








ditions of the African slaves, the old Chines in Montana and Idaho, or the early Sikh communities i nia s Imperial Valley.
The Muslim Co Center on Nev shire Avenue 1 Spring, Maryla
IN 1991, THE PLURALISM PROJECT AT HARVARD SET OUT multireligious America, beginning right here in Bo research seminar visited the mosque in Quincy bt shadow of the great cranes of the shipyards by Leb migrants who came early in the century, and we f< there were some 20 other mosques and Islamic ce are part of the Islamic Council of New England in I Wayland, Cambridge. We went to the spectacular nev shim temple in Ashland, a temple designed by Hu architects with tall towers decorated with the imaj gods and consecrated with the waters of the Gangs: with the waters of the Mississippi, the Colorado, anc rimack rivers. We visited half a dozen other Hindi nities in Boston, and two Sikh gurdwaras in h Milford, and a Jain temple in Norwood, housed in Swedish Lutheran church. We found a dozen Buddl tation centers, with their respective Tibetan, Burmesi and Japanese lineages of instruction. And we visits* pies of the Cambodian Buddhists in Lowell and Vietnamese in Roslindale and Revere, the Chinese and Lexington. Eventually, we published World R Boston, a documentary guide to a dty whose Asian p had doubled in 10 years, now a multireligious city
It was dear that what was true of Boston migl trus of many other American cities. So the Plural sent a research team of students, multiethnic anc
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34. Neighboring Faiths
Stupa containing relics of the Buddha, presented as a gift from Thailand to the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission of North America in 1935. The stupa is built on the roof of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco on Pine Street.
pous, to study "hometown" America, fanning out across the [nited States every summer for three years, e wer y three kinds of questions. First, who is ere_ n0  _ 990s? How many Hindu temples are there in tany mosques in Oklahoma City? How many u les in Houston? Second, how are these tra tions c . s they take root in American soil? And third, ow is hanging as Americans of many religions begin to appro lisnew multireligious reality and come to terms once g nth our foundational commitment to religious ee o onsequently, religious pluralism?	,
We found many remarkable developments. For examp e> Ihist communities widely separated in Asia are now neig 11 Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago Vietnamese am o . hai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan Bu s s' Betica, these Buddhist communities are just beginni. g  ow one another and to meet the distinctive communi new Buddhists  Americans of all races who ave co bddhism through its meditation practices an its  et c hiddhist Sangha Council of Southern California, t e '-ouncil of the Midwest, the Texas Buddhist Association a knee of the beginning of a new  ecumenical Bu sm. 16 American Buddhist newspapers and magazines, emm Atting groups, exemplary Buddhist AIDS hospice pr
Buddhism is an American religion.	of
We visited communities that represent the entire spe .	.
51111 in America: African American communities, us , ^ts Syria and Lebanon whose forebears ca _e, y 1900s, and new immigrant Muslims from A rica
AH of them are in the process of working out wha 1  t Muslim and American. They gather in huge
^tions in Dayton or in Kansas City to discuss the u J J  America or the American public schools. The sa 31 Association tackles ethical issues in medical pract ,
the Washington-based American Muslim Council facilitates Islamic participation in the American political process.
We found that most of the new religious institutions are invisible. The first generation of American mosques could be found in places like a former watch factory in Queens, a U-Haul dealership in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a gymnasium in Oklahoma City, and a former mattress showroom in Northridge. California. There were Hindu temples in a huge warehouse in Queens, a former YMCA in New Jersey, or a former Methodist church in Minneapolis. Most of the Vietnamese Buddhist temples of Denver, Houston, and Orange County were in ranch-style homes. Because of the invisibility of these first-generation religious institutions, many Americans, understandably, have remained quite unaware of these new communities.
The past decades, however, have also seen the beginnings of a striking new visible landscape. There are new mosques and Islamic centers in Manhattan and Phoenix, rising from the cornfields outside Toledo and from the suburbs of Chicago and Houston. There are multimillion-dollar Hindu temples, like the Sri Venkateswara temple in Pittsburgh, the Bharatiya Temple in the northern suburbs of Detroit, the spectacular Sri Meenakshi Temple south of Houston, the Ganesha temple in Nashville, and dozens of others. The Buddhists have made a striking architectural imprint, with, for example, the huge Hsi Lai temple in Hacienda Heights, California, and the Jade Temple in Houston. In the western Chicago suburb of Bartlett, the Jains have built a large new temple. To the north in Palatine is a striking new hexagonal gurdwara of the Sikhs.
There are some neighborhoods where all this is visible in short compass. For example, driving out New Hampshire Avenue, one of the great spokes of Washington, D.C., into Silver Spring, Maryland, just beyond the Beltway there is a stretch of road a few miles long where one passes rhe new Cambodian Buddhist temple with its graceful, sloping tiled roof, the Ukrainian Ortho
17
6. ASIAN AMERICANS
dox Church, the Muslim Community Center with its new copper-domed mosque. Farther along is the new Gujarati Hindu temple called Mangai Mandir. The many churches along the way also reveal the new dimensions of America s Christian landscape: Hispanic Pentecostal, Vietnamese Catholic, and Korean evangelical congregations sharing facilities with more traditional English-speaking  mainline  churches.
