From Buddhists to Jews to Minor Sects, L.A.’s the Place

Once the virtual province of old-line Protestant churches, Southern California has emerged in recent years as the most religiously diverse metropolitan area in the world.

From immigrant Pentecostal churches and suburban mega-churches overflowing with believers to the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere, 600 distinct religious traditions have been identified in the region.

The Los Angeles area, transformed by immigrants and a generation of Americans striking out for new spiritual horizons, now surpasses London and New York in the sheer number of religious beliefs, according to J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara.

“The old L.A. image as the bastion of Midwestern Protestantism is just down the tubes,” said religion professor John Orr of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

Christianity remains the region’s largest religion, and the Roman Catholic Church is far and away the leading faith, with 3 million communicants in Los Angeles County alone. Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians and Mormons continue to add impressive numbers. Most of the oldest Protestant denominations, once the spiritual home of the city’s powerful, have stopped losing members and some are growing modestly.

But there has been a steady rise in non-Christian presence. There are now as many Jews affiliated with synagogues in Los Angeles as there are members of old-line Protestant denominations, Orr noted. Although Muslim population estimates vary, Southern California appears to have the nation’s single-largest concentration of followers of Islam.

Buddhists in Southern California account for 40% of all Buddhists in America, Melton said, adding that the region also has a smaller but “sizable” population of Hindus.

Equally striking, the metropolitan region--often seen as the epitome of a secular city and a trendsetter of worldly values--is becoming more religious overall.

Between 1980 and 1990, Los Angeles County’s population grew by 18.5%, but the number of adherents of all faiths jumped by 57%, according to Glenmary Research Center, an Atlanta-based firm that tracks church growth.

The rise coincides with a surge of immigration from Asia and Latin America, and new interest in spirituality among baby boomers and younger Americans.

Not only were immigrants bringing their religious faith with them, but Westerners such as Kirtan-Singh Khalsa, 41, of West Los Angeles, were leaving their religious roots in search of meaning. Khalsa, who grew up in an Italian Catholic family, gave up his given name and became a Sikh. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion founded in northern India in the 16th century that combines elements of Hinduism and Islam.

“In my life I was looking for something of depth, something that would give me a sense of great meaning and fulfillment,” he said. For him, he said, Sikh religious practices of waking early and engaging in yoga and meditation became a spiritual awakening. “You have an experience,” he said. “Maybe it’s an experience that relates to your destiny or your soul. Maybe not. But for me it did.”

Spiritual Growth

The one-two punch of immigration and religious questing by native-born Americans can mean only one thing for Los Angeles’ future, according to Melton, author of the Encyclopedia of American Religion.

“This is a continuing and growing phenomenon that will lend religion increased influence in the next century,” Melton said.

To drive the streets or to step into these new tabernacles of faith is to experience a megalopolis in search of meaning. One can smell the incense of Hindu altars or hear the peal of church bells, the tinkling of Buddhist prayer wheels and the haunting voice of a muezzin summoning Muslim faithful to prayer.

Tableaux of faith abound. Bearded Orthodox Jews in prayer shawls address the Sublime, spirited gospel choirs sing of sweet Jesus and Roman Catholics light candles before a statue of the city’s namesake--Our Lady Queen of Angels. Practitioners of Santeria, now said to number 100,000 in Los Angeles, use potions, candles and herbs believed to be imbued with magical powers to bring love or punish enemies.

That growing religious diversity is having a broad impact on the culture and on religious institutions.

Responding to new immigrant constituencies as well as growing needs around them, religious groups--many the hubs of immigrant communities--are rallying around neighborhood issues such as crime, housing, poverty, education, jobs and social services.

At the same time, religious diversity is changing the way some congregations see their mission--and in some cases the way they worship. Established Protestant churches in immigrant communities are adopting Catholic rituals. Catholic churches are incorporating cultural observances from across the border. Some congregations are being wired with headsets in the pews to provide simultaneous translations of services for their multilingual members. Meanwhile, the Islamic Center of Southern California is printing brochures in Spanish.

