Pseudo-Secularism

Hindu dharma is implicitly at odds with monotheistic intolerance. What is happening in India is a new historical awakening... Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Scholar pushes pluralism as way to cope with diversity

The Johnson County Sun
Mario Sequeira, Staff Writer
October 27, 2005

In predominantly Christian America, Americans need to practice engagement with other religions, rather than just tolerance or understanding, to help them cope with the country's religious diversity, a religion scholar said.

The word for it is pluralism, as compared to exclusivism or inclusivism, Harvard University professor Diana Eck told an audience of about 225 at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village on Friday.

The isms are not difficult to understand. Exclusivism is when a person believes their religion is the only true one and all others are false. Inclusivism is when a person believes their religion is the only one but tolerates other religions, and believes that people of other faiths will be saved.

In Eck's words, pluralism "is not just diversity, it's engagement with that diversity. It's not just tolerance, it's a mutual understanding that we need in order to move from tolerance to a society that has a very deep foundation that will support the differences that we will live with in the years ahead."

In a practical sense, pluralism is recognizing that our own understanding, our own language, our ways of relating to God do not exhaust the fullness of God's presence, she said.

"There are distinct communities that have distinctive languages and they can't all be folded into our language. When my Hindu or Muslim friends speak of their relationship with God, I can't water that down into Christian language.

"I need to let the difference of their religious language stand and inform my own, and it becomes a place where both of us are seekers."

Pluralism is also recognition that we can be religious without compromising the richness and integrity of our own faith, Eck said.

It is a concept that has occupied theological thinkers all over the world for the past 40 years, and more pressingly in the past 20, as religious diversity has become demonstrably visible.

Pluralism is a fact of life that we must work for, she said, and not something that will come naturally.

Eck is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She started studying, eventually teaching at Harvard, the religious traditions of India. She has spent a collective eight years in India.

She has written several books, some of which have won awards. The book "Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey From Bozeman to Banaras" won the Grawemeyer Book Award in 1995.

Her latest book is "A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation." She is working on a book entitled "India:Myth on Earth."

Eck traces the beginnings of religious diversity in America to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. It was a historic act, removing the legal vestiges of racism from American immigration law and enabling people, regardless of race, to be eligible for immigration and citizenship, she said.

The act resulted, in Eck's image-filled language, in immigrants coming to America from all over the world, "bringing their Bhagavad Gitas and Qurans, their images of the Virgin of Guadalupe from Mexico, of Kwan Yin from Taiwan, of Vishnu, Shiva, and Kali from India." The Bhagavad Gita is the Hindu holy book.

Since that time, America's landscape has slowly but surely changed. As Eck says it: "A mosque rises from cornfields outside Toledo; a Hindu temple stands on a hilltop south of Atlanta, south of Houston, west of Nashville."

Other signs of religious diversity are the "Buddhist landscape of Richmond, Virginia or of my native Montana, and the mosques, temples, and gurdwaras of Salt Lake City." A gurdwara is a Sikh temple.

In the 40 years since the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Islamic world is not somewhere else; it is in Chicago, with its 70 mosques and half a million Muslims, Eck makes the telling point.

The demographic statistics are equally telling, she said. The 2000 census revealed that 10 percent of Americans are foreign born, which points to the highest level of immigration since the turn of the century.

The largest numbers of new immigrants are from Latin America and from Asia. And these new immigrants have brought their religions with them --Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, African and Afro-Caribbean.

"People are still surprised to find that there are more Muslims Americans today than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, probably as many Muslims as Jews," she said.

"We are astonished to be told that Los Angeles is the most complex Buddhist city in the world, with a Buddhist population spanning the whole range of the Asian Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to Korea, and with a multitude of native-born American Buddhists."

Eck thinks it is important to document the changing religious landscape. She has headed an organization called Pluralism Project since 1991 which does just that.

"Describing, from multiperspectival viewpoints, what this world looks is extremely important," she said.

"Developing a consciousness of our growing religious inter-relatedness and developing a moral infrastructure that will guide us in the years ahead are among the most urgent tasks of our time," Eck said.

She asks that we think deeply about religious diversity in order to help us understand our approaches to diversity.

To think deeply about religious diversity is to think about religious ideas, religious communities, religious sects, religious visionaries and religious fanatics, that have resulted in ferment, tension and competition, Eck said.

"America is our local workshop for working out these issues, and we have to get to work right here, if we are to reformulate and understand what we mean by 'we,'" she said.

She said there were acts of religious intolerance and violence but there were acts of outreach as well.

"If we lived in Lubbock, Texas or Savannah, Georgia, we might be the people who come together to work with our Muslim community in repairing and rebuilding a mosque attacked by vandals.

"If we lived in Portland, Oregon, we might be the people who speak out in disgust when the Christian organizers of a Mayor's Prayer Breakfast disinvited the Muslim participant," she said.

"And if we are in Kansas City, we would go to see "The Hindu and the Cowboy" at Village Church," she said, referring to the play about cultures and faiths to be staged tomorrow.

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