THE DIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE AVENUE, HOWEVER, IS NOT simply a curiosity for a Sunday drive. What it represents has profound implications for every aspect of American public life. What is happening to America as all of us begin to renegotiate the "we" of "We, the people"? That "we" in the United States is increasingly complex, not only culturally and racially, but also religiously What will this religious diversity mean for American electoral politics, for the continuing interpretation of "church-state" issues by the Supreme Court, for American public education and the controversies of school boards, for hospitals and health-care programs with an increasingly diverse patient population, and for colleges and universities with an increasingly multireligious student body? While many Americans are only dimly aware of the changing religious landscape, the issues this new diversity has raised are already on the agenda of virtually every public institution, including Harvard.
New Hampshire Avenue dramatizes the new diversity, but building a pluralist society from that diversity is no easy matter in a world in which the "politics of identity" is busy minting our identities in smaller and smaller coins, and in a world
in which religious markers of identity are often pre: be the most divisive of all differences. American pub is charged with the power of these issues. Some s; multicultural and multireligious society is impossil voices have been raised at each and every stage of. immigration too many Catholics, too many Jews, Chinese and Japanese. Those voices are present t< some of the most extreme have called for the rep< 1965 immigration act. Others have insisted there is s much pluribus and not enough unum. And still oth< insist that this is a secular society, so why make i looking at religious differences at all?
But to ascertain how we all of us are doing in struggle for America's soul, we have to look not on not only at ethnicity, but at religion. The history of and stereotype demonstrates that religious insignia tutions often become key markers of "difference." sistent attacks on synagogues and Jewish graveyarc ample testimony to the tactics of hatred. So does the continuing history of racist attacks on black churd ious insignia, religious markers of identity, and re' stitutions come to stand in a public way for the vei the community and often become the most visible bigotry and violence.
And so it is as America's new immigrants becon ingly visible as religious minorities. In New Jersey, bindi on the forehead, worn by many Hindu won for the strangeness of the whole Indian immigrant c in the eyes of a racist group calling themselves th<
the temple^t^	Massachusetts. Above lefttp :s
in May 1990.	consecratlon ceremony, the  mahakumbhabhis

172
  Those who beat Navroze Mody to death in 1987, shout-  Hindu, Hindu, Hindu," did not know or care whether  	, Hindu but conflated race, religion, and culture in
was a nuim*/ p cry of hatred.
^ Pluralism Project has documented the ways in which , minority religious communities have experienced the ilence of attacks on their visible religious institutions. In bruary 1983, for example, vandals broke into the newly con-uded Hindu-Jain Temple in Pittsburgh and smashed all the ute marble images of the Hindu deities. The sacred scrip-re of the Sikhs, housed on a side altar, was tom to pieces, eave!" was written across the main altar. In 1993, the temple a tiny Cambodian Buddhist community in Portland, Maine, u vandalized with an axe, its doorjambs hacked, its doors aken, the contents of the Buddha hall strewn in the front rd, and the words "Dirty Asian Chink, Go Home!" written
34. Neighboring Faiths
while serving as policemen. The Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, D.C., brought people of all religious communities together in March 1994 in the wake of the Hebron massacre. Because of new relationships of trust, the head of the Washington board of rabbis offered prayers right there on New Hampshire Avenue at the Muslim Community Center.
The public symbolic acknowledgment of America's diversity is also becoming more visible. In April 1990, for example, the city council of Savannah, Georgia, issued a proclamation in which Islam was recognized as having been "a vital part of the development of the United States of America and the city of Savannah." On June 25, 1991, for the first time in history, a Muslim imam, Siraj Wahaj of Brooklyn, opened a session of the U.S. House of Representatives with prayer. On February 20, 1996, at the end of the month of Ramadan, Hillary Clinton welcomed Muslims to the White House for the
There on a hillside overlooking farm fields, rabbis and priests, imams and Muslim leaders each turned a shovel of earth for the new Islamic Center of New England.
i the walls. In September 1994, a nearly completed mosque ?uba City, California, was burned to the ground, leaving   dome and minaret in the ashes of a fire that the sheriff !emed to be arson. There are dozens of these incidents every at some of them now documented by such groups as the ouncil on American-Islamic Relations, but most of them )ted only in the pages of local newspapers.
Bie documentary register of acts of violence is easier to semble than the register of new initiatives of cooperation id understanding, for violence is still deemed more news-orthy than cooperation. Yet assembling the evidence of  w patterns of interreligious encounter, cooperation, and redonship is also important in discerning how the "we is dng reconfigured in multireligious America. For example, 1 April 2,1993, a groundbreaking in Sharon, Massachusetts,  ought Jews, Christians, and Muslims together from the reater Boston area. There on a hillside overlooking the fields a former horse farm, rabbis and priests, imams and Muslim a ers each turned a shovel of earth for the new Islamic Cen-r of New England. Two weeks later, across the country in
California, Saint Paul's United Methodist Church fae Islamic Society of the East Bay broke groun
