Religious Diversity
As discussed in other modules, religious literacy is an important component of dialogue. This module will offer resources to better understand traditions and worldviews that are different than your own. The three Bs (belief, behavior, belonging) of religion religious literacy can be a helpful framework in understanding the religious identities of communities and individuals. In this module, you will find pages with brief introductions to several traditions. Some of the pages will offer practical tools, such as site visit guides, to help you engage with religious diversity in the U.S. and in your home countries.
Demographics of Religion in the U.S.
The U.S. Census does not record religious affiliation. However, the are several organizations that conduct research on religious life in the U.S. Here are some of the best:
Public Religion Research Institute - PRRI’s research explores and illuminates America’s changing cultural, religious, and political landscape.
For political and other polling data, visit FiveThirtyEight.
Religious Diversity in America - Randall Balmer, Professor of American Religious History
Barnard College, Columbia University
© National Humanities Center
“Ever since the first days of European settlement—and even before that with the wide variety of Native cultures—diversity has been one of the distinguishing features of religious life in North America. Sometimes the juxtaposition of religious groups created conflict, as when Spanish settlers sought to impose Roman Catholicism on the Pueblos in the Southwest, leading to the Pueblo uprising of 1680, seventy years after the founding of Santa Fe as the first European capital city in North America. At other times, religious groups have accommodated to one another, as in the Middle Colonies, where rampant ethnic and religious diversity forced various groups to find some way to coexist.” (Randall Balmer, Religious Diversity in America, p. 1)
“In contrast with most of New England, where the Puritans sought to impose religious uniformity, other colonies in the Middle Atlantic were also characterized by pluralism. Quakers and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, among many others, inhabited what is now New Jersey. Further south, the Swedes, flush from their crucial engagement in the Thirty Years War, sought to establish a beachhead in the New World with settlements along the Delaware River, settlements that yielded to Dutch rule in 1665 and then to the English nine years later. Maryland, named for the wife of England’s Charles I (not for the Blessed Virgin, as many believe), was founded by Lord Calvert as a refuge for English Catholics, but he recognized even from the beginning that Catholic settlers would have to accommodate believers from other traditions in order to ensure toleration for themselves. William Penn, an English Quaker, founded his “Holy Experiment” in 1680, a place of religious toleration that attracted Lutherans and Quakers, along with smaller groups such as Moravians, Mennonites, Amish, and Schwenckfelders.” (p. 2)
“The religious and ethnic pluralism in the Middle Atlantic persisted throughout the colonial period, and when it came time for the framers of the Constitution to configure the relationship between church and state for the new nation, they looked both to Roger Williams’s notion of a “wall of separation” as well as to the religious diversity in New York and elsewhere. Williams, a Puritan minister who arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1631, quickly ran afoul of the Puritan ministers because he recognized the dangers to the faith of too close an association between religion and the state. He wanted to protect the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay had no patience with such ideas; they expelled Williams from the colony, whereupon he migrated south to organize what became Rhode Island as a haven for liberty of conscience and toleration of religious diversity. The notion of disestablishment, the absence of a state religion, was utterly unprecedented in England and Europe, but New York had been functioning for decades with de facto disestablishment, proving that religious pluralism posed no threat to the secular order and that government could function without the backing of a particular religion.
The First Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion together with its proscription against a state church set up a kind of free market of religious life in the United States. The absence of an established religion means that all religious groups are free to compete in this marketplace, and (to extend the economic metaphor) American history is littered with examples of religious entrepreneurs who have competed for a market share. This system (in theory, at least) disadvantages no one, so all religious groups, regardless of their historical or ethnic origins or their theological inclinations, are free to compete in that marketplace.” (p. 2)
Resources
Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. (2001) Harper Collins.
World Religions in Boston: A Guide to Communities and Resources (1991, --, 1998,) A selective portrait of religious communities in the Greater Boston area. Now updated and integrated into www.pluralism.org.
“Pluralism: Problems and Promise,” Journal of Interreligious Studies (Issue 17, Summer 2015)
“Diana Eck’s Concept of Pluralism as a Norm for Civic Education in a Religiously Diverse Democracy” – Brendan W. Randall, Journal of Interreligious Studies, Issue 17 (August 2015).
