In the last three decades all of us have become increasingly aware of our new cultural and racial diversity, but many of us are still unaware of the religious diversity that has come with the new immigration.  We are surprised to find that there are more than twice as many Muslim Americans today as Episcopalians, that there are more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, and about as many Muslims as Jews—some five or six million in all.  Most of us are surprised to see the range of who “we the people”  have become.  Today there are large new mosques in cities like Toledo, Cleveland, and Houston. There are beautiful new Hindu temples in Atlanta, Louisville, and Nashville; Jain and Zoroastrian temples in the suburbs of Chicago.  Many people are astonished to learn 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 as well.  Some places in America, one can see it all in a single neighborhood.  On New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland, for example, we find a Cambodian Buddhist monastery, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a Muslim Community Center, and the Mangal Mandir Hindu Temple all virtually next-door neighbors.

As citizens, America’s  “we” today includes Buddhist Americans, like the Hawaiian born Jodo Shinshu Buddhist astronaut who died on the Challenger.  It includes Muslim Americans, like the Muslim major in the Oklahoma City Fire Department who spent two weeks working in the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building.  We are Jains, like the Cincinnati businessman who is past-President of the Jain Association of North America, and Hindus, like the engineer from Boston Edison who was the first president of the Hindu temple in Ashland, Massachusetts.  We also are Sikhs, like the research scientist in Fairfax, Virginia and Zoroastrians, like the computer engineer in San Jose, California who also serves as the mobed or priest of the Zoroastrian Temple.

Our public awareness, our community life, and our public policy are just beginning to catch up with these changes in our demography.   For example, in 1997 the governor of Kansas concluded his first official proclamation on the Muslim observance of Ramadan with these words:  “Now, therefore, I, Bill Graves, Governor of the State of Kansas, do hereby proclaim the month January 10 to February 9, 1997 a month of special assistance to the needy, in the spirit of Ramadan and call upon citizens of the State of Kansas to recognize the dedication and service of Muslims as an important part of the fabric of religious pluralism which enriches us all.” In the same spirit,  President Clinton issued official greetings to the Sikh community of the United States in November of 1998 on the occasion of the 529^th birthday of the teacher who launched the Sikh movement in the 16^th century, Guru Nanak.  The President wrote, “We are grateful for the teachings of Guru Nanak, which celebrate the equality of all in the eyes of God, a message that strengthens our efforts to build one America. Religious pluralism in our nation is bringing us together in new and powerful ways.”

There are many Americans, however, for whom religious pluralism is not a vision that enriches us all and brings us together, but one that is threatening, or perhaps tears us apart.  At the same time as our religious diversity becomes more complex, many are concerned about a growing climate of intolerance for religious and cultural difference.  The shadow of vandalism and violence perpetrated against religious groups, particularly minority or ethnic communities, has fallen markedly on the last years of this century. Hate crimes are registered on a regular basis:  the firebombings of three Jewish synagogues in Sacramento; a Hindu temple in Atlanta vandalized five times in a nine month period; the arson of a Minneapolis mosque and the strewing of nails across the parking lot of the Islamic Center in Flint, Michigan.   Unfortunately, these incidents are not isolated:  arson has damaged mosques in South Carolina, Massachusetts, California, and Illinois. The story of the Atlanta temple, the Greater Atlanta Vedic Center in Lilburn, is one shared by numerous Hindu temples in America, as well as many Sikh gurdwaras, mosques, synagogues, and minority Christian churches.

There are also many other controversies that engage our new religious differences around complex issues.  Can a turbaned Sikh work on a hard-hat job or wear his turban in the U.S. Army?  Can a Sikh high school student carry the symbolic dagger of Sikh religious initiation to school?  Will the Whirlpool Corporation in Nashville find a way for Muslim employees to meet their obligations for prayer?  Will a Dulles Airport security firm be allowed to fire Muslim women wearing the head scarf ?  Does a Hindu temple have to look more “Spanish” to meet the planning board standards of Norwalk, California?  Should states post the Ten Commandments in public schools?  Zoning boards, school boards, city and state judicial bodies have become the sites of interreligious encounter as new questions like these are posed, and in many cases they need the assistance of religious communities and interfaith councils to sort out the issues.

