an activity it forbids may find it elsewhere. By making a mosque
relatively inaccessible within the city limits to Muslims who lack automobile
transportation, the City burdens their exercise of their religion.≤Ω
The Islamic Center won its case after demonstrating that a ‘‘loud’’ charismatic
Christian congregation that met next door had not encountered any opposition
from city o≈cials.
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 191
Tra≈c congestion, noise, and other inconveniences brought about by congregational
meetings often arise in religious zoning cases, where municipalities
(often legitimately) question the impact of religious groups on residents’
quality of life. While zoning has in some cases plainly been used to
discriminate against groups, in other cases the discrimination is not as clear
cut. For example, in Four-Three-Oh v. baps (2001), the Third Circuit Court of
Appeals decided on a case of a Hindu congregation (baps) that wished to
purchase a building previously used as a nightclub in North Bergen, New
Jersey. The local zoning board ruled that to use the building as a temple, the
group had to hire o√-duty police o≈cers to manage tra≈c and to enforce the
legal maximum number of attendees. When the local police force stated that it
could not supply o√-duty o≈cers and the zoning board refused to withdraw
its requirements, the Hindu group went to court seeking rezoning. Both the
district court and court of appeals found the zoning requirements to be ‘‘arbitrary
and unreasonable.’’≥≠
Neither party made religion or free exercise part of its argument. Nevertheless,
the court apparently considered First Amendment issues in making its
decision, as the dissenting judge stated that the majority had failed to judge
the case on its merits (that is, whether too many cars would clog the highway
and whether a private voluntary group would be able to enforce rules limiting
the number of participants). As baps had not made religious free exercise an
issue, he argued, neither should the court. He ‘‘would view this case quite
di√erently if there were any suggestion that the [zoning board] harbored any
bias towards baps or its members,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but I am aware of no such
evidence.’’≥∞
This dissent implies that the majority assumed that religious
discrimination was at play in this case.
The public school system is another avenue through which Asian religions
have appealed to the courts. Every child in the United States is required to
attend school of some kind; student bodies consequently are religiously diverse.
We should not be surprised, therefore, to find Hindu students challenging
the largely beef-based federal lunch program or Muslim students asking
for the freedom to perform required prayers (even though no such cases have
as yet arisen). Nevertheless, students’ constitutional rights, like those of prisoners,
may be restricted by school authorities in the interests of safety, security,
discipline, or e≈ciency.
Such a case recently arose in California’s public schools when two Sikh
boys wished to wear kirpans (small yet fully functional daggers) to school.
While school policy forbade knives for safety reasons, the Cheema boys and
192 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
their families argued that Sikhism required that they wear the kirpan at all
times. Any proposed ‘‘compromises’’ (including riveting the dagger in its
ceremonial sheath, dulling the edge, making it smaller, or replacing it with a
symbolic medallion) invalidated the religious requirement that the dagger
must be functional and the wearer able to draw it. Faced with this impasse, the
appeals court found in a divided decision that the boys should be able to wear
their kirpans sewn into the sheaths and hidden under their outer clothing. The
dissenting judge argued that this decision put all other students at risk. It was
impossible to trust an eight-year-old boy, no matter how religious, with a
knife, he said, pointing to how ‘‘experts’’ had agreed that a Sikh must use the
kirpan if he or ‘‘innocents’’ were threatened.≥≤
Religious diversity in public schools heightens governmental interest in
preserving an appearance of nonendorsement and nonestablishment of religion.
Though children are occasionally believed to have some semi-independent
religious rights (as the Cheema case shows), they are more often cast
as uniquely sensitive and impressionable and thus liable to perceive religious
activities as being endorsed by school authorities. As a result, cases concerning
the regulation of the religious practices of teachers (and consequently
their free exercise in the classroom) have arisen.
Alima Delores Reardon, a longtime substitute teacher in the Philadelphia
public schools, began in 1982 to dress in traditional Muslim garb, including a
veil that covered her head. In 1984, a principal sent her home to change her
clothing, stating that Pennsylvania’s garb statute prohibited her from teaching
in religious dress. The statute specifically stated that it was not legal for
teachers to wear ‘‘any dress, mark, emblem or insignia indicating the fact that
such teacher is a member or adherent of any religious order, sect or de-
nomination.’’≥≥
Reardon refused and subsequently lost her job.
Reardon filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
and the Justice Department took up her case, arguing that the statute
conflicted with civil rights law and that the school district had failed to ‘‘accommodate
individuals who wear or who seek to wear garb or dress that is an
aspect of religious observance.’’ The commonwealth of Pennsylvania argued
that the statute helped maintain the religious neutrality in the public schools.
The district court ruled that the school district was in error but did not find the
garb statute discriminatory.
Both the school district and the Justice Department appealed, and the Third
Circuit Court of Appeals found for Pennsylvania, a≈rming the lower court’s
ruling in favor of the commonwealth’s law and reversing the lower court’s
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 193
ruling against the school district. It is in the commonwealth’s interest, the
opinion stated, to maintain ‘‘religious neutrality in the public school system,
and accordingly [to] conclude that it would impose an undue hardship to
require the Commonwealth to accommodate Ms. Reardon and others similarly
situated.’’≥∂
This opinion draws heavily on a similar case brought before the Oregon
state court in 1986 by a convert to Sikhism. Janet Cooper, who had taught in
public schools for twelve years, started to dress in all white, with her hair in a
turban. Like Reardon, she was dismissed from her teaching duties for violating
her state’s religious garb law. While Cooper won a short-lived victory in
the Oregon Court of Appeals, the Oregon Supreme Court reversed the decision,
arguing that statutes prohibiting religious dress were ‘‘narrowly tailored
to the compelling state interest in preserving the appearance of religious
neutrality in public schools.’’≥∑
Both cases focus on state garb laws that specifically target public schoolteachers
who dress in a distinctively religious manner. The states in both cases
e√ectively argued that while such laws limit teachers’ free exercise of religion,
the state’s overriding interest in religious disestablishment makes such limits
permissible. Where young and fertile minds are involved, teachers do not have
the right to present their students with a constant reminder of religious
beliefs.
Several other issues arise in these cases. First, while the schools are to
remain religiously neutral, the judges do not suggest that they become religiously
arid. Drawing on the opinion in Cooper, the Third Circuit opinion
noted that Oregon’s (and Pennsylvania’s) garb laws do not prohibit teachers
from wearing ‘‘ambiguous’’ religious symbols such as a cross or a ‘‘Star of
David’’ on a necklace or charm bracelet. Likewise, a teacher may dress in
religious garb ‘‘on her way to or from a seasonal ceremony.’’ Teachers are
prohibited only from dressing in a way that ‘‘may leave a conscious or unconscious
impression among young people and their parents that the school
endorses the particular religious commitment of the person whom it has
assigned the public role of teacher.’’≥∏
Teachers who cultivate less ‘‘obvious’’
or less ‘‘daily’’ expressions of religion need not hide them from their students.
Toward the end of its opinion on the Philadelphia case involving Alima
Reardon, the appellate court mentioned the Establishment issues that arose
obliquely in the case. Lawyers representing the Justice Department on Reardon’s
behalf had argued that the origins of the garb statute were not neutral
but rather intentionally discriminatory. In 1894, a year before the garb stat-
194 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
ute’s passage, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional
barrier to keeping Catholic nuns or priests from teaching in public
schools. The state legislature circumvented this judicial ruling by passing the
garb statute.
The appellate court acknowledged the law’s anti-Catholic history but stated
that past motivations had no bearing on the fact that the garb statute’s current
purpose was to maintain the appearance of neutrality in the public schools.
The opinion stated that ‘‘where [a] statute bans religious attire and is being
enforced by the Commonwealth in a non-discriminatory manner with respect
to the Muslim teachers as well as Catholics, we conclude that it is irrelevant
whether a portion of those who voted for the statute in 1895 were motivated by
the desire to bar Catholic habit from the classroom.’’≥π
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals gave the garb rule a second life, thanks
to twentieth-century Establishment notions of religious neutrality. That this
statute will discriminate against Sikhs and Muslims (and presumably some
Hindus) but not against other religious groups (including, ironically, most
Catholic orders) is lost on the court. The statute’s ‘‘second life’’ thus may
well mirror its discriminatory first; as Philip Hamburger has argued, the
nineteenth-century concept of a ‘‘wall of separation’’ originally excluded
an increasingly vocal religious minority from public life, including public
schools.≥∫
Regardless of what we make of this decision, this statute continues
to e√ectively exclude from public schools teachers of some minority faiths.
As many have observed, U.S. courts have often interpreted ‘‘religion’’ in
Protestant ways. So we might imagine that Asian religious actors would successfully
challenge this bias under the Establishment Clause. But this has not
yet come to pass. Few Asian religious actors have directly drawn on the
Establishment Clause to challenge the Protestant assumptions undergirding
American public life. Indeed, many Asian immigrants may well find the tacitly
Protestant aspects of public life more welcoming than alienating. Hindus,
Muslims, and Sikhs eager to win a place at the political table might find doing
so di≈cult if secular humanism exiles religion from public life. Ironically, recent
Establishment Clause cases based on equal opportunity for the public expression
of religion may well fit with some new immigrant religious groups’
perceptions of how they will be included in a religiously plural public sphere.
Some exceptions bear mentioning, however. Chief among these is Chaudhuri
v. Tennessee (1997), in which a Hindu professor sued the public university
that employed him for establishing religion first through prayers and later
through a moment of silence at university functions.≥Ω
Dr. Dilip Chaudhuri ar-
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 195
gued that the prayers—‘‘nonsectarian’’ according to the Tennessee State University
administration—were actually Christian, given that they were monotheistic
and referred to ‘‘our Heavenly Father.’’ When the university responded to
Chaudhuri by instituting a moment of silence rather than a prayer at football
games and college events, members of the audience ‘‘spontaneously’’ recited
the Lord’s Prayer—evidence that many participants considered the activity a
Christian one.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the ‘‘prayers did, to be
sure, evoke a monotheistic tradition not shared by Hindus such as Dr. Chaudhuri.’’
However, quoting from Marsh v. Chambers (1983), the court stated that
‘‘the content of the prayer is not of concern to judges where, as here, there is
no indication that the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or
advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.’’∂≠
In other words,
the court found that although the prayers evoked a particular tradition, they
were not advancing that tradition. ‘‘No reasonable observer could conclude
that tsu, merely by requesting a moment of silence at its functions, places its
stamp of approval on any particular religion or religion in general.’’∂∞
In coming to its decision that a monotheistic prayer did not advance any
particular faith, the Sixth Circuit relied on a ‘‘reasonable observer’’ test used
in many similar cases to determine whether a particular symbol or act is
religious. But who is a reasonable observer? By definition, the reasonable
observer is not a real person—and certainly not a person of any particular
religion—but rather an abstraction of a person who is not completely ignorant
of the meaning and history of a symbol or act.∂≤
But the Sixth Circuit clearly
envisioned its reasonable observer as someone similar to the Christian students
and faculty of Tennessee State, comfortable with a fairly high level of
accommodation between religion and government, expecting religious ‘‘solemnization’’
of public events, and su≈ciently Christian to view a prayer to
‘‘our Heavenly Father’’ as nonsectarian.
Some judges see grave problems in relying on this abstract and unreal
‘‘reasonable observer.’’ Justice William Brennan dissented bitterly to its use in
Allegheny v. aclu (1989), arguing that the ‘‘reasonable observer’’ test allows
for only one reasonable position. Concerning this case, in which the Court
decided that the public display of a crèche and a menorah on state property was
nonreligious and thus constitutional, he states, ‘‘I shudder to think that the
only ‘reasonable observer’ is one who shares the particular views on perspective,
spacing, and accent expressed in [the majority] opinion, thus making
analysis under the Establishment Clause look more like an exam in Art 101
196 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
than an inquiry into constitutional law.’’∂≥
And although Chaudhuri lost his
case, a partial dissent to the opinion recognized the shortcomings of the
majority position. Circuit Judge Nathaniel Jones reminded his peers that they
must be ‘‘vigilant to guard against quantifying the humiliation visited upon
one who follows a non-Christian religion or tradition within a nation that
maintains a strong Christian tradition. . . . The majority has applied a litmus
test that will certainly confuse future o≈cials and policy makers confronted
with the increasingly diverse religious orientation of the American public.’’∂∂
Chaudhuri’s supposedly unreasonable perspective is a religious perspective.
Chaudhuri made his claims as a Hindu, arguing that even a moment of
silence is an establishment of the majority Christian tradition. This is particularly
true when the case history shows that the authorities embraced a
moment of silence only after retreating first to nonsectarian prayer and that
the moment of silence was intended to preserve the community’s tradition of
solemnizing public events with prayer. The audience’s recitation of the Lord’s
Prayer during the ‘‘moment of silence’’ (and the loud applause that accompanied
it) shows that the majority wanted its own traditions to prevail, regardless
of Chaudhuri’s discomfort as a religious minority. While the judges suggest
that the prayers to ‘‘our Heavenly Father’’ are civic and not sectarian, a
Hindu (apparently unreasonably) sees otherwise.∂∑
But majority religions are
not the only faiths that might be established in public space.
In Brooks v. Oak Ridge (2000), Tennessee resident David Brooks argued that
the display of a ‘‘Friendship Bell’’ in a public park in Oak Park unconstitutionally
endorsed Buddhism.∂∏
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged
that the bell was cast in Japan, dedicated by Japanese monks, and
inscribed with religious symbols. It also noted that bells of a similar sort were
used by Buddhists in Japan for religious purposes. Using the ‘‘reasonable
observer’’ test, however, the court nevertheless determined that ‘‘although the
religious aspects of the bell and its casting ceremony remain troubling, on
balance we believe that the reasonable observer would determine that the City
of Oak Ridge intended to endorse peace and friendship with Japan, not the
Buddhist religion, by adopting and displaying the Friendship Bell.’’∂π
In short,
Brooks’s view of these symbols as primarily religious was ‘‘unreasonable.’’
In a similar case, Altman v. Bedford (2001), a group of Roman Catholic parents
charged that the Westchester, New York, public schools were endorsing
—and inculcating—Asian religions, paganism, and witchcraft. They cited,
among other things, a teacher’s lessons on India, in which she read her class a
‘‘folktale’’ about the Hindu deity Ganesh (‘‘How Ganesh Got an Elephant
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 197
Head’’) and had them craft small Ganesh sculptures as a project. The school
had also hired a yoga teacher (called the Yoga Guy) who dressed in distinctively
Sikh clothing to teach part of its physical education curriculum. The
court ruled in favor of the school district, referring to the ‘‘reasonable observer’’
in its decision. The Sikh teacher did not teach yoga as a spiritual
discipline, it determined, and reading the Ganesh story was an exercise in
cultural contact and therefore was not impermissibly religious. The court did
find, however, that having the children make Ganesh ‘‘idols,’’ as the Catholic
parents put it, violated the Establishment Clause, but this part of the decision
was reversed on appeal because of a legal technicality.∂∫
The ‘‘reasonable observer’’ concept can in theory be applied to each case de
novo, since it is, aside from reasonableness, contentless. But every ‘‘reasonable
observer’’ conjured up by the courts has specific characteristics. She
has some knowledge of the history of symbols. She reads civic and cultural
meaning into symbols but rarely religious import. In Brooks, this reasonable
observer saw the bell as a sign of cultural interchange, not religious proselytization.
In Altman, she read stories about Ganesh culturally rather than religiously.
Similarly, in Chaudhuri, the courts focus on the civic rather than the
religious aspects of a moment of silence. In other words, the ‘‘reasonable
observer,’’ whether protecting traditional Christian norms or denying that
municipalities are endorsing Asian religions, tends to remove rites, activities,
and symbols from a religious to a secular context. The courts appear to be
rather consistently rejecting citizens’ arguments that religious symbols are, in
fact, religious.∂Ω
The key question here, of course, is what religion is and what it is not. The
courts’ definitions of religion plainly influence their decisions. Judges understandably
do not wish to play theologians, so they work hard to appear detached
and objective, yet those who rule on Free Exercise and Establishment
cases necessarily operate, either consciously or unconsciously, with particular
definitions of religion. And such definitions matter.∑≠
Scholars of religion are quick to remind legal scholars that there is no such
thing as generic ‘‘religion,’’ only particular ‘‘religions.’’ Accordingly, personal
or mainstream assumptions always have the potential unwittingly to leak into
legal judgments. This problem has been duly noted by legal scholars, many of
whom now concede that the court’s operative definitions have a de facto
Protestant character.∑∞
(Whether this fact ‘‘establishes’’ Protestantism is of
course another question.) These operative definitions of religion have several
properties. First, they privilege individual conscience over collective religious
198 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
authority. Second, they presume that the core of religion is belief or conscience,
from which action follows. Third, they presume that religion is primarily
private.
These notions are widely and deeply embedded in our implicitly Protestant
political culture, notably in our conception of human rights, which are typically
understood to protect individuals rather than groups. J. S. Mill and other
liberals argued that ‘‘liberty of conscience’’ was particularly worth protecting,
and so they pressed for the maintenance of a vast, unregulated ‘‘private
sphere’’ wherein individuals could pursue their independent religious, ideological,
and aesthetic goals (as long as they did not harm society).∑≤
The goal of
the First Amendment, Martha Nussbaum states, is to promote ‘‘a regime in
which each citizen’s liberty of conscience is preserved inviolate, despite the
pressures that corporate bodies of various types, whether religious or secular,
may bring to bear.’’∑≥
The courts’ language of rights, therefore, neatly dovetails
with Protestant definitions of religion that give conscience and individual selfdetermination
a central place. This intersection might be inevitable. ‘‘Even
were it true that focusing on individual claimants has some slight e√ect on
encouraging individuality in religion, the law has little choice,’’ Kent Greenawalt
argues. ‘‘Free exercise rights are mainly individual; legal rules should not
insist that members see things according to prevailing views within a de-
nomination.’’∑∂
Greenawalt nevertheless fails su≈ciently to address the impact
of these definitions on religious minority groups. As the courts link
religious conviction to the right to choose a religion, they simultaneously
provide less latitude to those whose religious convictions are based not on
individual choice but on a duty to moral communities that precedes such
choices.∑∑
The courts’ definitions of religion started to expand in the 1960s, partly in
response to the growing presence of Asian religious actors (nontheistic Buddhists
in particular). The court relied largely on academic definitions of religion
and in some cases on academic experts who provided ‘‘unbiased’’ views
of the essentials of particular religions. (For example, in Cheema v. Thompson,
Columbia University Professor Gurinder Singh Mann testified about the kirpan
and the religious obligations of Sikhs.) Nevertheless, courts generally use
such testimony to arrive at a correct interpretation of a specific religion within
the operative definitions already employed. For example, in the iskcon
cases detailed later in this chapter, experts testified about whether sankirtan, a
tradition of soliciting funds as a form of proselytizing, is central to the religion
but did not call into question the standard of centrality itself.
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 199
The judiciary did not explicitly take up the burden of defining religion until
the 1960s, when the courts determined in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) and again in
Welsh v. United States (1970) that they could not discriminate against religions
that did not believe in a Supreme Being or a God.∑∏
After the courts saw that
not all ‘‘world religions’’ (for example, Daoism and some forms of Buddhism)
or home-grown religions (such as Ethical Culture) were theistic, the old substantive
definitions came under fire. Not wanting to appear to privilege some
forms of religion over others, the courts sought alternatives to those substantive
definitions. More specifically, the courts began to draw on functional
definitions of religion, which emphasize religions’ role in believers’ lives.
Many courts drew heavily on the work of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich,
whose definition of religion as a matter of ‘‘ultimate concern’’ quickly
replaced the older content-based definition of religion as belief in a Supreme
Being.
This ‘‘ultimate concern’’ perspective reinforced the psychological dimension
(inspired by the work of William James) already embedded in the courts’
content-based definitions. Ultimate concern was construed as an allegiance to
what people ‘‘really care about’’ and act on, regardless of temporal or earthly
consequences.∑π
In other words, ultimate concern definitions continued to
focus on the beliefs and concerns of individuals.∑∫
But the courts could now
entertain arguments from individuals expressing sincere beliefs, even if those
beliefs contradicted their religion’s orthodoxy. For example, although not all
Muslims or Catholics are conscientious objectors, those who claimed to be so
(qua Muslims or Catholics) could still be viewed as acting on religious convictions.
This emphasis on personal conviction, while congruent with notions of
individual liberty, placed an even greater burden on the courts to ascertain an
individual’s sincerity. And, as we have seen, determining sincerity is not a
straightforward task.
Both substantive and functional definitions of religion can exclude groups
and theologies that many consider religious. Not all religions emphasize
conviction as Protestantism does. So Greenawalt and others have proposed an
analogical approach that escapes some of the underlying theological assumptions
embedded in functional definitions. An analogical definition draws on
Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and determines the ‘‘religiousness’’
of the object in question based on its resemblance to a number of
elements found in other clear-cut cases of religion. Some appellate courts
have used analogical definitions to make decisions in gray areas, where the
religiousness of an entire ideology or system is in question. Analogical prin-
200 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
ciples in theory short-circuit the bias that exists in other definitions and seem
especially suited to cases involving Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other
Asian religious ‘‘families.’’ To date, however, applications of analogical thinking
have relied on those ‘‘families’’ (Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish) closer
to home.
The impact of these various definitions of religion is most obvious in cases
where courts must determine whether a group is religious or merely ideological
(for example, cases involving Scientology or move), but they also influence
decisions about Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.∑Ω
That is, even though
the courts have no di≈culty determining that Muslims are religious, judges
still draw on particular definitions of religion and religious practice to interpret
whether a Muslim’s particular practice is central or essential and whether
she is sincere in claiming constitutional protections.
The consequences of one’s choice of definitions become clear when we
compare two cases argued before di√erent appellate courts in the early 1980s.
Both turn on a similar issue: whether the Hare Krishnas’ practice of sankirtan
is a constitutionally protected religious activity. As we will see, the courts
continue to use definitions of religion that reinforce commonplace American
boundaries between religious and nonreligious activity. These boundaries are
not always appropriate, however, when dealing with Asian religions, Native
American faiths, or even sectarian Christian and Jewish groups.∏≠
By rarely
taking Asian religions on their own terms, court decisions limit free exercise
along the boundaries implicit in their definitions.
In iskcon v. Barber (1981), the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals determined
that sankirtan conducted at a state fair is a protected religious activity and
allowed the Hare Krishnas to solicit funds and evangelize there. In iskcon v.
Houston (1982), the Second Court of Appeals ruled that sankirtan is not a
protected religious activity insofar as it involves solicitation of funds and
determined that Hare Krishnas must register with the city before they make
their rounds of local residences. While these circuit courts of appeals agree
that the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (iskcon) is a religion,
they disagree about how religious the practice of sankirtan is. This disagreement
hangs in large measure on their operating definitions of religion.
iskcon v. Barber concerns whether iskcon members can practice sankirtan
at the New York State Fair. This fair, the judges note, has for years
allowed ‘‘religious, fraternal, and political groups’’ to participate but has also
(by long-standing unwritten rule) prohibited these groups from soliciting
funds. The State Fair formalized this solicitation rule in 1978, only after
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 201
sankirtan became an issue. The change, the group argued, unconstitutionally
restricted the Hare Krishnas’ free exercise of religion.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals began its ruling by stating that
iskcon is a religion and then proceeded to determine the place of sankirtan
within it. The ruling drew on the language of centrality and sincerity of practice
and discussed the history of the iskcon tradition. Without noting individual
sources, the opinion referred at several points to ‘‘experts’’ in south
Asian religions and Hinduism who had testified for and against iskcon.
The court laid out at some length its reasons for considering iskcon a
religion, no doubt as a result of contemporary charges that iskcon was a
cult: ‘‘Krishna Consciousness is an outgrowth of the Chaitanya movement of
Bengal, which derives from the Bhakti tradition. . . . Lord Chaitanya made the
chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra central to sankirtan. He opened up the
process of spiritual liberation to the masses by bringing into his movement
people who were outside the standard Hindu community and the caste system
and proclaimed that one day his name will be chanted in every town and village
of the world.’’ The opinion then discussed the introduction of iskcon
to the United States and described the di√erences in sankirtan practice in the
United States and India. By situating Krishna Consciousness within a long
tradition and positioning sankirtan as part and parcel of the religion, the court
brought the practice inside the circle of centrality. This finding, in turn, defined
sankirtan as a constitutionally protected religious activity, exempt from
the fair’s general restrictions against soliciting money.
The majority also commented on why it reversed the lower court’s ruling,
which found in favor of the state after determining that sankirtan fell under
the heading of ‘‘commercial speech.’’ Here the appeals court relied on a
‘‘functional, phenomenological investigation of an individual’s ‘religion’ ’’
that drew explicitly on Tillich’s definition of religion as ‘‘ultimate concern.’’∏∞
The opinion stated that such a concern ‘‘is more than intellectual when a
believer would categorically ‘disregard elementary self-interest in preference
to transgressing its tenets.’ ’’ Sankirtan is therefore not some secular thing that
Hare Krishnas do simply to make money; it emerges from the ‘‘literature and
doctrine’’ of the movement. Sankirtan is protected, in short, because it has
been a central Hare Krishna practice for some time and because those who
perform it do so sincerely.
While this case’s decision represents a victory for free exercise, the decision
was written in light of a plainly Protestant view of religion, where issues of ultimate
concern help to establish the sincerity of religious claims and the central-
202 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
ity of a given practice. The court also allowed itself a few parting words about
its distaste for those who use religion to further less tasteful ends: ‘‘We do not
condone the odious tactics of swindling and harassment hidden beneath a
veneer of religion. But when we are asked to sacrifice legitimate First Amendment
rights at the altar of law enforcement, we are given pause. The unpopular
traditions, practices, and doctrines of alien religions need not receive our approval
or support, but must be tolerated if our freedoms are to be preserved.’’∏≤
The outcome of iskcon v. Houston was quite di√erent. In this case, Hare
Krishnas argued that they should not be restricted by a Houston ordinance that
required those who ask for money by going door to door to register with the
city and to wear or possess a permit. The city argued that the ordinance was religiously
neutral and had never been used to restrict or censor anyone who
wished to go door to door but merely placed on public record those groups
who were doing so. iskcon argued that solicitation of funds was a religious
practice rather than a commercial activity and that the ordinance unfairly burdened
its practitioners’ ability to practice a fundamental religious obligation.
