[From The Church Next Door: Local Christians Face America’s New Religious Diversity, draft manuscript by Dr. Paul D. Numrich.  Please do not quote or cite without author’s permission.]

 

Introduction: America’s New Religious Diversity

 

[figure approx. here: montage of book covers, e.g., A New Religious America (Harper), Those Other Religions in Your Neighborhood (Zondervan), Alien Gods on American Turf (Victor), Relating to People of Other Religions (Abingdon), Four Views of Salvation in a Pluralistic World (Zondervan), Preaching and the Challenge of Pluralism (Chalice), No Other Gods before Me? (Baker), The Gospel for Islam (EMIS)]

 

            The place: the grand old Palmer House hotel in downtown Chicago.  The year: 1993.  The event: the Parliament of the World’s Religions, a gathering of some 8,000 representatives of the religions of the world on the centennial of the historic World’s Parliament of Religions, also held in Chicago.  The objectives (among others): “promote understanding and cooperation among religious communities and institutions” and “encourage the spirit of harmony and to celebrate, with openness and mutual respect, the rich diversity of religions.”

            As a historian of religions, I knew the significance of the 1893 Parliament, which many mark as the beginning of the modern interfaith dialogue movement.  I attended this second Parliament partly out of scholarly curiosity, but also as an ordained Christian minister interested in the implications of such dramatic, multi-religious conclaves for local Christians.  When the religions of the world “come to town,” so to speak, how do Christians respond?

Actually, the 1993 Parliament raised an even more pressing question: How do local Christians respond when they discover that the religions of the world now reside in their town?  Most of the non-Christian representatives to the first Parliament came to Chicago from other countries.  The organizers of the 1993 Parliament invited the religious communities of Chicago to form host committees for the event, more than half of which turned out to be non-Christian—Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Zoroastrian.  Christian host committees were formed by the local Anglican, Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic communities.  Thus, Chicago in the 1990s was a multi-religious metropolis, and many local Christians welcomed the new diversity as an opportunity for mutual celebration and understanding.

            Many, but by no means all.  If the 1993 Parliament was any indication, Chicago-area Christians varied significantly in their responses to the new religious diversity in their midst.  Outside the Palmer House, a group condemned the Parliament for supporting idolatry on American soil in violation of this nation’s sacred covenant with Almighty God.  Several evangelical Christian groups chose not to attend the Parliament, and some that did expressed reservations about it.  For instance, Pastor Erwin Lutzer of Chicago’s famous Moody Church complained that the proceedings privileged non-Christian faiths: “Jesus did not get a fair representation here,” he told the Chicago Tribune.  A few days into the eight-day event, the Orthodox Christian delegation withdrew in protest over the presence of groups “which profess no belief in God or a supreme being” and “certain quasi-religious groups with which Orthodox Christians share no common ground.”  Media reports suggested Buddhism, Hinduism, and neo-paganism as the most likely causes for offense to Orthodox sensibilities.

Much of the Christian criticism of the 1993 Parliament hinged on the implied equivalency of the religious truth claims of the various participants.  For instance, the Tzemach Institute of Biblical Studies, a ministry of Fellowship Church in Casselberry, Florida, featured the Parliament in an article rejecting the notion that Christianity could work in harmony with any “religion,” defined here as a false belief system that does not recognize the unique authority of Jesus and the Bible.  Likewise, gospelcom.net, an Internet ministry of Gospel Communications International of Muskegon, Michigan, listed the Parliament’s organizing body, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, on its Apologetics Index as an organization that promotes religious “pluralism,” a position “unacceptable to Christians” because it considers all religions to be equally valid expressions of truth.  Notable denominations with similar views about competing religious truth claims include the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, and the Assemblies of God, one of the nation’s largest Pentecostal denominations.  The issue of religious truth claims will resurface throughout this book.

 

Excerpt of statement on world religions from the Southern Baptist Convention:

. . . WHEREAS, Christianity is often presented in the context of world religions as merely one of the many expressions of humanity's religious consciousness, all of which are seen as independently valid ways of knowing God; and
WHEREAS, Theological accommodation in this critical area of faith and doctrine seriously compromises our evangelistic witness and missionary outreach to the lost. . . .

