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Anyone who has traveled in a bus or a subway in a major American city in recent years knows that the ethnic face of the country is changing dramatically. Once upon a time, when Americans spoke of ethnic diversity, they were usually referring populations derived from Europe. Of course, black-white relations constituted the intractable American Dilemma identified by Gunnar Myrdal, and immigration from China and then Japan began in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the melting pot that attracted so much attention in the 1930s or 1940s looks in retrospect like a rather limited affair.
Matters changed fundamentally with the 1965 Immigration Act, which effectively removed any ethnic or racial barriers preventing immigration and duly opened the United States to a floodtide of newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The raw numbers are staggering. About five percent of U.S. residents today have immigrated just within the last decade. According to the Census Bureau, by 2050, a quarter of all Americans will claim Latino roots, and another eight percent will be of Asian stock. Mexican Americans alone should make up one-eighth of the U.S. population. Within just two or three years from now, both California and Texas will be "majority-minority" states, in which no single group constitutes an absolute majority of the population. The term may sound strange now, but get used to it: it represents the coming reality for much of the nation.
If, as Martin Marty famously declared, ethnicity is the skeleton of American religion, then this continuing revolution in our racial and linguistic identity should have immense consequences for the nation's religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, some observers have been tempted to imagine a thorough transformation in America's traditional religious coloring.
At first glance the notion is not entirely implausible. Immigration can sometimes cause a substantial increase in the adherents of a religion hitherto little known in a given country, as is demonstrated by the striking growth of America's Jewish population in the previous great wave of immigration, between 1880 and 1924. (The "Judaeo-Christian" concept was an innovation of the 1940s.) Isn't it conceivable, then, that our emerging polychrome nation might come to acknowledge Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism just as wholeheartedly (if only grudgingly, and after a great deal of discrimination) as it has come to accept the Jewish presence? And wouldn't this bring about the eclipse of the well-known "Judaeo-Christian" scheme with which we have been so familiar for the past half century?
According to some writers, this is already happening; we simply haven't noticed it yet. So argues Diana Eck in her book, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. Coming at a time when many Americans have been eager to affirm the tolerant, inclusive character of the nation, Eck's enthusiastic vision of a new religious landscape has achieved wide and almost uniformly favorable publicity.1
However attractive one finds this notion, it suffers from one crucial defect: it is simply not accurate as a description of the state of things. In religious terms, the United States is not now, and never has been, a terribly diverse nation, nor are any likely changes going to make it so. When we boast of our Judaeo-Christian character, we are speaking of a land in which Jews make up perhaps two percent of a population that is overwhelmingly Christian. When Eck envisages "the world's most religiously diverse nation," she is contemplating an America that, within 20 years or so, may include a non-Christian population of at most six or seven percent, a figure that includes all Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and Sikhs. That is about as diverse as most European lands, and far less so than the pattern that prevails in much of Africa or the Middle East.
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