Here, as in Barber, the court found it necessary to explain why iskcon is
a religion. Rather than appealing to history, however, the Houston decision
employed an analogical approach. iskcon is a religion, it found, because
‘‘Krishna followers have a temple in Houston, ordained priests, are guided by
their construction of the Bhagavad-gita, a sacred Hindu text as important in
the Buddhist [sic] religions as the Bible is to Christians and Jews and, as far as
the record goes, are members of an institutionalized religion on the same
institutional level as many other religions.’’∏≥
While the judge had some di≈culty
in di√erentiating between Hinduism and Buddhism, both are religions,
just like Christianity and Judaism. Each has sacred scripture. Each has religious
authorities (priests) and a temple. The opinion then discussed sankirtan,
defining it in terms of its purpose: spreading religious beliefs, financially
supporting the group, and attracting new members. In reaching its decision,
the appeals court then extended its analogical definition to iskcon’s practice:
‘‘Krishna devotees have complete freedom to exercise their religion by
distributing their literature and otherwise spreading the society’s religious
beliefs. They also have complete freedom of speech to express their views and
to proselytize by persuasion. The third element, solicitation of funds, is a
di√erent matter; it is circumscribed by the requirements of the ordinance.’’∏∂
In this case, an analogical definition of religion includes proselytizing but
excludes what the judge sees as economic activity. In short, while spreading
the word or handing out literature are recognizable religious practices, asking
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 203
strangers for money is not.∏∑
Hare Krishnas apparently can engage in a ‘‘religious
practice’’ only insofar as it seems analogous to practices of mainstream
religious groups. Here we see the limitations of the analogical method
at work: in the contemporary United States, the mainstream religions from
which judges draw their analogies do not send priests or monks out to beg for
food in the streets or ask lay adherents to solicit strangers for charity. Thus,
despite the acknowledgment that Krishnas ‘‘ritualize’’ solicitation (a point
argued in He√ron v. iskcon), sankirtan remains an economic rather than a
religious activity in the eyes of this court.
Although these two court decisions are not identical, both turn on the
degree to which sankirtan is viewed as a religious practice. Both turn, in other
words, on the courts’ definitions of ‘‘religion,’’ which compel judges to evaluate
religious action by drawing on Christian norms such as religious individualism
and the primacy of religious conscience.
Theperiodofnewreligiousimmigrationhascoincidedwithnotablegrowth
in Free Exercise cases. Growing recognition of the United States as a nation of
religions has played a role in the jurisprudential turn that the Supreme Court
has taken in recent decades. The courts have responded to the presence of
Asian religious actors in varied ways: by expanding definitions of religion to
include nontheistic varieties, by drawing on the ideal of religious pluralism to
call for stricter separation of church and state, and by limiting free exercise lest
a nest of hornets or a ‘‘parade of horribles’’ overtake American society.
The courts’ views of religious diversity depend in part on the cases they
hear. Thus, it is important to reiterate that most cases to date dealing with
Asian religions and Islam heard by the federal courts involve European and
African American converts and prison inmates. These classes of claimants
arguably face more of an uphill battle in establishing the sincerity of their
religious practices than do nonconverts and nonconvicts. All Asian religious
claimants, however, encounter the additional burden of educating judges who
are largely unfamiliar with Asian religions and therefore operate with implicitly
Christian distinctions between the sacred and the profane. Asian religious
actors, in short, begin at a distinct disadvantage. At the same time,
cases such as Four-Three-Oh v. baps suggest that some federal judges are
willing to take religious discrimination into account even in cases that do not
seem on the face to be about religion.
One consequence of the presence of Asian religious actors in the courts is
their ability to expose the Christian principles that work by stealth in courts’
operating definitions. In the cases involving sankirtan, neither functional nor
204 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
analogical definitions of religion preclude the court from favoring some religions
over others. Functional definitions emphasize the psychological over
the practical elements of religions and accrue to the favor of religions that
define themselves as springing from individual conviction (rather than duty to
a community, family tradition, or religious authority). Analogical definitions
tend to exclude from protection actions and activities that are historically
viewed in the United States as political or economic rather than religious. Free
exercise is restricted in either case but even more so for those who must first
instruct judges as to which practices are central to the faith and for those
whose claims of sincerity are framed in terms other than personal conviction.
Ongoing changes in Establishment Clause interpretation present a somewhat
di√erent picture. The recent stress on ‘‘equal opportunity’’ or ‘‘evenhandedness’’
rather than ‘‘separation’’ reminds us that the United States has
never attained true separation of church and state (a fact reinforced by public
outcry over the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2002 decision that the Pledge
of Allegiance’s ‘‘under God’’ language constitutes an unconstitutional endorsement
of religion).∏∏
Whether this shift toward an equal opportunity
interpretation will expand the spaces where adherents to Asian religions can
act religiously remains to be seen and must be viewed in light of other recent
developments, including the courts’ reliance on a ‘‘reasonable observer’’ in its
Establishment Clause rulings. Unlike the Catholic parents in Westchester,
Brooks in Oak Ridge, or Chaudhuri at Tennessee State, the courts continue to
posit a ‘‘reasonable observer’’ for whom the religious symbols and ideas of
both majority and minority can coexist but only insofar as religious symbols
serve as mnemonic devices to remind Americans of both our diverse cultural
origins and the political state that supersedes them all. To this reasonable
observer (and the judges and justices who use this fiction in their decisions),
the challenges presented by a nation of religions do not seem insurmountable.
These recent decisions are certainly reshaping the contexts in which all
religious actors can act in public life. Whether they are adequate to the task of
anticipating and shaping the challenges of a nation wherein religion’s power
remains more than a cultural marker remains to be seen.
notes
1. Kent Greenawalt, ‘‘Religion as a Concept in Constitutional Law,’’ California Law
Review 72.5 (September 1984): 753.
2. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1898); Cantwell v. State of Connecticut, 310 U.S.
296 (1940); Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963).
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 205
3. Greenawalt, ‘‘Religion as a Concept’’; Philip E. Hammond, With Liberty for All
(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1998); United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163
(1965).
4. West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638 (1943).
5. We compiled this data by searching the legal case archives in Lexis-Nexis. We located
Free Exercise cases heard at the Supreme Court and Federal Appeals Court levels
from 1963 to 1999 through keyword searches (e.g., ‘‘free exercise’’ and ‘‘religion’’). We
coded as relevant all cases in which Free Exercise constituted the primary legal issue, excluding
all cases where the decision was determined by the courts not to be publishable.
6. John Ryan, ‘‘Smith and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act: An Iconoclastic
Assessment,’’ Virginia Law Review 78 (September 1992): 1407. Even after Sherbert, the
courts rarely ruled in favor of expanding Free Exercise. Only four of the seventeen cases
to reach the Supreme Court between 1963 and 1990 won, and almost three-quarters of
all Free Exercise cases to reach federal appellate courts between 1963 and 1994 lost. A
recent study finds that at all court levels, Free Exercise cases made by mainline Protestants
are almost twice as likely to succeed than those brought by Muslims or members
of ‘‘new religious’’ groups. Native Americans and sectarian Christians are also less
likely to win cases. See John Wybraniec and Roger Finke, ‘‘Religious Regulation and
the Courts: The Judiciary’s Changing Role in Protecting Minority Religions from Majoritarian
Rule,’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40.3 (September 2001): 427–44.
7. Barnett v. Rodgers, 410 F. 2nd 995, 1004 (1969).
8. Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 890 (1990).
9. Nancy Rosenblum, ‘‘Introduction: Pluralism, Integralism, and Political Theories
of Religious Accommodation,’’ in Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith, edited by
Nancy Rosenblum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13.
10. Employment Division v. Smith, 891.
11. See, e.g., Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Basic Books, 1993);
Michael McConnell, ‘‘Free Exercise Revisionism and the Smith Decision,’’ University of
Chicago Law Review 57 (Fall 1990): 1109–53.
12. City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997).
13. Ira Lupu, ‘‘The Trouble with Accommodation,’’ George Washington Law Review
60.3 (March 1992): 754.
14. Noah Feldman, ‘‘From Liberty to Equality: The Transformation of the Establishment
Clause,’’ California Law Review 90.3 (May 2002): 673.
15. Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 115 S. Ct. 2510 (1995); Lamb’s Chapel v. Center
Moriches School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993); Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District, 509
U.S. 1 (1993); Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 122 S. Ct. 2460 (2002).
16. Phillip E. Hammond, ‘‘American Church/State Jurisprudence from the Warren
Court to the Rehnquist Court,’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40.3 (September
2001): 463.
17. Thomas J. Curry, Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59.
18. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002); Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).
206 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
19. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2505.
20. Wybraniec and Finke, ‘‘Religious Regulation and the Courts.’’
21. Tom Smith places the number of Muslims in the United States roughly between
1.4 and 1.9 million, making the number closer to 0.67 percent of the population
(‘‘Religious Diversity in America: The Emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and
Others,’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41.3 [September 2002]: 577–85).
22. Although more research is required to verify this, it also appears that many
cases in the 1970s were brought by inmates identified with the Nation of Islam and that
in recent years a larger proportion are identified (if at all) as ‘‘Orthodox’’ Muslims.
23. The scholarly debate over how to best categorize Asian religions’ ‘‘immigrant’’
and ‘‘convert’’ groups continues. For a history of this debate, see Martin Baumann,
‘‘Protective Amulets and Awareness Techniques, or How to Make Sense of Buddhism
in the West,’’ in Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Martin Baumann and
Charles S. Prebish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51–65; Charles S.
Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 57–63.
24. Leary v. United States, 383 F. 2nd 851 (1967).
25. Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971); Cruz v. Beto, 92 S. Ct. 1079, 1081 (1972).
26. Cruz v. Beto, 1084.
27. On the Zen Buddhist prisoner unable to practice congregational chanting, see
Spies v. Voinovich, 173 F. 3rd 398 (1999). Numerous cases deal with prisoners and
Ramadan fasting, and they are frequently brought by segregated or solitary confinement
prisoners rather than prisoners at large (for whom prisons attempt to schedule
Ramadan meals). A typical example is Akeem Abdul Makin v. Colorado Dept. of Corrections,
183 F. 3rd 1205 (1999). On the Sikh forced to room with a smoker, see Grote v. Ramirez,
1998 U.S. App. lexis 34239. On the objections of Sikhs and Muslims to beard and
hair-length regulations, see Silvey v. Schriro, 117 F. 3rd 1423 (1997). Cases of prisoners
unable to use Muslim or religious names are also many; see, e.g., Matthews v. Morales,
23 F. 3rd 118 (1994).
28. Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).
29. Islamic Center v. Starkville, 840 F. 2nd 293, 299 (1988). Internal citations omitted.
30. Four-Three-Oh v. baps, 256 F. 3rd 107, 111 (2001).
31. Ibid., 119.
32. Cheema v. Thompson, 67 F. 3rd 883 (1995). For an excellent treatment of this case,
see Vinay Lal, ‘‘Sikh Kirpans in California Schools: The Social Construction of Symbols,
the Cultural Politics of Identity, and the Limits of Multiculturalism,’’ in New
Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans, edited by David K. Yoo (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1999), 87–133.
33. United States v. Board of Education, 911 F. 2nd 882, 885 (1990). See also Kathleen
Moore, ‘‘The Hijab and Religious Liberty: Anti-Discrimination Law and Muslim
Women in the United States,’’ in Muslims on the Americanization Path?, edited by
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 105–27.
34. United States v. Board of Education, 894.
First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965 207
35. Cited in ibid., 888.
36. Ibid., 890.
37. Ibid., 894.
38. Hamburger, Separation of Church and State.
39. Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 130 F. 3rd 232 (1997), cert. denied.
40. Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983).
41. Chaudhuri v. Tennessee.
42. Justice O’Connor wrote in a concurring opinion to Allegheny v. aclu, 492 U.S.
573 (1989), in which the court ruled that a crèche display in a county courthouse
violated the Establishment Clause but that a similar display with a menorah did not,
‘‘Under the endorsement test, the ‘history and ubiquity’ of a practice is relevant not
because it creates an ‘artificial exception’ from that test. On the contrary, the ‘history
and ubiquity’ of a practice is relevant because it provides part of the context in which a
reasonable observer evaluates whether a challenged governmental practice conveys a
message of endorsement of religion. It is the combination of the longstanding existence
of practices such as opening legislative sessions with legislative prayers or opening
Court sessions with ‘God save the United States and this honorable Court,’ as well
as their nonsectarian nature, that leads me to the conclusion that those particular
practices, despite their religious roots, do not convey a message of endorsement of
particular religious beliefs’’ (630).
43. Ibid., 643.
44. Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 241.
45. Ibid., 241 n.2.
46. Brooks v. Oak Ridge, 222 F. 3rd 259 (2000), cert. denied, February 2001.
47. Ibid., 266.
48. Altman v. Bedford Cent. Sch. Dist, 245 F. 3rd 49 (2001), cert. denied, October 1,
2001. Yoga and meditation classes in schools are a frequent target of such lawsuits.
Since these activities can be taught as either religious disciplines or stress-reducing (or
weight-reducing) activities, and since they are frequently taught by ‘‘New Age’’ or
Asian religious practitioners, some parents feel that their children’s rights are violated
when they are taught in public schools. At least one such complaint—where students
were directed to perform puja (a form of Hindu worship) and learn mantras from their
yoga teacher—seems to be valid. See Malnak v. Yogi, 592 F. 2nd 197 (1979).
49. One possibility is that it will lend ballast to the claims of conservatives that
secular humanism is an established religion. Putative evidence for such establishment
is located in court decisions and government policies that refuse to view religious
symbols as inherently religious. See Graham Walker, ‘‘Illusory Pluralism, Inexorable
Establishment,’’ in Obligations of Citizenship, edited by Rosenblum, 111–36.
50. Kent Greenawalt, ‘‘Five Questions about Religion Judges Are Afraid to Ask,’’ in
Obligations of Citizenship, edited by Rosenblum, 197.
51. See, e.g., Catharine Cookson’s discussion of the four models of religion used by
courts in Free Exercise cases, derived almost exclusively from Christian (especially
Protestant) theology in Regulating Religion: The Courts and Free Exercise (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001); Winnifred Sullivan’s close reading of the ‘‘narrow’’ Protestant-
208 c o u r t n e y b e n d e r & j e n n i f e r s n o w
inflected conceptions of religion in Establishment decisions in Paying the Words Extra:
Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard Center for
the Study of World Religions, 1994); Michael J. Sandel’s related argument that the
courts often incorrectly view religion as a ‘‘choice’’ rather than a ‘‘duty’’ in ‘‘Freedom of
Conscience or Freedom of Choice?’’ in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty
Clauses and the American Public Philosophy, edited by James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990), 74–92.
52. See, e.g., J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), esp. 53–57, 82–83,
87–91.
53. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘‘Religion and Women’s Equality,’’ in Obligations of Citizenship,
edited by Rosenblum, 348.
54. Greenawalt, ‘‘Five Questions,’’ 227.
55. Sandel, ‘‘Freedom of Conscience.’’ Sandel places a finer point on it when he
argues that ‘‘what is denied’’ to the liberal, unencumbered chooser ‘‘is the possibility
of membership in any community bound by moral ties antecedent to choice; he cannot
belong to any community where the self itself could be at stake’’ (76).
56. Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961); Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333 (1970).
57. Jesse Choper, ‘‘Note: Toward a Constitutional Definition of Religion,’’ Harvard
Law Review 91.5 (March 1978): 1056; Greenawalt, ‘‘Religion as a Concept.’’
58. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982).
59. Africa v. Pennsylvania, 662 F. 2nd 1025 (1981); Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 S. Ct.
680 (1989).
60. Winnifred Sullivan states, ‘‘Whereas, as Durkheim and others observed, it is in
the nature of the human religious imagination to distinguish between the sacred and
the profane, legislating on the basis of that perception is extremely di≈cult because of
the shifting and fertile nature of religion. The structural possibilities of the coexistence
of a secular state and of human religion in a situation of radical pluralism—plural
religious and legal traditions, plural experience of those readings—are not obvious’’
(Paying the Words Extra, 44–45).
61. iskcon v. Barber, 650 F. 2nd 430, 439 (1982), cert. denied.
62. Ibid., 447.
63. iskcon v. Houston, 689 F. 2nd 541, 553 (1982).
64. Ibid., 545.
65. Compare He√ron v. iskcon, 452 U.S. 640 (1981).
66. Elk Grove v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (2004).
S T E P H E N D A W S O N
10
Agonistic Federalism
The Alabama Ten Commandments Controumy
The controversy over the installation (and subsequent removal) of
a 2,5-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the
Alabama State Judicial Building has elicited arguments from around the country
and across the political spectrum. Much of the public discussion on this
issue is distinguished by its loudness, stridency, and sharp partisanship. Substantive
politicalissues have received short shrift amid a plethora of emotional
calls to arms. In this chapter, I set out these substantive political issues and
propose a remedy not simplyto the AlabamaTen Commandments monument
controversy but to the larger issue of public recognition of shared values in a
pluralistic society.
The United States has from the beginning enjoyed a rich tradition of religious
diversity. Increasingly, however, traditional liberal interpretations of
the First Amendment'sreligionclauses have proven inadequatefor the task of
resolving issues regarding public recognition of moral and religious values.1
This inadequacysteins from the traditional liberal bifurcation between public
secularity and private religiosity. That is, the logic of the traditional liberal
reading of the First Amendment's religion clauses produces a public square
naked of religion. Seen an approach lacks the capacity to address shared
values through politicalchannels: traditional liberalism evades the problem of
recognition by promoting a policy of equal exclusion.
Many traditionalliberals argue that perfectlyvalid teasons exist for a public
square shorn of religiosity. Foremost is the First Amendment to theU.S.
Constitution, which by this view expressly prohibits public recognition of the
kind epitomized bythe Ten Commandments monument. The Alabama monument
does not exactlyestablish religion but does endorse it, and the perception
of endorsement is sufficient for the monument to foundet on the shoals
of First Amendment jurisprudence.2
Without these constitutional protections,
209
210 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
traditional liberals protest, religious majorities would overwhelm and dominate
religious minorities. Religious freedom would atrophy.
Traditional liberals often cite the fact of religious diversity as a warrant for
maintaining a ‘‘high and impregnable’’ wall separating church and state.≥
Constitutional protections for religious freedom di√er from ordinary law
precisely because they are not open to the vicissitudes of political compromise.
Constitutional rights, in other words, are those freedoms that have been
removed entirely from the give-and-take of politics. Hence it is the constitutional
duty of the federal courts to guard against all instances of establishment,
of endorsement, and of interference with an individual’s free exercise of
religion by governments of all stripes—federal, state, and local. In the words
of religious studies scholar Diana L. Eck, the ‘‘one vital area of America’s new
pluralism is the courts.’’∂
Indeed, many traditional liberals (as well as their
conservative opponents) see the courts—not a deliberative body such as the
legislature—as the central political institution.∑
(One could say that the American
culture wars consist largely of conflicts waged through the courts over
which rights and liberties are to be removed from political deliberation.)
Traditional liberals claim that the flourishing of religious diversity depends
on the courts’ ability to maintain a stout wall of separation. In practice, this
wall separates an increasingly abstract, universal concept of religious freedom
from all particular vestiges of lived religion. The wall can be viewed as a
metaphor for the liberal state itself, a neutral, disinterested framework of
universal political institutions. Many critics of traditional liberalism (most
notably John Gray) have observed that a fundamental contradiction lies at the
heart of this project. The deep diversity of American public life is cited as a
warrant for purging the concept of religious freedom of all traces of religion
itself, lest the concept be compromised by implicitly favoring one religion or
one set of religions. But this concept is not itself neutral or disinterested: it is
robustly secular. While secular is clearly synonymous with nonreligious, it is
not at all reducible to neutral disinterest. This point can be stated di√erently:
the traditional liberal concept of religious freedom is comprehensive in the
same way that an explicitly Christian or Buddhist concept of religious freedom
might be. It advances a substantive conception of the good; it is part and
parcel of a comprehensive way of life.
The attempt to isolate a theoretical principle or right of religious freedom
is part of the larger traditional liberal project: to specify once and for all a
set of basic rights and liberties that are to be removed entirely from the
political process. In carrying out this program, traditional liberals are advanc-
Agonistic Federalism 211
ing their own comprehensive conception of the good. They do so, however,
under the guise of neutrality or disinterestedness. Here we come to the contradiction.
Traditional liberals claim neutral disinterest for their conception of
the good by arguing that no comprehensive conception of the good enjoys
special authority, a claim endorsed by the fact of deep diversity. But this
argument deprives the traditional liberal good of any claim to special authority.
There is no warrant, in other words, for liberal government to promote or
otherwise privilege liberal goods. That liberal government persists in doing so
under the fiction of neutral disinterest can be attributed with charity to conceptual
confusion. (Lacking charity, we might attribute it to cynicism and
disingenuousness.)
The task of liberal government, according to these critics, is not the advancement
of liberalism as a comprehensive good (and especially not under
the fiction of disinterest) but promotion of a modus vivendi among people
holding di√erent, often conflicting, beliefs and values. This calls for a new
style of politics that has been dubbed agonistic liberalism.∏
Political theorists
describe agonistic politics as the ongoing clash of pluralities, a permanent
contest among political actors lacking final settlement and punctuated only
intermittently by brief periods of placid commonality. Sheldon S. Wolin describes
this new style of politics: ‘‘Politics refers to the legitimized and public
contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access
to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity. Politics is
continuous, ceaseless, and endless.’’π
Pluralism, Bonnie Honig argues, requires
a≈rmation of ‘‘the inescapability of conflict and the ineradicability of
resistance to the political and moral projects of ordering subjects, institutions,
and values. . . . It is to give up on the dream of a place called home, a
place free of power, conflict, and struggle.’’∫
Agonistic liberalism, in short,
seeks to combine the advantages of commodious living with a provisional
civil peace among rival and conflicting ways of life.
Agonistic-style politics, however, is often subjected to two criticisms. First,
there is the persistent concern that diversity is in fact so diverse as to be
divisive—that there exists a tipping point beyond which diversity crumbles into
ungovernability. Second, the question is raised regarding the limit at which socalled
competitive politics ceases to be fair and just and instead becomes
‘‘instances of fascism, xenophobic nationalism, and right-wing populism.’’Ω
Benjamin Barber argues that these concerns are misplaced: ‘‘Democracy is
self-correcting: its insu≈ciencies are corrected democratically rather than by
the imposition of externalities on the democratic process. The process is
212 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
dynamic because it is self-transforming: educative.’’∞≠
Seyla Benhabib builds
on this argument by listing some of the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy:
‘‘the institutions of the Bill of Rights, constitutionalism, the interplay of
the highest court of the land with the elected representatives of the people,
processes of constitutional review, and the like.’’∞∞
Agonistic liberalism can
thus be distinguished from closely related persuasions such as participatory
democracy. While the latter remains vulnerable to certain excesses, such as
majority tyranny (Barber’s democratic sanguinity to the contrary), the former
combines a greater role for democratic engagement with self-correcting
mechanisms of the kind given by Benhabib. The result is the Tocquevillian
ideal of moderate democracy.∞≤
In this chapter, the Alabama Ten Commandments monument controversy
serves as a case study in the application of agonistic-style politics to issues of
public religious recognition. This approach is not entirely theoretical. A recent
U.S. Supreme Court decision has opened the possibility for resolving
issues of constitutionality relating to the public expression of shared religious
values politically, through democratic processes, rather than leaving these
controversial issues exclusively to the adjudication of the federal judiciary.
This case, Employment Division v. Smith (1990), makes what I call a ‘‘federal
opening’’ in the First Amendment religion clauses: the Court reserves the
prerogative to enforce infractions of the religion clauses by federal as well
as state governments but leaves open the possibility of positive recognition of
shared religious values by state governments.∞≥
In other words, Smith makes
possible agonistic religious accommodation—within carefully prescribed
limits—by states. To demonstrate the applicability of Smith to the Alabama Ten
Commandments monument, we must make two determinations. First, we
must ascertain that the monument fits through the federal opening established
by Smith. We will attempt to do so by developing a fictitious ‘‘Smith
test.’’ Second, we will evaluate the outcome of applying the Smithian federal
opening to the Alabama monument controversy. What are the benefits of such
an application? What are the possible complications or unintended consequences?
We shall address these questions at the end of this essay.
Employment Division v. Smith involved two Native American counselors employed
by a private drug rehabilitation center who were fired because they
ingested peyote for sacramental purposes during a religious ceremony. The
state of Oregon denied their application for unemployment compensation
under a state law denying unemployment benefits to anyone discharged for
Agonistic Federalism 213
‘‘misconduct.’’ The respondents in turn claimed that their First Amendment
right to free exercise e√ectively voided Oregon’s controlled substance law.
The relevant constitutional issue in Smith concerns whether the possible
violation of First Amendment rights (in this case, free exercise) is su≈cient to
nullify generally applicable state law. Put di√erently, is the state of Oregon
bound by the First Amendment to accommodate minority religious practices
by allowing exceptions to otherwise generally applicable state law? Precedent
for court action of this kind was established in Sherbert v. Verner (1963), when
the Warren Court developed a ‘‘balancing test’’ for evaluating instances where
government interest in enforcing general applicable laws conflicted with an
individual’s right to the free exercise of religion.∞∂
The Court ruled in Sherbert
that the burden of proof fell on the government to show its compelling
interest, finding that a Seventh-Day Adventist who was fired for refusing to
work on Saturday (the day set aside by her faith for worship) was nevertheless
eligible for unemployment benefits.
Critics denounced the Sherbert test then and later as an open-ended invitation
for individuals to pick and choose which laws of the land to obey. A latterday
critic, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, writes in Smith,
The government’s ability to enforce generally applicable prohibitions of
socially harmful conduct, like its ability to carry out other aspects of public
policy, ‘‘cannot depend on measuring the e√ects of a governmental action
on a religious objector’s spiritual development.’’ To make an individual’s
obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with
his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is ‘‘compelling’’—
permitting him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘‘to become a law unto himself ’’—
contradicts both constitutional tradition and common sense.∞∑
Scalia argues against interpreting the Free Exercise Clause as a categorical
exemption for sincere believers of all stripes from generally applicable criminal
law. He does so by distinguishing between government infringement on
First Amendment freedoms and public recognition of those freedoms. Oregon’s
controlled substance law, because it is generally applicable, does not
qualify as government infringement on First Amendment freedoms.
This is not to say, however, that the plainti√s’ argument (that the sacramental
use of peyote should be evaluated di√erently from the recreational
use of marijuana or crack cocaine) is rejected outright. Rather, Scalia argues
that the enforcement of negative prohibitions against government encroach-
214 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
ment is the constitutionally mandated responsibility of the Court. But political
recognition of First Amendment freedoms, such as providing an exemption
for the sacramental use of peyote, should be left to the democratic process.
The people of the state of Oregon, not the U.S. Supreme Court, determine
whether the sacramental use of peyote should be allowed as an exemption to
state drug laws. (He cites Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico as examples of
states that have made similar exemptions.) Scalia thus concludes, ‘‘It may
fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at
a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged
in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be
preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which
judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all
religious beliefs.’’∞∏
In essence, the Court’s decision federalizes Sherbert in part by leaving positive
recognition of the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights to the democratic
process while preserving the federal judiciary’s prerogative to enforce
infractions of those freedoms by states as well as the federal government.
