Old Time Religion

ED: Our last stop on our tour of the World’s Columbian Exposition takes us several miles off the fairgrounds to downtown Chicago. Today, the Art Institute of Chicago is a world renowned museum. It’s also one of the few remaining buildings that was used during the exposition. In 1893, the Institute served as an auxiliary meeting hall for a series of conventions called congresses.

MATT HEADSTROM: The congresses were the intellectual side of the fair.

ED: This is scholar Matt Headstrom. He says these congresses were devoted to all manner of subjects, things such as the arts, manufacturing, and medicine.

MATT HEADSTROM: And they were all designed to showcase, look how far we’ve come. Look at the state of the art in these various fields. Look at the contribution of American civilization to these forms of knowledge.

ED: The capstone of these congresses was one dedicated to faith, the parliament of the world’s religions. Held in September near the tail end of the fair, the session brought together religious figures from around the globe. The local host and most attendees were English speaking Protestants. Catholic and Jewish representatives made the trip as well.

MATT HEADSTROM: But there were a significant number of Buddhists and Hindus, smaller numbers of Muslims, Jains, representatives 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.

ED: 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.

MALE SPEAKER: For the first time in history, the representatives of the leading historic faiths will meet in fraternal conference over the great things of human life and destiny.

MATT HEADSTROM: I mean, on the one hand, it was a progressive’s vision of bringing representatives of the great world religions together to come to understand each other.

MALE SPEAKER: 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 HEADSTROM: And yet Barrows 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 civilization, the way the White City was.

ED: He even celebrated the attendance of the so-called enlightened heathens.

MATT HEADSTROM: He talks about the full sun and the twilight. And he sees basically the illumination of Christianity offering up visions of truth in its full, 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. 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.

MALE SPEAKER: 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.

MATT HEADSTROM: 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.

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

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

ED: 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.

MATT HEADSTROM: 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 spellbinding speaker who had that kind of it factor as an orator.

ED: That it 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.

MATT HEADSTROM: He was playing the role of the monk from the east, with the wisdom from an ancient culture and 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. So he could speak the language of the fair and the language of the parliament of religions, the language of progress, the language of modernity, 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.

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

ED: 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–

MALE SPEAKER: The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is 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 HEADSTROM: This is the way he could bring that message and subtly subvert the kind of hierarchies that were quite present from the Christian point of view in the parliament.

ED: His message was well received, as was Anagarika Dharmapala’s. Dharmapala didn’t have the same star wattage of his contemporary, but like Vivekananda, he understood what fairgoers were looking for.

MATT HEADSTROM: 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, 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. He said, we Buddhists, we don’t need that.

ED: His message found a ready and immediate audience.

MATT HEADSTROM: He very famously took a convert.

ED: 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 HEADSTROM: This was not the way things are supposed to work. Asians don’t come to the United States as missionaries. And here was Dharmapala taking an American convert on the streets of Chicago in 1893.

ED: Headstrom says it’s not as if thousands of Americans immediately followed in Strauss’ 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 faiths in cities across the United States.

MATT HEADSTROM: 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 were 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.

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

MATT HEADSTROM: And in a sense, that’s what Vivekananda and Dharmapala were doing is going, OK, 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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Matt Headstrom is a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia. He’s the author of The Rise of Liberal Religion Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

JOANNE: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily [? Gedacht, ?] and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angelie [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney [? Spania, ?] Erin [? Teling, ?] [INAUDIBLE] Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE], Podington Bear, and [? Jazar. ?]

ED: Special thanks to our wonderful voice actors this week, Sharon Milner, who played Ida B. Wells, William Jones, who played Frederick Douglass, James Scales, as John Henry Barrows, and Abhishek Mishra as Swami Vivekananda. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins studio in Baltimore. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Backster Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia humanities.