World’s Parliament of Religions

Sources

Gathering. The liberal religious temper of the 1880s and early 1890s was reflected in a meeting of the leaders of all the world’s major religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The World’s Parliament of Religions was inspired by Charles C. Bonney, a Chicago attorney, and organized by John Henry Barrows, pastor of Chicago’s First Presbyterian Church. They promoted the event as an unparalleled opportunity for ecumenical discussion, and it attracted hundreds of delegates and thousands of observers to solemn meetings in the “White City” fairgrounds during September 1893. Many Christian religious groups were represented, as were small but unprecedented delegations of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Shintoists, Confucians, Taoists, and Jains.

Impact. The parliament was an essentially liberal project—conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews all objected vigorously to a meeting that seemed to place all religions on an equal plane. Indeed, the conference’s motto, “Have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us?,” did suggest the movement of liberal Protestantism toward broad toleration of non-Christian religious groups. Discussion at the parliament tended to focus on the commonalities, rather than the differences, between the world’s religions, which tended to reinforce the notion of the equality, or at least the broadly shared fundamental character of world religions. Barrows and other Protestant organizers simply assumed that open discussion would show that Christianity was the most highly evolved of all the world’s religions and that other religions were evolving toward the spiritual and ethical norms of liberal Protestantism. In fact, the event served largely to highlight and lend legitimacy to non-Christian religion. The parliament attracted several charismatic and well-trained spokesman for Asian religions, who were the first representatives of these traditions ever to speak before American audiences. As an unintended consequence the parliament produced several celebrities, most notably the Hindu reformer Swami Vivekenanda and the Buddhist Angarika Dharmapala, both of whom lectured widely in the United States after the parliament and established convert groups.

Sources

Richard H. Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);

Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).