Scalia’s argument e√ectively divides jurisdiction of the religion clauses between
the federal and state governments. Limiting the role of the federal
judiciary to adjudication of possible First Amendment violations creates an
opening for public recognition of shared religious values. Such recognition
might take the form of granting exemptions, as the state of Arizona does, for
example, in permitting the sacramental use of peyote. Other examples of
public recognition include beginning legislative sessions with prayer (as the
state of Nebraska does), invoking the ‘‘favor and guidance of Almighty God’’
(as found in the preamble to the Alabama State Constitution), and the widespread
practice by state and federal elected o≈cials of appending the phrase
‘‘so help me God’’ to their oaths of o≈ce.∞π
The relevant question for our interest here, of course, is whether the Alabama
Ten Commandments monument could be considered an example of
political recognition of the kind singled out in the Smith decision. We can
make this determination by reference to a fictitious Smith test consisting of
four criteria. First, public recognition must derive from the democratic political
process rather than the court. Second, democratic recognition must be in
accordance with some constitutional standard for religious freedom. In the
kinds of cases addressed by the Smith tests, the relevant constitutional standard
would be provided in nearly all cases by a particular state’s constitution.
Without any constitutional standard, of course, ‘‘religious freedom’’ would
Agonistic Federalism 215
become a license for any democratic majority to impose its will without restriction.
Third, recognition must be nonobligatory. It must either be cost-free
(such as an exemption for the sacramental use of peyote) or paid for out of
the largesse of private donors. Furthermore, it must not incur any coercive
obligations, such as mandatory observance or a≈rmation. Fourth, public recognition
must be nonsectarian. It should not be so narrowly construed as
to recognize only a specific religious body, mode of worship, or religious
doctrine.
Consider now the history of the Alabama Ten Commandments contro-
versy.∞∫
By all accounts, the chief protagonist was Roy S. Moore, who was
elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in November 2000 with 55
percent of the vote. Much of his campaign literature called him the ‘‘Ten
Commandments Judge,’’ referring to the hand-carved wooden plaque of the
Ten Commandments he had displayed in his courtroom during his tenure as a
circuit judge. And one of his oft-repeated campaign promises was to display
the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court.∞Ω
Moore delivered on
this promise on the night of July 31, 2001, when he supervised the installation
of a 2.5-ton monument (referred to locally as ‘‘Roy’s Rock’’) in the rotunda of
the Alabama Judicial Building, which houses the Alabama Supreme Court, the
Courts of Criminal and Civil Appeals, the state law library, and the Alabama
Administrative O≈ce of Courts. Moore did so without any prior approval by
or knowledge of the Alabama Supreme Court’s other eight justices. He was
not under any obligation to include his colleagues on the bench in his decision,
however, for under Alabama law the o≈ce of the chief justice is vested
with final authority regarding what decorations may be placed in the rotunda.
In late October 2001, two lawsuits were filed in federal court against the
chief justice.≤≠
The lawsuits were consolidated, and the trial commenced
on October 15, 2002. On November 18, 2002, Judge Myron H. Thompson
ruled that the Ten Commandments monument violated the Establishment
Clause and gave Moore thirty days to remove the monument.≤∞
Moore refused.
On December 19, therefore, the district court issued an injunction ordering
him to remove the monument by January 3, 2003. The chief justice then filed a
notice of appeal, requesting that the court stay or suspend the injunction
while the case was pending on appeal. This request was granted on December
23.
The Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals a≈rmed the district
court’s ruling on July 1, 2003.≤≤
On August 5, the District Court lifted the
suspension of the December 19 injunction and ordered Moore to remove the
216 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
monument no later than August 20. Moore then requested on August 15 that
the district court stay its August 5 injunction. This request was declined on
August 18, setting up a final confrontation between the chief justice and Judge
Thompson. On August 20, the final day of the injunction, Moore filed a
motion to recall and stay the mandate with the U.S. Supreme Court, which
denied the application the same day. The following day, Moore’s eight colleagues
on the Alabama Supreme Court voted unanimously to reverse the
administrative decision of the chief justice with respect to the district court’s
injunction and ordered the building manager to have the monument removed
‘‘as soon as practicable.’’≤≥
Moore announced on August 22 that he would not
attempt to block removal of the monument.
On the same day, Stephen R. Glassroth and Melinda Maddox, two of the
plainti√s who filed the original suit against the monument, entered a formal
compliant with the state’s judicial board.≤∂
They charged Moore with failure
‘‘to respect and comply with the law,’’ failure ‘‘to comply with an existing and
binding court order directed at him,’’ failure ‘‘to observe high standards of
conduct,’’ and failure ‘‘to avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety
in his activities.’’ Moore was at that time suspended without pay. His case
went before the state’s nine-member Court of the Judiciary, which voted unanimously
on November 13, 2003, to remove Moore from the bench. As for the
Ten Commandments monument, workers removed it from the rotunda and
placed it in a storage room at the Judiciary Building on August 27.
With regard to the first Smith test—that public recognition must derive
from the political process—the evidence in this case is mixed. In his trial
defense, Moore argued that he acted within the constitutional limits of his
o≈ce. The o≈ce of chief justice is responsible for the administration of the
state court system, including any and all decorations placed in the rotunda of
the Alabama Judicial Building. Moore had argued that the decision to install
the monument was administrative and thus was not open to the political
process or court review. The Court of Appeals rejected this argument, noting
that ‘‘if we adopted his position, the Chief Justice would be free to adorn the
walls of the Alabama’s Supreme Court’s courtroom with sectarian religious
murals and have decidedly religious quotations painted above the bench.
Every government building could be topped with a cross, or a menorah, or a
statue of Buddha, depending upon the views of the o≈cials with authority
over the premises.’’≤∑
No one, presumably not even the chief justice, would argue that the monu-
Agonistic Federalism 217
ment is only decorative. To do so obscures the popular warrant for Moore’s
actions. His decision to install a monument to the Ten Commandments was
not arbitrary. Moore campaigned on a pledge to do so. In fact, owing to the
administrative responsibilities held by the o≈ce of chief justice, such a campaign
promise would likely not be construed by the electorate as mere rhetorical
grandstanding. Moore was not elected to erect a Latin cross or a menorah.
He was elected on his promise to display the Ten Commandments. The people
of Alabama endorsed that promise in electing the Ten Commandments Judge
by majority vote. Hence, we can say that the decision to recognize the moral
values of the people of Alabama by the installation of a monument to the Ten
Commandments originated democratically, with the people of Alabama, even
if the details of that decision were left to the discretion of the o≈cial elected to
carry out that decision. The first of the four fictitious Smith tests has been met.
The need for the second test—for democratic recognition to be bound by
some constitutional standard—speaks to concerns about Moore’s use of the
discretionary powers of his o≈ce. What if, we might ask, Moore campaigned
on the promise to install a Latin cross on the roof of the Judiciary Building and
the people of Alabama elected him by an overwhelming margin? If Moore’s
discretionary power allows equally for a monument to the Ten Commandments,
a Latin cross, or a menorah, and if he was popularly elected on a
campaign promise to install a Latin cross or a menorah, would he be able to
do so? The answer is no. Even if political recognition is left to state governments,
they are bound nevertheless by their state constitutions. Section 3 of
the Alabama State Constitution, subtitled ‘‘Religious Freedom,’’ reads,
That no religion shall be established by law; that no preference shall be
given by law to any religious sect, society, denomination or mode of worship;
that no one shall be compelled by law to attend any place of worship;
nor to pay any tithes, taxes, or other rate for building or repairing any place
of worship, or for maintaining any minister or ministry; that no religious
test shall be required as a qualification to any o≈ce or public trust under
this state; and that the civil rights, privileges, and capacities of any citizen
shall not be in any manner a√ected by his religious principles.
Thus, we can say provisionally that the Ten Commandments monument meets
the requirements of the second Smith test insofar as it is not simply an act of
the majority. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the monument
violates the standards provided by section 3 of the Alabama State Constitution.
218 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
This question requires that we first clarify the distinction between establishment
and endorsement or preference. We shall return to this question following
our discussion of the third and fourth Smith tests.
The third Smith test requires that public recognition not impose financial or
any other coercive obligations on citizens, such as mandatory observance
and/or a≈rmation. This in e√ect rea≈rms the long-standing constitutional
prohibition against establishment. To take the sacramental use of peyote as an
example, a state might grant an exemption to existing state drug laws, but in
doing so it incurs no obligation to furnish worshipers with peyote, to provide
a place where sacramental use might take place, to maintain a spiritual leader
of some kind, and so forth. Likewise, the Ten Commandments monument
itself was paid for by the chief justice. Coral Ridge Ministries, an evangelical
Christian organization with which Moore had enjoyed a long-standing relationship,
defrayed the costs of the monument’s installation. The presence of
the monument in the rotunda did not obligate anyone, for example, to stop
beside it and silently reflect or pray, even though it quickly became an area
where employees and visitors to the Judicial Building chose to pursue these
activities. The Ten Commandments monument, to echo Thomas Je√erson,
neither picked anyone’s pocket nor broke anyone’s leg. If narrowly construed
in this way, the monument passes the third of the four Smith tests.
With regard to the fourth Smith test (that is, public recognition must be
nonsectarian), the monument would appear to pass as well, since the Ten
Commandments embraces a plurality of religious traditions.≤∏
Hence, the
monument would seem not to establish, endorse, or otherwise favor any
particular religious sect.
Or does it? Both federal court decisions ruled that the Ten Commandments
monument indeed violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Both decisions appealed to the ideal of religious pluralism, citing the ‘‘history
and tradition of religious diversity’’ in America, as warrant for the First
Amendment’s religion clauses.≤π
Judge Thompson, in his decision for the
District Court, emphasized that ‘‘the First Amendment does not elevate one
religion above all others, but rather it places all religions on par with one
another, and even recognizes the equality of religion and non-religion.’’≤∫
It
does so by the mechanism of separation. The idea of separation was given its
imprimatur by Justice Hugo Black in Everson v. Board of Education (1947):
Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither
can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one reli-
Agonistic Federalism 219
gion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to
remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or
disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or
professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance.
No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support
any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or
whatever from they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state
nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the
a√airs of any religious organizations or groups or vice versa.≤Ω
The idea of separation ultimately bedevils nearly all contemporary interpretations
of the religion clauses of the First Amendment.≥≠
Separation, in this
view, is the legal practice of religious freedom.
There remains a certain opacity shrouding the contemporary idea of separation.
Much of it, as noted earlier, can be attributed to the universal presumptions
of traditional liberalism. Separation erects an impregnable wall
that partitions an abstract, universal religious freedom from all particular
instances of actual religion. Religious freedom, in other words, is uncontaminated
by anything religious. Yet this leaves religious freedom without a clearly
delimited object (‘‘religion’’). Such was not always the case. At the time of the
passage of the Bill of Rights, the definition of ‘‘religion’’ provided by James
Madison in his well-known ‘‘Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious
Assessment’’—‘‘the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging
it’’—commonly served as the constitutional standard for religion.≥∞
As late as
1931, this definition was a≈rmed by Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes in his
dissent in United States v. McIntosh, where he defined religion as ‘‘belief in a
relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human
relation.’’≥≤
But, following Everson, the Court increasingly emptied ‘‘religion’’
of qualities and characteristics. Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) served to evacuate the
Court’s earlier definition of religion. In this decision, the Court discarded
belief in the existence of God as a viable characteristic of religion.≥≥
With the paucity of definitional criteria, the court began developing tests to
detect the presence of religion. One of the first is provided in United States v.
Seeger (1965), where the Court developed the test of ‘‘sincerity’’: ‘‘A sincere and
meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to
that filled by the God of those admittedly qualifying comes within the statutory
definition.’’≥∂
The most influential test, however, is found in Lemon v.
Kurtzman (1971). Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority, broadly
220 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
interprets the prohibition against establishment, arguing that ‘‘a given law
might not establish a state religion but nevertheless be one ‘respecting’ that
end in the sense of being a step that could lead to such establishment and
hence o√end the First Amendment.’’≥∑
Lacking ‘‘precisely stated constitutional
prohibitions,’’ the court must test possible violations with regard to
three tests: ‘‘First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second,
its principal or primary e√ect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits
religion; finally, the statute must not foster ‘an excessive government entanglement
with religion.’ ’’≥∏
In e√ect, the Burger Court redefines ‘‘establishment’’
to include not only actual violations but also all actions that might
possibly lead toward establishment.≥π
Judge Thompson, writing for the Circuit Court, argues that the Ten Commandments
monument fails as an example of public recognition because,
viewed alone or in the context of its history, placement, and location, the
primary e√ect of the monument is the endorsement of religion—in other
words, violation of the first and second prongs of the Lemon test. The plainti√s
contended that Chief Justice Moore’s installation of the Ten Commandments
monument deprived them of their rights of religious freedom (that is, Moore
abridged religious freedom by the putative endorsement contained in the act
of installing the monument), and thus they sought to rectify this injury by
means of the monument’s removal. Hence, according to the decision reached
by the federal courts, the Alabama Ten Commandments monument fails as an
example of public recognition of moral values because it endorses religion
and thus violates the Establishment Clause. Since we had earlier reached the
tentative conclusion that the monument in fact succeeded as an example of
public recognition according to the fictitious Smith test, we should be able to
account for the court’s decision in terms of the Smith test. If we are unable to
do so, then we must conclude that either the court’s decision is correct and
our application of the Smith test is flawed (for example, based on faulty legal
reasoning) or the Smith test itself as we have developed it here is insu≈cient
and thus should be revised or discarded.
Consider again the third Smith test (public recognition must not impose
financial or any other coercive obligation on citizens, such as mandatory
observance and/or a≈rmation). The monument, as noted earlier, did not
incur any positive obligations. No government funds were used for its construction
or installation. Employees and visitors to the Judicial Building were
free to stop at the monument and silently reflect or pray. They were equally
free to ignore the monument and walk on by.
Agonistic Federalism 221
But the three plainti√s did not argue that the monument imposed direct or
positive obligations. All testified that they found the monument ‘‘o√ensive,’’
they felt like ‘‘outsiders’’ because of the monument, and their ‘‘use and enjoyment’’
of the rotunda had significantly decreased because of the monument.≥∫
(Two of the three plainti√s—all three are attorneys who for professional reasons
regularly use the Judicial Building—testified that they had changed their
behavior because of the monument, deliberately avoiding the rotunda when
possible because of the monument’s presence.) In other words, the three
plainti√s testified that the monument evoked unpleasant subjective attitudes
—feelings of being o√ended, being excluded, and being uncomfortable while
in the rotunda—that could be objectively discerned in their behavior (for
example, physical avoidance of the rotunda, purchase of books and other
resources to avoid using the library, and so forth).
These subjective attitudes su√ered by the plainti√s we can understand in
terms of a negative coercive obligation. Had the state, in the figure of the chief
justice, not installed the monument, the three plainti√s would have been
spared feelings of o√ense, exclusion, and discomfort arising from the monument’s
presence. One could even say that a negative coercive obligation (in the
language of the third Smith test) represents a perceived endorsement of religion,
and thus our earlier provisional conclusion that the monument passed
as an example of public recognition should be revised in light of this new
subjective criterion. The question that we must now address is whether the
perception of a negative coercive obligation su≈ces for the purpose of finding
the monument unconstitutional.
There are two problems with answering this question a≈rmatively. First,
one of the long-standing criticisms of the Lemon test is that the standard of
‘‘endorsement’’ is premised on the court’s ability to discern subjective attitudes.
As Courtney Bender and Jennifer Snow note in their chapter in this
book, the court often does so by means of the ‘‘reasonable observer’’ standard,
asking whether a reasonable observer would perceive a given government
action as endorsing religion. Criteria for a reasonable observer have
been the focus of sharp judicial dispute. For example, Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor describes the ‘‘reasonable observer’’ as someone ‘‘aware of the
history and context of the community and forum in which the religious display
appears,’’ while Justice John Paul Stevens holds the reasonable observer
to be any reasonable person without necessarily possessing any knowledge of
the community where the disputed practice occurs.≥Ω
In a sharp dissenting opinion, Scalia derides both constructions of the
222 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
reasonable observer’s perception of endorsement. In Lamb’s Chapel v. Union Free
School District, the Court had analyzed endorsement in terms of ‘‘what would be
thought by ‘the community’—not by outsiders or [uninformed] individual
members of the community [who] might leap to the erroneous conclusion of
state endorsement.’’∂≠
Scalia’s remark represents an advance on the endorsement
test: the community, rather than outsiders or the uninformed, constitutes
the standard for calibrating endorsement. This approach, however,
does not address what is most problematic about any endorsement test: its
reliance on subjective attitudes (especially as they take the place of ‘‘precisely
stated constitutional prohibitions’’), be they individual or communal, and the
presumption that the court is competent to discern them.∂∞
This shortcoming
becomes problematic when genuine issues of constitutionality become enmeshed
in the idiosyncratic attitudes of those who might—out of malice,
ignorance, or deliberate provocation—misconstrue particular public displays,
utterances, or actions. The court, in other words, while it can detect instances
of perceived endorsement, lacks any certain means of evaluating those perceptions
for accuracy and genuineness.
Second, we recall the second Smith test (that is, public recognition is not
simply decided by majority rule but is bound by some constitutional standard,
and this standard is generally though not always provided by a particular
state’s constitution). In the case of the Ten Commandments monument, the
relevant constitutional standard would be section 3 of the Alabama State
Constitution, not the First Amendment’s religion clauses.∂≤
The protections
a√orded religious freedom in section 3 generally mirror those provided in the
First Amendment. The prohibitions described in section 3, however, are more
detailed than in the First Amendment. ‘‘Establishment,’’ for example, is unequivocally
prohibited in both. Unlike the First Amendment, however, section
3 also addresses explicitly the idea of ‘‘preference’’ or ‘‘endorsement.’’
Endorsement of ‘‘any religious sect, society, denomination, or mode of worship’’
is prohibited. This is an important distinction. Unlike the Lemon test,
which extends endorsement to the perception of religion in general, section 3
limits endorsement to those acts of government extending o≈cial preference
to particular religious bodies. Put di√erently, the Lemon test excludes certain
ideas merely because they are religious; it is an ideological test. Section 3
allows for o≈cial recognition of religious ideas as long as those ideas are not
the exclusive province of any one religious body. So, section 3 would clearly
prohibit the display of a Latin cross or a menorah in the rotunda of the state
Judicial Building because both are unambiguous symbols of particular re-
Agonistic Federalism 223
ligious traditions. But the Ten Commandments monument would not be
prohibited under section 3 because, as already noted, the Ten Commandments
are embraced by a plurality of religious traditions.
Therefore, the Ten Commandments monument passes the Smith tests as a
constitutional example of public recognition. It does so in large part as a
consequence of the fact that section 3 of the Alabama State Constitution, with
its precisely stated prohibitions against endorsement, provides a clearer constitutional
standard than the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and
the imprecise guidelines for endorsement provided by the Lemon tests. The
Ten Commandments monument, in other words, fits through the federal
opening made by Smith.
Now we are in a position to consider the possible advantages and disadvantages
of such an application. The principal disadvantage of this proposal is
that it increases the risk that religious majorities might dominate religious
minorities by appropriating the instruments of government to recognize publicly
the majorities’ symbols, values, and way of life. Religious minorities,
furthermore, risk being placed at a ‘‘relative disadvantage’’ with regard to
recognition of their symbols, beliefs, and ways of life (to quote Scalia), owing
to their small numbers. Application of the Smith test, therefore, might inflame
political passions by tilting the playing field in favor of religious majorities.
Such a proposal would be unfair; indeed, insofar as it would putatively increase
rather than decrease inequality, it can be said to lead outside of the
American political tradition altogether.∂≥
Some participants in the Ten Commandments monument controversy no
doubt encouraged such dark predictions. Although a majority of Alabama’s
voters supported the Ten Commandments Judge, many supporters were undoubtedly
discomforted by the covert midnight installation of the monument
and the highly visible role played by Coral Ridge Ministries. Moore, furthermore,
seemed to go out of his way to antagonize potential allies. In 2001, for
example, he rejected out of hand a request by black lawmakers to place a
monument to Martin Luther King Jr. in the rotunda. In his reply to State
Representative Alvin Holmes, Moore wrote, ‘‘The placement of a speech of
any man alongside the revealed law of God would tend in consequence to
diminish the very purpose of the Ten Commandments monument.’’∂∂
He
alienated more supporters during his trial when he claimed complete authority
for his decision to install the monument by virtue of the powers of
his o≈ce, reminding more than one observer of former Alabama Governor
George Wallace’s defiant attempt to resist federal desegregation orders in
224 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
1963.∂∑
Moore, intentionally or not, succeeded in making the controversy personal:
the political and constitutional merits of public recognition of shared
religious and moral values were subordinated to the Christian witness and
professional martyrdom of Roy S. Moore. Yet the political psychology of the
chief justice is ultimately incidental to this investigation. Even if Moore was a
bad man acting for the wrong reasons, that does not necessarily mean that his
actions did not warrant a fair hearing.
There are three possible advantages o√ered by a Smith-mediated resolution
to this controversy. The first is that it restores what could be called a federal
proportion to the First Amendment religion clauses. Rather than imposing a
one-size-fits-all interpretation for all cases, recourse to state constitutions
allows for a plurality of solutions. Issues regarding public recognition of
shared religious and moral values would be decided di√erently in, for example,
Alabama and California. Not only would schemes of public recognition
possibly di√er, but the actual content of those shared values might di√er too.
The second advantage is a practical correlation of the first. An agonistic
federalist settlement would release to some degree the political pressures
characteristic of culture conflict. Controversies of this kind would be opened
—and would remain open—to the political process. Furthermore, the actions
of one state would not impose coercive obligations on any other state. Agonistic
politics, paradoxically, might ultimately moderate the political process by
lowering the stakes of cultural conflict.
The third advantage is that constitutional protections would be detached
from the universalizing tendencies of traditional liberalism. As noted at the
beginning of this essay, pluralism is often cited as a warrant for traditional
liberal institutions and practices. Yet pluralism does not stop at the courtroom
door; pluralism deprives traditional liberalism of any special authority it
might presume for itself. There is no compelling necessity, in other words, to
argue in terms of a universal principle of religious freedom and an impregnable
wall of separation. Traditional liberals should not delude themselves
into thinking that they have solved the intractable problems engendered by
the Protestant Reformation. Rather, they should aim more modestly at a
modus vivendi among people holding di√erent beliefs and values. Such a
provisional settlement would be dynamic and open to future revision. Its lack
of finality, however, should not be taken as a defect but as a strength. That
there is ultimately no satisfactory Archimedean point whence all human beliefs
and values can be leveled (and thus dealt with once and for all) is not a
consequence of political inequality (and thus exasperated by the democratic
Agonistic Federalism 225
process) but in all possibility is intrinsic to the human condition itself and
therefore beyond the reach of political remedy.∂∏
notes
1. By ‘‘traditional liberal,’’ I mean someone who takes J. S. Mill as a distinguished
forebear, John Rawls as a near contemporary, and Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition
in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) as ‘‘our’’ story. The rank and file of
the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, is composed largely of traditional
liberals.
2. The distinction between ‘‘establishment’’ and ‘‘endorsement’’ will be expounded
later in the chapter.
3. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black described the wall separating church and
state as ‘‘high and impregnable’’ in Everson v. Board of Education (330 U.S. 1 [1947]). This
influential Supreme Court decision enshrined in constitutional law Thomas Je√erson’s
metaphor of a wall separating church and state. Indeed, much First Amendment
jurisprudence since Everson can be read as a long-running e√ort to clarify the terms of
this separation. See Jo Renée Formicola and Hubert Morken, eds., Everson Revisited:
Religion, Education, and Law at the Crossroads (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,
1997).
4. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the
World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 321.
5. For this reason (among others), John Gray sees traditional liberalism as a ‘‘species
of anti-political legalism’’ (Two Faces of Liberalism [New York: New Press, 2000], 16).
6. For a superb introduction to agonistic liberalism, see John Gray, ‘‘Agonistic
Liberalism’’ and ‘‘From Post-Liberalism to Pluralism,’’ in Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake
(London: Routledge, 1995), 64–86, 131–43; John Gray, ‘‘Rawls’s Anti-Political Liberalism,’’
in Gray, Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity,
1997), 51–54; John Gray, ‘‘Postscript,’’ in Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 1996), 130–58; John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996); John Gray, ‘‘Berlin’s Agonistic Liberalism’’ and ‘‘What Is Dead and What
Is Living in Liberalism,’’ in Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London:
Routledge, 1993), 64–69, 283–328; Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism.
7. Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘‘Fugitive Democracy,’’ in Democracy and Di√erence: Contesting the
Boundaries of the Political, edited by Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 31.
8. Bonnie Honig, ‘‘Di√erence, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,’’ in Democracy
and Di√erence, edited by Benhabib, 258.
9. Seyla Benhabib, ‘‘The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Di√erence,’’ in
Democracy and Di√erence, edited by Benhabib, 8. Benhabib’s examples are complemented
in Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1998).
10. Benjamin R. Barber, ‘‘Foundationalism and Democracy,’’ in Democracy and Di√erence,
edited by Benhabib, 354.
226 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
11. Benhabib, ‘‘Democratic Moment,’’ 9.
12. For discussion of this ideal, see Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of
Democracy, translated by John Waggoner (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
13. Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).
14. Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963).
15. Employment Division v. Smith, 885. Internal citations omitted.
16. Ibid., 890. The Smith decision was extremely controversial. In response to a
barrage of criticism from traditional liberals and their conservative opponents alike,
Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (rfra) in 1993. The rfra
putatively restored the balancing test articulated in Sherbert, which places the burden of
proof on government to prove a compelling interest in cases where generally applicable
laws infringe on the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court, however,
struck down rfra in 1997 as an unconstitutional attempt to legislate the legal precedent
set by Sherbert. In passing the rfra, Congress had justified its actions by appealing
to section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives Congress the right to
enforce through ‘‘appropriate legislation’’ the fundamental rights and liberties protected
by that amendment. In striking down the rfra in Boerne v. Flores (117 S. Ct. 2157
[1997]), the Court did not deny this constitutional role of Congress with regard to the
Fourteenth Amendment; it found, however, that the ‘‘rfra is so out of proportion to a
supposed remedial or preventive object that it cannot be understood as responsive to,
or designed to prevent, unconstitutional behavior’’ (2169). That is, rather than preventing
unconstitutional activity, the rfra was seen as an unwarranted, unconstitutional
legislative attempt to make a ‘‘substantial change in constitutional protections’’ (2169),
something that can be accomplished only by the amendment process.