When they wrote the sixteen words of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the founders unquestionably did not have Buddhism or the Santeria tradition in mind. But the principles they articulated have provided a sturdy rudder through the past two centuries as our religious diversity has expanded.  Step by step, we are beginning to claim and affirm what the framers of the Constitution did not imagine, but equipped us to embrace.

In the Constitutional arena, all of us are clear about the fact that our own rights are secure only if the rights of our neighbors are secure.  Whether we are Sikh, Muslim, or Roman Catholic, where the rights of one are threatened, all are threatened.  Here our challenge is that of awareness. As vigilant as we are about the threat to our own rights, we often don’t know how are neighbors are faring, even in this age of the worldwide web.  But the Constitution is only one of the arenas in which we struggle with the issues of religious difference in America.

Beyond the Constitutional arena are the moral and social questions of the Civic arena.  All of us do not share religious or theological ideas to be sure.  But we do share a concern for the quality of our common life as communities.  There are many forms of threat, belligerence, and discrimination that are not legally actionable, but have severe consequences for our lives together as neighbors.  They are insensitive, provocative, and ugly, but not illegal.  The negative stereotypes we hold of one another, the benign ignorance and willful misrepresentation of each other—these are matters of great importance, for we know that our society is shaped by the quality of our relationships and by forces for good or ill that governments simply cannot legislate.

So, what might “pluralism” mean in this new multireligious context? Religious traditions are irreducible and they tend to resist syncretistic amalgamation; for this reason, religious pluralism is an essential and preliminary focus for probing America's new challenge of pluralism.  Religions don’t “melt” in the so-called melting pot of America.  However, pluralism is not just difference, but engagement with our differences.  It means involvement and participation in common life, despite our differences.  It means traffic, exchange,  dialogue, and debate.  Pluralism is not simply a “given” with our new diversity, but must be created.  The makings of pluralism are surely there on New Hampshire Avenue, but without any real engagement with one another, without being attuned to the life and energies of one another, this might prove to be just a colorful example of diversity— interesting, but inconsequential and maybe divisive for American society.

In the late 1950s,  the Roman Catholic thinker John Courtney Murray described pluralism as the vigorous engagement of people of different religious beliefs around the “common table” of discussion and debate.  He wrote, “By pluralism here I mean the coexistence within the one political community of groups who hold divergent and incompatible views with regard to religious questions. . . . Pluralism therefore implies disagreement and dissension within a community.  There is no small political problem here.  If society is to be at all a rational process, some set of principles must motivate the general participation of all religious groups, despite their dissension, in the oneness of the community.  On the other hand, these common principles must not hinder the maintenance by each group of its own different identity.”

The engagement of difference in a pluralistic society is not modeled on the structure of competition, but on the structure of dialogue.  Vigorous engagement, even argument, around the common table is vital to the very  heart of a democratic society.  One might also contend that it is also vital to health of religious faith, which must be appropriated not by habit or heritage alone, but within the context of dialogue with the commitments of those of other faiths. Such dialogue is not aimed at achieving agreement, but achieving something far more important: relationship, based on real give and take. Even still, we must remember that there are pluralities within faith groups themselves that wrestle with each other over this particular issue. Many faithful find themselves unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the discourse of inter-faith religious dialogue and find themselves scrutinizing the cogency of these suppositions about the value of dialogue. Rather than strengthening and re-affirming faith, many fear that such relationships are risky, that they may weaken their community by eroding the traditions that bind it. Hence, the real challenge of religious pluralism in the new millenium is to demonstrate for these more hesitant voices, that such engagement is indeed worth the risk, that true, egalitarian dialogue cannot destroy the purity of faith, that it can only strengthen it, and thus communities must take steps toward establishing relationships with other communities. Whether in the public square or interfaith council, commitments are not left at the door.  Indeed, the “naked public square” so repudiated by Richard Neuhaus two decades ago, will soon become the multireligious public square in which many new voices are heard.

Finally, the process of pluralism is never completed and settled, but is the ongoing work of each generation.  In America, we might go further to say that part of the engagement of pluralism is participation in the “idea of America.”  After all, America is a nation formed not by a race or a single people, but by the ideals articulated in the succession of founding documents, beginning with the Declaration of Independence.  To say, “We hold these truths. . .” is not to hold them in the safe deposit box of the past, but to keep them alive through argument and dialogue in the present.  This will be our task as we enter a new century and a new millennium.