The years around 1850 represented a watershed in American religious history, for they marked the onset of a series of waves of immigration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East
that transformed a largely Protestant landscape into a new and far more pluralistic one that, dotted with new churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques, encompassed nearly the entire kaleidoscopic array of the world’s religions.
The first wave began in the late 1840s and brought millions of Irish Catholics to the urban Northeast. Then, from 1880 to 1920, American industrial cities and mining towns from the East Coast to the Great Lakes were peopled by a “new” immigration far larger and more varied than the “old” immigration patterns that had brought white westward-moving Christians—mostly Protestant Christians—from northern and western Europe. Now arriving from eastern and southern Europe were Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. From there and from the Near and Middle East came, initially in smaller numbers, Muslims. Asian immigrants, meanwhile, streamed eastward across the Pacific Ocean to the West Coast, bringing Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and other Asian religions to the cities and rural interior. Somewhat later, in the early 20th century, agricultural and urban expansion in the West and Southwest attracted northward-moving Mexican Catholics. Restrictive legislation in the 1920s reduced most of these streams to a trickle, but 1965 revisions, coupled with ongoing economic expansion in the United States and political turmoil elsewhere in the world, have sparked immigration from all directions, particularly from southern and southeastern Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Religiously as well as demographically and physically, the United States became vastly different from what it had been in 1850.
Arriving to work in the nation’s expanding systems of large-scale industrial production and agricultural production, immigrants often formed ethnic communities, sometimes in rural areas but far more often, and in much greater numbers, in the nation’s cities, particularly those of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. Cities became places of intercultural contact and conflict as immigrants living among peoples of varying ethnicities and nationalities and in a new American setting moved to defend or to transform their distinct religious traditions and cultures.
Exacerbating these religiocultural tensions were social ones resulting from differences—often a function of order of arrival—in level of cultural assimilation, status, affluence, and power, as well as generational ones, with immigrants’ children often proving more willing and able to adapt than their parents. Such ethnic tensions often inhibited unity within religious traditions, generating multiple and competing ethnically based institutions which became foci of ethnic group loyalty and centers of social, cultural, and educational life. On the other hand, religious institutions as readily fostered interethnic unity as ethnic exclusiveness.America’s transformation from a largely “Judeo-Christian” culture to a far more multiethnic and multireligious one was heralded, symbolized, and promoted by the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. Held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition that celebrated the 400th anniversary of the European colonization of the Americas, this gathering of representatives of many of the world’s religions (including twelve Buddhists, eight Hindus, two Muslims, three Zoroastrians, two Shintoists, one Daoist, and one Jain) was organized by Protestants eager to promote Christianity. But the conference in fact spearheaded the entry of non-Western religions into American life by giving voice to diverse traditions and serving as a springboard for lecture tours and institution formation. The many voices at the parliament announced the highly pluralistic American religious culture aborning on the eve of the 20th century.
