Professor Plots a Varied Religious Landscape

Diana Eck’s office at Harvard University attempts to bring perspective to the changing religious makeup of America.

In color-coded file folders are notes about the nation’s 1,100 mosques and Islamic centers, 1,500 Buddhist centers and 800 Hindu temples. The shelves are lined with three-ring notebooks stuffed with research about Baha’i, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.

Eck is a professor of comparative religion and director of the Pluralism Project, a three-year effort to inventory and examine American religious life. Each summer, Harvard students fan out across the country and collect the kind of information the U.S. Census doesn’t tally.

They have studied Cambodians in California, Muslims in Massachusetts, Hindus in Houston and religious diversity in Denver.

“Even a city like Denver has a religious landscape that most people in Denver don’t know about,” Eck said.

In fact, the transformation has been invisible in many places.

“There’s a certain amount of concern about acceptance,” Eck said. “But some of it is a practical matter: A Muslim group will buy a former school and use the gymnasium as the prayer room, so you drive by and don’t notice it.”

In addition to indexing these religions, the project ultimately will attempt to answer how they will change America--and how being in America changes them.

Some signs are evident. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims have started religious summer camps, earlier pioneered by Jews. Many also have pieced together national advocacy organizations.

One, the Islamic Society of North America, says there are 8 million Muslims. Other estimates put the number at 1.4 million. Eck said 5 million is a reliable figure.

“This is a very sensitive issue, to some extent,” she said. “What if there are more Muslims than Jews in the United States, for example? That could have very serious significance.”

The heavy influx of religions from outside the Judeo-Christian culture started with the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated national origin quotas. Since then, the number of Asian-Americans has skyrocketed from 1 million to 7.3 million. Immigrants from the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and eastern Europe also flock to the United States.