|
 America
is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded
by
Christians…, and according to
a 2008 survey, 76 percent of US
continue to identify as Christian
(still, that's the lowest
percentage in American history).
Of course, we are not a
Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or
Wiccan—nation, either. A
million-plus Hindus live in the
United States, a fraction of the
billion who live on Earth.
But recent poll data show that
conceptually, at least, we are
slowly becoming more like Hindus and
less like traditional Christians in the ways
we think about God, our selves, each other,
and eternity.
The Rig Veda,
the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is
One, but the
sages speak of it by many names." A
Hindu believes there are many paths to God.
Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another,
yoga practice is a third. None is better
than any other; all are equal. The most
traditional, conservative Christians have not
been taught to think like this. They learn
in Sunday school that their religion is true,
and others are false. Jesus said, "I
am the way, the truth, and the life. No one
comes to the father except through me."
Americans are
no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey,
65
percent of US believe that "many religions
can lead to eternal life"—including 37
percent of white evangelicals, the group
most likely to believe that salvation is theirs
alone. Also, the number of people who seek
spiritual truth outside church is
growing. Thirty percent of Americans call
themselves "spiritual, not religious,"
according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from
24 percent in 2005. Stephen
Prothero, religion professor at Boston University,
has long framed the American
propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria
religion" as "very much in the spirit of
Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing
from different religions, because they're
all the same," he says. "It isn't
about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going
to yoga works, great—and if going to
Catholic mass works, great. And if going to
Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist
retreat works, that's great, too."
Then there's
the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally
believe that bodies and souls are sacred,
that together they comprise the "self,"
and that at the end of time they will be
reunited in the Resurrection. You need both,
in other words, and you need them forever.
Hindus believe no such thing. At death,
the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where
identity resides—escapes. In
reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves
come back to earth again and again in
different bodies. So here is another way
in which Americans are becoming more
Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they
believe in reincarnation, according to a
2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about
the ultimate fates of our bodies that
we're burning them—like Hindus—after
death. More than a third of Americans now
choose cremation, according to the Cremation
Association of North America, up
from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think
the more spiritual role of religion tends to
deemphasize some of the more starkly literal
interpretations of the Resurrection,"
agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative
religion at Harvard. So let us all say
"om...
Source
: Newsweek
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