“People are going to look at who the winners and losers are, but the important thing in terms of future religious hegemony is there ain’t gonna be a winner,” Melton said. “Diversity is going to be a big factor.”

Few areas better exemplify the burgeoning religious diversity than the San Gabriel Valley and the Wilshire district west of downtown Los Angeles.

Within a few miles of Mission San Gabriel, which was founded by Father Junipero Serra in 1771, is the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights--probably best known these days as the scene of a questionable Al Gore fund-raiser in 1996, but known to those who track religious developments as the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere.

In Rosemead, Evergreen Baptist Church is a thriving Korean congregation that has achieved national prominence. In places like Monterey Park, Diamond Bar and Walnut, the number of Chinese Christian Buddhists and East Indian Hindus are rising. Not far away, Norwalk has the Radhakrishna Hindu Temple.

Along the Wilshire corridor, students at the Korean Buddhist Cultural Center at Third Street and Serrano Avenue meditate beneath an eight-foot Buddha carved of wood. Across the street at the Spanish-language Iglesia Evangelica Monte Hebron (Mt. Hebron Evangelical Church) enraptured believers raise their arms in praise amid shouted amens.

A few blocks away, at 4th and New Hampshire, Korean Presbyterians sing traditional Christian hymns in a former Jewish synagogue still marked with stars of David, as devout Muslims pass by on their way to noonday prayers at the nearby Islamic Center of Southern California.

Seeds of Diversity

This outpouring of religious diversity should come as no surprise. Los Angeles, for all its secular image, has long had another side, an interior landscape of the soul whose topography shifts and convulses with tremors of belief.

It was here in 1923 that the flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson built the Angelus Temple in Echo Park that became the mother church of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Los Angeles was the birthplace of the Church of the Nazarene in 1908, the Church of Scientology in 1958, and Metropolitan Community Churches in 1968--the first denomination in the world expressly ministering to gay men and lesbians.

In 1906, the multiracial Azusa Street Revival in what is now Little Tokyo ignited a worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism. It was evangelist Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade that catapulted him into the national spotlight. Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family--two of the most influential evangelical organizations--both started here.

As impressive as these historic milestones may be, they paint a religious landscape in hues of the same color. Almost all were Christian. But that dominance is changing.

“The obvious trend,” Melton said, “is the arrival of large communities of the major non-Christian religions.”

Four years ago, for example, the Shura Council of Southern California was organized to help address the common needs and concerns of mosques. From a membership of 35 Islamic mosques in 1994, it has nearly doubled in size, according to its coordinator, Shakeel Syed.

“We can see that the religion is growing,” said Maher Hathout, spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California on Vermont Avenue.

A comprehensive study this year of the Wilshire area by the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture underlines the changes. The study pinpointed 106 churches, synagogues and mosques in a 2.5-square-mile area. Of the 106 congregations, 47 are explicitly Korean, even though Asians of all nationalities, including Koreans, and Pacific Islanders account for just 26% of the neighborhood population. Until the mid-1960s, the area was predominately Anglo, said USC researcher Doug Harrison.

The transformation of congregations, styles of worship and outreach ministries is especially telling at the historic “big steeple” churches along Wilshire Boulevard, among them Wilshire Christian Church, Immanuel Presbyterian Church, St. James Episcopal Church, and Wilshire Methodist Church.

These and other large edifices were the congregations of the city’s rich and influential--oil company executives, military officers, motion picture moguls, real estate barons and powerful politicians.

The triumphal Gothic and Romanesque churches and the massive Moorish dome of Wilshire Boulevard Temple bespoke wealth and privilege. To enter their vaulted sanctuaries or to be moved by the swell of their great pipe organs was to be cloaked in the trappings of transcendence befitting one’s station in life.

