Building temples and starting summer camps, Hindus step into the American cultural mainstream.
A century after Swami Vivekananda popularized Hinduism in “Christian America” during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, his spiritual descendants on U.S. soil have grown into a significant minority whose influence extends far beyond their actual numbers.
Whether they will continue to change the increasingly pluralistic American society, or be changed by the evangelical Christians in it, is unclear. Yet, with a second parliament scheduled for this August and September in Chicago, the Hindus appear to have gained momentum, both numerically and ideologically.
“Because of immigrations from Asian countries, a current fascination with Eastern mysticism among many of this country’s spiritual seekers, and the influence of the New Age movement, Hinduism is likely to maintain a steady growth into the next century,” says veteran religion writer Russell Chandler in his 1992 book Racing Toward 2001.
Terry Muck, author of Those Other Religions in Your Neighborhood, said, “There is some Hindu influence on our culture. There are a lot more natives of India here now than ever before, and they’ve brought their religion with them—and so you have the growth of what you could call ‘temple Hinduism.’ ”
Dramatic increases
According to the 1990 Census, the number of Asian Indians in the U.S. (not all of them Hindus) jumped 125.3 percent during the 1980s, from 361,531 to 815,447, to about 0.3 percent of the nation’s people. The mushrooming of Hindu temples has been even more dramatic. In his 1992 book Religious Bodies in the United States, J. Gordon Melton counts one Hindu intrafaith organization (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad), ...
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