We Are All Hindus Now

[Guest guest]

We Are All Hindus Now

 

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 15, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155

 

 

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. "