Today, the founding “old stock” Euro-American congregations have largely dissipated. Cavernous sanctuaries once filled by thousands commonly draw about a hundred to English-language church services. The growth in many of these churches is in immigrants from Africa, Central and South America and Asia. Churches such as First Baptist Church and Immanuel Presbyterian Church that once turned away African Americans by formal vote or subtle hint now welcome a rainbow of ethnic groups.

“Now I am a member of the largest minority in the congregation, that’s 40% and declining--European Americans,” said the Rev. George Hill, the 81-year-old interim pastor at First Baptist Church at 8th Street and Westmoreland Avenue. Asians account for an additional 20% of members and Latinos from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean make up 29%. “They’re the real growing edge of the church,” Hill said.

At Immanuel Presbyterian, the Rev. William S. Meyer, who retired in 1974, once asserted that as long as prayers were lifted to God from the church’s great Gothic sanctuary, they would be lifted in English only.

He was wrong.

Today, the church’s Spanish-speaking congregation, many from El Salvador and Guatemala, observes the stations of the cross--a ritual usually associated with Roman Catholicism--in which the faithful commemorate the 14 points or stations at which Jesus stopped or fell as he carried the cross to his execution.

“Some churches around here said we’d rather die than catch up--and they have!” said the Rev. Frank Alton, Immanuel’s new senior pastor, who speaks fluent Spanish.

A World View of Worship

On one recent Sunday, while the English-speaking congregation listened to a Latin motet echoing of ancient cloisters, the rhythmic sounds of an electric guitar and synthesizer seeped from a nearby chapel where members of Amanuel Ethiopian Church, a separate evangelical congregation, clapped their hands and danced in the aisle.

Once an upper-crust congregation of 4,800 members where fashionably elegant worshipers were escorted to their pews by ushers in tail coats, Immanuel now houses, in addition to the Ethiopian congregation, the 1,500-member Yul Lin Mun Korean Presbyterian Church, as well as its own Spanish-speaking congregation of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

About half of the English-speaking congregation is Anglo. The other half come from the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, Africa and Latin America.

“It gets a little confusing around here,” longtime Immanuel member Marilyn Moores said good-naturedly.

It isn’t only the cacophony of languages. Worship is changing too.

“In the Spanish-speaking church service they have communion every Sunday,” just like Catholics, said Margarete Johnson, who joined Immanuel Presbyterian Church in 1939. “We have it once a month.”

Blended liturgies that draw from Euro-American, Latino and Korean cultures are used at Wilshire Christian Church when the three separate congregations come together for their monthly joint worship service.

“Worship is probably one of the ongoing big challenges we face,” said the Rev. Charles Elswick, senior pastor. “It takes a lot of sitting down and working together.”

Moreover, historic founding congregations have had to learn when to let go. At the First Church of the Nazarene on 6th Street, the mother church of the denomination, the English-speaking leaders used to call the shots when it came to joint services with the church’s Latino, Filipino and Korean congregations.

While the four congregations worshiped together, the service was decidedly “Euro-American,” said Rev. Ron Benefiel, who recently retired as senior pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene to teach at Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego County. Now a pastoral council with representatives from all four congregations jointly plan services--and hold joint title to the building.

Not all old-line members like the change. “We may have lost some members because they didn’t approve of that,” says Johnson, “but they can go to a church where they have all Caucasians. I don’t think you’ll find very many [here] now.”

On the other hand, some like Keythe Farley, a 33-year-old animator who is white, say that the multiethnic offerings drew him back to church after trying out Eastern religions.

“They had a Nigerian talking drum ensemble that knocked my socks off,” Farley said of one recent Sunday. “Here was this Presbyterian church offering another mode of worship--these Nigerians and the drums and the dancing. It was really just another incredible moment of intense spiritual energy reaching out to spiritually embrace the world.” Before long, Farley said he was dancing too, along with the senior pastor, the Rev. Frank Alton.

Unmistakable Signals of Change

What is unfolding at the Wilshire area churches may be a harbinger of things to come throughout the region.

