A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation
by Diana L. Eck
Harper San Francisco. 385 pp. $26.00

When President George W. Bush launched his Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in February, he was repeatedly asked how the government would treat applications for funding from less familiar religious groups. Would Hindus receive the same consideration as Presbyterians and Jews? Would Muslim imams compete on an equal footing with priests and preachers?

Such questions are hardly hypothetical, as Diana L. Eck vividly documents in her new book. Thanks to immigration and religious conversions, the U.S. has become home over the last 30 years to an astonishing array of non-Judeo-Christian faiths. The largest of these groups—Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims—now constitute sizable minorities all across the country, in small towns and suburbs no less than in big cities.

A professor of religion at Harvard and the head of a research effort there called the “pluralism project,” Eck has spent much of the last decade visiting these seemingly exotic religious communities and learning how their members live and worship. As she sees it, most Americans are only dimly aware of this new and unprecedented diversity of creed, and have yet to come to terms with accommodating it.

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America’s Hindu population, Eck reports, has roughly doubled over the last decade, to 1.6 million, largely as a result of liberalized terms of entry for skilled immigrants from India. Though many of these doctors, engineers, and scientists were not observant back home, in the U.S. they have felt a need to reconnect with their religious roots. The result, Eck shows, has been an explosion of temple-building, from a humble converted warehouse in Sunnyvale, California to a sparkling new sanctuary on a hilltop in suburban Maryland. “And so it is,” she writes, referring to the new homes of the most important Hindu deities, “that Lord Rama resides in Chicago, Vishnu in Pittsburgh, the Goddess Meenakshi in Houston, and the Goddess Lakshmi in Boston.”

As for Buddhism, its center in the U.S. is California, whose large and growing Asian population encompasses virtually every form of that Eastern religion. Indeed, as Eck sees it, Los Angeles—with its substantial Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai communities—is “unquestionably the most complex Buddhist city in the world.” Completing the picture—and making it difficult to estimate the total number of American Buddhists—are the countless non-Asians in California and elsewhere who, if not exactly full co-religionists, have enthusiastically adopted meditation and other Buddhist practices.

Of the approximately 6 million Muslims now living in America, the vast majority, according to Eck, are immigrants or their children, having come from Syria and Lebanon early in the 20th century and, more recently, from Pakistan and India. Though Eck visits newer Islamic centers in places like Quincy, Massachusetts; Toledo, Ohio; and Pompano Beach, Florida, she devotes most of her reporting to the large, well-established Arab community in the state of Michigan. (A smaller but still significant part of the Islamic community is composed of American blacks, who have come to the faith, Eck explains, either through the long-preserved traditions of their West African ancestors or through the more recent efforts of the Nation of Islam and its offshoots.)

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One key to these groups’ success in the U.S., Eck suggests, has been their readiness to accept American norms. Thus, most of the communal activities sponsored by a large mosque in Dearborn, Michigan—“classes for all ages, meals in the dining hall, Thursday evening youth programs with pizza, even a Girl Scout and a Brownie troop”—are no different from those of a full-service modern church. For their part, Hindus in Nashville, unable to erect a temple for every god they wished to worship, solved the problem in a uniquely American way—by a vote in which the popular god Ganesha “won by a landslide.”

Yet, despite such bows to American practices and beliefs, these newcomers, Eck laments, have not always been welcomed by their neighbors. A group of Cambodians in Maine, for instance, was blocked by a local zoning board from securing land for a Buddhist sanctuary. The words “Get out Hindoos” were painted on the walls of a Hindu temple in New Jersey. And Muslim women have been fired from jobs at major U.S. corporations like Domino’s Pizza and U.S. Air for refusing to shed their religiously mandated headscarves.

Combating such discrimination, Eck believes, must become a civic priority. Americans of every creed need to work on “building bridges” among the country’s diverse communities, turning interfaith dialogue and cooperation into a reality of everyday life. Only when we “create a society in which we actually know one another” will Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims begin to regard each other as equal fellow citizens.

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A New Religious America is in many ways an impressive achievement. Not only does it offer a rich description of the new religious terrain of the United States, but it also serves as a useful primer on the basic beliefs and practices of the major non-Judeo-Christdan faiths. Eck’s enthusiasm for what she has found can be cloying—a reader is charmed only so many times by the juxtaposition in one community of, say, a Hindu temple built by Trinidadians, a bustling Pakistani-dominated Islamic center, and a congregation of Korean Baptists—but on the whole she has succeeded in capturing the vitality of these burgeoning faiths.

Unfortunately, in her eagerness to celebrate this new diversity, Eck refuses to confront its less benign aspects, especially with regard to U.S. Muslims. She treats the Council on American Islamic Relations—a group that has defended Islamic terrorism and attempted to silence those who expose it—as an advocate of tolerance and understanding, seeking to dispel anti-Muslim stereotypes. At the same time, she glosses over the centrality of anti-Semitism to the message of the Nation of Islam, saying only that the group has “captured headlines, positive and negative.”

Neglecting the threat posed by some of the country’s new communities, Eck also fails to recognize the most serious threats to them. For her, the key problem is bigotry. But her own reporting belies this. Such resistance as these groups encounter—and there is not much—usually arises from misunderstanding or the clash of legitimate interests, not outright hostility. Even when nontraditional religious communities spark controversy, they often find strong allies among their new neighbors or in the American system of law. In Maine, as Eck herself relates, the Cambodians whose proposal for a Buddhist temple was turned down by the zoning board were able to secure a new site six month’s later, thanks in large part to a $10,000 loan from the local Quaker meeting. Under the threat of legal action, American corporations, including Domino’s Pizza and U.S. Air, have reinstated fired employees and reconsidered headscarf-wearing applicants.

If anything, according to several of the religious spokesmen interviewed by Eck America has been too accommodating. Their chief worry is not discrimination but assimilation—a process that has already caused the faith of their younger members to recede and their numbers to shrink. The last thing that most of these religious groups need, in short, is more “bridge-building,” even in Diana Eck’s tame version of it. As they have discovered, the principal challenge of life in America is not to absorb the wider culture—with its easygoing openness to every form of antitraditionalism—but rather to carve out a small haven from it.

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