Old Time Religion

Brian: Major funding for Backstory’s provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory. Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman. Each week, my colleagues, Nathan Connolly, Brian Balogh, Ed Ayers, and I explore a different aspect of American history. The free exercise clause of the first amendment forms the basis for the separation of church and state, and you probably know the line, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote that he contemplated this principle of separation with “sovereign reverence and sincere satisfaction” and yet, throughout American history, this principal hasn’t stopped Americans from using religious differences to draw boundaries around who is and isn’t American.

Joanne Freeman: For instance, Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, recently suggested the congresswoman Ilhan Omar support Sharia law and opposes the constitution because she wears a hijab. Pirro isn’t alone in seeing Muslim Americans as somehow un-American. A 2018 democracy fund study found that “On average, Americans believe that only 51% of Muslim Americans respect American ideals and laws.” So today on the show, we’re digging into the backstory archives to bring you a selection of segments that look at religious identity in America, how faiths, cultures, and rituals adapted to American life.

Joanne Freeman: We start today’s show at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The fair put American progress on view and alongside the cultural pavilions and technological feats on display, stood a meeting hall for a series of intellectual events called congresses. Last year, Ed spoke to scholar Matt Hedstrom about the congress dedicated to faith, the parliament of the world’s religions. Most attendees were English speaking Protestants, but Catholic and Jewish representatives made the trip as well.

Brian: But there were a significant number of Buddhists and Hindus, smaller numbers of Muslims, Jains, representatives of Shinto from Japan, sometimes they were called the Enlightened Heathens, those who were not Christians, but who had civilization, who had great ideas to contribute.

Speaker 3: The congress was the fulfillment of a dream articulated a year before by Chicago Minister John Henry Barrows, president of the parliament. In front of a huge crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden, he had outlined his vision.

Speaker 4: For the time in history, the representatives of the leading historic faiths will meet in fraternal conference over the great things of human life and destiny. I mean, on the one hand, it was a progressive’s vision of bringing representatives, the great world religions, together to come to understand each other.

Speaker 3: I have no doubt that this phenomenal meeting will make apparent the fact that there is a certain unity in religion. That is that men not only have common desires and needs, but also have perceived more or less clearly certain common truths.

Matt Hedstrom: And yet, [Barrows 00:03:46] was also a Christian minister who had a very clear sense of a kind of hierarchy of culture, a hierarchy of civilizations. He was a Darwinist, and so had a sort of evolutionary understanding of the trajectory of history and very clearly understood Christianity is sort of standing at the apex of civilizations the way the white city was.

Speaker 6: He even celebrate the attendance of the so-called Enlightened Heathens.

Matt Hedstrom: He talks about the full sun and the twilight and he sees basically the illumination of Christianity offering a visions of truth in its full light, standing in full daylight. The other great religions had truths to share, but they were sort of dimmed. So he described them as in the twilight, right? It’s not bad, it’s not wrong. It’s just not fully developed. So in that sense, like the other congresses, it’s like what’s the state of the art in finance? What’s the state of the art in engineering? Well, what’s the state of the art in religion? It’s progressive Protestant Christianity.

Speaker 3: America will be on exhibition the coming year, and especially American Christianity. You have an opportunity of influencing the whole world with the spirit of our common Christianity without parallel in ancient or modern times.

Speaker 7: That is the most modern, the most up to date, and the completest form of religion. And he thought the parliament would ultimately demonstrate that.

Matt Hedstrom: But it didn’t really pan out that way.

Speaker 7: Because some of the other participants didn’t quite play their assigned roles.

Matt Hedstrom: Two participants, in particular, Hindu, Swami Vivekananda from India, and Buddhist, Anagarika Dharmapala from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Both men had been educated by Westerners. They understood their audience far more than their audience understood them.

Speaker 3: Vivekananda was, by all accounts, a spectacular showman and many consider him to be the kind of star of the show, somebody who was just a spell binding speaker who had that kind of it factor as an order.