17. See, for example, article 2, section 7, of the Constitution of Virginia: ‘‘All o≈cers
elected or appointed under or pursuant to this Constitution shall, before they enter on
the performance of their public duties, severally take and subscribe the following oath
or a≈rmation: ‘I do solemnly swear (or a≈rm) that I will support the Constitution of
the United States and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that I
will faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent upon me as [title of
o≈ce], according to the best of my ability (so help me God).’ ’’ This practice harkens
back to George Washington’s first inauguration, where he added ‘‘so help me God’’ to
his oath of o≈ce. Presidents and other elected o≈cials have since followed Washington’s
example.
18. My account of the Alabama Ten Commandments controversy is indebted to Tom
Baxter and Juanita Poe, ‘‘Ten Commandments Furor,’’ Atlanta Journal and Constitution,
August 23, 2003, 8a; Steve Benen, ‘‘Monumental Mistake,’’ Church and State 54.11
(December 2001): 8–12; Steven Lubet, ‘‘Rule of Law,’’ Lynchburg (Virginia) News and
Advance, August 31, 2003, e1; Charlotte Moore, ‘‘Ten Commandments Furor: Q & A
with John Witte Jr., Director of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University,’’
Atlanta Journal and Constitution, August 23, 2003, 8a; Marvin Olasky, ‘‘Push Has Come to
Shove,’’ World Magazine 18.33 (August 30, 2003): 1; Bill Rankin and Juanita Poe, ‘‘Commandments
Justice Outvoted,’’ Atlanta Journal and Constitution, August 22, 2003, 1a; Jim
Ringel, ‘‘Ten Commandments Symbol Passes Test,’’ Legal Intelligencer 228 (June 4,
Agonistic Federalism 227
2003): 4; Manuel Roig-Franzia, ‘‘Alabama Judge Relents on Monument,’’ Washington
Post, August 24, 2003, a6; Manuel Roig-Franzia, ‘‘Two Tablets May Renew a High
Court Headache,’’ Washington Post, August 31, 2003, a3; Saul Singer, ‘‘Who’s Afraid of
the Ten Commandments?’’ Jerusalem Post, July 4, 2003, 8a.
19. In 1995, Moore began displaying a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments
and inviting clergy into his courtroom to lead prayer before trials. In March 1995, the
aclu of Alabama filed a lawsuit against Moore, which was later dismissed for lack of
standing. The state of Alabama brought a second suit in April 1995 seeking a declaratory
judgment that Moore’s display of the Ten Commandments was constitutional.
This suit was dismissed by the Alabama Supreme Court as ‘‘nonjusticiable,’’ or incapable
of being decided by legal principles.
20. The first was Johnson v. Hobson; the second was Glassroth v. Moore. ‘‘Hobson’’ in
the first case refers to Rich Hobson, the administrative director of courts for the state
of Alabama. He is second in the administrative hierarchy of the Alabama court system,
answerable only to Chief Justice Moore, who was listed as co-defendant.
21. Glassroth v. Moore, 229 F. Supp. 2nd 1290 (M.D. Ala. 2002).
22. Glassroth v. Moore, 335 F. 3rd 1282 (11th Cir. 2003).
23. See ‘‘In the Matter of Compliance with Writ of Injunction of the United States
District Court for the Middle District of Alabama,’’ August 21, 2003, 7, [http://news.
corporate.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/religion/glsrthmre82103alsc.pdf].
24. For the text of the complaint, see ‘‘Judicial Inquiry Commission of the State of
Alabama’’ at 11, 13, In the Matter of Roy S. Moore (Ala. Ct. Judiciary Aug. 22, 2003)
(No. 33), [http://www.judicial.state.al.us/documents/complaint.pdf].
25. Glassroth v. Moore, 335 F. 3rd 1282, 1309 (11th Cir. 2003). A statue of the Buddha
is not sectarian (at least if by sectarian one means confined to only one sect), as the
Buddha is revered by Buddhists as well as by certain Hindu sects.
26. This plurality comprises Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. As an example of the
latter, the Alabama House passed in March 2003 an amendment (which would have to
be approved by voters in a statewide referendum) to allow the posting of the Ten
Commandments in public school classrooms across the state. In the floor debate,
Representative Yusuf Salaam, a Democrat from Selma and a Muslim, supported displaying
the Ten Commandments, declaring that they ‘‘were revealed to Moses by the
followers of Judaism. The Islamic faith does not have a problem with the Ten Commandments’’
(Bob Johnson, ‘‘House Passes Amendment to Allow Ten Commandments
in Schools,’’ Associated Press State and Local Wire, March 11, 2003).
27. The phrase ‘‘history and tradition of religious diversity’’ repeats the formulation
given in the Supreme Court decision Allegheny v. aclu (492 U.S. 573, 589 [1989]),
which contended that the Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution ‘‘precisely
because of the religious diversity that is our national heritage.’’
28. Glassroth v. Moore, 229 F. Supp. 2d 1290, 1343 (M.D. Ala. 2002).
29. Everson v. Board of Education, 11.
30. Much First Amendment jurisprudence regarding religion seeks to clarify the
terms of separation. Two broad interpretative models developed in Everson’s wake:
neutrality (sometimes called strict separation) and accommodation. According to the
228 s t e p h e n d a w s o n
former, government must be held strictly to the standard of neutrality with respect to
all public expressions of religion. According to the latter, the Constitution only prohibits
bestowing o≈cial favor or privilege upon a particular church or sect in such a
way that would compromise free exercise by believers of other faiths. From this second
perspective, legal rulings on religion should strive for accommodation, or equal opportunity,
rather than neutrality. ‘‘Accommodation’’ refers specifically to the position
of Justice William Rehnquist in his dissent in Wallace v. Ja√ree (472 U.S. 38 [1985]): ‘‘The
Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and
irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory
aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that
the Framers intended to build the ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in
Everson’’ (106).
31. James Madison, ‘‘Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessment,’’
in The Papers of James Madison, edited by Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 8:299. This commonly accepted definition
was o≈cially a≈rmed in Davis v. Beason (133 U.S. 333 [1890]): religion consists in
‘‘one’s views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of
reverence for his being and character, and of obedience to his will’’ (342).
32. United States v. McIntosh, 283 U.S. 605, 633–34 (1931).
33. Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 495 (1961).
34. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 176 (1965).
35. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612 (1971).
36. Ibid., 612–13. The tests developed in Lemon were crafted in light of Walz v. Tax
Commission (397 U.S. 664 [1970]), which held that the Establishment Clause, broadly
interpreted, prohibited three discrete categories of action: ‘‘sponsorship, financial
support, and active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity’’ (668).
37. The idea of ‘‘possible establishment’’ was clarified in terms of ‘‘endorsement.’’
The Supreme Court has defined ‘‘endorsement’’ in terms of ‘‘conveying or attempting
to convey a message that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred’’
(Wallace v. Ja√ree, 70).
38. Glassroth v. Moore, 229 F. Supp. 2d 1290, 1304 (M.D. Ala. 2002).
39. Capital Square Review and Advisory Board v. Pinette, 515 U.S. 753, 779–80, 800
(1995); Lamb’s Chapel v. Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993).
40. Capital Square Review and Advisory Board v. Pinette, 765.
41. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 612. By making the subjective attitude of the community prior
to that of outsiders or the uninformed, Scalia has only relocated rather than resolved
the fundamental problem of the endorsement test.
42. Finally we cash in the promissory note left earlier in this essay to consider
whether the monument violates the standards provided by section 3 of the Alabama
State Constitution.
43. Many traditional liberals hold that equality—first pronounced by Thomas Je√erson
in the Declaration of Independence (‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal’’) and brought to fruition by Abraham Lincoln—is the core
American principle. For Lincoln, who called equality an ‘‘apple of gold’’ and the
Agonistic Federalism 229
Constitution a ‘‘picture of silver’’ (The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P.
Basler [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 4:169), the great purpose
of American government was to extend to all persons the practical benefits of this
principle. In other words, Lincoln held unabashedly to the political faith that government
must and should advance a comprehensive conception of the good, and he did so
without reliance on the fiction of disinterested neutrality. This interpretation of Lincoln
is not exclusive to traditional liberals. Some conservative critics make a similar argument.
See, e.g., Harry V. Ja√a: ‘‘Equality as a Conservative Principle,’’ in Ja√a, How to
Think about the American Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), 13–
48; Harry V. Ja√a, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
44. Stan Bailey, ‘‘Moore Says No to King Monument; Chief Justice Plans to Install a
Plaque at Own Expense,’’ Birmingham News, September 28, 2001.
45. Baxter and Poe, ‘‘Ten Commandments Furor,’’ 8a.
46. This assertion should be taken in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin’s conclusion to his
celebrated essay ‘‘Two Concepts of Liberty’’: ‘‘To demand [an ideal of freedom lacking
eternal validity] is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to
determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral
and political immaturity’’ (Four Essays on Liberty [New York: Oxford University Press,
1969], 172). This position does not entail relativism. See Adam B. Seligman, Modest
Claims: Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2004).
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PART V
cONCLUSIONS
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R , S T E P H E N W A R N E R
11
The De-Europeanlzation of American Christianity
Christianity is not the property of Europeans: it is a world religion.
I learned this lesson unforgettably in 1994 when the fellows of the New
Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project (NEICP) convened in Chicago
for a six-weekseminar on ethnographic methods in congregational study that
led off the project.1
1 made a point of apologizing to the fellows for the
Eurocentrism of the syllabus of readings, one heavily focused on studies of
Christian churches. I explained that sociological ethnographies of religious
communities to date had been produced primarilyin the United States. Part
of the goal of the NF.ICP, I said, was to extend that literature beyond its
Eurocentric base. Sheba George, an tndian-born, American-raisedsociologist
from Berkeley, objected to my phrasing this apology in terms of "Lurocentrism,"
letting me know that her ancestors had probably been Christian far
longer than mine. Legend holds that Christianity came to her Indian homeland
of Kerala in the first century C.E., and history confirms that it has been
there for at least sixteen hundred years; much of northern Europe,where my
grandfather came from, was not Christianized until a thousand or even (as
in the case of Lithuania) six hundred years ago.2
The Keralites are one of
many indigenous Christian communities all over the world. Even where nonEuropean
Christianity stems historicallyfrom European or North American
missions (as in Mexico, the Philippines, and sub-Saharan Africa), many indigenous
populations have long since taken over the missions and made them
their own. But even today, a college religion course with proportionate attention
paid to Christian communities is unlikely to earn its students "diversity"
or "world culture" degree credit. With a mixture of arrogance and exasperation,
white Americans still tend to claim Christianity as their property, even
when many of them wish they could disown it.
A shorter version ofrhis essay appeared earlier as R. Stephen Warner, "Comingro America,"
Christian Century 121.3 (February 10, 2004): 20-23. Copyright 2004 Christian Century. Reprinted
by permission. Subscriptions: $49/yr. from RO. Box 378, Mt. Morris, n. 61054;
1-800-208-4097.
233
234 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
One consequence of the new, post-1965 immigration will surely be that
white Americans will come to see that Christianity is neither theirs nor their
European ancestors’ alone.≥
New immigrants of myriad races and national
origins are now practicing their Christianities on these shores.∂
I will develop this argument in four parts, beginning with (1) a sketch of
the religious demography of post-1965 immigrants before (2) describing a
few Christian communities established by these immigrants in the United
States. I will then (3) explicate dynamic processes endemic to these communities
that portend change over the next several decades before (4) concluding
by considering what these facts about Christians of non-European origin
might mean for American public life.
Despite being overwhelmingly (about 85 percent) non-European, at least
two-thirds of post-1965 immigrants are Christian.∑
There are several reasons
why such is the case. Many new immigrants come from historically Christian
countries, such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Guatemala,
El Salvador, and the Philippines. More new immigrants come from
Mexico than from any other country (it is the largest sending country), and
Mexico’s population is overwhelmingly Christian. To take an Asian example,
according to the 1990 census, the population of the Philippine Republic was
83 percent Catholic, 5.5 percent Protestant, and 4.5 percent Muslim, with the
remainder a≈liated with Buddhist and indigenous Christian movements.∏
Filipinos are the second-largest Asian-origin group (after Chinese) in the
United States. Few countries where religions other than Christianity predominate
are among the top sending countries (a few exceptions are Taiwan, India,
and Pakistan).
Many immigrants come disproportionately from Christian segments of
religiously mixed countries—for example, Korea, Vietnam, India, Lebanon,
Jordan, and Palestine. Although these are not majority-Christian countries,
those who leave them for the United States are either mostly Christian (in the
cases of Korea and Vietnam) or disproportionately Christian (in the cases of
India and the Levant). The population of India, for example, is about 2 percent
Christian, but 10 percent of Indians in America likely are Christian.π
Similarly,
Muslims are overrepresented among Indian immigrants, while Hindus are
underrepresented. The general principle is that migration is not random with
respect to religion.∫
Some immigrants come from countries with rapidly growing Christian
movements—for example, such sub-Saharan African countries as Nigeria,
Ghana, and Congo. As the world’s South turns Christian, many immigrants
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 235
from these regions bring with them the enthusiastic faith of new converts.Ω
Thus, America’s cities have many new African Protestant congregations, and
other African immigrants worship in Episcopal congregations.∞≠
Most of those Europeans and white North Americans who are numbered
among the new immigrants (for example, Poles, Irish, British, and Canadians)
are Christian, although they range from the more pious (Poles) to the less
(British). Many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are Jewish, and even
more claim no religion. But Soviet-origin immigrants to the United States who
are Jewish may be outnumbered by those who are Orthodox Christians.∞∞
Many of those who come with no religious identity (for example, from
o≈cially atheistic states like China and the former Soviet Union) convert to
Christianity soon after coming to the United States. It has been estimated that
about one-third of Chinese in America are Christian, and many have become
so very recently.∞≤
Immigration is also biased in favor of Christians through the marriage
provisions of U.S. immigration policy. Those who enter the United States on
visas set aside for spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to be religiously similar to
their sponsors; U.S. women in particular seem to be biased toward Catholic
immigrant husbands.∞≥
For these and other reasons, when one multiplies individuals’ religious
identities by the numbers of immigrants coming from the various countries,
we would expect the product to yield very large numbers of Christians among
post-1965 immigrants in the United States. The trouble is that hard data are
scarce, which is one reason why claims about the size of minority religious
groups vary so widely. U.S. government agencies, including the Census Bureau
and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, may not collect data on
individuals’ religion. Academic and commercial social surveys that do a good
job of predicting the presidential vote every four years do not work well for
estimating numbers of people who constitute, as most immigrant groups do,
small proportions of the overall population. A pilot study for a planned New
Immigrant Survey (nis-p) was conducted, however, by Guillermina Jasso and
her associates between October 1996 and February 1998 on a probability
sample of 976 legal immigrants who were admitted in the summer of 1996.∞∂
The nis-p yielded the most reliable quantitative estimates we have on the religious
identities possessed by new immigrants upon arrival (see table 11.1).∞∑
According to the nis-p, almost two-thirds (64.7 percent) of the sample
claimed a Catholic (41.9 percent), Protestant (18.6 percent), or Eastern Orthodox
(4.2 percent) ‘‘religious preference.’’ This figure compares to the 76.5
236 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
table 11.1 \ Distribution of Religious Preference of U.S. Adults:
New Immigrant Survey—Pilot (nis-p) and American Religious Identification
Survey (aris)
Immigrants U.S. Population
Religious Preference (nis-p) (aris)
Jewish 2.6 1.3
Christian Catholic 41.9 24.5
Christian Orthodox 4.2 0.3
Christian Protestant 18.6 51.7a
Muslim 8.0 0.5
Buddhist 4.04 0.5
Hindu 3.4 0.4
Other 1.4 1.0
No religion 15.0 14.1
No response 1.2 5.4
Total 100.0 100.0
Sources: Guillermina Jasso, Douglas S. Massey, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and James P. Smith,
‘‘Exploring the Religious Preferences of Recent Immigrants to the United States: Evidence from
the New Immigrant Survey Pilot,’’ in Religion and Immigration: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
Experiences in the United States, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, and John L.
Esposito (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2003), 217–53; Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Meyer, and
Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey (New York: Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, 2001).
Note: Percentages are for adults eighteen and older and are based on weighted data. nis-p data
come from a probability sample of all immigrants legally admitted in July and August 1996
(N = 976). aris data come from a random-digit dialed telephone survey of households in the
contiguous forty-eight states conducted between February and June 2001 (N = 50,281).
a
aris ‘‘Protestants’’ include Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
percent of the American population that professed a Christian religious identity
in the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (aris), a very large
scale random telephone survey of the adult American population in the contiguous
forty-eight states.
For several reasons, the relatively high portion (64.7 percent) of Christians
among new immigrants is a conservative figure. The nis-p survey excluded
illegal immigrants (many of whom are from Mexico and are very likely to be
Christian); furthermore, the completion rate was biased toward those whose
phone numbers could be determined, which also probably excluded many
poor legal immigrants, those from the Western Hemisphere again likely constituting
a Christian population. The data also indicate that substantial num-
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 237
bers of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish immigrants are coming to the
United States, in each case in much greater proportions than those of their
cobelievers already here. The new immigration is definitely changing the U.S.
religious profile. Yet if we count the three branches of Christianity as a single
‘‘religious family,’’ the second-largest religious family, at 15 percent of the
total, is those who claim no religion.∞∏
Given that the survey queried legal
immigrants over eighteen years of age and not their children, and given that
immigrants tend to be younger than the population they are joining and more
likely still to be in their reproductive years, the survey undoubtedly understates
the long-term e√ect of immigration on the U.S. religious demography. Thus,
there can be no doubt that the new immigration is greatly diversifying the
religious profile of the United States, with greatly increased numbers of nonChristians
and those with no religion. But among Christians, this immigration
is significantly increasing the relative presence of Catholics and Eastern
Orthodox at the expense of Protestants.
There is every reason, then, to believe that the great majority of new immigrants
are Christian. They are not only augmenting the numbers of their
cobelievers in the United States but also greatly increasing the internal ethnic
and racial diversity of American Christians.
Probably the most self-conscious and certainly the best-documented new
immigrant Christian community is Korean American Protestants. Their story
is in many ways remarkable.∞π
Due to a very rapid process of evangelization
spanning the twentieth century, South Korea now has about as many Christians
as Buddhists (each with one-quarter of the population). Because of
selective migration (from the younger, more highly educated, and urban sectors
of the Korean population), half of these emigrants are Christian. And because
the Korean immigrant church is the center of Korean American community
life, half of the non-Christian immigrants become church members as
they settle in the United States. As a result, approximately 75 percent of Korean
immigrants here are Christian. Korean American Christians have founded
more than three thousand congregations, in which they tend to be highly
involved, attending regularly and contributing generously. Already well educated
in Korea, they have nurtured a critical mass of religious studies scholars
so that there is a large and growing literature by Korean Americans on the
Korean American church.
Because the most successful turn-of-the-century evangelists in Korea were
Presbyterians and Methodists, many Korean American churches retain such
a≈liations. They are thereby one of the few sources of growth in otherwise de-
238 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
clining mainline Protestant denominations. However, because Korean Americans
tend to be more conservative than white Presbyterians and Methodists,
many of their churches are a≈liated with ethnic judicatories in white denominations,
ethnic Korean denominations, and conservative American denominations
such as the Presbyterian Church in America and the Southern
Baptist Convention. A minority among Korean American Christians, accounting
for some 10–15 percent, are Catholics, who attend ethnic parishes dedicated
to such Korean martyrs as St. Andrew Kim and St. Paul Chung or
designated centers within mixed-ethnic parishes.
Whether Protestant or Catholic, Korean immigrant churches are not, by
and large, neighborhood churches. Korean Americans are one of the many
Asian immigrant religious groups who travel relatively long distances to get to
their places of worship. There is also remarkable membership turnover in
Korean Protestant churches, caused, in the judgment of some researchers, by
competition for status, leading to schisms and the founding of new churches.
The largest but probably one of the most di√use and least defined of the
new immigrant religious communities is certainly that of Mexican-origin
Catholics.∞∫
With the high and rising rate of migration, many millions of
Mexican immigrant Catholics live all over the United States, refilling pews in
both urban parishes left empty by upwardly mobile, now-suburban Catholics
and midwestern small-town parishes whose young people have left for the
cities. Mexico itself is a regionally, culturally, and socially diverse country, and
Mexican Americans are correspondingly diverse.∞Ω
A few are descended from
families who became part of the United States by conquest a century and half
ago, and others are third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation descendants of latenineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century immigrants, religious refugees from
the Cristero rebellion against the anticlerical postrevolutionary government of
the 1920s, and guest workers of the 1942–64 bracero program. One thrust of
the Chicano movement of the 1960s was itself an anticlerical protest against
neglect on the part of the institutional church, but over the past thirty years,
the size of the immigrant flow has brought to the United States a vastly larger
number of first-generation immigrants and their children for whom U.S.
history is less salient and Mexican-origin Catholic identities more so.
Today, Mexican Americans are, of all Hispanics/Latinos, the group most
likely to retain their Catholic heritage; about three-quarters identify as Catholic,
according to the national survey conducted for hcapl. In contrast to
Korean American Protestants, Mexican American Catholics tend to attend
nearby neighborhood churches and in that respect are good American Catho-
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 239
lics.≤≠
Because of residential segregation and the Catholic parish system as
well as the strenuous e√orts of the U.S. Catholic Church to accommodate
their presence and rectify decades of neglect and abuse of Hispanics, Mexicanorigin
Catholics are likely to congregate for Spanish-language masses, often
in churches that make special symbolic provision for their presence (for
example, with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe) and sometimes in de facto
or de jure national parishes.≤∞
Without many of their own clergy, either from Mexico or from the Mexican
American community, Mexican American Catholics are likely to be served,
more or less sensitively, by Spanish-speaking Anglo priests and for that
among other reasons have yet to coalesce into the huge, cohesive bloc that is
one potential of their presence.≤≤
Yet their religiosity is distinctive, and their
growing presence in parishes of Irish, German, Polish, and other European
provenance seems to be steering American Catholicism away from its previously
dominant asceticism and more recent post–Vatican II tendencies to
Protestantization and religious individualism. Their religiosity seems to be
more sacramental and devotional than that of Anglo-Catholics: they are more
likely to go for private confession, make stations of the cross, say the rosary,
ask the priest’s blessing on their households, and have home altars featuring
images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, mementoes of the deceased, candles,
and religious jewelry.≤≥
Heirs to traditions that enshrine mixtures of late medieval
European and pre-Columbian Meso-American elements, they are comfortable
holding onto what Anglo-Americans tend to experience as symbolic
opposites (for example, individual and community or the material and the
spiritual), and they resist top-down e√orts to ‘‘purify’’ religion of popular
culture and practices.≤∂
Especially because of immigration from Mexico, the
future of the U.S. Catholic Church lies increasingly with Hispanics.
The largest Asian Christian community, that of Filipino Catholics, is one of
the least visible and least studied but, at least at an individual level, is among
the most religiously devout.≤∑
They are the largest because of the size (second
to Chinese among Asian-origin groups) and long duration (since the 1910s) of
immigration from the Philippines, which, as has been noted, is overwhelmingly
and robustly Catholic. (Something of a Catholic counterreformation
took place in the Philippines after the American conquest in 1898.) Filipino
Catholics are relatively invisible because they adhere to the parish system and
because Filipino Americans tend not to be residentially concentrated. Filipino
parishes are thus rarer than Filipinos’ numbers would warrant, and Filipino
Catholics often represent small minorities in their mixed ethnic parishes.
240 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
(Many Filipino Catholics gather periodically at regional centers and private
homes for saints’ days and hometown festivals, however.) They are least
studied in part because of antipathy to religion among many postcolonial
scholars of Filipino origin. Filipinos are among the most active Catholic
laypeople because their high educational and occupational levels endow them
with cultural capital and their religious conservatism gives them an impetus to
become ‘‘reverse missionaries’’ involved in movements such as Cursillo, Opus
Dei, and Couples for Christ.
Two additional, mostly conservative, forces within American Catholicism
are enclaves of refugees concentrated in places known as Little Saigon and
Little Havana.≤∏
As di√erent as these communities are (the former is sometimes
characterized as ‘‘Confucianized Christianity,’’ and the latter mixes
Afro-Caribbean elements at the popular level), their leadership tends to be
nationalistic and anticommunist. Many of the Vietnamese who left for the
United States after 1975 were in fact twice refugees from communism, having
left North Vietnam after the 1954 Vietminh victory over the French. The first
refugees from Saigon were followed by those less elite and less piously Catholic,
which is also the case for Cubans (the anti-Castro elite having been
followed twenty years later by Marielitos). Nonetheless, Vietnamese Catholics
manifest high levels of vocations to the priesthood, and Cuban Catholics have
taken up the Cursillo movement. Both communities have a strong Catholic
self-consciousness, and because of their spatial concentration, both are visible,
not least to the politicians who represent those districts.
At the other end of the social ladder from the first wave of anti-Castro
Cubans are lower-class Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, and (although they are
not technically immigrants) Puerto Ricans. Many immigrants from the Caribbean
are Protestant, but most are Catholic, and they are contributing Afrocentric
practices, including Vodou and Santeria, to the U.S. religious mix.
While some of these practices, such as outdoor processions, are highly visible,
others, such as all-night domestic devotions, are much less so.≤π
Despite
the protestations of purists on both sides—indigenists and ‘‘pure’’ Catholics—
an intimate overlap exists between popular Catholicism and such practices.≤∫
For example, one of the largest annual Catholic festivals in Cuban Miami is the
December 17 festival of San Lázaro, the ‘‘man with the crutches,’’ who is an
ambiguously Christianized version of the Yoruba orisha Bábalu Ayé.≤Ω
Many of
those who partake in such hugely popular rites think of them as genuinely
Catholic, a notion of which some church authorities are understandably reluctant
to disabuse them.≥≠
To take an example from the other side, Vodou rituals
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 241
often begin with lengthy recitations of the Our Father and the Hail Mary (in
Kreyol, led by a Vodou priest), the people taking charge, as it were, of the
religion.≥∞
One of the more widely heralded ‘‘discoveries’’ of the past decade on the
part of observers of U.S. religion was that not all Hispanics are Catholic. That
millions are in fact Protestant began to dawn on the American consciousness
ten years ago thanks to thousands of Spanish-language storefront churches
dotting American cities, newspaper features about them, and survey research.
According to the hcapl-sponsored survey, Protestants account for 23 percent
of the 37 million American Hispanics, so the United States has more
Latino Protestants than Jews or Muslims.≥≤
Most of these Hispanic Protestants
identify with evangelicalism and Pentecostalism and with Mormons and Jehovah’s
Witnesses rather than with mainline Protestant churches. Thus, Latino
Protestantism represents another rapidly growing theologically conservative
presence.
