Religious diversity has been a key element of American society from earliest times. Prior to the arrival of the first European settlers, a wide variety of Native American cultures and spiritual traditions were present throughout the continent. Although the English Puritan colonists in New England sought to establish a uniform religious society, most other settlements along the eastern seaboard – in the areas that became New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland – were comprised of immigrants of diverse ethnic backgrounds and a variety of Protestant Christian groups (an even Catholics in the case of Maryland). Official support for religious pluralism and the free exercise of diverse religions was set forth in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Yet, in practice, religious diversity originally referred primarily to acceptance of different types of Protestant Christians; going beyond that definition has not always been easy. Since the colonial period, religious diversity has been increased by successive waves of immigration from different parts of the world. Each new ethnic and religious group has forced an expansion of the nation’s understanding of such diversity – beginning with Irish, German and Italian Catholic, along with Jewish, immigrants in the late 18th and 19th centuries, through the influx of Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century and continuing through the 1965 Hart-Cellar immigration act, that opened the doors to increased immigration especially from South and Southeast Asia. As recently as the 1950s and 60s, scholars of religion described the U.S. as predominantly “Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.” But in the last 50 years, immigration has resulted in a vast expansion of America’s religious diversity, to include significant communities of Muslims, Buddhist, Sikhs, Hindus, Baha’i and numerous other traditions.
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