New Twists on Religious Traditions, American Style

Japanese tea ceremony teacher Yoshiko Koizumi, elegant in kimono and coiffed hair, spoke of spirits. Generation Xer Brian Kimura hung out in shorts and sunglasses, and talked about software.

But in the American culture’s bubbling brew of freedom and innovation, ancestral spirits and leading-edge software managed to merge in Little Tokyo, at the Zenshuji Soto Mission’s Obon, a Buddhist celebration to honor the departed.

As Buddhist temples around the nation observe Obon this month, what popularly began in Japan as a time to welcome the spirits home now features an eclectic array of nontraditional touches: hula dancers and martial artists, raffles and ring toss.

For most celebrants, the carnival, the community and preserving Japanese culture amid the ethnic mix of America now loom larger than the original ancestral spirits.

The way Obon celebrations have changed is just one example of the powerful influence that American culture exerts on the practice of religion. America’s individualist culture is reshaping both the ways people worship and the institutions in which they do so.

Individualism has opened the way for new practices, challenged people to make clear choices about their commitment and offered space and privacy to worship more freely than in less tolerant societies.

Individualism can threaten traditional faiths with a loss of members as they assimilate into the mainstream. At the same time, the atmosphere of freedom and the ideal of egalitarianism can produce a range of religious innovations.

American Muslims, for example, are experiencing an “intellectual revolution” that aims to “redefine our Islamic tradition” in a setting free from control by the theocracies, monarchies and military regimes of Middle Eastern Muslim nations, said Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

“It’s a revolution against the oppression within the Muslim world against free thinking and personal liberation,” he said.

Among the workshops, speaking tours and interviews sponsored by the Islamic Center of Southern California was a recent event highlighting what he calls the “astonishing” similarities between the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of the first Islamic state in Medina in 623.

California a Cradle for New Movements

The freedom to experiment--especially in California--has over the years spawned many religious and spiritual movements, including the human potential gurus of Esalen and the fast-growing Pentecostal faith, a form of Christianity popularly associated with healing and speaking in tongues after the personal experience of a “baptism of the Holy Spirit.”

The American experience also has reshaped the very mission of many temples, churches, mosques and synagogues. Many not only offer spiritual nourishment, but are community cultural centers and social gathering places that allow people living amid so much diversity to connect with those of similar backgrounds.

“People who wouldn’t have attended religious or cultural gatherings in India will do so here because it’s the only way to meet other people from their country,” said Prema Kurien, a USC assistant professor of sociology.

The development of Hindu group worship is an adaptation born of the necessity to connect people of the same faith, she said, noting that in India, people generally worship in their own homes or visit temples individually or as families.

Kurien said the desire to unite Hindus from diverse states and religious sects in India also has led to a growing ecumenicalism, symbolized by the recent decision by the Malibu Hindu temple to do what would be unusual in India: house two major deities--Shiva, the god of destruction, and Vishnu, the god of sustenance and protection--in the same temple.

The temple, like other religious organizations, offers a range of social, musical and cultural events, and hopes to build a learning center to teach Sanskrit and Vedic literature to youngsters.

Those teachings sometimes depart from tradition in a distinctively American form. Kurien, for example, observed one storyteller who narrated the story of Pativrata, the “perfect wife,” which moralizes that a wife’s devotion to her husband amasses more spiritual power than the saint who extensively meditates and fasts. The storyteller emphasized--and provided examples from other epics-- that duties were mutual: husbands had to listen to wives, provide for and care for them.

“The primary effect of the last 150 years of American culture over religion is the increased individualization and the seeking of personal experience,” said Scott Bartchy, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, which this year sponsored a seminar on religion and culture.

“This greatly reduces a person’s loyalty to an institution. Groups will be less and less able to rely on the momentum of tradition. It will have to be justified, explained and experienced, or people will go off and do something else.”

The Rev. Nobuo Miyaji of the Nishi Honganji Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo would probably agree. In his native Japan, where families might be able to trace their roots--and membership in a particular temple--back centuries, a chief role for priests has been to perform traditional rituals honoring ancestors. Not so in America.

