Chapter 17
Muslims, Jews, Mormons, and
More
When the United States and its allies declared war on a predominantly Muslim nation in January of 1991, a spate of books and articles about the mysterious religion of Islam hit the bookstores and newstands almost overnight. It was as if America had discovered for the first time a world faith of 900 million members.
The roots of this basically anti-Western and anti-Christian religion go back to a cave at the foot of Mount Hira near Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia. There, in A.D. 610, Ibn Abd Allah had a vision, and the prophet-to-be, Muhammad, began to preach the word of Allah and transcribe the first verses of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.
"As a result, this man and his work transformed the lives of millions of people and affected significantly the history of the modern world," writes Michael Youssef in America, Oil, and the Islamic Mind.1
The bad image evoked by Saddam Hussein in his exploitation of the Muslim faith for his own perverted ends will largely be forgotten or forgiven, slowing the growth of Islam in the United States only momentarily.
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Islamic mosques are being built by the hundreds throughout the U.S. and Islamic teachings are being propagated vigorously. The American Council of Mosques was preparing the way in 1990 for a nationwide missionary crusade. And Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries are spending tens of millions of dollars in community development and other projects in America in order to help Muslim communities expand.2
Lawud Assad, president of the Council of Mosques of the United States, says there are more than 1,000 Muslim community organizations in his group alone, some worshiping in basements and other makeshift places.
Declared Gutbi E. Ahmed, director of the Moslem World League: "We are at a new stage in which we cease to be a religion on the margins, but [are] a religion of American Life, a major interfaith group. Muslims are "now ready," Ahmed said, "to interact with the rest of the American people, particularly in relation to its religious communities."3
Black Muslims
Nowhere are the Muslims edging more fully into American life than in the black community. Many there, says Youssef, "are rejecting values and ideals they consider outgrowths of a hypocritical white Christian society."4
"Islam is particularly attractive to young black males," asserts C. Eric Lincoln. "Many . . . see Christianity as a racist religion. And they're looking for an alternative to the black church of their mothers and fathers . . . The black church is not yet aware of this potential threat."5
Lincoln estimates that as many as 1 million of America's Muslims are black. The militant Nation of Islam, led by iconoclastic black Muslim Louis Farrakhan, appeals to many black youths. The group evokes a strong image of male assertiveness, black supremacy, and ramrod discipline. But Lincoln and others think the enduring impact on blacks will not come from "cult-type" Muslims but from the
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orthodox "black Muslims" (a phrase coined by C. Eric Lincoln) who follow the main body of worldwide Islamic teaching.
"This trend will intensify" during the 1990s, Lincoln thinks, "and the Christian black church will have to look to its laurels."6
Bolstered by immigration of committed Muslims and by younger American-born converts, Islam will be a factor in black politics in the next century, Lincoln says.
Yet, as Islam moves into the mainstream of American religion though increased numbers, recognition, and interfaith cooperation, Muslims will remain a heterogeneous group, often with little in common. The devout will continue to avoid pork, abstain from liquor, fast during the month of Ramadan, pay the "alms-tax," and pray five times daily. But, like Christianity, Islam is divided into splinters and sects. And, like other religions, it has extremist fanatics as well as moderate ecumenists.
Still Kosher to Be Kosher
Some Jews are worried that a great rise of Islam in the United States will pose a formidable challenge to Jews because the Koran makes it clear that Islam is to triumph over Christianity and Judaism.7
As a sign of the new times, however, American Jewish and Christian leaders, on March 1, 1991, issued a call to cease all verbal abuse and violence against Arab-Americans, Muslims, and their houses of worship.8
"Islam hasn't had the same tradition of pluralism that Christianity has had," observed Jonathan Farna, professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. "So we're in for a period of interreligious tension in America." Jews will have to deal with Muslim groups that "begin from a point of hostility to Judaism," Farna explained.9
Nor is Farna sanguine about Jewish prospects in a heterogeneous America of the 1990s.
Sometime this decade, Islam may surpass Judaism as the nation's largest minority religion. The rapidly expanding numbers of Muslims will eclipse the 2 percent of Americans who are Jews, a proportion
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that has held steady since the early 1970s, according to Gallup and Castelli.10 The 5.9 million members of Jewish religious organizations listed in the 1990 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches were a slight decline from the previous year's figures.11
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of Chicago, a bridge-builder between the Jewish and Christian communities, foresees divisions between the major branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist). These divisions will widen during the decade, he fears. The rifts will involve technical questions, like "who is a Jew?" Will standards of cooperation be developed to define who is a Jew and who has religious authority? Eckstein asks.
We're going to have to find new ways to help Jews define what it means to be a Jew . . . How to live in this world without melting down into some pot of stew . . . conveying values that we feel are distinctive without becoming an island unto ourselves. These are key questions for Jews of the 1990s.12
Jewish leaders are also concerned about the low birth and conversion rates among Jews. And they are disturbed by low rates of attendance at religious services and high rates of marriage to non-Jews. Brooklyn College sociologist Egon Mayer's extensive studies show that during the last two decades, fewer than half of Jews under forty married another Jew.13 For these reasons, more than a few Jewish leaders are into a "survivalism" mode, seeking to confront these serious losses to assimilation, intermarriage, and indifference.
