External Forces Shaping Minority Traditions

Due to slavery and massive waves of immigration, America has become the most religiously and culturally diverse nation. Although America has many different races and religions, our country was founded on the values of the Protestants.  This idea of public Protestantism is embedded in America’s culture and government, providing the nation with Protestant values and ideas like moralism and voluntaryism.  Although public Protestantism has shaped this nation in a positive way, it has created an ideal that Protestantism is the norm in America.  Due to this, people began identifying foreign people with certain religious beliefs.  People from the Middle East were immediately thought as Muslim, people from China were thought of as Buddhist, and people from India were assumed to be Hindu. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition showcased foreign traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in a stereotypical way, which shaped the way American society viewed these religions.

When immigrants arrived in America, they brought with them their own religious values and practices. The immigrants who came to America in large waves found it easy for their practices to be accepted in society because there were a lot of them.  As Hutchinson writes in Religious Pluralism in America, tolerance usually isn’t accepted until the outside group has big enough numbers.¹  Because of this, people like the Irish Catholics assimilated into society with ease, but religions like Hinduism and Buddhism that had a small amount of people had a lot of trouble integrating into society.  In 1893, The World’s Columbian Exposition took place in Chicago to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival. The World’s Columbian Exposition “revealed white, mainstream America’s preferred image of itself, but the Midway Plaisance, a living ethnographic display that formed a second great part of the Exposition, revealed America’s image of the rest of the world.”² The images of the rest of the world that America portrayed were based on racial and religious stereotypes.  In the Chinese part of the Exposition, there were Buddhist paintings, a Confucian play, and everyone was dressed in traditional clothes.³  Since this was a majority of Americans first time seeing these traditions, this painted stereotypical pictures in the minds of the American people.  They now had this idea that all Asian people were Buddhist and dressed in the traditional clothes that were worn at the Exposition.  Because there were not large groups of people from Asia or the Middle East until the Immigration Act of 1965, these groups did not have the chance to reverse these stereotypical ideas in Americans minds.

The Colombian Exposition had the effect because the religions of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism have become associated with the appearance of the “other.”  This means that Americans identify people who are Middle East with being Muslim and people that are Indian with being Hindu.  Joshi argues in The Racialization of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in the United States, that there is an association with the Asian look and the religious practices of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism.  Joshi asserts that this generalization gives ideas of “otherness” when compared to the standard of Protestant America.⁴  Due to this racialization of religion, people in America began thinking of these religions as foreign and illegitimate.  Although a lot of these stereotypes went away after the Immigration Act of 1965, stereotypes still subtly occur in American culture. In The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture, Iwamura discusses how America has popularized the Oriental Monk in pop culture.  She says “we have encountered him under different names and guises: as Mahatma Gandhi… as Mr. Miyaga in the Karate Kid.”⁵ Although American culture has popularized this “other” culture in a positive light, they are still making stereotypes of the monk and the religion of the monk.

Before the Immigration Act of 1965, there were few people with diverse religious traditions in the United States.  In 1893 when the World’s Columbian Exposition took place, Americans developed stereotypical visions of the religious tradtions of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  Since there was not a huge representation of these people in America, these stereotypes continued to occur in American culture.  A lot of these stereotypes have been diffused throughout time, but some of these notions of “otherness” still exist within pop culture today.

¹ William Hutchinson, Just Behave Yourself: Pluralism as Selective Tolerance, (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2003), 32.

² Richard Seager, The Midway Plaisance and The Magic of the White City, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 24.

³ Seager, 26.

⁴ Khyati Joshi, The Racialization of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in the United States , (Sammartino School of Education, Fairleigh Dickson University, 2006), 212.

⁵ Jane Iwamura, The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture, (California: UC Press, 2000), 26.