Hindu Americans face challenges, growth in following their faith

I moderated a panel discussion on Hinduism in America at the temple last weekend, during a visit by a large group of religion writers. Three speakers, Anantanand Rambachan of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, Khyati Joshi of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, and Suhag Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation, talked about issues facing the estimated 1.5 million to 2 million Hindus in the United States.

The biggest challenge, they said, is transmitting faith from immigrants, most of whom grew up in predominantly Hindu India, to their children, who are growing up in a predominantly Christian society. Temples are launching religious education programs, modeled after those in churches and synagogues, but Rambachan said there are other issues - for example, Hindus will have to decide what language to use for worship, and, he asked, “can we visualize English being a liturgical language for Hindus?’’ He called Hinduism “the least understood among American religious traditions,’’ noting that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “are all suspicious about imaging the divine’’ and emphasize the oneness of God, whereas Hinduism offers a plethora of iconography and “celebrates a multiplicity of divine names and forms.’’

Both Joshi and Shukla talked about the arrival of large numbers of Hindus on college campuses, the children of the immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. Joshi said many of those students are flocking to courses on Hinduism and South Asian studies seeking to better understand their own heritage and faith. She said many feel ill-informed about their own family traditions. “Some are reluctant to identify as Hindus,’’ she said, and others feel ill-equipped to explain or even practice their faith. Shukla also noted challenges for Hindus on college campuses, particularly in the form of aggressive conversion campaigns by various Christian organizations.

Several of the panelists noted that Hinduism is often practiced in private, and that the religion doesn’t have a strong tradition of articulating a position on public policy issues. Priests in Hinduism do not play the same role as Christian or Jewish clergy - Hindu priests are experts at performing rituals, but are not necessarily scholars or theologians. So now, Hindu leaders in the United States are grappling with the question of who speaks for their community, and whether and how the Hindu community becomes, collectively, a player in the nation’s public square.

Harvard Divinity professor on faith and the future

Cox has been at this a long time and has a lot of interesting observations after a career thinking about the state of religion in the world, but among his central arguments is this: “I do not think fundamentalisms are going to last much longer.’’

Cox argues that fundamentalist movements - and he cautions against describing any serious expression of religion as fundamentalist - are doomed by the flow of history and by what he describes as an inevitable internal fractiousness that erodes any fundamentalist movement’s vitality. He cited as evidence what he called “the decreasing effectiveness of the religious right in America,’’ as well as what he sees as “growing opposition’’ in the Muslim world to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “They’ve been blowing up buildings and tearing down statues, but where is the food? Where are the jobs?’’ he said.

Cox advised reporters to keep an eye on two trends: the changing nature of evangelicalism in the United States and the growth of Christianity in China. He also noted there are tensions in the way religion is seen by theologians and bishops - who tend to view faith as a set of beliefs - and the way religion is seen by laypeople - who often view faith as a series of experiences. He connected this to the spectacular growth of Pentecostalism, which, he said, emphasizes the experiential.

Finally, on the home front, Cox rejected the notion of a godless Harvard. He noted that there are adherents of 51 different religious traditions at Harvard Divinity School, said the university “can’t add enough courses’’ about religion to keep up with demand, and said, “on any given weekend, more Harvard students are worshiping today than at any time since 1636.’’

But he also noted that, although he had balked at grazing a cow named Pride in Harvard Yard because pride is one of the seven deadly sins, a friend had joked, “I thought, at Harvard, pride was not a sin.’’