We Are All Hindus Now by Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK

[Guest guest]

We Are All Hindus Now

 

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 15, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

 

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. "