Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 6, 1993 TAG: 9311050098
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: C9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JON MARCUS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
In color-coded file folders are notes about the nation's 1,100 mosques and Islamic centers, 1,500 Buddhist centers and 800 Hindu temples. The shelves are lined with three-ring notebooks stuffed with research about Baha'i, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.
Eck is a professor of comparative religion and director of the Pluralism Project, a three-year effort to inventory and examine American religious life. Each summer, Harvard students fan out across the country and collect the kind of information the U.S. Census doesn't tally.
The researchers have studied Cambodians in California, Muslims in Massachusetts, Hindus in Houston and religious diversity in Denver.
"Even a city like Denver has a religious landscape that most people in Denver don't know about," Eck said.
In fact, the transformation has been invisible in many places.
"There's a certain amount of concern about acceptance," Eck said. "But some of it is a practical matter: a Muslim group will buy a former school and use the gymnasium as the prayer room, so you drive by and don't notice it."
In addition to indexing these religions, the project ultimately will attempt to answer how they will change America - and how being in America changes them.
"What will Buddhism start to look like when it's planted in the soil of Arizona?" Eck said.
Some signs are evident. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims have started religious summer camps, earlier pioneered by Jews. Many also have pieced together national advocacy organizations.
One, the Islamic Society of North America, says there are 8 million Muslims. Other estimates put the number at 1.4 million. Eck said 5 million is a reliable figure.
"This is a very sensitive issue, to some extent," she said. "What if there are more Muslims than Jews in the United States, for example? That could have very serious significance."
The heavy influx of religions from outside the Judeo-Christian culture started with the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated national origins quotas. Since then, the number of Asian-Americans has skyrocketed from 1 million to 7.3 million. Immigrants from the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and eastern Europe also flock to the United States.
"We're not talking about the sort of Western gurus and cults of the '70s," Eck said. "We're talking now about new Americans who have brought distinctively Asian and Islamic traditions to this country."
Eck wrote about her own search for meaning in her book "Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras."
She also is working with WGBH-TV on a public television documentary about the American religious metamorphosis. It will focus on Buddhists in Los Angeles, Muslims in Houston, Hindus in Pittsburgh, Jews in Denver and Chinese and Vietnamese evangelical Christians in Boston.
Eck said Americans don't realize their nation is evolving from its Judeo-Christian roots. Many appeal for prayer in school, for instance, in areas where the Christian majority is tenuous.
"I don't think it has ever occurred to them that if there is prayer in the schools, in many places it might turn out to be Buddhist prayer or Hindu prayer and not a prayer from the Christian tradition," Eck said. "There's a very real sense in which we Americans don't know who we are."
Christians and Jews not only don't know the extent of this phenomenon, Eck said, they also don't know much about the religions involved.
"As a nation, we have a rather low level of religious literacy," she said. "Part of that has been the result of a very extreme separation of church and state. We also don't really teach much about religion in the public schools."
There, and in other areas of life, that's changing, Eck said.
New York City, for example, has begun to suspend alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules on certain Muslim holidays.
But Eck said it will take more than municipal ordinances to head off a rise in intolerance she said may accompany the increase in diversity.
"It will be important to begin building bridges between the religious communities of the United States so that we have those bridges in place before the floodwaters rise," she said.
by CNB