But Steven Bayme, director of Jewish Communal Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, says the challenge to today's Jewish leaders "is to move beyond survivalism; to continue to guard against threats to Jewish interests but also to develop the content of Jewish life; to form a Jewish community so compellingly attractive that others will wish to join it."14
Eckstein is among Jewish leaders who are optimistic about what they see as a nascent resurgence of Jewish spirituality: "a faith-oriented identity."
Along with the conservative growth trend within Protestantism,
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there is a concomitant swing among Jews who grew up in secular or alienated homes to return to their religious roots. This "re-Jew-venation" is particularly strong within the Baal Tshuvah (a person who repents or returns) movement.
"I see this new fresh blood coming into Jewish life — Jews who are recouping their Jewish identity or who are coming into it through conversion," said Eckstein. "They are providing a fresh basis for the next decade or two . . . [giving] a fresh leadership and appreciation to Judaism."15
Speaking about New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, fountainhead of the nation's conservative Judaism and "an institution that always prided itself on its intellectual vigor and steered clear of the mystical side of religion," Rabbi Neil Gillman says "we can now talk of what everybody calls 'spirituality.' I don't know what the word means, but to students today it means they don't want to be Jews and rabbis just for the rituals, just for symbolism, but in order to come closer to God."16
Jewish Baby Boomers
Some Jewish baby boomers are returning to an orthodox religion of dietary practices, daily prayers, and Scripture reading after experimenting with and rejecting other lifestyles. There's been a surge in kosher food sales, says Steve Ostrow, who published a guide to 850 kosher restaurants in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Queens College sociologist Steven Cohen estimates that about 10 percent of U.S. Jews are Orthodox, and kosher-keeping kitchens number somewhere between 500,000 and 1.8 million, depending on who's defining kosher.17
Despite contentions of Cohen and Gillman that Jews across the religious spectrum feel more intensely Jewish, Newsweek religion editor Ken Woodward concludes that Jews have yet to recover 70 percent of their "lost" baby-boomer generation.18
So what will American Judaism of the 21st century be like, already?
Farna predicts American Jewry will be "one of the great centers of the Jewish diaspora." By that he means that Jews will become isolated in several major population centers — North America,
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Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and Israel — with larger and larger pockets having no Jews at all.
"Judaism will become more of a regional religion," he summarized. "A major change that we really haven't thought of."
Maybe we should.
Mormon Magnification
Like the Jews, the Mormons also hold down a 2 percent share of the U.S. population. But there is hardly a place in this country — or abroad, for that matter — where members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have not trod. Although they are still based predominantly in the western states, their worldwide missionary movement has had startling penetration in the last generation.
At the end of 1989, there were 7.3 million Mormons in the world; by early 1991 the number had increased to about 7.7 million, according to communications spokesman Jerry Cahill in Salt Lake City. At the end of 1989, U.S. Mormon membership stood at 4,175,000 a significant increase since reaching the 1 million mark in 1950.19 (Webmaster's note: by mid-2010, LDS worldwide membership was 14 million).
In 1989 alone "the church baptized 393,940 people into the faith, or an average of 1,082 every day!"20
What has made the LDS explode? According to Timothy J. Chandler, "the two biggest reasons for Mormonism's success have been their identification of themselves as a culture, and their remarkable missionary program. The first of these accounts for their success in the United States, and the second explains the millions of converts in foreign countries."21
Demographic considerations also have played a role in this religion's remarkable magnification. These include a higher proportion of Mormon women than men; the tendency to marry young and have an average of four children (about twice the national average); the relatively young average age of LDS church members and converts; and longevity factors attributed to "clean living."
Further, the Mormon Church is known for the deep loyalty of its members, its stress upon family life, and abstinence from intoxicants.22
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It seems certain that more and more Mormons will be in the race toward 2001.
The Jehovah's Witnesses are another rapidly growing American-bred religious group. The Witnesses' aggressive door-to-door missionary zeal, biblical literalism, heavy proselytism among Latinos, and an unyielding certainty that theirs is the only true faith are among the reasons for its 10 percent growth to 804,600 between 1985 and 1988.23
Hindus, Buddhists, and Baha'is
Several world religions of Eastern origin are making gains during the 1990s as well.
Hindus comprise 690 million of the world population and their growth rate is about 2 percent a year. According to Tom Sine, their ranks will reach 859 million by the dawn of the millennium.24 In 1990, there were about a half million Hindus in the United States.25
Naisbitt and Aburdene say there are more than forty Hindu temples and 500 Hindu religious organizations in the United States.26
Because of immigration from Asian countries, a current fascination with Eastern mysticism among many of this country's spiritual seekers, and the influence of the New Age movement, Hinduism is likely to maintain a steady growth into the next century.
The same is true for Buddhism.
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Worldwide, there are an estimated 320 million Buddhists. With a projected growth rate of 1.7 percent annually, they should top 359 million by 2001; an increasing number will reside in the West.27
Baha'i, an eclectic and independent world faith whose followers revere 19th-century prophet-founder Baha'u'llah of Persia, has an estimated membership of 4 million worldwide. Teaching "the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, the oneness of mankind," and that religious truth is relative, Baha'i's estimated 110,000 American followers gather in several thousand local houses of worship.28
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are turning to alternative altars. Many seekers are on quasi-spiritual quests representative of the non-traditional beliefs our nation will embrace in the coming century.