Be it . . . RESOLVED, That we oppose the false teaching that Christ is so evident in world religions, human consciousness or the natural process that one can encounter Him and find salvation without the direct means of the gospel, or that adherents of the non-Christian religions and world views can receive this salvation through any means other than personal repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, the only Savior . . . . [Southern Baptist Convention, “Resolution On The Finality Of Jesus Christ As Sole And Sufficient Savior,” June 1993]

 

Excerpt of statement on world religions from the Assemblies of God:

. . . On what basis can we claim that Christianity alone brings people into right relationship with God?  The answer is simple: Only the gospel provides a true antidote to the problem of sin.

Generally speaking, all religions recognize that human beings have somehow fallen short and become alienated from the godhead (singular or plural).  The problem is how to receive forgiveness of sin and become reconciled with an offended or distant godhead.

We must therefore ask on what basis the deity offers forgiveness.  Muslims and Jews do their best and hope for mercy.  Hindus patiently bear their lot, hoping for a better life next time around.  Buddhists seek for an ultimate nirvana.  But none of these faiths provides a definite and certain answer.  [Michael L. Brown, “With so many religions in the world, how can you say that Christianity is the only way? Isn’t Buddha as good as Christ?” in the Assemblies of God periodical, Pentecostal Evangel]


            More than a decade after the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, non-Christian religious communities claimed large numbers of adherents in the Chicago metropolitan area: 2,000 Baha’is, 150,000 Buddhists, 80,000 Hindus, 7,000 Jains, 260,000 Jews, 400,000 Muslims, 6,000 Sikhs, and 700 Zoroastrians.  Some of these figures, published in 2004 by the Chicago and Northern Illinois Region of the National Conference for Community and Justice (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), may be inflated—self-estimates are always suspect, no matter what the group.  But Chicago’s growing religious diversity cannot be denied.

            And Chicago mirrors the nation.  The Pluralism Project at Harvard University has tracked America’s growing religious diversity since the early 1990s.  In 2003 the Project’s Website posted the figures shown in the accompanying table.  America’s new religious landscape is not confined to major metropolises like Chicago.  The Pluralism Project has researched religious diversity in Maine, Mississippi, Kansas, the Miami Valley in Ohio, Phoenix, and numerous other areas across the country.

 

Table: Selected non-Christian religions in the United States.  Source: Pluralism Project, 2003.

Religion

Adherents

Local Centers/Groups

Baha’i

142,245-753,000

1,152

Buddhism

2.45-4 million

1,654

Hinduism

1.2 million

647

Islam

4.1-6 million

1,835

Jainism

25,000-75,000

94

Judaism

5.6-6.1 million

NA

Sikhism

234,000

213

 

Of course, national estimates may also be inflated, particularly self-estimates of adherents.  That granted, even critics of commonly reported figures like those in the middle column of the accompanying table admit that America is more religiously diverse today than ever before and will likely continue to diversify in the future.  But debates over quantitative measures of America’s non-Christian population miss the point of the crucial qualitative shift in America’s self-perception as a religious nation in recent years.  Although still a predominantly Christian country in terms of the religious self-identity of its residents, the United States increasingly perceives itself as a multi-religious society.  This shift in the perception of the nation holds no matter what one thinks of the new religious diversity.  Locally this shift can occur when a single mosque, temple, or other non-Christian religious center joins a previously all-Christian landscape.  Indeed, most of the interviewees for this book were vague on the names and identities of the non-Christian centers in their vicinities, but they were quite aware of the new religious presence around them.  A perceptual shift can also occur through media reports and features on diverse American religious groups.

How did the United States reach its present level of multi-religious diversity?  It is almost cliché today to tout the social significance of the 1960s, but to answer this question we correctly look to the ferment of that decade.  Two major social trends that either began or intensified in the 1960s have significantly diversified the American religious landscape in the early 21st century.