Sixty of the 100 Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod congregations in metropolitan Los Angeles are termed “ethnic” by the church, representing 17 cultures. The United Methodist Church also reports growing numbers of Latino congregations in the Los Angeles area--15 new since 1977, when there were three--even as the church’s overall numbers decline.

“The demographic realities are all pervasive,” said Michael Mata, director of the Urban Leadership Institute, an affiliate of the Claremont Colleges.

“The realities will tend to be more intensive in the city core, but what we have in the Mid-Wilshire you’ll find in every other community in California. Mid-Wilshire churches and synagogues are providing some new thinking and ways of doing things, but others will have to address these issues one way or the other--and sooner than later.”

Historically, for example, evangelical churches have directed their attention at meeting the needs of their own members as opposed to the needs of those in the immediate vicinity, said Benefiel.

But in changing inner-city neighborhoods, evangelicals are increasingly adopting the Roman Catholic “parish model,” which ministers to the surrounding neighborhood as well as church members, he said.

“The church that I grew up in was a family-oriented church. The church we have today is still family oriented, but we have a day school [and] four different [ethnic] congregations,” said Linda Treece, a lifetime member of the First Church of the Nazarene. “Now the building is busy 20 hours a day, seven days a week, with ministries for the homeless and others. It’s wonderful, but, no, it’s not the same.”

Benefiel’s Nazarene congregation launched new ethnic ministries and became an advocate for poor immigrants who had moved into the neighborhood.

“It nudged us back to a commitment and focus on issues of justice, which for us was definitely a rediscovery of our heritage,” said Benefiel.

There are 1,354 religiously affiliated nonprofit corporations in the city of Los Angeles running food, job training, low-cost housing and other social services, Orr said. Of those, 500 have been started by churches and synagogues to finance and maintain human service ministries at a time when welfare budgets and other government services are shrinking.

Salvador Gomez, 43, a community organizer at Immanuel Presbyterian, who has been in the United States for 18 years, said immigrants trust churches more than the government.

“There is a lot of worry in the city,” said Gomez, a native of El Salvador. “A lot of people don’t know where to go. The churches are the first place. We’re not afraid of the church.”

Religious diversity has also nudged faith groups into working together. The president of the Interreligious Council of Southern California, organized 30 years ago as a Jewish, Catholic and Protestant body, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). She succeeded the group’s first Muslim president. Council members include Buddhists, Muslims, Greek Orthodox, Sikh, Hindu, Mormon and Bahais.

Interreligious dialogue, said Islamic Center spokesman Hathout, has helped during political crisis as well. During times of impasse and controversy among Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims in Los Angeles managed to talk.

“We found an outlet to express our honest opinions, to teach others without resorting to negativism in general,” Hathout said.

To be sure, there have been disappointments. Muslims, for example, have been unable to break into the inner circle of the mainline Council of Religious Leaders, which includes Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Episcopal Bishop Frederick H. Borsch, and other leading Christian and Jewish clergy. There have also been few contacts between Muslims and evangelical and Pentecostal churches, said Salam Al-Maryati, chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Nonetheless, interreligious cooperation in Southern California exists at a level that is “unusual for America,” said Melton.

As a crossroads of creeds and cultures, Southern California is a place where houses of worship are becoming intersections where diversity takes on a human face--in the singing of a hymn, the sharing of a story, or the palpable stillness of silent prayer in the midst of a congregation.

In that sense, how successful--or unsuccessful--faith communities are in accommodating change may be an indicator of how successful the larger society will be.

“It doesn’t mean everyday all the time it’s heaven on Earth here,” said Monsignor John Kane, senior pastor at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Hacienda Heights, whose congregation is evenly divided between Anglos, Hispanics and Asians.

“Simple, everyday things like [communal] meals can be an issue. . . . We are just learning what L.A. has to do on a large scale--how to get along, love differences and kind of find out the good things that various peoples and cultures have to offer.”