One Nation Under Gods

By Richard N. Ostling

When J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur praised the "strange religious medley" he observed in late 18th century America, he could hardly have imagined the full orchestral symphony of faiths that resounds in the U.S. two centuries later. The world has never seen a nation as religiously diverse as the U.S., which becomes ever more so each year under the impact of new immigrants. In addition to the various mainstream Judeo-Christian faiths that populated the original colonies, America now encompasses 700 to 800 "nonconventional" denominations, according to J. Gordon Melton, who monitors the proliferation for his Encyclopedia of American Religions. Half of them are imported variants of standard world religions, mostly Asian; the other half a creative and chaotic mix of U.S.-born creeds -- everything from Branch Davidians to New Agers. In the future, says sociologist Wade Clark Roof, "clearly the bounds of religious pluralism will push further and further out, and that's very American."

While adding exotic new creeds, the tide of immigration since the 1960s has also increased the variegation within Christianity. Millions of Hispanics have brought a florid, fervent Latin sensibility into U.S. Catholicism, challenging a church hierarchy dominated by the stolid sons and grandsons of Irish immigrants, who now are struggling to recruit Hispanic priests. The bishops also face Pentecostal or Baptist soul winners who successfully target Spanish- speaking neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Koreans have had a notable impact within - Protestantism with their evangelistic zeal and religious traditionalism.

Christianity still claims nearly nine-tenths of the populace, according to a City University of New York survey of 113,000 Americans. But talk of a "Christian" nation from the likes of Pat Buchanan and Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice is increasingly misplaced. More accurately, the country's traditional consensus faith is biblical monotheism, which comfortably includes Judaism. Now, however, there is a major new player. Islam, the third great monotheistic faith, is expanding through both immigration and the conversion of African Americans and is bidding to supplant Judaism as America's second largest faith. In 1978 the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington became the first major interfaith organization to include Muslims alongside the Catholics, Protestants and Jews. It has since admitted Mormons and Sikhs; Hindus will probably be next. Other prospects: Buddhists, Baha'is.

Mapping such widening diversity is a goal of Harvard University's Pluralism Project, run by religion professor Diana Eck. Students have located, among other things, seven Buddhist temples in Salt Lake City, two Sikh gurdwaras in Phoenix, Arizona, a Taoist temple in Denver, a Jain center in Blairstown, New Jersey, and five Oklahoma City mosques. The project estimates that nationwide there are 1,139 houses of worship for Muslims, 1,515 for Buddhists and 412 for Hindus.

Despite some doctrinal hostility and episodes of the nativist hysteria that once confronted Catholic and Jewish immigrants, America has by and large managed to retain its vaunted toleration. In contrast with Bosnia, Belfast, Beirut and Bombay, interreligious conflicts are most often fought out in courtrooms, zoning boards or school boards rather than in the streets. The process is typified by events in Georgia, in the heartland of the old Southern Protestant hegemony. There certain Baptists joined non-Christians to keep the state from erecting a statue of Jesus along a highway. Prison inmate Randy James is getting ready to sue for the right to keep wearing the dreadlocks that are required by his Rastafarian faith. While Atlanta Muslims have already won from their employer, the city housing authority, the right to attend Friday worship, Muslim women may petition to obtain a driver's license without removing their veil. And a Douglasville, Georgia, family of agnostic Native Americans got federal courts to outlaw prayers before high school football games.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also grappled with the perplexities of the emerging interreligious climate. Last June the court decided that Hialeah, Florida, could not outlaw the animal sacrifices of the Santeria religion. By contrast, in 1990 it ruled against devotees of Oregon's Native American Church, who claimed the right to ingest peyote in its rituals, and a few years earlier declared that an Orthodox Jewish rabbi could not wear the skullcap his faith required because doing so would violate Air Force dress regulations. But Congress then passed a legal head-covering exemption that benefits both Orthodox Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs (although the military still requires Sikh men to violate their faith by shaving off their beard). Further confusing matters, the Supreme Court in 1987 ruled that, unlike the Georgia case, New Jersey prison rules took precedence over the demand of two Muslims to attend Friday worship.

As newly emerging religions face conflicts with the wider society, they are subtly Americanizing their internal operations. Asians incorporate their temples and organize boards just as churches do, and lay leaders often bear more practical authority than traditional holy men imported from Asia. American holidays such as the Fourth of July and New Year's are adopted for major gatherings. Though Sunday has no significance in the Hindu calendar, it is now the busiest day for worship at the ornate Hindu Temple in New York City.

Cultural pressures are usually resisted, however, when they impinge upon important tenets. In its 1992 guidelines for public school administrators (35,000 copies in print), the Islamic Society of North America urges schools to accommodate Muslim practices for adherents of Islam. These include seating boys and girls separately, exempting Muslims from music and drama classes, allowing them to leave for afternoon prayers and letting them wear special gym clothing to meet religious dictates on modesty. Though some American Muslims might take out interest-bearing loans, which are forbidden by the faith, in their personal life they shun mortgages and try always to pay cash when building their mosques.

Other faiths are no less assertive in protecting their traditions in the larger society. Hindus have discovered that they must inculcate their faith in their young much more consciously and aggressively than in India, where it could be taken for granted. As new religions find their footing and become bolder, some analysts believe that surprises are in store. Devout adherents of Asian religions, for example, are as uncomfortable as Middle American Protestant Fundamentalists with the sort of secularization that U.S. intellectuals have fostered in education, law, politics, entertainment and the arts. Phong Nguyen, leader of a Vietnamese Buddhist congregation in Washington, sounds for all the world like a Christian Coalition activist as he complains about the lack of moral teaching in the public schools.

Although proponents of secularism and separation of church and state believe they are advancing religious toleration, believers often feel that the practical result is intolerance toward religion as a whole. That view is expressed vigorously by Stephen Carter of the Yale Law School in his book The Culture of Disbelief. Carter claims that the leaders of American culture increasingly treat religious faith as a somewhat embarrassing or purely private affair that should be allowed to have no impact on society -- unlike all other modes of thinking. The newly arriving faiths can be expected to resist that sort of limitation as they reinvigorate America's spiritual marketplace.

That is all a far cry from the narrow spectrum of mostly Christian believers so celebrated by Crevecoeur, who foresaw "religious indifference" spreading from one end of the continent to the other. Where that would lead, he wondered, "no one can tell; perhaps it may leave a vacuum fit to receive other systems." In America's third century, that vacuum has been filled to overflowing.

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington, Adam Biegel/Atlanta and Hannah Bloch/New York