            First, a steadily increasing wave of immigrants entered America after the changes in US immigration law beginning in 1965.  Restrictive immigration policies in place since the 1920s were relaxed and historic preferences for European immigrants set aside.  From the 1950s to the 1990s, European immigration dropped from 53 percent of the total immigrant flow to a mere 15 percent, while Latin American and Asian immigration increased from 31 percent to a substantial 78 percent of the total.  The Asian increase accounted for most of the growth in America’s non-Christian population, particularly in the numbers of the three largest non-Christian groups—Muslims (many from South Asia), Buddhists (mostly from East and Southeast Asia), and Hindus (from India and countries with secondary Indian settlement).

            The second major social trend affecting America’s religious landscape did not strictly begin in the 1960s, but it certainly intensified in that decade and beyond.  This involved significant numbers raised in America’s historic “mainstream” religions of Christianity and Judaism converting to “alternative” or “new” religions, or at least being influenced by them to a notable degree.  Roots of this conversion/influence trend can be traced in earlier decades, especially the so-called “Zen boom” among white Americans in the 1950s and the so-called “Black Muslim movement” among African Americans beginning in the 1930s.  Even so, the 1960s ushered in a new era of spiritual inquisitiveness in the indigenous population that, when combined with the new immigration, has created today’s multi-religious America.

The two figures below provide selected indicators of the recent growth in America’s non-Christian religions.  The first shows the number of Muslim mosques, both immigrant and convert, established in the US in each decade since the 1920s (from a sample total of 416 mosques).  The second figure shows the number of Buddhist meditation centers established in North America between 1900 and 1997 (from a sample total of 1,062 centers, mostly convert-type).  In both cases the increase since the 1960s is dramatic.  Even if the recent immigration and alternative religion waves have crested, their sustained effects on American society are substantial.

 

[first figure appox. here: reproduce p. 23, “The Mosque in America” report]

 

[second figure appox. here: reproduce p. xvi, Complete Guide to Buddhist America]

 

            In his 1983 book, Christians and Religious Pluralism, theologian Alan Race argued that the modern age has forced a dilemma on Christians, the dilemma of evaluating “the relationship between the Christian faith and the faith of the other religions.”  Race identified several contributing factors to this dilemma, including new knowledge from the academic study of world religions and increasing personal contacts with adherents of other faiths.  After noting in their 1996 volume, Ministry and Theology in Global Perspective, that Christians disagree among themselves “on virtually every issue of substance,” Don Pittman, Ruben Habito, and Terry Muck make this further point: “Among the defining practical theological issues of our time that are surrounded by debate, perhaps none poses a more difficult set of interrelated foundational questions than the relation of Christians to people of other living faiths and ideologies.”  These authors also cite a memorable quip by comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith that epitomizes the modern Christian dilemma: “We explain the fact that the Milky Way is there by the doctrine of creation, but how do we explain the fact that the Bhagavad Gita [a Hindu scripture] is there?”

Christians can choose to avoid such theological questions posed by the living non-Christian religions, and Christian congregations can choose to ignore the non-Christians living and worshiping in their neighborhoods.  But if Christians make such choices, they should realize that these, too, are responses to religious diversity.  We do not have the option of doing “nothing,” since even avoidance is doing something.  The Christian congregations and groups described in this book have responded to religious diversity out of deliberate conviction.  Their choices are meant to prompt you to act with the same level of deliberate conviction, no matter what choices you make.

 

About This Book

            The idea for this book grew slowly during my years of researching America’s new religious diversity, particularly the new immigrant religions.  I watched with interest the media coverage of the topic, such as the CBS News documentary, The Strangers Next Door, about “trialogues” among Jews, Christians, and Muslims organized by The Greater Detroit Interfaith Roundtable in response to a proposed mosque in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.  I read articles like Terry Muck’s essay in the evangelical periodical Christianity Today, entitled “The mosque next door: How do we speak the truth in love to Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists?”  I noted projects like “The Sikh Next Door: Introducing Sikhs to America’s Classrooms,” which provides educational materials for 6th and 7th graders, funded by the September 11th Anti-Bias Project of the National Conference for Community and Justice.  And I accepted invitations from local church groups to explain their new religious neighbors, whether Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, or groups only vaguely known.