Reliable data on this trend are hard to come by, a problem for religious
statistics generally but exacerbated for a population that is not comfortable
answering surveys in English. For example, the General Social Surveys, the
source of the richest, most reliable religion data for the majority of the American
population, is by definition a survey of the noninstitutionalized adult
English-speaking U.S. population. Nonetheless, some statements can be
made with confidence:
\ Many Hispanic Protestants immigrate as Protestants. For example, in the
nis-p data, Mexico is not only the largest single sending country for
Catholic immigrants but also the largest single source of Protestant
immigrants. Thus, it is a mistake to conclude that the millions of Hispanic
Protestants are defectors from the American Catholic Church.
\ Hispanic Protestants are less attached to the neighborhoods of their
residence than are Hispanic Catholics, because Hispanic Protestantism
tends to organize congregationally rather than by parish.≥≥
For example,
in Washington, D.C., the parishes of Salvadoran Catholics tend to link
them to the local and panethnic community, whereas the more homogeneous
congregations of Salvadoran Protestants link them to coreligionists
in the home country and elsewhere in the United States.≥∂
\ Proportionately more U.S. Hispanics of Puerto Rican and Cuban origin
than Mexican Americans are Protestant. Indeed, as many as one-third of
Puerto Ricans, either on the island or on the mainland, are Protestant.
242 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
Other things being equal, the more Mexican a city’s Latino population is,
the more likely its Latinos are to be Catholic.
\ To say that Hispanic Protestants tend to be theologically conservative
is not to say that they are politically conservative. Tending to vote for
Democratic candidates, they are likely to consider themselves political
independents. Moreover, for all the theological di√erences between Catholicism
and Protestantism, millions of adherents of both confessions
a≈rm cross-cutting born-again and charismatic identities.≥∑
Protestants come to the United States from all over the world. In metropolitan
Chicago, for example, I have visited Jamaican, Nigerian, Ghanaian,
Congolese, Liberian, Puerto Rican, pan-Hispanic, Korean, Chinese, panAsian,
and Indian Protestant congregations, some of which met in their own
facilities, some of which share quarters with white American mainline Protestant
congregations. Many west African and Jamaican immigrants are Anglicans,
but an increasing percentage of Protestant immigrants from Africa, the
Caribbean, Latin America (for example, Guatemala), Asia (for example, the
Philippines), and eastern Europe (for example, Ukraine) have their roots in
indigenous evangelical and Pentecostal churches.≥∏
Some 4 percent of the nis-p respondents identified with Christian Orthodoxy,
two-thirds of them from such bastions of Eastern Orthodoxy as the
former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Romania. But others came from the
original heartland of Orthodoxy in countries of the Middle East, including
Turkey, Lebanon, and Ethiopia. Given the accepted pattern of ethnic particularism
within Orthodoxy, it is not surprising that the United States today
has not only Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Serbian Orthodox churches but
also Albanian, Arab, Assyrian, and Indian Orthodox congregations.≥π
The immigrant impact on the U.S. religious profile, however, does not end
with the religions they bring with them. Specific processes of change extend,
mitigate, and refract immigrants’ religious presence.
As the children of immigrants (the second generation) grow up, their religious
identities may change. They may revert to a faith more in keeping with
the national/ethnic identity associated with the home country, they may adopt
a version of their parents’ religion that they feel is more in keeping with their
new circumstances, they may follow more closely in their parents’ religious
footsteps, and, of course, they may abandon their parents’ religion altogether.
Once again, the religious lives of Korean Americans have been most thoroughly
analyzed, and the literature discusses all four of these possibilities.
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 243
Because the net rate of immigration from Korea dropped precipitously at the
end of the 1980s (from more than thirty thousand per year to a third of that
number), fresh cultural input from Korea has greatly diminished, the first
generation is aging, and an ambiguously Americanized second generation is
emerging. A large demographic bulge is now moving through Korean American
society, a distinct second generation whose religious proclivities illustrate
the options of generational succession.≥∫
The members of the second generation
prefer English, and many of them identify more as Christian than as
Korean.≥Ω
In such respects, their religiosity di√ers significantly from that of
their parents. However, members of the founding generation have many years
ahead of them, and great resistance to the use of English in Korean immigrant
church services exists. As a consequence, some observers have sensed the
onset of a second-generation ‘‘silent exodus.’’ Others see in the reported
disa√ection of youth a long-delayed recognition of the dubious legitimacy of
Christianity for an Asian culture.∂≠
But surveys show that second-generation
Korean Americans have problems with the immigrant church, not with their
Christian faith, and there is a growing literature on the English-language worship
services (elws) they have founded, whether as freestanding churches or
as parallel congregations.∂∞
Like their parents’ churches, these elws are predominantly
if not exclusively Korean; unlike the parents’ churches, the worship
is informal and contemporary. Those elws that remain part of immigrant
congregations—often called the ‘‘youth department’’ or the ‘‘English
congregation’’ of a Korean immigrant church—may presage the future of
such churches as the first generation slowly gives way to the second.∂≤
Other immigrant Christian communities may languish as they negotiate
viable identities in the United States. For example, Indian Christians su√er an
identity crisis between their more numerous Hindu coethnics and pervasive
evangelical Protestants, both of which appeal to college-bound youth.∂≥
At the
same time, the male elders of the community, su√ering significant loss of
status in the migration process and finding in the church a close-at-hand
answer to their status needs, seem loath to cede much cultural room to their
children’s generation.∂∂
In response, the children may well assimilate to other
segments of the population, joining predominantly white churches or converting
to other religions. Either way, the immigrant religious tradition itself
may slowly go dormant, as happened with the Buddhism and Daoism of
nineteenth-century Chinese on the West Coast and the Islam of many turn-ofthe-century
Lebanese immigrants.∂∑
If a religious community may lose adherents by defection (a failure of
244 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
cultural reproduction), it may also augment its numbers by natural reproduction.
Fertility is in decline worldwide, and the fertility of Asian immigrants
and Asian Americans in particular tends not to di√er greatly from that of
white Americans, with that of African Americans being somewhat higher. But
the fertility of Hispanic women is higher still.∂∏
Bringing children into the
world does not automatically add to the rolls of religious institutions, yet
because of the Hispanic component of the new immigration, di√erential
fertility is another factor that seems likely to at least maintain if not increase
the Christian share of the population.
In the past four decades, the U.S. Christian community has lost members
by conversion to Islam (especially African Americans) and to Buddhism (especially
European Americans) but has gained by the conversion to Christianity
of others, especially Chinese.∂π
Most Chinese who immigrate to the United
States (the majority of immigrants from China and a sizable proportion from
Taiwan) bring no religious identification with them, but the least stable religious
identification in the United States is ‘‘none.’’∂∫
In other words, proportionately
more of those who grow up in America without a religious identification
later a≈rm one than those who grow up with a religious identification
and later a≈rm none. In a society where some religious identification characterizes
the vast majority of the population, many Chinese become Christian as
they settle in the United States.∂Ω
In converting to Christianity, these new
immigrants—who are often of high professional status—do not wish to turn
their backs on their Chinese identification, so they practice a form of ‘‘adhesive
assimilation.’’∑≠
Their churches are internally diverse (with Chinese
members speaking several languages), and some have a history of serving
generations of Christians. These churches are typically nondenominational
conservative Protestant (preaching respect for family and elders), and they are
constrained to be indubitably Chinese.∑∞
Thus, although Chinese Christianity
is largely made in America, it does not represent assimilation in the sense of
conformity with Anglos.
Some Asian American (as well as Latin American and African) immigrants,
and especially their children, gravitate toward panethnic elws and congregations.
On the West Coast in particular, pan-Asian churches have a growing
presence.∑≤
Some are new, and some are formerly monoethnic Japanese or
Chinese churches reconfigured to be pan-Asian as the founders die o√ and
their o√spring lose interest in their parents’ religion. It is an emerging issue
in the literature whether such churches are governed primarily by an ‘‘ethnic’’
or a ‘‘racial’’ logic.∑≥
In other words, are members brought together more by
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 245
their common cultural experience as upwardly mobile children of immigrants
or by their common racial experience as outsiders in America? Russell Jeung,
for one, shows that among West Coast pan-Asian congregations, those under
evangelical Protestant auspices adopt the ethnic approach, while mainline
Protestants adopt the racial one.
Adhesive assimilation (maintaining old-country identities in the process of
adding host county ones) and panethnicity (joining with others who share an
often disesteemed status in the host country) are two processes representing
amendments to classic assimilation. That theory came under intense criticism
beginning in the 1960s for both its ethnocentrism and its misrepresentations
of American realities. Previous generations of immigrants had not simply
melted into the American population, nor should they have done so. In particular,
classic assimilation was seen as the ideology of what came to be called
Anglo-conformity, a false promise of acceptance on the part of American
society of those groups who led their lives according to the dominant model
(false because it denied the reality of American racial and ethnic exclusion).
Assimilation theory was decidedly out of fashion for a whole generation of
social scientists. Over the past decade, however, the recognition has emerged
that post-1965 immigrants—especially their children—are indeed assimilating
to America but not necessarily to the dominant (Anglo) model. Recognizing
that the receiving society is itself racially and economically segmented, the
new theory of ‘‘segmented assimilation’’ both conceptualizes diverse assimilation
trajectories and explains why those who assimilate to one of the available
American models may do worse in America than those who adhere to
select old-country ways. For example, the children of black West Indians who
avoid becoming African American are likely to get better jobs, and children of
immigrants from Mexico may do better in school if they stay closer to their
parents than to their peers.∑∂
In today’s multicultural society, religion may play
a role in protecting members of the second generation from deleterious influences
of the host society to the extent that they remain at least partly aloof.
The academic success of certain Vietnamese Catholic youth in New Orleans
provides the best documented example of this phenomenon.∑∑
To the extent
that they do well in school (as is the case with many but by no means all
second-generation Vietnamese youth), they may be said to be on the road to
assimilation. But Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III show that these Vietnamese
youth succeed in school partly by virtue of involvement in religion
(specifically, in this case, Catholicism). Religious participation seems to link
them to their parents and their parents’ values, thereby di√erentiating them
246 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
from the peer culture of inner-city youth that would otherwise undermine
their academic orientation. Thus, they succeed in school. According to this
line of reasoning, insofar as second-generation Vietnamese are represented in
higher reaches of American society in years to come, it will likely be those
Vietnamese who are most Catholic and least Americanized.
The theory of segmented assimilation assumes that incorporation into one
or another stratum of American culture is inevitable, with the key question
being which racial, ethnic and/or social class ‘‘segment’’ of American society
the group will assimilate to. Especially for groups who for racial, cultural, or
other reasons have ready at hand a ‘‘proximal host’’ that is underprivileged in
American society (as, for example, Jamaicans are often taken to be African
Americans and Guatemalans taken for Chicanos), parents may use whatever
resources they have to distinguish their children from those whom parents
fear will become their children’s peers.∑∏
Parents with the resources to live in
the suburbs, to send their children to private (often religious) schools, and/or
to create cultural capital through religious institutions may have some chance
of defeating the powerful processes of racialization in American society. If
their e√orts succeed, historians may look back on our time and say that
whereas religiously grounded ethnicity was the fate of the 1880–1920 immigrant
working class, something their children could not escape, it was the
privilege of the 1965–2000 immigrant middle class, something for which
the parents had to strive. In post-1965 America, ethnic religion, including
unfamiliar forms of Christianity, may become more a help than a hindrance
to success.
The point of this essay is not to celebrate Christianity, to claim that immigration
has had few e√ects on American religions, and least of all to deny
that substantial numbers of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs are now
among America’s believers. There is no question that immigration is greatly
diversifying the American religious order (see table 11.1). The argument of this
chapter is not religiously triumphalist. It is empirical—an insistence that we
must face the facts as they are and not as we wish they might be—and theoretical.
Religion in the United States is not now (if indeed it was ever) a monolithic
overarching symbol system under which a pluralistic society carried on
its business.∑π
If indeed the country was unified for three-quarters of a century
under a ‘‘civil religion’’ in which Abraham Lincoln played the part of messiah,
confessional religion in America is and has long been constitutively pluralis-
tic.∑∫
Today’s increasingly diverse religious institutions—Christian, Jewish,
Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and other—largely serve the interests of their con-
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 247
stituents (and indirectly of society) in ‘‘(sub)cultural reproduction,’’ but such
trends do not portend a process of Balkanization.∑Ω
Because of the new immigration, American religious pluralism extends not
only to denominational and ethnic diversity within American Christianity
and to non-Christian alternatives but especially to increasing racial diversity
within Christianity. Thus, when Americans think of Christians, they will decreasingly
be able to think simply of whites and the captive Africans they
Christianized. They will also think of Asian students conducting Bible studies
and witnessing for Christ on college campuses nationwide. They will think
about Mexicans observing Holy Week with open-air passion plays known as
Via Crucis and observing Christmas with the pageant known as Posada, about
Haitian Catholics marching through the streets of New York to honor the
Virgin Mary in July, and about Cuban Catholics gathering outdoors by the
thousands to celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Charity in early September.∏≠
‘‘Catholic’’ will no longer be a code for ‘‘Irish, Polish, and Italian’’ but will
have to include ‘‘Mexican, Filipino, and Vietnamese.’’ When Americans think
of Asians, they will not just think of exotic religious Others but also of believers
who thump the Bible and ask you if you are saved. Race and religion are
increasingly decoupling.∏∞
One consequence of such decoupling should be an increased appreciation
of the salience of both religion and race as axes of social di√erentiation so
that, for example, African American Christians are seen as Christians, not
only as blacks, and Asians as racial, not only religious, Others. This trend may
even have the salutary e√ect of causing European American Christians to
reflect on the cultural oddity of figures in their own religious penumbra, such
as St. Nick and the Easter Bunny. Insofar as this means that significant axes of
division are juxtaposed instead of superimposed, the decoupling of religion
and race should be conducive to civility.
Within the American religious order, the new immigrants undoubtedly
strengthen the Catholic Church, certainly in numbers of parishioners if not
yet in monetary donations or vocations to the priesthood. The hierarchy’s
increasingly assertive claim to speak for the society is made more credible by
the palpable diversity and size of its constituency. As low-wage immigrants,
especially Hispanics, come to constitute a greater percentage of Catholics, the
church’s ‘‘preferential option for the poor’’ will seem less a matter of the
noblesse oblige that characterized liberal Protestant outreach in the middle of
the twentieth century than a return to an older constituency-driven ethical
stance.∏≤
New immigrants are also strengthening religiously conservative ten-
248 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
dencies in both Catholicism and Protestantism: biblicism and supernaturalism
(especially among Asian and Hispanic Protestants), sacramentalism,
mysticism, and devotionalism (among Asian and Hispanic Catholics, some of
whom are bringing back religious artifacts and practices that Vatican II reformers
tossed out). Across the religious spectrum (including Hindus and
Muslims as well as Christians), new immigrants tend to be conservative on
many of the social issues that get wrapped up with religion, especially questions
of sex and gender. (If the Democrats and Republicans knew how conservative
new immigrants tend to be on these issues, they might switch sides on
their relative openness to immigration.) Americans of color are not an automatic
constituency of the Democratic Party.
As a case in point, Adventist sociologists of religion speak of the ‘‘browning
of Adventism,’’ where Asian, African, Caribbean, and South American
converts to the American sectarian movement known as Seventh-Day Adventism
immigrate to the United States in su≈cient numbers to have a notable
impact on the parent body.∏≥
Adventists of color are now ‘‘returning’’ to the
United States and increasing the numbers of such sectarian groups, both
uncoupling them from presumptive whiteness and slowing down their rate of
accommodation to the culture. Among other things, the ‘‘browning of Adventism’’
means that the Seventh-Day Adventist church will remain a sect for the
near future.
Yet, for at least two reasons, it is unlikely that the new immigrants, especially
the Christians among them, will line up with the American right to
exacerbate the so-called culture wars. First, a plurality of them, a near majority,
are Catholics, and Catholics tend to sit astride the left-right divide in
American politics, taking conservative stances on sex and personal morality
but more liberal stances on social issues such as income distribution and
minority rights. In Los Angeles, organizers from such Catholic networks as
the Industrial Areas Foundation help dampen the otherwise deep-seated conservatism
of immigrant Latino Catholics.∏∂
The findings that are emerging
from the project on the Hispanic Church and American Public Life point to a
consistent pattern: conservatism on theology and personal morality, liberalism
on social welfare, growing independence in party identification, and
continuing Democratic leanings when it comes time to vote.∏∑
Second, insofar as they experience racial discrimination—which most do,
even after they have become acculturated—non-European immigrant Christians
will have less in common with a Religious Right that is perceived to be a
movement of whites.∏∏
That is one lesson we can learn from the experience
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 249
of African Americans, whose moral conservatism does not bring them into
alignment with the Republican Party. To be sure, some Asians have aligned
themselves with the Republicans, and it is possible in the future that American
politics as well as American religion will become decoupled from race.
But we have not yet come to that point. Race is likely to be a factor in American
politics well after the current ‘‘culture wars’’ have become a distant memory.
notes
1. Funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trusts and headquartered
at the University of Illinois at Chicago (uic), the three-year neicp provided research
training and support to graduate students and postdoctoral students studying immigrant
religious communities. Twelve neicp fellows participated in a six-week workshop
on sociological field methods and sociology of religion under the direction of
Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner at uic in the summer of 1994. Warner visited their
research sites with them during the 1994–95 academic year, and the group reconvened
in July 1995 for a one-week writing workshop in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Fellows then
presented their research at the Association for the Sociology of Religion Conference in
New York in August 1996, and the conference papers were revised by the authors and
edited by Warner and Wittner under the title Gatherings in Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998).
2. See Raymond Brady Williams, Christian Pluralism in the United States: The Indian
Immigrant Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. ‘‘The rapidity with which Asians have become Christian and Latinos have become
Protestant forces us to reconsider our notions of Christianity as a ‘Western’ tradition
that has encountered the mysterious East and triumphed over it. It is equally true that
Christian traditions have been internationalized, thanks in large measure to impulses
originating on the Pacific Rim. Pentecostalism, perhaps our best claim to an originally
internationalist religious movement, began with revivals in Los Angeles’’ (Laurie
Ma√ly-Kipp, ‘‘Eastward Ho!: American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific
Rim,’’ in Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed [Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997], 146).
4. Thus, this essay might have been titled, ‘‘The De-Whitening of American Christianity,’’
and the first line might have read, ‘‘Christianity is not a white person’s
religion.’’
5. This fact is obscured in the influential writings of Diana Eck, where Christian
immigrants are all but neglected in discussions on religion and post-1965 immigration.
See Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the
World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 45.
6. Ste≈ San Buenaventura, ‘‘Filipino Religion at Home and Abroad: Historical
Roots and Immigrant Transformation,’’ in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith
Communities, edited by Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira,
2002), 144.
7. Williams, Christian Pluralism.
250 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
8. R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Religion and the New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles
Drawn from Field Research,’’ American Studies 41.2–3 (Summer–Fall 2000):
267–86.
9. See Philip Jenkins, The New Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002); Toby Lester, ‘‘Oh, Gods!,’’ Atlantic Monthly, February
2002, 37–45.
10. See, e.g., William David Stevens, ‘‘ ‘Taking the World’: Evangelism and Assimilation
among Ghanian Pentecostals in Chicago’’ (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University,
2003).
11. Guillermina Jasso, Douglas S. Massey, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and James P. Smith,
‘‘Exploring the Religious Preferences of Recent Immigrants to the United States: Evidence
from the New Immigrant Survey Pilot,’’ in Religion and Immigration: Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim Experiences in the United States, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane
I. Smith, and John L. Esposito (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2003), 217–53.
12. Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, Adhesive Identities
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
13. Guillermina Jasso, Douglas S. Massey, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and James P.
Smith, ‘‘Family, Schooling, Religiosity, and Mobility among New Legal Immigrants to
the United States: Evidence from the New Immigrant Survey Pilot,’’ in Immigration
Today: Pastoral and Research Challenges, edited by Lydio F. Tomasi and Mary G. Powers
(Staten Island, N.Y.: Center for Migration Studies, 2000), 52–81.
14. For this study’s findings, see Jasso et al., ‘‘Exploring the Religious Preferences.’’
15. Jasso et al., ‘‘Family, Schooling, Religiosity, and Mobility,’’ incorrectly assigned
an additional 13.6 percent of the sample to the Other religion category. Most of these
were self-identified Christians (primarily evangelical Protestants who do not answer to
the Protestant label) or Eastern Orthodox Christians who are neither Catholic nor
Protestant.
16. See Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its
Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
17. For further discussion, see Ho-Youn Kwon, Kwang Chung Kim, and R. Stephen
Warner, eds., Korean Americans and Their Religions: Pilgrims and Missionaries from a Di√erent
Shore (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
18. My discussion of Hispanic/Latino religious communities, Protestant and Catholic,
is based on many sources, including unpublished conference presentations and
my unpublished field notes. The most important of the conferences is the Hispanic
Church in American Public Life (hcapl), held in Washington, D.C., May 3–4, 2002.
See Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, ‘‘Hispanic Churches in
American Public Life: Summary of Findings’’ (interim report), Notre Dame University
Institute for Latino Studies, 2003; Gastón Espinosa, ‘‘Demographic Shifts in Latino
Religions,’’ Social Compass 51.3 (September 2004): 303–20. hcapl was a three-year
study (1999–2002) funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and co-sponsored by the
Alianza de Ministerios Evangélicos Nacionales (amen), a Protestant association, and
the Mexican American Cultural Center (macc), a Catholic research and teaching
institution. hcapl thus from the start represented a Protestant-Catholic collabora-
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 251
tion. The codirectors were amen founder Dr. Jesse Miranda and macc founder Dr.
Virgilio Elizondo. The project manager was Dr. Gastón Espinosa, a historian of religion
and visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The
national survey was conducted by telephone on four di√erent probability samples
intended to ensure representation of urban, rural, Protestant, and Puerto Rican His-
panics.
19. ‘‘The term Mexican American is not the only self-designation used by people of
Mexican heritage born and/or living in the United States. Since the 1960s, some U.S.
residents of Mexican descent have rejected the term as assimilationist and instead
called themselves Chicanas and Chicanos, usually as a means of expressing a strong
ethnic consciousness and orientation toward social struggle and justice. Many recent
Mexican arrivals call themselves Mexicanos or simply Mexicans, while some native-born
Texas of Mexican heritage call themselves Tejanos. Still others identify themselves as
mestizos to accentuate their mixed descent from Native American and Spanish ancestors’’
(Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions
in U.S. Catholicism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002], 153).
20. See Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New
Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Creek, Calif.:
AltaMira, 2000); Janise D. Hurtig, ‘‘Hispanic Immigrant Churches and the Construction
of Ethnicity,’’ in Public Religion and Urban Transformation: Faith in the City, edited by
Lowell W. Livezey (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 29–55.
21. Alan Figueroa Deck, ‘‘The Challenge of Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity to
Hispanic Catholicism,’’ in Hispanic Catholics in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, edited by Jay P.
Dolan and Alan Figueroa Deck (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1994), 409–39.
22. Virgilio Elizondo, a Catholic priest native to the west-side barrio of San Antonio,
Texas, is a notable exception to the generalization about a lack of indigenous
leaders. The concept of mestizaje, on which he has been working for more than twenty
years, is one of the most promising developments in Catholic theology. See Virgilio
Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983);
Matovina and Riebe-Estrella, Horizons; R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Elizondo’s Pastoral Theology
in Action: An Inductive Appreciation,’’ in Beyond Borders: Writings of Virgilio Elizondo
and Friends, edited by Timothy Matovina (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000), 47–57.
23. Dean R. Hoge, William D. Dinges, Mary Johnson, S. N. D. de N., and Juan L.
Gonzales Jr., Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (Notre Dame, Ind.:
Notre Dame University Press, 2001); Milagros Peña and Lisa M. Frehill, ‘‘Latina Religious
Practice: Analyzing Cultural Dimensions in Measures of Religiosity,’’ Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 37.4 (December 1998): 620–35. Although some Mexican
Americans have left the Catholic Church for Pentecostal and evangelical Protestantism,
it should not be assumed that they do so in reaction to the perceived inhospitality of the
U.S. Catholic Church, which, in many dioceses is trying hard to welcome them, partly
to counter Protestant competition. For further discussion, see Deck, ‘‘Challenge of
Evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity.’’ Many Hispanic Protestants, including some
Mexican immigrants, bring their Protestantism with them. According to the nis-p
252 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
(Jasso et al., ‘‘Exploring the Religious Preferences’’), Mexico is the top sending country
not only for Catholics but also for Protestants: 15.5 percent of the summer 1996 legal
immigrants in the survey who came from Mexico were Protestant; 77.8 percent were
Catholic.
24. See Matovina and Riebe-Estrella, Horizons, esp. Robert S. Goizueta, ‘‘The Symbolic
World of Mexican American Religion,’’ 119–38.
25. Pyong Gap Min, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Religions in Asian America, edited by Min and
Kim, 1–14; San Buenaventura, ‘‘Filipino Religion at Home and Abroad,’’ 143–83;
Joaquin L. Gonzales, ‘‘Christianity Returns to America,’’ report from the Religion and
Immigration Project, University of San Francisco, [2001].
26. Min Zhou, Carl L. Bankston III, and Rebecca Y. Kim, ‘‘Rebuilding Spiritual Lives
in the New Land: Religious Practices among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United
States,’’ in Religions in Asian America, edited by Min and Kim, 37–70; Kathleen Sullivan,
‘‘St. Catherine’s Catholic Church: One Church, Parallel Congregations,’’ in Religion and
the New Immigrants, edited by Ebaugh and Chafetz, 255–89; Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady
of the Exile: Diaspora Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
27. ‘‘Since the upper socioeconomic levels were overrepresented in the early wave of
the migration from socialist Cuba, the incidence of Afro-Cuban religious practices
among Cuban Americans was not as evident in Miami prior to 1965. As the successive
waves of migrants became increasingly more representative of the Cuban population,
Afro-Cuban religious practices became more evident in Miami. The Mariel boatlift was
especially important in increasing in Miami the number of practitioners and believers
in the various Afro-Cuban cults’’ (Lisandro Pérez, ‘‘Cuban Catholics in the United
States,’’ in Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900–1965, edited by Jay P. Dolan
and Jaime R. Vidal [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 207).
28. Elizabeth McAlister, ‘‘The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian
Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism,’’ in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner
and Wittner, 123–60; Elizabeth McAlister, Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti
and the Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
29. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile, 50. It would be a mistake to regard the Catholicism
in Vodou and Santeria as a mere veneer overlaid on a deeper African base or vice versa.