Brian: That if factor was on full display, the very first day of the parliament. Reportedly, Swami Vivekananda said just five words in greeting, “Sisters and brothers of America.” And the crowd burst into applause for several minutes. Audience members were enthralled by the Swami in his orange robes and yellow turban.

Speaker 3: He was playing the role of the monk from the east with the wisdom from an ancient culture in an ancient civilization. And he knew how to play to westerners’ expectations of what someone in that capacity should look like and sound like. And he played it perfectly.

Matt Hedstrom: So he could speak the language of the fair and the language of the parliament of religions, the language of progress, the language of maternity, the language of the compatibility of science and philosophy with religious wisdom. He simply thought that a kind of hierarchy of civilizations that said Christianity had the full illumination and others groped not in darkness, but in twilight, was inaccurate.

Brian: And that this particular Christian attitude had a negative impact on his people. Vivekananda was an outspoken Indian nationalist. In fact, today he’s considered a spiritual father of modern India.

Matt Hedstrom: And so he was deeply critical of the ways in which he sought that Christian theological claims to a kind of an exclusive hold on truth facilitated Christian, in his case, British imperialism.

Brian: So Vivekananda used his platform at the Congress to preach a message of spiritual equality. He believed that all religions were manifestations of the divine. That first day of the parliament, he told the assembled crowd…

Swami V.: The present convention, which is one of the most August assemblies ever held as in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the most wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita, “Whosoever comes to me through whatever form, I reach him.”

Matt Hedstrom: This is the way he can bring that message and subtly subvert that kind of hierarchies that were quite present from the Christian point of view at the parliament.

Brian: His message was well received as was on Anagarika DharmaPala’s. Dharmapala didn’t have the same star wattage if it is contemporary, but like Vivekananda, he understood what Fair goers were looking for.

Matt Hedstrom: He presented Buddhism in terms that I think are very familiar to those of us in the 21st century West. In a sense as the fulfillment of a dream that is simply a philosophy of mind, He said that theology is a way of thinking that represents the past and the future will be about philosophy and psychology. And if that’s the case, then Buddhism is better positioned to lead us into that future than Christianity is. Christianity requires belief in all kinds of supernatural historical events except we Buddhists, we don’t need that.

Brian: His message found a ready and immediate audience.

Matt Hedstrom: He very famously took a convert.

Brian: A man named CT Strauss became the first public convert to Buddhism on American soil. His conversion reportedly left his Jewish family at a loss. As a newspaper put it, they could not understand his move toward the effete religious mysticism of the east.

Matt Hedstrom: This is not the way things were supposed to work. Asians don’t come to the United States as missionaries and here was Dharmapala taking in American convert on the streets of Chicago in 1893.

Brian: Hedstrom says, “It’s not as if thousands of Americans immediately followed in Strauss’s footsteps.” But he argues that it does mark a shift in American religious consciousness. Vivekananda and Dharmapala found a spiritually hungry audience at the World’s Fair. When it was over, they both set up learning centers for their face in cities across the United States.

Matt Hedstrom: So for the first time, if you were an American, what we might today call a seeker, there was a place to go, there were people to talk to, there was literature, but even more on this most public of stages, it did make this case for those who are interested in a kind of progressive story of religion that one might need to look outside of Christianity. And so the appeal, I think, for religious liberals across the 20th century for sort of looking east is the story that Vivekananda and Dharmapala told best.

Brian: And in doing so, they countered the message that men such as Barrows had envisioned for the fair.

Matt Hedstrom: And in a sense that’s what Vivekananda and Dharmapala were doing, saying, “Hey, you want to tell a story about the progress of civilizations and the coming of a kind of fulfillment of a religious dream? Great. Let me tell you that story.”

Joanne Freeman: Matt Hedstrom is a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia. He’s the author of The Rise of the Liberal Religion book culture and American spirituality in the 20th century.