            It finally dawned on me to turn the focus around in order to examine what is happening in Christian groups and congregations in religiously diverse settings in the United States.  Thus, this book is about “the church next door” to the new mosques, temples, and other non-Christian religious centers of America.  The Church Next Door presents on-the-ground case studies of the issues, challenges, and decision-making dynamics involved in local Christian responses to America’s new religious reality.  This book will appeal to Christian readers at all points on the theological spectrum and from all denominational (or non-denominational) backgrounds who wish to learn from congregations and other local Christian groups that have squarely faced the realities of America’s growing religious diversity and, in the process, have discovered effective and satisfactory ways of defining their own Christian identity and mission.  The Church Next Door offers a broad, balanced, and sympathetic sampling of the variety of local Christian responses so that readers can make informed decisions about their own stances and strategies vis-à-vis their non-Christian neighbors.

            The book features 11 case studies of local Christian congregations or groups, bracketed by introductory and concluding chapters on America’s new religious diversity and the implications for Christians, with an appendix listing biblical and theological sources that emerged during the writing of the book.  The book’s format fits a typical congregational adult or young adult education unit, covering one chapter per week, but the book can also be used for individual study.  Each chapter includes a section entitled “For More Information” that expands on key topics and identifies resources for further investigation.  Each chapter ends with a set of questions “For Discussion,” designed to stimulate further thought about important points in the text.  Chapters have been kept to a manageable length in order to encourage substantive exploration and reflection on topics of interest to readers.  Group leaders may wish to assign specific tasks to participants in preparation for upcoming sessions, such as consulting Internet sites or bibliographic resources listed under “For More Information.”

            This book was made possible primarily by a grant from the Louisville Institute, whose mission is “to enrich the religious life of American Christians and to encourage the revitalization of their institutions, by bringing together those who lead religious institutions with those who study them, so that the work of each might stimulate and inform the other” (www.louisville-institute.org).  My special thanks go to Executive Director James W. Lewis for his support and advice throughout the project.  Supplemental funding was secured from the Pluralism Project of Harvard University and the Center for the Advanced Study of Christianity and Culture, Loyola University Chicago.  My additional thanks go to Fr. Michael Perko, S.J., director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Christianity and Culture, Dr. Randal Hepner of the Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago Project, Loyola University, and Dr. David Daniels, Dr. Lowell Livezey, and Dr. Elfriede Wedam, my colleagues in the Religion in Urban America Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for their valuable insights on the project.

During 2002-2004 several graduate students from the Sociology and Anthropology Department of Loyola University Chicago ably assisted me in researching this book: Suzanne Bundy, Nori Henk, Saher Salod, and Sarah Schott.  Along the way, they also developed their own scholarly interests in the project.  With the approval of Loyola’s Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects, we conducted semi-structured interviews and field observations in the Chicago area, choosing research sites and subjects for their illustrative suitability for the book.  We also incorporated data from the Religion, Immigration and Civil Society in Chicago Project, Loyola University, particularly field research by graduate students Kersten Bayt Priest and Matthew Logelin.  Principals from the case studies in the book reviewed draft versions of their chapters in order to fact-check the information and offer feedback on the presentation.  Dr. Fred Kniss, Director of the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion, Loyola University, where this project was housed, lent his expertise, encouragement, and collegiality to this endeavor.

For practical reasons, we were unable to extend our research to other locations in the US.  Nonetheless, we are confident that the case studies featured in this book are suggestive of national trends.  To be sure, locale matters in the relationships between Christians and their non-Christian neighbors.  We use a Chicago lens to portray “the church next door” in a multi-religious America.  We encourage readers to consider the implications for your “church next door.”

 

For More Information

The Council for a Parliament of the World Religions may be contacted at P.O. Box 1630, Chicago, IL 60690-1630, phone 312-629-2990, email info@cpwr.org, Web site www.cpwr.org.  The Council has organized a series of international interfaith parliaments: Chicago (1993), Cape Town (1999), and Barcelona (2004).  On the 1993 Parliament in Chicago, see the book Community of Religion: Voices and Images of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, edited by Wayne Teasdale and George F. Cairns (New York: Continuum, 2000), and the video documentary Peace Like a River, available from the Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 200 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 403, Chicago IL, 60601, phone 312-236-4483.  On the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, see Richard Hughes Seager’s The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893 (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1993).