Both the Catholic and the African expressions are robust. ‘‘In Africa, Bábalu-Ayé is a
most dreaded orisha since he controls infectious diseases. . . . In Cuba, he is identified
with Saint Lazarus, ‘the man with the crutches,’ a merciful and su√ering leper. Saint
Lazarus has greatly influenced the personality and character of Bábalu-Ayé. Thus, in
Cuba, this orisha is perceived as a pious, merciful, and miraculous healer who is
inclined to forgiveness and goodness and is most loved instead of dreaded’’ (Mercedes
Cros Sandoval, ‘‘Afro-Cuban Religion in Perspective,’’ in Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism
With African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religion Among Latinos, edited by Anthony M. StevensArroyo
and Andres I. Pérez y Mena [New York: City University of New York, Bildner
Center, 1995], 87–88). Because surveys of American religion tend to o√er their respondents
mutually exclusive choices of ‘‘religious preference’’ (i.e., ‘‘are you Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, or something else?’’) and because ‘‘Catholic’’ is typically o√ered as
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 253
one of the legitimate choices, it is a safe assumption that U.S. survey data underestimate
the number of practitioners of Santeria, Vodou, and the like. But because these
practices overlap so intimately with folk Catholicism, such survey data do not necessarily
overestimate the number of self-identified Catholics.
30. Author’s field notes, Hialeah, Florida, March 1, 2002.
31. Author’s field notes, Brooklyn, New York, September 17–18, 1994.
32. Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, ‘‘Hispanic Churches,’’ 14–16.
33. For Hispanic Catholics, see Hurtig, ‘‘Hispanic Immigrant Churches’’; for Hispanic
Protestants, see R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘The Place of the Congregation in the
American Religious Configuration,’’ in New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations,
edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 54–99.
34. Cecilia Menjivar, ‘‘Religious Institutions and Transnationalism: A Case Study of
Catholics and Evangelical Salvadoran Immigrants,’’ International Journal of Politics, Culture,
and Society 12.4 (June 1999): 589–612.
35. See Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, ‘‘Hispanic Churches.’’
36. See Jenkins, New Christendom; Lester, ‘‘Oh, Gods!’’; Stevens, ‘‘ ‘Taking the
World.’ ’’
37. For Indian Orthodox churches, see Sheba M. George, ‘‘Caroling with the Keralites:
The Negotiation of Gendered Space in an Indian Immigrant Church,’’ in Gatherings
in Diaspora, edited by Warner and Wittner, 265–94.
38. R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘The Korean Immigrant Church as Case and Model,’’ in
Korean Americans and their Religions, edited by Kwon, Kim, and Warner, 25–52; Jung Ha
Kim, ‘‘Cartography of Korean American Protestant Faith Communities in the United
States,’’ in Religions in Asian America, edited by Min and Kim, 185–213.
39. Jeanette Yep, Peter Cha, Susan Cho Van Riesen, Greg Jao, and Paul Tokunaga,
Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents: Asian American Discipleship (Downers
Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).
40. See Karen Chai, ‘‘Competing for the Second Generation: English-Language
Ministry in a Korean Protestant Church,’’ in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and
Wittner, 295–331; see also Pyong Gap Min, ‘‘Immigrants’ Religion and Ethnicity: A
Comparison of Hindu Indian and Korean Christian Immigrants in the United States,’’
Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 2.1 (Spring 2000): 122–40.
41. For survey results, see Young Pai, Deloras Pemberton, and John Worley, Findings
on Korean-American Early Adolescents and Adolescents (Kansas City: University of Missouri
School of Education, 1987); for discussion, see Peter Cha, ‘‘The Role of a KoreanAmerican
Church in the Construction of Ethnic Identities among Second-Generation
Korean Americans’’ (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2002); Chai, ‘‘Competing
for the Second Generation’’; Soyoung Park, ‘‘The Intersection of Religion, Race, Gender,
and Ethnicity in the Identity Formation of Korean American Evangelical Women,’’
in Korean Americans and Their Religions, edited by Kwon, Kim, and Warner, 193–207.
42. Robert D. Groette, ‘‘The Transformation of a First-Generation Church into a
Bilingual Second-Generation Church,’’ in Korean Americans and Their Religions, edited by
Kwon, Kim, and Warner, 125–40; Warner, ‘‘Korean Immigrant Church.’’
254 r . s t e p h e n w a r n e r
43. Prema Kurien, ‘‘Christian by Birth or Rebirth? Generation and Di√erence in an
Indian American Christian Church,’’ in Asian American Religions: Borders and Boundaries,
edited by Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang (New York: New York University Press,
2003), 160–81; Min, ‘‘Immigrants’ Religion and Ethnicity.’’
44. George, ‘‘Caroling with the Keralites.’’
45. For discussion of the decline of Buddhism and Daoism among nineteenthcentury
Chinese immigrants, see Fenggang Yang, ‘‘Tenacious Unity in a Contentious
Community: Cultural and Religious Dynamics in a Chinese Christian Church,’’ in
Religions in Asian America, edited by Min and Kim, 71–98.
46. Georges Sabagh and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, ‘‘Population Change: Immigration
and Ethnic Transformation,’’ in Ethnic Los Angeles, edited by Roger Waldinger and
Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York: Sage Foundation, 1996), 79–107.
47. Yang, ‘‘Tenacious Unity’’; Yang, Chinese Christians; Yang, ‘‘Religious Diversity.’’
48. Jasso et al., ‘‘Exploring the Religious Preferences’’; on ‘‘none’’ being the least
stable religious identification, see R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Work in Progress toward a
New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,’’ American
Journal of Sociology 98.5 (March 1993): 1077.
49. See Yang, Chinese Christians, for further discussion. Other Chinese, especially
Taiwanese with residual Buddhist identification, turn assertively toward Buddhism
under pressure from coethnic Christian proselytizers. For more, see Carolyn Chen,
‘‘Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigrants Converting to Evangelical Christianity
and Buddhism’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2002), esp.
87–137.
50. Kwai Hang Ng, ‘‘Seeking the Christian Tutelage: Agency and Culture in Chinese
Immigrants’ Conversion to Christianity,’’ Sociology of Religion 63.2 (Summer 2002):
195–214.
51. Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘‘Religion and Ethnicity among New
Immigrants: The Impact of Majority/Minority Status in Home and Host Countries,’’
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40.3 (September 2001): 367–78; Ng, ‘‘Seeking the
Christian Tutelage.’’
52. Russell Jeung, ‘‘Asian American Pan-Ethnic Formation and Congregational
Culture,’’ in Religions in Asian America, edited by Min and Kim, 215–43. Pyong Gap Min
(‘‘A Literature Review with a Focus on Major Themes,’’ in Religions in Asian America,
edited by Min and Kim, 15–36, esp. 23–24) has rightly pointed out that such communities,
while often called ‘‘pan Asian,’’ are really pan–east Asian, bringing together, as
they do, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese but not south Asians.
53. For di√erent perspectives on this issue, see Groette, ‘‘Transformation’’; Jeung,
‘‘AsianAmericanPan-EthnicFormation’’;JungHaKim,‘‘CartographyofKoreanAmerican
Protestant Faith Communities’’; Min, ‘‘Literature Review’’; Park, ‘‘Intersection.’’
54. Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola E.
Suárez-Orozco, ‘‘The Culture Patterning of Achievement Motivation: A Comparison of
Mexican, Mexican Immigrant, Mexican American, and Non-Latino White Students,’’ in
California’s Immigrant Children: Theory, Research, and Implications for Educational Policy, ed-
The De-Europeanization of American Christianity 255
ited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Wayne A. Cornelius (San Diego: University of California,
San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1995), 161–90.
55. Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III, Growing up American: How Vietnamese Children
Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Sage Foundation, 1998).
56. David Mittelberg and Mary C. Waters, ‘‘The Process of Ethnogenesis among
Haitian and Israeli Immigrants in the United States,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 15.3 (July
1992): 412–35.
57. R. Stephen Warner, ‘‘Changes in the Civic Role of Religion,’’ in Diversity and Its
Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary American Society, edited by
Neil J. Smelser and Je√rey C. Alexander (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999),
229–43.
58. Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21;
Warner, ‘‘Work in Progress.’’
59. Warner, ‘‘Changes in the Civic Role.’’
60. For Mexican Catholics, see Hurtig, ‘‘Hispanic Immigrant Churches’’; Warner,
‘‘Elizondo’s Pastoral Theology.’’ For Haitian Catholics, see McAlister, ‘‘Madonna of
115th Street.’’ For Cuban Catholics, see Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile, 125–33.
61. See Kwang Chung Kim, R. Stephen Warner, and Ho-Youn Kwon, ‘‘Korean
American Religion in International Perspective,’’ in Korean Americans and Their Religions,
edited by Kwon, Kim, and Warner, 3–24; David Cho, ‘‘On Campus, Spiritual Groups
Witness a Cultural Conversion,’’ Washington Post, May 4, 2003, C1.
62. Compare Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, ‘‘Hispanic Parishes Where Something Seems to
Be Going Right,’’ in Strangers and Aliens No Longer, Part I: The Hispanic Presence in the Church
of the United States, edited by Eugene F. Hemrick (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic
Conference, 1992), 1–21.
63. Edwin Hernández, ‘‘The Browning of Adventism,’’ Spectrum 25 (December
1995): 29–50; Ronald Lawson, ‘‘From American Church to Immigrant Church: The
Changing Face of Seventh-Day Adventism in Metropolitan New York,’’ Sociology of
Religion 59.4 (Winter 1998): 329–51.
64. See, for example, Donald Miller, ‘‘The Role of Religion for New Immigrants in
Los Angeles: A Report from the Religion and New Immigrants in Los Angeles Project,’’
lecture presented at Loyola University of Chicago, February 21, 2002.
65. Espinosa, Elizondo, and Miranda, ‘‘Hispanic Churches.’’
66. In other words, in many cases the first generation can attribute the discriminatory
treatment they receive to their poor English and their unfamiliarity with American
manners. Members of the second generation are more sensitive to racism.
J A M E S D A V I S O N H U N T E R & D A V I D F R A N Z
12
Religious Piuralism and Civil Society
The vitality of political institutions presupposes cultural understandings
and social practices withinwhich those institutions make sense and
have legitimacy. In the American case, the realm of civic culture on which
democracy depends rested from the beginning on a unique combination of
Reformed Protestantism, Lockean individualism, and neoclassical republicanism.
The political culture of American democracy at its founding was
neither radically secular, as some have argued, nor radically religious, as
Others have claimed; rather, it represented a unique combination of moral
traditions and ideas in a tense but workable equilibrium. What is so striking,
in retrospect, is the contingency of these cultural factors and their relationship
to each other. Democracy has long been called an "experiment," but we
now have some understanding of just how fragile it was at the time of the
founding of the new republic.
We are, at the same time, acutely aware of how fragile that experiment
remains. As Adam Seligman observes in his brilliant study, Tfie Idea o/Ciuii
Society (1992), those cultural conditions that made civil society so vital are no
longer in place, and the social institutions that reinforced them have long
disappeared. The sources of this disintegration arc varied and complex—the
growth and transformation of capitalism, the expansion and secularizationof
the state, tile marginalization of religious institutions from public life, and so
on. Yet the disintegration also results partly ftom successive waves of immigration
and the expansion of religiocultural diversity that came with them.
Through immigration and religious diversity, our public culture has evolved
and been reconfigured by multiple traditions and competing ideals. It continues
to do so today. What is the social and political significance of this
widening diversity? What challenges does it portend?
© 1006 James Davison Hunter and David Franz
= 56
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 257
The Expansion of Religious Pluralism in America
One way that the history of America can be told is through the story of
expanding religious diversity. Start with the colonists, mainly from Great
Britain, whose culture was dominated by the particularly Puritan mandate to
build a ‘‘city upon a hill’’ in the New World. Insular and homogeneous by
any definition, that culture recognized little if any distinction between the
community faith and the political order. The covenant of Reformed Christianity
defined the boundaries and agenda of each. As the population grew
through the thirteen colonies, this mandate was di√used and reconfigured in
terms that were more broadly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. This represented a
subtle shift from our twenty-first-century perspective, but at the time it was
deeply felt and the changes challenged profoundly the colonists’ collective
self-understanding. Through the early years of the new republic, the number
of Catholics remained miniscule (in the nation’s first census in 1790, Catholics
made up less than 1 percent of the population). Their numbers expanded
greatly, particularly between the 1830s and 1850s, with the great migrations
from Ireland and Germany. In time, their presence forced an enlargement in
the nation’s collective identity: Americans came to see themselves as properly
and more generically Christian and to see that view as strongly compatible
with republicanism. Similarly, the presence of Jews in America was insignificant
until the 1880s, but as their numbers grew and presence stabilized, the
American national identity absorbed this community too, into an ideal and
heritage that by the middle of the twentieth century had plainly become JudeoChristian.
To be sure, the influx of new immigrants from around the world
after 1965 increased the numbers and diversity of people within the larger
Judeo-Christian framework (most notably through the immigration of Latin
American and Asian Christians), yet the number of immigrants rooted in
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam has reached a new and critical mass. This
too represents an expansion of American religious and cultural diversity in
ways that are novel. In turn, this development has come to challenge inherited
understandings of America’s collective identity and civic culture.
To recite this history quickly without consideration of the rich and complex
historical detail of lived experience is to suggest that the expansion of diversity
in America has been, by and large, linear, gradual, and harmonious. In reality,
of course, it has been none of these things. Every surge of expansion challenged
the stability of public culture. Accordingly, tension, conflict, and even
violence ensued as rising groups challenged an existing social, religious, and
political establishment that often excluded them from public life and from
258 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
membership and participation in collective life. Though hard to imagine now,
Episcopalians’, Baptists’, and Congregationalists’ hostility toward each other
was both oppressive to individuals and disruptive to the social order. As the
number of Catholics increased, their marginality was reinforced through institutional,
physical, and symbolic coercion. Not merely were innumerable
small groups such as the Know-Nothing Society bent on purging the country
of ‘‘Popery, Jesuitism, and Catholicism’’; the sentiment was deeply embedded
within the entire society’s economic, educational, and status structures. Only
after more than a century of hostility and the realization that Catholics were
not going away did the attitude toward Catholics change to one of grudging
inclusion. The experience of the Mormons partially overlaps that of Catholics:
Mormons, too, received a reception that was anything but warm and hospitable.
Rejection, denunciation, exclusion, and even murder forced their westward
migration. The same of course can be said of the Jewish immigration:
anti-Semitism was part and parcel of the Jewish experience in America from
the beginning. While anti-Semitism has diminished dramatically in the past
thirty years, its remnants remain aggressive and intractable. And so it is that
the murder of a Sikh who was mistaken for a Muslim soon after September 11
is part of a long-standing historical pattern of violence directed at members of
minority immigrant religions in this country.
In sum, tension, conflict, and violence inhere within diversity, particularly
at points of expansion. Each new wave of immigration brought a new challenge
to the stability of civil society and its shared understandings of justice,
rights, respect, toleration, and the public good.
Why is every new surge of religious immigration not simply and quietly
absorbed into civic culture? How does one explain the hostility and violence?
Such acts invariably violate precisely the traditions of moral reasoning that
the perpetrators claim to be defending. In their own terms, these acts are
indefensible—indeed, unintelligible. What is clear (and what the fact of mistaken
identity in the murder of the Sikh makes particularly plain) is that it is
not primarily di√erences in doctrinal content and substantive logic that explain
the forceful exclusion of rising religious minorities. These acts of violence
are not religious debates carried too far but tensions inherent to the
contest over social space and collective identity.
Thus, to make sense of the tension and conflict that attends the expansion
of religious pluralism in American history, it is helpful to distinguish between
substantive reason and social logic, between theoretical formulations and
their social embodiment. A long line of scholars from Emile Durkheim to
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 259
Mary Douglas has shown that societies are, among other things, commonly
held ways of ordering reality. If aspects of reality resist that ordering or fall
outside of its categories, they are regarded as ‘‘impure’’ or ‘‘dirty.’’∞
While
finding one expression in the idiom of hygiene, the problematic nature of
people and things without social categories is hardly trivial. Such a situation
requires the assertion and maintenance of categories at the very heart of social
life and in so doing summons a society’s most coercive forces. The people and
things included within a social order must be strictly separated from those
excluded. Defining and enforcing these bounds of inclusion and exclusion
takes on an urgency disproportionate to their practical significance. Through
this process of excluding outsiders, the shared order of a society is clarified
and social solidarity is reinforced. Here again, this process is governed primarily
by a social logic rooted in fear and manifested in collective rituals of
boundary maintenance rather than embedded in the substantive reason inherent
to particular moral and religious traditions.
Religion, with its capacity to place all meanings in a transcendent frame of
reference, only intensifies the emotion and vested interests. At stake in the
conflicts between established and emergent religious groups in U.S. history is
the by no means trivial question of what it means to be an American. In such
conflicts, the dominant culture typically maintains its status precisely by keeping
a new minority faith marginal. In this context, acts of violence against
religious minorities become intelligible, even predictable.
But this is not all that is going on.
The Life Course of Immigrant Religions
As a general rule, then, the inclusion of a new religious group within the
American mainstream is not bestowed but won. Beneath each phase of expansion
is the complicated history of groups that successfully contended for
acceptance as members and participants in the social and political order. This
is a dynamic and even idiosyncratic process that challenges not only the larger
social order but also the coherence and identity of the challenging group itself.
How a faith community carried by a new wave of immigration is integrated
into the social order is influenced by the content of the particular religion in
question. Returning to the American case, Protestantism provided the founding
myths for the nation and for this reason long enjoyed a de facto establishment
that, in turn, provided civil religious legitimation and the institutional
means (in schools and churches) for inculcating in succeeding generations
the habits of civility basic to democratic citizenship. Though Catholicism and
260 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
Judaism worked out comparable narratives to reconcile their relationship to
American culture, it took more than a century for those groups to become
accepted by the Protestant majority. For all of the di√erences among Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews, commonalities of language and an overlapping
European heritage within the Judeo-Christian tradition could renew civil society
and make it vital. The substantial Protestant bias in law explored in
Courtney Bender and Jennifer Snow’s chapter in this volume provides a window
into this dynamic. The courts’ tendencies to define religion, marriage,
family law, and property rights in ways compatible with the form (individuation)
and content (monotheism) of Protestant theology and experience were
entrenched from the beginning. Congruent in many ways and incompatible in
others, the Jewish and Catholic communities took decades of internal negotiation
before becoming reconciled to some of these legal structures and
practices. (Some observers speak rightly of the Protestantization of Judaism
and Catholicism in this regard.) Reconciliation and inclusion may not have
been a foregone conclusion, but enough commonality existed for these traditions
to be workable. In the end, the public culture expanded and rebalanced
and the communities of faith adapted and accommodated to prevailing social
and cultural circumstances.
This backdrop raises important questions about the current wave of expansion
in American diversity. Do Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism have a
unique relationship to American civic culture? Is the vitality they contribute to
civic culture something peculiar to these traditions? Can other faith communities
participate in vital ways only insofar as they can imitate and re-create the
relevant features of Protestantism? Or can the civic culture presupposed by
American democratic institutions find congenial content in the very di√erent
traditions of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism and the communities
that carry them?
We can begin to answer these questions by acknowledging that the experience
of each new religious group in American culture is di√erent. It could not
be otherwise. Yet one can discern broad patterns in the way in which new
religious groups are incorporated, with implications not only for the larger
civic and political culture but also for these groups themselves. A life course
model suggests four broad phases: introduction, recognition, negotiation,
and establishment. These phases are ideal types, of course, analytically distinguishable
but in reality overlapping. This is a heuristic model intended to
help clarify certain tendencies of the complex cultural and political impact of
post-1965 immigration.
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 261
phase 1 \ Introduction
The introductory phase of a new religious group in American culture is
often quiet, with the group satisfied to find a niche on the margins and
representatives of the dominant culture content to leave group members alone
for the simple reason that they make few if any claims for themselves and pose
no particular threat to mainstream economic or political interests. The formation
of inwardly focused enclaves, through geographical proximity, language,
and other symbolic markers, characterizes the orientation of the new group.
However, to call this phase ‘‘quiet’’ is misleading in some cases. This internal
focus often results from a minority group recognizing the limits of its welcome.
Mormons, to take an obvious example, faced hostility from the outset.
They saw their search for an isolated place free from intervention as much as a
necessity as a choice. In most cases, there is a mix of both.
Examples of this inward-looking introductory phase can be found in the
history of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, each of which clustered geographically
and developed alternative parallel institutions to mainstream Protestant
institutions. We can also find examples in the recent history of post-1965
immigrant religions. Prior to being pulled out of isolation by racially motivated
violence in the early twenty-first century, the Sikh community had been
a quietly prosperous minority. Similarly, Vietnamese Buddhists, in creating
temples with traditional Vietnamese architecture and conducting services in
the Vietnamese language, are trying to imagine what a Vietnamese Buddhism
would be like absent the political domination of the Chinese. This is a unique
kind of Buddhism growing on American soil, but it is enabled more than
shaped by the American context. Tibetan Buddhism in America illuminates
another of Buddhism’s introductions to the United States. It was introduced
to American culture in the 1950s not through large numbers of immigrants
but rather through a few small teaching centers. These e√orts produced no
recognizable enclave: Tibetan Buddhists self-consciously maintained a geographically
di√use following. So in diverse ways, encounters between the
mainstream culture and immigrant religious communities tend to be deferred
and deflected in the introductory phase.
phase 2 \ Recognition
Groups in the introductory phase generally lack the interests, the resources,
and the critical mass required to risk increased visibility before the
American public and the American state. However, any number of changes
internal or external to the group may drive it out of isolation to demand public
262 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
recognition. One way that a group is characteristically pulled out of isolation
is by being defined by the dominant culture as an enemy. The Japanese Buddhist
community leaders during World War II o√er an example of how being
cast as enemies encourages leaders to make public claims to recognition. The
leaders of the Japanese Buddhist community responded to Pearl Harbor and
the anticipated reaction by internally encouraging members to be politically
active while working externally to portray Japanese Buddhists as model citizens.
This dynamic is also evident in the position taken by the Hindu International
Council against Defamation, which petitioned the White House following
Hinduism’s absence at a September 16, 2001, government-sponsored
prayer service. The authors of this petition argued that as ‘‘hard working
people who contribute to the American society, economy, education and quality
of life,’’ Hindu citizens ought to be recognized as rightful occupants of the
American religious landscape. Such e√orts by spokespersons encourage both
members and outsiders to think of group members as loyal citizens. In so
doing, the group works to create new space for itself in the public sphere and
tends to make politics more central to its identity. A similar dynamic appears
to be at play in American Islam. While deeply ambivalent about U.S. culture
and politics, mosque leaders agree on the importance of participation in
American politics for purposes of protection. Since 9/11, American Muslim
leaders see involvement in American politics as necessary, if not desirable, for
securing fair treatment.
Yet these e√orts to achieve recognition often coincide with a desire to avoid
recognition and to escape notice as a minority. In fact, these claims for recognition
are themselves ambivalent. On the one hand, leaders are demanding
that their di√erences be taken into account; on the other, they argue
that these di√erences should be reckoned with because they already fit very
well within existing notions of citizenship. The group should be included,
in other words, precisely because its members are not substantively di√erent.
In this way, demands for recognition are simultaneously e√orts to avoid
recognition—to hide, protect, and minimize di√erence. Here, in the form of
organizational rhetoric, we find something akin to what Erving Go√man
called passing.≤
Go√man argued that members of a stigmatized group usually
find it in their interest to try to pass for ‘‘normal,’’ to hide or disguise their
stigma, whether it is a physical handicap, a questionable family background,
or a minority religious a≈liation. So the adoption by Japanese American
Buddhist groups of the title ‘‘church’’ and even certain Protestant practices,
like the use of ‘‘hymnbooks’’ and the singing of songs such as ‘‘Onward
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 263
Buddhist Soldiers’’ among members of the Buddhist Churches of America,
can all be partly understood as e√orts collectively to pass. This tendency
toward Protestantization is invariably challenged, of course, initiating internal
debates about the limits of compromise. So here too the possibilities for
conflict multiply.
Claiming legal protection under the Free Exercise Clause of the First
Amendment is another way that immigrant religions demand minimal recognition
and state protection. In this way, often quite apart from the public voice
of group leadership, members of immigrant religious groups initiate an encounter
between themselves and the state. For example, Jewish and other
prisoners whose religions include dietary restrictions have regularly brought
suit against the government for failing to provide acceptable food. The act of
turning to the courts for protection grants some legitimacy to the American
state and implies a certain degree of integration into American society. Not
surprisingly, these e√orts to gain recognition tend to come first from native
converts and prisoners, the members likely to be most familiar with the U.S.
legal system and most integrated into U.S. society. Moreover, these cases are
often furthered by organizations at some distance from the immigrant community,
dedicated to the legal protection of religious freedom in general (the
American Civil Liberties Union) or to particular kinds of religious freedoms
(Home School Legal Defense Association) in addition to those dedicated to
the protection of a particular group. These organizations have resources that
allow an issue to gain a public hearing and to shape the way the issue is
framed (often in terms of individual rights). Thus, the American Civil Liberties
Union of Rhode Island, in challenging the charges brought against a Sikh
man for carrying a kirpan (the small sword worn by Sikhs) on a Providence
train on September 12, 2001, cited the man’s ‘‘right to religious freedom.’’≥
The impact of these cases on the boundaries of inclusion has been mixed,
sometimes broadening, sometimes narrowing the courts’ definition of religion.
In either instance, these cases raise the visibility of the minority religious
group in the eyes of the public and the state.
In the recognition phase, groups make claims that are public in nature, and
their focus is more outward than it is in the introduction phase, though this
outwardness is defensive. Increasing public visibility and increasing interaction
with the state make life in an enclave much more di≈cult to sustain.
After moving into public recognition, the religious group’s identity will necessarily
be negotiated both internally and externally in relation to the broader
culture and the state.
264 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
phase 3 \ Negotiation
Without calling too much attention to it, the existence of books such as this
one dedicated to post-1965 immigrant religions is significant. It suggests that
these religions have moved beyond the introductory phase and perhaps even
the recognition phase, entering into the process of negotiation with American
culture. This negotiation has both an internal focus and an external concern.
An immigrant group’s internal negotiation is related to the competing
pulls of continuity and change, preservation and assimilation, that play o√ of
each other in a new setting. The issues run to questions of how to maintain
integrity in doctrine and/or belief, concerns about the fidelity or adaptability
of ritual, and the desire to tell a coherent collective narrative that acknowledges
the changes a community has experienced. We can see this process
working itself out on a number of levels. The emergence of progressive Islam
provides one example of internal negotiation at the intellectual/theological
level. Sacred texts are read in light of the new place and social location within
the university, with new purposes in mind giving rise to new interpretations—
in this case, an interpretation that, drawing on the work of both modern
western intellectuals and Islamic traditions, criticizes both certain forms of
Islam and certain forms of modernity. Events outside of intellectual life gave
progressive Islam a new appeal and opened up new forums. After 9/11, the relationship
of Islam to the West took on heightened significance, both through
traditional mosque-based dissemination and, as Muslim intellectuals found
an expanded audience, through academic work and popular media. Mainstream
conferences, journals, and newspaper and magazine articles have suddenly
become prominent venues for discussing Islamic political theology.
