On Common Ground World Religions in America

Author(s): Diana L Eck
Publisher: Columbia University Press New York

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ON COMMON GROUND Guide for Teachers and Students
religious diversity is America's fundamental commitment to religious freedom: matters of religious conscience cannot be legislated or decided by majority rule.
The more immediate reason for this new diversity, however, is the 1965 Immigration Act which changed American immigration policy, opening the door once again to immigration from many parts of the world for the first time since the 1920s. Restrictive immigration laws going back to the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had severely limited immigration from many parts of the world, particularly Asia. With the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, however, America began to address the issues of discrimination in immigration policy. Robert Kennedy, supporting the new immigration act before the U.S. Congress said, "Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on national origins. Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law." The 1965 act eliminated national origins quotas and opened the door again for immigration. The new post-1965 immigration has made clear for all Americans that the United States is a nation based not on race, ethnicity, or religion, but on common commitment to the democratic ideals of its Constitution.
In the past thirty years, the ethnic composition of the United States has gradually changed, with new immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The term "multicultural" has come to common use to describe the new cultural reality of the American people. But what are the religious dimensions of America's new cultural mix? What changes have taken place in the religious landscape of America's cities and neighborhoods? How have new religious traditions changed as they have taken root in American soil? And how is America changing as the freedom of religion cherished by America's founders is now cherished by Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus who have come to America as immigrants? These are the questions the Pluralism Project set out to investigate, and these are the questions you are invited to explore in this CD-ROM, On Common Ground.
The American Constitution begins with words, "We the People of the United States of America. .." The thirty-nine people who framed and signed the Constitution in 1787 were almost all white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men. The "we" of which they spoke referred to the citizens of the new America, who were mostly English Protestants, joined by a few Catholics, and still fewer Jews. At that time, "we" did not include the Native peoples of America, or the considerable number of African slaves who accounted for approximately one-fifth of the nonindigenous population.
Over the past two centuries, the "we" has expanded and become considerably more complex. Through years of struggle, America's "we" has come to include African Americans and Native Americans, and has come explicitly to include both women and men among its voting members. It has also come to include immigrants from all parts of Europe, from Asia and the Pacific, from Africa and Latin America. Coming to know who "we" now are is one of America's most challenging tasks.
In many parts of the world today, the "we" is being defined in ever narrower terms--the "we" of ethnic, religious, or national chauvinism. But America's "we" has become ever broader. Today it includes Buddhist Americans, like the Hawaiian-born Buddhist astronaut who died on the Challenger. It includes Muslim Americans, like the Muslim mayor elected to office in Kuntz, Texas and the first Muslim commissioned as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. Our "we" includes Hindu and Jain engineers and surgeons, Zoroastrian social workers, and Sikh political advisers. It includes Native American legislators, activists, and educators. It includes Christians of all races and denominations-Hispanic pentecostalists, Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Vietnamese Catholics, Korean Presbyterians. It includes Jews from black-coat Lubavitchers to Reform women rabbis. It includes Baha'is and Unitarians, Wiccans and Earth Spirit communities, and Afro-Caribbean practitioners of Santeria and Vodou. And it includes a wide range of people who cherish the freedom to stand outside all