Christian criticisms of the 1993 Parliament and the notion that all religions contain equally valid truth claims can be found at the following Internet sites: www.tzemach.org/articles/relharm.htm (Tzemach Institute of Biblical Studies, Fellowship Church, Casselberry, Florida); www.gospelcom.net/apologeticsindex/c54.html (Gospel Communications International, Muskegon, Michigan); www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=651 (Southern Baptist Convention, “Resolution On The Finality Of Jesus Christ As Sole And Sufficient Savior,” June 1993); http://ag.org/pentecostal-evangel/articles/Life_QA/Religions.cfm (Michael L. Brown, “With so many religions in the world, how can you say that Christianity is the only way?  Isn’t Buddha as good as Christ?” in the Assemblies of God periodical, Pentecostal Evangel).

The Web site of the National Conference for Community and Justice (founded in 1927 as The National Conference of Christians and Jews) is www.nccj.org.  The Chicago and Northern Illinois Region of the NCCJ publishes an annual Interfaith Calendar featuring information on local Christian and non-Christian groups; their contact information is 27 E. Monroe Street, Suite 400, Chicago, IL 60603, phone 312-236-9272 or 800-311-9823, email chicago@nccj.org, Web site www.nccj-chicago.org.

The Web site of the Pluralism Project, Harvard University, is www.pluralism.org.  The Pluralism Project tracks America’s growing religious diversity, promoting a “pluralist” approach defined as an active, appreciative, and respectful interchange among diverse religious elements of society.  For the statistics on selected world religions in America shown in the table above, see www.pluralism.org/resources/statistics/index.php, which includes maps of the distribution of non-Christian religious centers across the country.  For information on the Pluralism Project’s research initiatives mapping America’s new religious diversity, see www.pluralism.org/resources/map/index.php.

 For a study challenging commonly reported estimates of America’s non-Christian population, see “Religious Diversity in America: The Emergence of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Others,” by Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, posted on the Website of the American Jewish Committee, www.ajc.org/inthemedia/PublicationsPrint.asp?did=400.

www.religiousmovements.org includes profiles of several “alternative” or “new” religions in America.  The cover story, “Faith in America,” in the May 6, 2002 issue of US News and World Report, provides a useful overview of major religious trends today.  For a readable scholarly study of religious trends in America’s storied “baby-boomer generation,” see Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).  For information about a major research initiative on America’s new immigrant religions funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, see www.newimmigrants.org.

Numerous books address the issue of Christianity’s relation to other world religions.  The two mentioned in this chapter are Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1983), and Don A. Pittman, Ruben L. F. Habito, and Terry C. Muck, eds., Ministry and Theology in Global Perspective: Contemporary Challenges for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996).  See the concluding chapter in this book for more references.

The 1995 CBS News documentary, The Strangers Next Door, can be purchased through the National Council of Churches, phone 800-494-6007.  Terry Muck’s essay in Christianity Today, “The mosque next door: How do we speak the truth in love to Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists?” is discussed in Chapter 1 of this book.

 

For Discussion

  1. Would you or representatives of your congregation have attended the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions?  Why or why not?  Which position on the Parliament described in this chapter most closely matches your own?  What position does your denomination or Christian tradition take on the truth claims of the world’s religions?
  2. What does it mean that America is now a multi-religious society?  Have you seen evidence of both the quantitative increase in non-Christian religions in the United States and the qualitative shift in America’s religious self-perception?
  3. What is the relationship between a religion’s truth claims and its number of adherents?  Christianity is America’s (and the world’s) largest religion—is that because it is the “truest” or “highest” religion?  How did Christianity become the largest religion?  Was it because of its truth claims?
  4. Discuss the two major social trends that have significantly diversified the American religious landscape since the 1960s—immigration and spiritual inquisitiveness.  Do you know individuals representing each of these trends?  How do you relate to those individuals as a Christian?
  5. Having read only this introductory chapter, speculate on what you and/or your congregation might do in response to local religious diversity after completing this book.  What are you doing now, and how might that change?  If you have done “nothing” until now, was it out of deliberate conviction or for some other reason?

 

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