Religious interpretations also find expression in the phenomenology of
everyday life. For example, American Hindus living away from the sacralized
geography of India face a profound challenge in their new setting. This is
partly an intellectual challenge but, more importantly, is a challenge for practical
religious life in a place where the physical locations of the sacred are far
away. The Hindu response has been to reinterpret, both intellectually and
ritually, the sacred geography so that the American continent finds its place in
traditional Hindu cosmology, literally and figuratively merging the waters of
great American rivers with the sacred rivers of India.
The Hindu case illustrates the importance of language as a site of internal
negotiation. More than just a medium of communication, language is a way of
expressing loyalties and taking up sides. As is the case for American Hindus,
the naming of things is often bound up with ritual. Thus, the language of
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 265
religious services, along with linguistic analogues such as the symbolism of
architectural space and dress, are negotiated and contested within immigrant
religious groups, particularly between generations, as younger practitioners
tend to learn and speak English more readily than their elders. The language
and symbolic ordering of religious life, alongside of and in tension with
experiences in the broader culture, provide the context of negotiation at the
level of experience, where members of the immigrant group feel their di√erences
from outsiders, whether as pride, embarrassment, or revulsion, and
then feed those di√erences back into the negotiation process in a loop as
circular as the cycle of life, death, and rebirth itself.
Part of this process consists of these new immigrant groups’ e√orts to
establish their loyalty to the mainstream in the face of suspicion and discrimination.
The case of Sikhism again provides an interesting example. The Sikh
community is held together by the Guru Granth (the sacred text), the practice
of langar (sharing food), the Nishan Sahib (a triangular flag hung in the place
of worship), and members’ distinctive appearance. That appearance includes,
for men, the so-called five Ks: kes (unshorn hair worn under a turban), kanga
(comb), kirpan (sword), karha (steel bracelet), and kaccha (special undergarments).
The standards of dress have raised questions in the eyes of authorities,
both about the loyalty of Sikhs and about bureaucratic procedure. The
turban has become problematic when other forms of headgear are normally
associated with a role. For example, recent controversies have involved a high
school student who would not remove his turban to wear a graduation cap, a
construction worker who would not wear a hard hat, and a police o≈cer
whose turban violated department policy. The kirpan has faced slightly different
challenges as the suspicion of men wearing turbans after 9/11 has
combined with heightened security policies that place the kirpan into the
category of prohibited objects. Each of these cases poses a complex set of
questions to the Sikh community about what is essential to Sikh practice and
what can be compromised.
Instances of negotiation often take on a life of their own, going far beyond
the concerns of a particular individual. This is particularly likely when organizations
dedicated to protecting members of a group from discrimination are
involved. For example, when Amric Singh Rathour was fired from his position
at the New York Police Department for wearing a turban, he turned to the Sikh
Coalition, which wrote letters to city o≈cials on his behalf, prepared and
distributed a thirty-page media guide, and filed a lawsuit against the city. The
Sikh Coalition was formed after September 11, 2001, to combat expected
266 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
discrimination against Sikhs. While working to protect Sikh individuals, however,
the organization has also taken on the more ambitious goal of public
education. It attempts to inform the public about Sikhism’s commitment to
civic and human rights and to the democratic political order. In this way, the
Sikh Coalition, like other organizations interested in defending members’
rights, is contributing to the expansion of American civil religion, stretching
the American ‘‘sacred canopy’’ and changing its colors.
If public a√airs organizations of minority religions function to extend the
scope of the dominant culture, the case of Latin American Christianity reminds
us that this culture is not monolithic or without internal conflicts of its
own. Nowhere is this more clear than in U.S. politics, which often pits religious
conservatives promoting traditional family structures and laissez-faire
capitalism against religious liberals who are less traditional in their views on
family, have a less favorable view of the market, and tend to vote Democratic.
According to the Hispanic Church and Public Life study, funded by the Pew
Charitable Trust, Latin American immigrants sit astride the standard American
political distinctions.∂
Latin American immigrants are largely Christian
(90 percent) and tend to be religiously conservative and traditional in their
beliefs about family life. However, they also favor more government intervention
in the economy and usually vote for Democratic candidates. How the
rapidly growing population of Latinos will change to fit the American religious
and political landscape and how those landscapes will change to fit
them are increasingly important issues with high political stakes. The U.S.
political system tends to channel political debate into liberal-conservative
oppositions. The structure of the two-party political system and U.S. political
institutions push in this direction. Latin American Christians will doubtless
face pressure to fit their politics within these categories. However, as a large
and growing group of voters, Latin American Christians may also contribute
to a realignment of American political life.
phase 4 \ Establishment
A group can be seen as reaching the establishment phase when new
boundaries of American civic life have normalized around the group, when it
has been accepted within the public imagination and its presence reinforced
within public institutions. Both the Protestant and Judeo-Christian establishments
were coercive cultural establishments of a kind; they were hard won
and continually contested, but eventually they normalized. In this regard it is
important to note that the terms of establishment will vary considerably,
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 267
largely as a result of conditions intrinsic to the religious community itself.
While is too early to say how any of the post-1965 immigrant groups will
finally negotiate the terms of normalization, Buddhism and Islam illustrate
the di√erent ways that this process could unfold.
Though it had won some followers in the academy and in literary circles by
the early 1960s, the presence of Buddhism in the United States was mostly
insignificant. That changed quickly. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many
Americans became aware of Asian religions not just because of new immigration
but also through the religious experimentation of the counterculture. A
survey of the San Francisco Bay area conducted in 1973, for example, found
that 30 percent of residents had not only heard of Zen Buddhism but knew
something about it, and a sizable percentage of these respondents were attracted
to it.∑
Transcendental Meditation, yoga, and iskcon (the Hare Krishnas)
all had roughly similar degrees of recognition and appeal. While San
Francisco was hardly a barometer of the nation as a whole in 1973, the data
suggest where and when the shift in public consciousness began. In the years
that followed, the Dalai Lama came to enjoy celebrity status, and popular films
and books portrayed Buddhism in a positive light. Today Buddhism is visible
in the culture to an extent far greater than the actual proportion of Buddhists
in the population (less than 1 percent).
Part of this visibility and acceptance can be traced to a lack of desire among
Buddhists to turn Buddhism into a public religion. Indeed, Buddhism and
most other Asian faith communities have made few claims on the reordering
of public and political life. Moreover, Buddhism’s absence of strict doctrinal
codes, its sympathy with liberal criticisms of organized and authoritarian
religion, and its a≈nity with a culture of subjectivism have created a broad
context of receptiveness.∏
In some cases, of course, even a mostly private
religion will become involved in public conflicts, as in a construction project
and or in education, yet even here the conflicts tend to be localized and
contained. By and large, Buddhism, along with Hinduism and Sikhism, has
taken a low-profile strategy vis-à-vis public culture in general and the political
world in particular. Buddhism has ventured out visibly (and then rather tentatively)
only to engage the Tibet cause, though many members of the groups
energized by that issue are not Buddhists.
Islam in America is a di√erent story. Though it was fairly quietistic politically
through the last three decades of the twentieth century, by tradition it is
less inclined to remain a private faith. Take, for example, the recent proliferation
of Islamic public a√airs organizations. The formation of antidefa-
268 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
mation and public advocacy groups to monitor public discourse represents an
important step toward religious establishment. The Jewish Anti-Defamation
League is the model of this kind of organization. Founded in 1913, the AntiDefamation
League exists explicitly to shape public portrayals of Jews and
employs considerable organizational and financial resources toward that end.
(The league’s annual budget is $45 million.) The Catholic League for Religious
and Civil Rights, along with more policy-oriented groups such as the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, perform a similar function for American
Catholics.
Muslims have formed a number of antidefamation groups, most of them
since 1990. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (cair) was established
in 1994 to ‘‘promote an accurate image of Islam and Muslims in America’’
through moral persuasion and public opinion pressure. The group has
already claimed several notable victories. In 1996, under pressure from cair,
Simon and Schuster withdrew a world religions textbook that unfavorably
depicted the Prophet Muhammad. In 1998, Nike agreed to remove the word
‘‘Allah’’ from the side of a shoe after a cair Action Alert ignited worldwide
Muslim protests. In 2001, United Airlines changed its uniform policy to allow
employees to wear a hijab or a turban as part of their uniform in response to
pressure from the organization.π
In addition to these sorts of policing organizations, American Muslims
have founded groups focused on mobilizing and informing Muslim voters,
influencing policy decisions, and gathering data and conducting research. The
North American Muslim Resource Guide lists fifty-three Muslim public a√airs organizations
in the United States, including antidefamation groups, think tanks,
and lobbying organizations ranging in focus from local concerns to issues of
international politics.∫
The Federal Election Commission listed five active
Muslim political action committees in 2004.
The increasing presence of Islamic organizations in American public life
suggests that talk of an ‘‘Abrahamic’’ America is not purely imaginary. In fact,
some of the institutional groundwork has been laid for a move in this direction.
Conversely, there is no guarantee that increasing visibility of Islam in
American public life will lead to its acceptance. It seems equally likely that
participation might give rise to new conflicts between Muslims and other
religious groups that previously could ignore each other. Whether JudeoChristian
America will yield to Judeo-Christian-Islamic America remains an
open question.
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 269
The Question of Education
While not explicitly discussed in this volume, education is a critical arena
where these larger questions are worked out. Schools, of course, not only are
institutions for passing on skills and integrating the young into the labor
market but also are sites of social, moral, political, and cultural formation.
Cumulatively, their function is to reproduce the national culture across generations.
Through education, children come to internalize the boundaries that
separate ‘‘us’’ from ‘‘them’’ and the cultural markers that distinguish each.
From the vantage point of the dominant culture, the work of boundary maintenance
becomes explicit in the schools. For this reason, school standards
and textbooks are deeply contested by di√erent faith and ethnic communities.
Claims and counterclaims about what is American, what should be included
in the curriculum, and who deserves attention, respect, and consideration are
at stake. At the same time, schools are the social institutions in which the
immigrant community works through its concerns about preservation and
assimilation, its tensions between continuity and change.
This situation creates a quandary for immigrant groups and religious minorities.
How do members participate in a least-common-denominator public
life and still reproduce their distinctive cultures, sustaining solidarity from
generation to generation? Both Catholics and Jews responded to this challenge
by creating alternatives and supplements to the Protestant-dominated
public schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The great
school wars of the mid–nineteenth century between Catholics and the Protestant
establishment testify to all that is at stake.
How recent immigrant religions will engage these challenges remains unclear.
Will they create after-school and weekend religious education courses?
Will they set up separate schools? Will they school their children at home? At
the same time, how will public schools accommodate the presence of more and
more children from the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Muslim communities?
By all appearances, Muslims have been the most active in creating educational
institutions and making claims on the public schools. Part of this e√ort
seeks to increase the scope of education in public schools to include teaching
about major religions in general and Islam in particular. The Council on
Islamic Education (cie), which is ‘‘devoted to raising the standards of teaching
religion in schools,’’ is the leading Islamic organization on this front. The
cie operates out of a multiculturalist framework, arguing that ‘‘in the public
forum of the classroom . . . knowledge gained by individuals of diverse
270 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
heritages validates and tempers their experience of learning about themselves
and others.’’Ω
In this spirit, the cie tries to convince textbook manufacturers,
school districts, and teachers to spend more time teaching about Islam and to
do so in ways that assume neither the superiority of Christianity nor the
stagnation of Islam.
AmericanMuslims’ambivalenceaboutAmericancultureandpublicschooling
for their children goes beyond concerns about the content of formal
education. Immigrant parents recognize that without intentional e√orts to
instruct children in the ways of the faith, their children will not learn to inhabit
Islam (as they did as children) as an all-embracing culture.
Mosques have long tried to fill this void by holding religious education
classes on weekends. Although these classes may succeed in teaching the
Koran, they are unlikely to reproduce a culture among children who spend five
days each week in public schools. In fact, it is this culture of public schools to
which many Muslims most object. Khaled Husein, a Palestinian engineer
whose three children attend New York’s Islamic Al Noor School, put the point
this way: ‘‘You don’t have to be a psychologist or an expert to see there is
something wrong at public schools . . . big competition and pressure on kids
to be the best dressed, the best looking, the slimmest.’’∞≠
Thus, Islamic educational
e√orts are animated by more than simply the desire to pass on religious
doctrine and belief. They also constitute a recognition that the culture of Islam
is at odds with some of the dominant cultural features of American youth
culture generally. ‘‘We want [school] to be a place where they don’t have to
assimilate,’’ said Majida Zeiter, an Islamic studies teacher in northern Virginia.
‘‘We teach them the history and good values and what it takes to be a
good Muslim.’’∞∞
In recent decades, the appeal of these arguments, along with Muslim immigration,
have made full-time private Muslim schools increasingly popular.
The National Center on Education Statistics has collected data on Islamic
private schools since the 1991–92 school year, when 4,482 students attended
44 Islamic private schools. By the time of the 1999–2000 survey, these figures
had grown dramatically, with the number of students in Islamic schools increasing
to 11,412 and the number of schools to 152.∞≤
This rate of growth
greatly outstripped that of private schools generally, which expanded by only
5 percent over the same period.
The growth of private Islamic schools has created opportunities for supporting
organizations. For example, the Council of Islamic Schools of North
America was founded in 1990 to develop and implement accreditation stan-
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 271
dards for Islamic private schools. Accrediting organizations tend to protect
schools from challenges, but the legitimacy granted by accrediting organizations
comes at the cost of a degree of imposed uniformity, since standards are
typically not made from scratch but are at least partially borrowed, and the
most readily available and publicly legitimate model is the one developed by
Christian private schools. In court cases, because Islamic schools are so new,
they are interpreted in light of cases involving other religious minorities; as a
result, Islamic schools tend to hire lawyers with experience defending Christian
sectarian education. In short, for a number of institutional reasons,
Islamic schools likely will not chart an entirely new path but will follow a
model created by other minority religions that have used parochial schools to
sustain their unique identities.
While the success of Islamic private schools in sustaining a unique cultural
identity remains an open question (even privately schooled children
encounter the broader culture), private schools in principle provide a context
in which the uniqueness of Islamic culture, including its standards of appearance
and sexuality, might be sustained and even flourish. However, what
do such schools mean for democracy?
Islamic schools have given rise to worries, first among them the concerns
that Americans have long harbored about the existence of religious schools.
Public schools have borne the weighty hopes of John Dewey and many others
that they would be models and carriers of pluralist democracy. A similar and
perhaps more realistic expectation has been that public schools would serve
as a homogenizing force, cultivating a certain degree of homogeneity necessary
for democracy to function. These objections are wide ranging and have
diverse historical strands, but they generally share a belief in an Enlightenment
solution to religious diversity—religions can peacefully coexist insofar
as they are privatized. Public schools, in this view, serve both to create a public
space in which di√erent people can participate and to exclude religious commitments
from that space. Schools that seek to instruct children in one particular
religious tradition necessarily pose a threat to democracy.
However, if we do not assume that publicly held religious commitments
are necessarily at odds with democratic citizenship, then we find ourselves on
much less sure ground with respect to the consequences of Islamic schools
for democracy. An answer will depend on exactly what is taught in history,
social studies, and Islamic studies courses and on the culture developed in
Islamic schools. At this point, we have little more than anecdotal evidence on
any of these counts. These schools are in the very early stages, as are the
272 j a m e s d a v i s o n h u n t e r & d a v i d f r a n z
supporting organizations growing up around them. More fundamentally, remembering
that schools do not so much produce culture as reproduce culture,
the future shape of Islamic education will depend on how American
Islam as a whole positions itself with respect to American democracy and how
American democracy positions itself with respect to Islam. In short, the implications
of Islamic education for American democracy will likely hinge on
whether Muslims will claim insider status within America and be able to do so
plausibly.
Change and Continuity
As we have said, establishment is a particular configuration of power, and
this configuration is never without challenges and conflicting pressures. The
traditions that enjoy influence in social and political life and whose legitimacy
is critical to the vitality of public institutions do so under the heading ‘‘for the
time being.’’ For this reason, ‘‘establishment’’ is never stasis. The post-1965
era o√ers eloquent testimony to this reality. The last decades of the twentieth
century and the first years of the twenty-first have been a time of incredible
flux during which the terms of older establishments have destabilized and
what will replace them remains undecided.
The force of this larger point is made by the case of evangelical Protestantism.
Though much altered internally from the colonial period to the mid–
nineteenth century, it held a proprietary place in American social life if not a
dominant role in the shaping of the nation’s public institutions. Since the
nineteenth century, it has followed a long trajectory from the center of cultural
formation to the periphery, enduring a century-long schism from its liberal/
progressive wing and a combination of withdrawal and eviction from its
leading role in public schools, higher learning, social services, and the arts.
Contemporary evangelicalism of course continues to do very well institutionally—it
maintains some political clout, and its success in popular commerce
may be unrivaled. Yet evangelicalism flourishes mainly as a subculture
on the margins of cultural formation. Though highly committed to U.S. political
ideals, over the past three decades the American evangelical population
has shown increasing disa√ection from governing institutions, consistent
resentment toward elites in all realms of public life, and strong disapproval of
the direction of the nation. Nowhere are these dynamics seen more clearly
than through the prism of education: evangelicals’ exodus from the public
schools in favor of sectarian alternatives (home schooling among them) represents
a recognition that they are outside the mainstream of American civic
Religious Pluralism and Civil Society 273
culture. The relationship of contemporary evangelicalism to civil society is,
then, at the very least, ambivalent. While evangelicals are still part of a civic
and political establishment, the terms of that establishment have altered in
ways that were unimaginable a century ago.
At this stage, the question is not so much whether but how Buddhism,
Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam will be integrated within the civic, political,
and cultural establishment. The nature of their relationship to the dominant
order remains to be determined. How will the dialectic pressures alter the
internal dynamics of each faith community? Belief, ritual, structures of authority,
and social practices will face the relentless pressures of assimilation.
Through it all, the negotiation between faith communities—new and old—
and political institutions and ideals persists unabated, the contingencies of
civil society remain as fragile as ever, and the experiment of American democracy,
tentatively and apprehensively, continues to unfold.
notes
1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966).
2. Erving Go√man, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York:
Aronson, 1963).
3. American Civil Liberties Union, ‘‘aclu Calls on Providence Police to Dismiss
Case against Sikh Arrested at Train Station,’’ press release, October 16, 2001, [http://
www.aclu.org/immigrants/discrim/11595prs20011016.html].
4. [http://www.nd.edu/&latino/research/pubs/HispChurchesEnglishweb.pdf].
5. Robert Wuthnow, The Consciousness Reformation (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976).
6. Steven Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural
Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Wuthnow, Consciousness Reforma-
tion.
7. See [http://www.cair-net.org].
8. Mohamed Nimer, The North American Muslim Resource Guide (New York: Routledge,
2002).
9. [http://www.cie.org].
10. Tara Bahrampour, ‘‘Where Islam Meets ‘Brave New World,’ ’’ New York Times,
November 11, 2001, 4a.23.
11. Valerie Strauss and Emily Wax, ‘‘Where Two Worlds Collide: Muslim Schools
Face Tension of Islamic, U.S. Views,’’ Washington Post, February 25, 2002, a1.
12. More recent survey data are not yet available, but observers expect that the
numbers are currently much higher, with some estimating the existence of as many as
six hundred Islamic schools with thirty thousand students.
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275
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Many thanks to Professor Peter Berger of Boston University, who
conceived of this project, helped to secure funding for it, and headquartered it at his
Institute on Culture, Religion, and World A√airs (cura). Many thanks also to the
Smith-Richardson Foundation, for stretching beyond its traditional areas of interest
to fund this research, and especially to Mark Steinmeyer, the foundation’s senior
program o≈cer on domestic public policy, for convincing his colleagues to wade into
the controversial waters of American religion. (We hope they are liking getting wet.)
Laurel Whalen, cura’s administrator, took expert care of the project’s finances.
Stephen Dawson did much of the heavy lifting as our project administrator, helping
to organize two workshops and seeing this volume into print. Karen Nardella
and Neil O’Callaghan provided much-appreciated administrative support in Boston
University’s Department of Religion.
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277
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283
c o n t r i b u t o r s
ihsan bagby is an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of
Kentucky. He specializes in Islam in America and is the coauthor of the first
comprehensive study of mosques in the United States, The Mosque in America:
A National Portrait (Washington, D.C.: Council on American-Islamic Relations,
2001). He is active in the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim
Alliance in North America, and the Islamic Society of North America.
courtney bender is an assistant professor in the Departments of Religion and
Sociology at Columbia University and is the author of Heaven’s Kitchen: Living
Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Her latest project is Worlds of Experience, a study of the religious experiences of
contemporary mystics and spiritual practitioners in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
stephen dawson holds a Ph.D. in the study of religion from Boston University and
teaches philosophy and religion at Lynchburg College. He is at work on a book
project that combines religious history and constitutional law and is tentatively
titled A Facsimile of Grace: The Protestant Roots of American Constitutionalism.
hien duc do is an associate professor in the Department of Social Science at San
Jose State University and is a past president of the Association of Asian American
Studies. The author of The Vietnamese Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1999), he also served as associate producer of Viet Nam: At the Crossroads (kteh,
1994), a one-hour documentary film that aired nationally on pbs and won the
1994 cine Golden Eagle Award.
david franz is a graduate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at
the University of Virginia.
james davison hunter is the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor in
Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and serves as executive director of the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His eight
books include Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987) and Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books,
1991). In 2004, President George W. Bush appointed Hunter to a six-year term on
the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
prema a. kurien is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University. She
is the author of Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction
of Community Identities in India (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2002) and served as the editor of a special 2004 issue of the International Journal of
284 Contributors
Sociology and Social Policy on the impact of immigrants on American institutions.
She is at work on a second book, Multiculturalism and Immigrant Religion: The
Development of an American Hinduism.
gurinder singh mann is the Kundan Kaur Kapany Professor of Sikh Studies at
the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Sikhism (Upper
Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003) and The Making of Sikh Scripture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001) and is coauthor of Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). He is also the sole contributor
of entries on Sikhism for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
vasudha narayanan is a professor of religion at the University of Florida and
previously served as president of the American Academy of Religion. She has
written or edited six books, including Hinduism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004) and The Vernacular Veda (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1994). She is active in the University of Florida’s Center for the Study of Hindu
Traditions.
stephen prothero is the chair of the Department of Religion and director of the
Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. He
has written or edited five books, including most recently American Jesus: How the Son
of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), and has
contributed to a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street
Journal, Salon.com, and the New York Times Magazine.
omid safi is an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as cochair of the Study of Islam section at the
American Academy of Religion and is the editor of Progressive Muslims: On Justice,
Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford, Eng.: Oneworld, 2003) and the author of The Politics
of Knowledge in Premodern Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2006).
jennifer snow holds a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia
University and is administrator and associate program director of Progressive
Christians Uniting in Los Angeles.
robert a. f. thurman, a former Tibetan Buddhist monk, is the Jey Tsong Khapa
Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies and chair of the Department of
Religion at Columbia University. He is a prolific translator and writer of both
scholarly and popular works, among them Essential Tibetan Buddhism (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) and Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Real Happiness (New York: Riverhead, 1998). He is also the cofounder,
with actor Richard Gere, of Tibet House, a New York City–based nonprofit
organization dedicated to preserving the living culture of Tibet. In 1997, Time
magazine tapped Thurman as one of its twenty-five most influential Americans.
r. stephen warner is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and previously served as president of the Association for the Sociology
of Religion. He has written or edited four books, including A Church of Our Own:
Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2005) and Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the
Contributors 285
New Immigration (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). His many articles
include the widely cited ‘‘Work in Progress: Toward a New Paradigm for the
Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,’’ American Journal of Sociology
98 (1993): 1044–93.
duncan ryûken williams is an associate professor of Japanese Buddhism at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of two books and the author
of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of S¯ot¯o Zen: Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). His current projects include Camp
Dharma, a study of Japanese American Buddhism during World War II, and Hot
Water Buddha, a study of Buddhist influences on hot springs in Japan.
