THE WORLD'S PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1893: AMERICA'S RELIGIOUS COMING OF AGE

America's first serious encounter with the religious of Asia took place at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Illinois in September of 1893. Americans greeted the Asians amid widespread hopes that the twentieth century would usher in a universal, millennial reign of peace. For many of its participants, the Parliament seemed to be a re-enactment of the day of the Pentecost, a day that Christians celebrate as the founding of their church. For liberals this latter-day Pentecost suggested the dawning of a new era of spiritual cooperation among the religions of the world, perhaps even the establishment of a universal natural religion. For more traditional Christians, it suggested that the conversion of the world was at hand. Asians, although partaking of the buoyant hopes of the age, saw the event in a different light; for them the Parliament was a formal debut for the spirit of New Asia with its revitalized religious traditions.; The controversies during and after the Parliament ultimately turned on the meaning of a fundamental American ideal: the freedom of religion. Did this ideal imply the right of non-Christians to persist in error and untruth or their right to have a free and equal claim to religious truth? After the Parliament, many conservative Christians were deeply troubled by what appeared to them to be a compromise of their faith. Moderates advocated a new tolerance for Asian religions, but remained unchanged in their conviction of the superiority of Christianity. Liberals redoubled their efforts to build an inclusive, but essentially assimilative, universal religion for all the world. Representatives of the Oriental religions began at the same time their own missions to the United States, while a few religious intellectuals began to articulate a new variant of America's ideal of freedom: radical religious pluralism.; The Parliament was a rite of passage for America, a transition from an era when the United States was often considered, however inaccurately, to be a Christian, even a Protestant, nation into an era marked by increasing religious pluralism. America had gone into the Parliament aspiring to be a cosmopolitan nation; after the Parliament a radical kind of cosmopolitan religiosity became a fact of life.