“Americans are more individualistic, so we don’t emphasize ancestors,” Miyaji said. “Individual salvation is more important here.”

For some, the demand for individual effort in America--and especially in Los Angeles--has strengthened their faith.

“It is more challenging to be a Muslim here,” said Maher Hathout, a physician and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California. “Here, it is an open market of ideas and it makes people think again and again about themselves, what they believe in and what they stand for.”

New Environment Challenges Faith

Shirin Karoon Nouh, 39, says that practicing Islam in her native Iran was “second nature. I didn’t even have to think about it.”

But after moving to the United States in 1977 to attend the University of Southern California, it took far more effort to plan her religious activities: a noon slot to pray, fasting during the traditional holy month. At the same time, compared with Switzerland, where she spent her high school years avoiding stares, Los Angeles’ open atmosphere made her choices easy to carry out, she said.

After five years, she decided to switch--in stages--from Western styles to the head coverings and longer, looser dresses of the Islamic tradition. In more than two decades here, she has been harassed only once--by a fellow Iranian, who screamed at her that “people like you” had caused the nation’s shift to an oppressive religious regime.

“I was scared that if I didn’t strengthen my faith, I would lose it because my surroundings were not [Muslim],” Karoon Nouh said. “I had to be there on my own, pushing myself all the time.”

Yet individualism, the loosening of ties to tradition and the freedom here to accept or reject religion can also spell trouble.

Japanese Buddhist religious institutions, for example, report declining memberships, much of it fueled by assimilation and choices once denied to previous generations.

In this way, the Japanese are repeating a phenomenon well-known to other groups, such as American Jews. “We have a major demographic problem, and it’s very much affected by the openness of American culture,” said Elliot Dorff, a Conservative rabbi and philosophy professor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

Both Jewish and Japanese Americans are having fewer children and marrying more outside their groups.

Both groups are declining relative to overall population growth: Japanese Americans once were the largest Asian group in California but have fallen to third.

And many Japanese Americans do not belong to religious organizations. Miyaji, the Nishi Honganji priest, said the church’s membership has steadily declined since the 1940s, dropping nearly 30% in the last 20 years to the current 1,000.

That is a familiar picture, says Dorff, noting that two-thirds of Jews in Los Angeles do not belong to a synagogue. “The way some Jews talk about it is: ‘We survived persecution all these years, but will we survive freedom?’ ” Dorff said.

Bartchy of UCLA frets that individualism has also diminished the sense of community responsibility, reflected in the tradition of barn-raising, once prevalent in Christianity. Nowadays, he said, many people choose a church based on a charismatic minister or good choir, for instance, rather than the desire to help neighbors and build links with their community.

But individualism is here to stay, he says, and demands for a personal religious experience are bound to keep escalating. And that, he says, could reshape even the most traditional faiths.

“Catholic leaders are aware that if they don’t place a stronger emphasis on personal experience, they will continue to lose members in droves,” he said.

Japanese Buddhists grappled with the same problem of how to attract and hold members, especially the young--and, as one solution, came up with the Obon festival. One priest, the Rev. Yoshio Iwanaga, arrived in the United States in 1930 and began traveling throughout the West, introducing and expanding the Obon celebration’s signature folk dances to the American children of the Issei pioneers as a way to preserve and pass on Japanese culture, according to Buddhist experts.

The carnival was brought in after World War II as a way to raise money and rebuild temples, Miyaji said--but not all Buddhists are happy about it.

“That was really damaging to Obon. [The celebration] became a come-on to buy something and moved away from its religious roots,” said the Rev. Masao Kodani of the Senshin Buddhist Church in Los Angeles, which does not stage a carnival.

For 25-year-old Generation Xer Kimura, the carnival may admittedly be about a bit of commercialism: at his temple’s event, he displayed photo software sold by the company where he works. But for him and his friends, it is more about holding together an increasingly fragmented community.

“Most of us are going to college. Our schedules are really busy and it’s hard to see each other,” said Kimura’s younger brother, Tracy, a UCLA math major. “Obon is a time to see them . . . [and] to pay back our elders for all they gave to us.”