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287
i n d e x
Abrahamic tradition, 9, 10, 98
Accommodation, 12, 14, 123, 125, 269;
in American Hinduism, 139; in
American Islam, 23, 40, 41; in
Japanese American culture, 64
Aerosmith, 13, 128
Afghanistan, 43, 164
African American mosques, 27, 33
African American Muslims, 7, 11, 24, 27,
31, 32, 35, 37, 187, 244
African Americans, 245, 247, 249
Agonistic liberalism, 211, 212, 224
Akhter, Javeed, 32, 38
Ali, Muhammad, 187
Allegheny v. ACLU, 195
Altman v. Bedford, 196, 197
America: as Abrahamic, 37–38, 75, 119,
125, 268; as anti-Islamic, 24, 30, 31,
32–34; as Christian, 6, 10; as dvipa,
140; as God’s promised land, 1; as
immoral, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 35,
36; as Islamic, 38, 39; as JudeoChristian,
2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 181, 257, 268;
as Judeo-Christian-Islamic, 11, 14,
119, 124, 268; as kafir/kufr, 33, 35, 50;
as multireligious, 6, 185; patriotic
myths of, 6, 23, 40
American Academy of Religion, 120, 131,
132
American Buddhists, 186, 187, 188, 198,
237, 243, 244, 246, 257, 260, 267,
269, 273
American flag, 11; and American
Muslims, 27, 34, 36, 40, 52; and
Hindu Americans, 153; and Japanese
Americans, 65; and Sikh Americans,
168
American foreign policy, 25, 36, 37
American Hinduism, 119–59, 165, 257,
260, 267, 269, 273; and caste system,
129, 130; and conceptions of the
divine, 129, 130; and ‘‘genteel
multiculturalism,’’ 120, 121, 126, 133,
134; and Internet, 119, 122, 125, 131,
132; and ‘‘militant nationalism,’’ 120,
126, 131, 133, 134; as polytheistic,
130; similarities with evangelical
Christianity, 154, 155, 156; and
women, 129, 130
American Hindus against Defamation,
13, 127–28
American Islam, 12, 23–60, 183, 257,
260, 262, 267, 273; and American
teenage culture, 25–26; and identity,
24, 31, 38, 41, 75–76; and internal
racism, 26, 27; and variations in
textual study and interpretation, 28–
29, 35
Americanization, 12, 72, 90, 92; of
Hinduism, 125, 157; of Korean
Americans, 243; of Sikhism, 170
American Muslim Council, 73, 75
American Muslims, 11, 23–60, 64, 72,
165, 186, 190, 194, 199, 237, 241,
246, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272; attacks
on after 9/11, 72–73; mosque
membership in 2000, 4; as suspected
terrorists, 32, 74, 75; as targets of
interrogation, 32, 74; and traditional
garb, 192, 193, 194
288 Index
American sexual mores, 24, 25
American Sikhism, 14, 160–77, 260,
265, 267, 273; and arranged
marriages, 170; and gender, 170, 171,
175; immigration of, 160, 164;
mortuary rites of, 170; and U.S.
holidays, 170; worship schedules of,
170
American Sikhs, 166, 186, 187, 189, 197,
246, 261, 266, 269; and traditional
garb, 191, 192, 194, 263, 265
American Society of Muslims (ASM), 27,
30, 31, 33, 34, 38
American Union Mission, 155–56
American way of life, 3, 100
American Zen Buddhism, 105, 189, 267
Al-Amin, Jamil (formerly H. Rap Brown),
27, 34
Amritsar, India, 162, 170, 174, 175
Anna dana, 155, 157
Anti-Defamation League, 13, 268
Anti-Semitism, 50, 258
Arab American Muslims, 11; population
of, 13, 26; as targets of interrogation,
32
Arab Americans, 50, 72, 75
Asian American Christians, 148, 245,
247, 248
Asian American Muslims, 11, 26
Asian Americans, 3, 4, 12, 91, 133
Asian and Pacific Islanders, 3
Asian religions: as misunderstood, 203;
and special requirements, 188; as
witchcraft, 196
Assimilation, 3, 11, 15, 24, 123, 264, 273;
of Asian Americans, 133, 245; of
European immigrants, 122; of Indian
Americans, 122–23, 125, 243; of
Japanese Americans, 69, 72, 74; of
Muslim Americans, 270; of Pakistani
Americans, 122–23; of Tibetans into
Chinese culture, 107; of Vietnamese
Americans, 84
Atlanta Union Mission (AUM), 155, 158
Bagby, Ihsan, 11, 72
Baptists, 2, 6, 258
Barsana Dham, 149, 150
Bender, Courtney, 15, 221, 260
Berger, Peter, 1, 23, 39, 41
Bhagavad Gita, 125, 130, 132, 147
Bible, 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 184, 247
Bill of Rights, 182, 212, 219
Bin Laden, Osama, 51, 55, 133
Black, Hugo, 185, 218
Bodhisattva, 13, 89, 99, 112
Boerne v. Flores, 184
Brahman, 143, 146
Breyer, Stephen, 184, 185
Brooks, David, 196, 204
Brooks v. Oak Ridge, 196, 197
Brown, H. Rap. See Al-Amin, Jamil
Buddha, 7, 66, 67, 70, 88, 89, 99, 112,
114
Buddhism, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 63–116, 181,
182, 196, 199, 200, 202, 210, 234;
Americanization of, 69; as
countercultural, 98, 267; as Soka
Gakkai International, 5; stereotyped,
128; and transsectarianism, 67–68; in
wartime, 72
Buddhist Churches of America (BCA),
12, 69, 71, 263
Buddhist Mission of North America, 65,
66, 69
Buddhists, 3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 48, 63–
116, 124, 261; Buddhist centers, 5, 6,
7, 102, 103, 105; ‘‘Junior Catechism,’’
69; Buddhist organizations, 65, 70,
71; population of, 4; Buddhist priests,
63, 64, 73; Buddhist retreats, 10;
Buddhist symbols on soldiers’
gravestones, 72; Buddhist temples,
69, 71, 74, 85, 90
Burger Court, 219, 220
Burma, 94, 105
Bush, George H. W., 107
Bush, George W., 7, 9, 10, 39, 43, 73, 75,
114, 119, 127, 128, 133, 160, 172
Index 289
Cantrell v. Connecticut, 182
Carter, Jimmy, 105
Catholicism, 3, 7, 8, 9, 119, 200, 240,
248, 259
Catholics, 1–6, 10, 12, 16, 185, 186, 187,
196, 197, 199, 204, 233, 235, 258,
260, 261, 269; immigration of, 15, 23,
237
Central Intelligence Agency, 50, 51
Chaudhuri, Dilip, 194–95, 196, 204
Chaudhuri v. Tennessee, 194, 197
Cheema v. Thompson, 191–92, 198
China, 84, 94, 105, 111, 123
Chinese Americans, 75, 244
Christian conservatives, 10, 113, 114, 124,
131, 248
Christian evangelicals, 1, 10, 25, 190,
242, 272; and home schooling, 272;
and polemics against Islam, 55;
similarities with Hinduism, 154, 155,
156, 158; similarities with Islam, 25,
39
Christianity, 3, 11, 14, 48, 101, 106, 112,
119, 121, 124, 128, 153, 155, 156, 157,
165, 188, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197, 200,
202, 210, 224, 270; as world religion,
233–55
Chua Duc Vien. See Perfect Harmony
Temple
Church and state, 7, 9, 15, 99–101;
separation of, 14, 114, 210, 219
‘‘City upon a hill,’’ 1, 10, 257
Civic culture, 259, 260
Civil society, 256–73
Clinton, Bill, 9, 74, 119, 131
CNN, 131, 132
Columbia University, 133, 171, 198
Confucianism, 3, 84
Congregationalists, 1, 258
Conversion: to Buddhism, 100, 108, 244;
from Buddhism to Christianity, 66;
from Christianity to Islam, 244; from
Euro-American religions to Asian
religions, 187; to Hinduism, 125; to
Islam and new names, 189; of new
Chinese immigrants to Christianity,
244; from Protestantism to
Buddhism, 5; to Roman Catholicism,
13; to Sikhism, 193
Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), 9, 44–45, 72, 75, 268
Council on Islamic Education (CIE), 269,
270
Cruz v. Beto, 188
Dalai Lama, 13, 56, 94, 95, 105, 106, 107,
109, 110, 267
Daoism, 3, 83, 199, 243
Darbar Sahib, 162, 175
Democracy, 7, 38, 41, 46, 211, 212, 214,
256, 272, 273
Democrats, 39, 248
Dewey, John, 271
Dharma, 89, 98, 125, 141
Diversity, religious, 5, 6, 8, 10
Drepung Loseling Monastery, 110, 113
Duc, Thich Minh, 85, 89
Ebadi, Shirin, 53, 55
Eck, Diane, 5, 10, 72, 210
Education, 269–72; parochial, 270–71
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1
Elk Grove v. Newdow, 12
Employment Division v. Smith, 183, 184,
186, 212–23 passim
Engaged Hinduism, 157
English Language Services, 243, 244
Enlightenment, 7, 97, 98, 99, 271
Episcopalians, 235, 258
Esack, Farid, 52, 53
Establishment phase, 15, 37, 266–68
Eurosecularity, 1
Everson v. Board of Education, 185, 218, 219
Executive Order 9066, 65
Faith-based groups, 7, 9, 114
Falwell, Jerry, 10, 51, 55
Fanaticism, 23, 41
290 Index
Fatwas, 49, 55
Federal Bureau of Investigation, 12, 63,
64, 73, 74
Federation of Hindu Associations, 126,
127
Filipino Catholics, 239, 240
Finke, Roger, 187
First Amendment, 1, 7, 185, 188, 198,
201, 209, 213, 214, 219, 220, 222; Free
Exercise and Establishment Clauses,
15, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187,
188, 189, 194, 195, 197, 203, 204, 213,
220, 223, 224, 263; jurisprudence,
181–229
Five Ks: kaccha, 161, 265; kanga, 161, 265;
karha, 161, 166, 265; kes, 161, 265;
kirpan, 161, 166, 191, 192, 198, 263, 265
Foundation for the Preservation of
Mahayana Tradition, 103, 109
Four-Three-Oh v. BAPS, 191, 203
Gandhi, Mahatma, 56, 158
Ganesh, 128, 196, 197
Ganesha Temple, 5, 157
Ganga (Ganges) River, 147, 148
Gargi, Sister, 152, 153
Garuda, 140, 152
Gay marriage, 12
‘‘Genteel multiculturalism,’’ 14; in
American Hinduism, 120, 121, 126,
133
Gere, Richard, 12, 107
Ghettoization, 32, 82
Gore, Al, 9
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, 100, 101
Graham, Billy, 10
Graham, Franklin, 10, 55
Greenawalt, Kent, 181, 198, 199
Gurdwaras, 10, 160–74 passim
Guru Granth (text), 161, 162, 163, 166,
168, 169, 170, 265
Hadith, 51, 53
Hamburger, Philip, 185, 194
Hare Krishnas, 190, 200, 201, 203
Hawaii, 7, 71, 74; Buddhists in public
schools in, 6
Herberg, Will, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 122;
Protestant, Catholic, Jew (book), 3, 7
Hijab, 40, 268
Hindu Americans, 14, 119–38, 186, 187,
191, 194, 196, 237, 246, 248, 264; as
model minorities, 127; and religious
identity, 124, 127, 147; from upper
castes, 121
Hindu International Council against
Defamation (HICAD), 119, 128, 133,
262
Hinduism, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 119–59, 181,
185, 187, 196, 200, 202; within
academia, 128, 132; as anti-Islamic,
131; caste system of, 7, 125, 129, 130;
description of, 124; in diaspora, 126;
as opposite of Islam, 120; and
orthopraxy, 125, 139; as stereotyped,
128; Vedantic, 99, 112; and women,
130
Hinduism Today (newspaper), 121
Hindu organizations, 13, 121, 126, 127,
130
Hindu Temple of Atlanta, 155–58
Hindus, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 48, 73, 75,
162; percentage of population of in
India, 121
Hindu temples, 5, 6, 10, 140, 142, 149–
53, 156, 157; first in America, 14
Hispanic American Christians, 241, 242,
248, 266
Hispanic Church and American Public
Life project, 248, 266
Historically Sunni African American
Mosques (HSAAM), 27, 28, 30, 33, 36
Homosexuality: in Islam, 25, 36
Hunter, James Davison, 15, 37, 46, 124
Huntington, Samuel, 11
Imams, 48, 189
Immigrants: and American identity, 3;
Index 291
from Asia, 10; and ethnic identity,
123, 125; from Middle East, 10;
political e√ects of, 6; relationship to
parents, 3, 122, 123, 125; as reshaping
American identity, 256; self-identity
of, 3, 6, 122, 123, 125; social location
of, 3, 6, 125; waves of Vietnamese,
79–80
Immigration and Naturalization Act of
1965, 3, 5, 15, 121, 124, 139, 141, 154,
167, 181–208, 233, 234, 245, 260,
261, 264, 266
India, 16, 84, 94, 96, 105, 131, 139, 141,
142, 144, 147, 152, 157, 158, 160, 165,
166, 172, 264; Christianity in, 233;
number of Hindus in, 121
Indian Americans, 13, 121, 243
India Post (newspaper), 121, 131
Indic Buddhism, 96, 97, 102, 107
Infinity Foundation, 126, 128, 132
‘‘In God We Trust,’’ 3, 11
Insulation, 11, 24, 37, 41
Interfaith activities, 14, 25, 27, 47, 48,
119, 151, 156
International Society for Krishna
Consciousness. See ISKCON
Internet Archives of Religions in South
Asia, 131
Interagency Task Force, 82, 83
Introduction phase, 37, 261
Invisibility, 15, 37
Involvement, 23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 36, 41
Iraq, 36, 43
ISKCON (International Society for
Krishna Consciousness), 198, 200,
201, 202, 267; He√ron v. ISKCON, 203;
ISKCON v. Barber, 200, 202; ISKCON v.
Houston, 200, 202
Islam, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 23–60, 128,
153, 181, 185, 187, 200, 244; antiAmericanism
in, 52; as fast-growing,
11, 38, 119, 244; formal structure of,
46, 49; and gender, 55; Hindu attacks
on, 120; liberal, 43–57; as opposite of
Hinduism, 120; progressive, 11, 43–
57, 264; as religion of peace, 9, 43; as
religion of war, 10; as resistant to
Americanization, 11
Islamic centers, 4, 32, 73
Islamic law. See Sharia
Islamic organizations, 9, 12, 27–28, 38,
40, 44, 45, 270
Islamic practice, 24, 51
‘‘Islamic reformation,’’ 56–57
Islamic Society of North America, 40, 45
Islamophobia, 55
Isolation, 11, 23, 24, 31, 32, 261, 262
Israel, 32, 36, 43, 52
Issei, 64, 71
Jainism, 10, 128, 162
Jambu Dvipa, 144, 145
Japan, 94, 99, 196
Japanese American Buddhists: attacks on
after Pearl Harbor, 72–73; attempts
to Americanize, 69; as ‘‘dangerous
suspects,’’ 65, 73, 262; festivals and
rites of in internment camps, 68; and
identity crisis, 64, 66, 67, 75; as more
Buddhist than American, 63, 65; in
World War II internment camps, 12,
63–78
Japanese American Christians, 63, 66
Japanese American internment camps,
12, 63–78
Japanese Americans: as government and
military o≈cials, 74; and identity, 63,
66; population of in 1930, 64; public
accusations of disloyality to U.S., 65;
in World War II internment camps,
65, 67
Japanese American soldiers, 70, 74
Japanese Zen Buddhism, 99, 102, 104,
105
Je√erson, Thomas, 14, 185, 218
Jews, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 16, 48, 126, 160,
186, 190, 235, 237, 241, 261, 263, 269;
Eastern European immigration of, 2,
292 Index
257; immigration of, 15, 23, 257; as
integrating successfully, 126, 257; as
religiously and culturally distinct, 126
Jihad, 131, 187; misuse of term, 55;
progressive Muslim definition of, 56
Jihadists, 112
Jindal, Bobby, 13, 166
Judaism, 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, 106, 119, 185, 200,
202, 246, 260
Judeo-Christian tradition, 2, 6, 7, 119,
260, 266
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, 9, 14
July 4th, 34, 36
Kampuchea, 94, 95
Khalistan, 171, 172
Khalsa, 161, 162, 170
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 50, 52, 56, 140,
155, 156, 158, 223
Kirpan. See Five Ks
Koran. See Quran
Korean American Christians, 237, 238,
243
Korean Americans, 75, 242–43
Korean Christians, 123, 238
Krishna, Lord, 13, 128, 202
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 50, 185
Kumata, K., 65, 66
Kurien, Prema A., 13, 14
Lakshmi, 142, 143, 147, 157
Lamaism, 94, 95, 96
Lamb’s Chapel v. Union Free School District,
222
Langar, 162, 166, 169, 171
Lemon v. Kurtzman, 219, 220, 221, 222,
223
Lewis, Bernard, 55
Life (magazine), 15, 71
Lincoln, Abraham, 7, 246
Lived religion, 6
Lord’s Prayer, 195, 196
Lotus Sutra Buddhism, 99, 104
Luce-Celler Act of 1946, 163, 166
Luu, Thich Dam (Thich Dieu Thanh), 12,
79, 85–87, 90
Madhhabs, 28–29, 35
Madison, James, 219
Madrassas, 47, 48
Mahayana Buddhism. See Messianic
Buddhism
Malaysia, 46, 86, 90
Malcolm X, 7
Malhotra, Rajiv, 129, 132
Mann, Gurinder Singh, 14, 198
Manu, 141, 157
Marsh v. Chambers, 195
Materialism, 24, 101, 127
Mauss, Armand, 37, 123, 125
Mediating structures, 6, 9
Meditation, 99, 100, 104, 105, 129, 154,
267
Messianic Buddhism, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99
Methodists, 6, 238
Mexican American Catholics, 238, 239
‘‘Militant nationalism,’’ 14; in American
Hinduism, 120, 126, 131, 133
Mohammed, W. Deen, 27, 34, 38
Monastic Buddhism, 94–98, 104
Monotheism, 9, 98
Moore, Roy S., 215, 216, 217, 218, 220,
223, 224
Mormonism, 37, 258, 261
Mosque in America: A National Study
(MIA), 23, 28, 29
Mosques, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 34, 35, 270
Mossad, 50, 51
Mount Meru, 145, 146
Muhammad, Prophet, 8, 27, 45, 53, 54,
268
Muslim American Society, 7, 9
Muslims, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 23–60,
73, 119, 132, 160, 162, 189, 234, 258;
American population of in 2000, 4;
Arab, 26, 47, 132; as enemies of rightwing
Hindu and Jewish groups, 126,
132
Index 293
Nanak, Guru, 160, 161, 169
Narayanan, Vasudha, 14, 70, 131
Naropa University, 102–3, 108
National Association of Evangelicals, 10
National Geographic (magazine), 9
National Umma, 27, 34
Nation of Islam, 27, 34
Nation-states, 2, 6
Native Americans, 133, 200
Negotiation phase, 37, 264–66, 273;
external, 15, 37, 124, 158, 263, 265;
internal, 15, 124, 263, 264, 265
Nepal, 103, 209
New Ethnic and Immigrant
Congregations Project (NEICP), 233
New Immigrant Survey (NIS), 235, 241,
242
New World, 7, 257
New York Times, 75, 160
9/11, 9, 12, 14, 23, 24, 37, 38, 40, 43, 46,
49, 50, 52, 64, 72, 73, 74, 119, 120,
121, 124, 125, 129, 132, 133, 134, 160,
166, 170, 258, 262, 264, 265
Nine Lives (CD), 13, 128
Nisei, 64, 70, 71
Nishan Sahib, 162, 166, 168, 265
Nixon, Richard, 105
O’Connor, Sandra Day, 183, 221
100th/442nd Combat Regiment, 70, 71,
74
Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, 163
Orthodox Christianity, 235, 237, 242
Pacific Coast’s Khalsa Diwan Society,
165, 167
Pakistan, 25, 130, 131, 132, 134
Palestinian/Israeli conflict, 43, 52
Patriot Act of 2001, 40, 46
Patriotic piety, 3, 40; among Cuban
Catholics in Miami, 5; among Hindu
Americans, 154
Pearl Harbor, 63, 64, 72, 73, 74, 151, 262
Perfect Harmony Temple, 13, 79–93
Peyote, 214, 215, 218
Pledge of Allegiance, 3, 10, 11, 12, 204
Pluralism, 1, 4, 8, 10, 16, 41, 113, 211,
224; as counterculture, 97–98;
epistemological, 48, 52, 53; in
Hinduism, 120, 126, 129, 131; in Indic
Buddhism, 97, 98, 107; in Islam, 24,
39; new pluralist paradigm, 4, 10, 211;
politics of, 6; religious, 256–73; in
Tibetan Buddhism, 98, 114
Pluralism Project, 5
Presbyterians, 1, 238
Princeton University, 55, 132
Protestant denominations, 186. See also
Baptists; Congregationalists;
Episcopalians; Presbyterians;
Seventh-Day Adventists
Protestantism, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 181, 185,
197, 199, 200, 242, 248, 256, 257,
259, 263, 266
Protestantization: of Buddhism, 69
Protestant paradigm, 5, 6, 15, 49
Protestant Reformation, 2, 7, 57, 90, 224
Protestants, 1, 3, 6, 10, 119, 156, 199, 234,
235, 237, 260, 269; number of
churches in 1776, 2
Protestant virtues, 6; of faith over
practice, 189, 194, 201, 203
Prothero, Stephen, 67, 69
Public schools, 6, 271
Public secularity, 209, 210
Public square, 5, 14, 31, 71, 209
Punjab: Sikhism in, 160, 161, 162, 163,
164, 168, 169, 173, 174
Puranas, 140, 147
Pure Land Buddhism, 99, 104
Puritans, 1, 257
Al-Qaeda, 40, 44, 49, 50, 51, 160
Quran, 7, 28, 35, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53,
131, 270
Ramadan, 189
Reagan, Ronald, 1
294 Index
Reardon, Alima Delores, 192, 193
Recognition phase, 15, 37, 124, 261–63
Rehnquist Court, 184, 185
Reincarnation, 97, 113
Religious Freedom Restoration Act of
1993 (RFRA), 184
Republicans, 1, 39, 247, 248
Resistance, 12, 64, 123, 124; in Islam, 23,
35, 36
Reynolds v. United States, 181
Rinpoche, Chagdud, 108, 109
Rinpoche, Chetsang, 108, 110
Rinpoche, Deshung, 102, 110
Rinpoche, Dudjom, 104, 109
Rinpoche, Gelek, 108, 109
Rinpoche, Kalu, 102, 103
Rinpoche, Lama Zopa, 103, 104, 108, 109
Rinpoche, Penor, 108, 109
Rinpoche, Sakya Trichen, 104, 108, 110
Rinpoche, Tai Situ, 108, 109, 110
Rinpoche, Trungpa, 102, 103, 104, 108
Roman Catholics. See Catholics
Sacralization of landscape: by American
Hindus, 69–70, 139–59, 264; by
Oregon Buddhists, 69
Sacred canopy, 23, 24, 38, 75, 114, 119,
134, 266
Sacred geography, 139–59, 264; in
Hindu rituals, 144; in Sikhism, 162,
174
Safi, Omid, 11, 46
Said, Edward, 49, 53
Salafi movement, 35, 36; return to ways
of al-salaf al-saleh, 45; thought, 28, 45,
47, 48
Sanghas, 97, 113
Sankaranti festivals, 125, 140, 155, 156
Sankirtan, 198, 200, 201, 203
Sanskrit, 97, 139, 142, 143, 144, 155
Sarasvati River, 141, 148
Saudi Arabia, 45, 132
Scalia, Antonin, 183, 213, 214, 221, 222
School prayer, 7, 12
Secular humanism, 53
Secularism, 24, 101, 209
Secularization, 8, 34, 101, 256
September 11, 2001. See 9/11
Sera Monastic University, 103, 113
Sethuraman, J., 142, 143
Seva, 156, 157
Seventh-Day Adventists, 182, 213, 248
Seven Years in Tibet, 101, 107
Sharia, 50, 51, 55
Sherbert v. Verner, 182, 183, 184, 213, 214
Shiite Muslims, 45, 54
Shintoism, 63, 65
Shiva, Lord, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154
Sikhism, 4, 8, 10, 14, 160–77, 181; and
gender equality, 168; as stereotyped,
128
Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task
Force (SMART), 173
Sikhs, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 50, 64, 72, 73, 75,
121, 160–77, 198, 258; American
population of, 4; and identity, 161;
world population of, 161
Singh, Guru Gobind, 161, 162
Slavery, 133; biblical view of, 14
Snow, Jennifer, 15, 221, 260
Sodhi, Balbir Singh, 14, 72
Soka Gakkai International. See Buddhism
South Africa, 46, 53
South Asians, 50, 72
Spiritual marketplace, 5, 15
Sri Lanka, 94, 95, 96, 151
‘‘Sri Venkatesha America Vaibhava
Stotram’’ (poem), 142, 143
Sufis, 29, 45, 46, 47, 54, 112
Sunna, 28, 45, 47, 48
Sunni Muslims, 7, 27, 54
Sutras, 66, 88, 90
Swastika symbol, 69, 72
Tablighi Jamaat, 29, 35, 36
Taliban, 43, 132
Tantric Buddhism, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99
Taoism. See Daoism
Index 295
Ten Commandments: Alabama
controversy about, 209–29; public
display of, 15
Tennessee State University, 195, 204
Terrorism, 48, 51; war on, 9, 43, 73, 74,
75, 132
Thailand, 94, 95, 105
Thanh, Thich Dieu. See Luu, Thich Dam
Theravada Buddhism. See Monastic
Buddhism
Thind, Bhagat Singh, 166
Thompson, Myron H., 215, 218, 220
Thoreau, Henry David, 129, 147
Three Religions (Tam Giao), 83; as
central to Vietnamese identity, 83–84
Thurman, Robert A. F., 13
Tibet, 13, 104, 109; attempted genocide
in, 107, 112; Chinese invasion and
occupation of, 95, 101, 105;
International Campaign for Tibet,
107; International Year of Tibet, 108;
Japanese Shingon response to, 95,
96; number of religious renunciants
in before 1950, 95; number of Web
sites on, 108
Tibetan American Buddhism, 94–116,
261
Tibetan Buddhism, 13, 94–116; as
aberrant, 94–96; as apocalyptic, 97,
113, 114; Asian Buddhists’ attitudes
toward, 95, 96; and Buddhahood, 94,
97; Buddhocratic government of, 105,
106, 112; description of, 95, 97–98;
Gelukpa order of, 103, 104, 105, 108;
Kagyupa order of, 101, 102, 103, 104,
108, 111; Kaliyuga order of, 113–14;
Karma Kagyupa order of, 109, 110; as
mainstream, 99, 111; as messianic,
97; as monastic, 97; Nyingma order
of, 104, 109, 111; Sakyapa order of,
104, 108, 110
Tibet House, 12, 107, 108
Tillich, Paul, 199, 201
Torcaso v. Watkins, 199, 219
Traditional liberalism, 209, 210, 211, 219,
224
Trigunatita, Swami, 152, 153, 154
Triple melting pot theory, 3, 10
Tse-Tung, Mao, 101, 106
Tulku, Tarthang, 102, 103
¿Ulama, 46, 47
Umma, 44
U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 166
U.S. v. McIntosh, 219
U.S. v. Seeger, 182, 183, 219
United Vietnamese Buddhist Church, 85
University of California: at Berkeley, 168,
171; at Santa Barbara, 171
Upasika/upasiki, 95, 96
Vajrayana Buddhism. See Tibetan
Buddhism
Vedanta Society, 153
Venkatesha, Lord, 142, 143, 144
Venkateswara, Lord, 141, 142, 149
Venkateswara Temple, 149
Vietnam, 12, 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90,
94; French control of, 84
Vietnamese American Buddhists, 79–93
Vietnamese American Catholics, 84, 245,
246
Vietnamese Americans, 83, 85
Vietnamese Buddhism, 84
Vietnamese Catholics, 240
Vietnamese refugees, 81, 82
Vietnamese Zen Buddhism, 105
Vietnam War, 81, 83, 85, 101
Virgin of Guadalupe, 239, 247
Vishnu, Lord, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144,
150, 152, 154
Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America
(VHPA), 126, 127
Vodou, 5, 240–41
Wahhabism, 45, 47, 51
Wall of separation, 14, 185, 210
Warner, Stephen R., 16, 122
296 Index
Warren Court, 184, 186, 213
Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA),
63, 67; Americanization program for
Japanese Americans, 68–69
Washington, George, 7, 14
Welsh v. United States, 199
White House, 7, 13, 74
Williams, Raymond, 122–23
Wisdom Publications, 104, 109
World Trade Center, 73, 133
World War II, 2, 10, 63–78, 262
Yeshe, Lama Thupten, 102, 103, 104, 109
Yoga, 99, 100, 113, 129, 153, 154, 157,
197, 267
Yusuf, Hamza, 40, 49
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 184, 185