The Religions Next Door What We Need to Know About Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam— and What Reporters Are Missing by Marvin Olasky

OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page i The Religions Next Door What we need to know about Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam— and what reporters are missing by Marvin Olasky to be published September 1, 2004 by Broadman & Holman Publishers Nashville, Tennessee 2d pages <official half-title page to come> OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page ii Other Books by Marvin Olasky On Fighting Poverty Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America Renewing American Compassion: How Compassion for the Needy Can Turn Ordinary Citizens into Heroes The Tragedy of American Compassion Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy More Than Kindness (with Susan Olasky) On American History The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America Philanthropically Correct: The Story of the Council on Foundations Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America Corporate Public Relations: A New Historical Perspective On Journalism Telling the Truth: How to Revitalize Christian Journalism Central Ideas in the Development of American Journalism The Press and Abortion, 1838–1988 Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media On Religion and Society Standing for Christ in a Modern Babylon Whirled Views (with Joel Belz) Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration (with Herbert Schlossberg) OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page iii <official title page to come> OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page iv Copyright © 2004 by Marvin Olasky All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 0–8054–3143–8 Published by Broadman & Holman Publishers Nashville, Tennessee Dewey Decimal Classification: 291 Subject Heading: RELIGIONS CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER RELIGIONS Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977; used by permission. Quotations marked NKJV are from the New King James Version, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page v To Susan v OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page vi OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Judaism’s Rules 7 Hermits in a Shopping Mall 31 Hinduism’s Flow 57 Untouchable Problem 79 Buddhism’s Detachment 99 The Japanese Experience 123 Islam and Attachment 145 Nonattachment to Grace 171 Missing the Story 195 How to Do Better 221 vii OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page viii OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page ix Acknowledgments oward and Roberta Ahmanson, friends for over fifteen Hyears, made it possible for me to write this book and to research Buddhism and Hinduism in Japan, India, and Cambodia. Samuel and Prema Sunder Raj and their children, Honda Yoshinari and his family, and David Willis were among those who showed hospitality on the other side of the world. University of Texas students who have taken my Journalism and Religion course over the past five years ran across many of the newspaper stories I quote in chapters 9 and 10, and asked searching questions. Bits and pieces of many of the chapters have appeared in issues of World, ably led as always by publisher Joel Belz. The one human constant through all my adult life, through war and sadness, through boom and bust, for twenty-eight years of marriage, has been not baseball (although it’s a strong con- tender) but my wife Susan. Even when I pray erratically, I thank God for her and for Pete, David, Daniel, and Benjamin, our four wonderful sons. ix OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page x OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page 1 Introduction ames Sire’s fine book The Universe Next Door, first pub- Jlished in 1976, was a response to a generation’s run from religion. Many students brought up in mainline churches were finding preaching meaningless. It seemed that the demise of Christianity predicted by Clarence Darrow in 1925, after his big oratorical victory at Tennessee’s “monkey trial,” was not far off. Judging by the drift on university campuses, biblically faithful churches would soon be rare. Propelled by swirling winds, bright students were drifting toward faithless beliefs such as—to cite the subjects of three of Sire’s chapters—naturalism, nihilism, and existentialism. By the turn of the millennium, though, much had changed. Despite decades of mockery by media and acade- mia leaders, Christianity was retaining some grip on 85 per- cent of Americans. For many that grip was tenuous, but with two generations educated largely from the perspective that God has nothing to do with history, literature, biology, or other subjects, surveys still showed an overwhelming major- ity of Americans believing that we owe our existence to God, not time plus chance. What’s more, within Christianity 1 OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page 2 The Religions Next Door adults were moving from Bible-doubting to Bible-believing churches in a wave so unmistakable that even the New York Times acknowledged in a headline, “Conservative Churches Grew Fastest in 1990’s.” What about the young, the early twenty-first-century equivalent of the students Sire reached in the 1970s? Colleen Carroll’s recent book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy notes that many people in their twenties and thirties want to be able to profess a faith. Those who have grown up in homes broken by divorce and “a feeling of being saturated by greed, sex, and all the deca- dent forces in our culture” are harkening to churches where they don’t have to say creeds with their fingers crossed. During two decades of teaching at the University of Texas, I’ve seen some of that among my own students. Curiously, few journalists have written about the way Christianity has survived and even thrived. Imagine a person sentenced to death by numerous tribunals and then shot by a firing squad, hanged by the neck until dead, fried on an electric chair, poked with a lethal injection, and guillotined. What if after all that he was still alive and even able to pick up his head and reattach it to his neck? Wouldn’t that be the story of the year? Yet the big story of Christian endurance in the last quarter of the twentieth century was right in front of thousands of American journalists, and virtually all missed it. Reporters have also missed most of the international story. In the largest country geographically, the Soviet government spent most of the twentieth century teaching atheism to schoolchildren and persecuting adults who would not 2 OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page 3 Introduction go along. Nevertheless, at century’s end Christianity was roaring back in Russia and the Ukraine. In the biggest country by population, fifty years of force-feeding atheism to adults and children could not wipe out theistic yearnings. At the end of the century Christianity was stronger than ever in China, despite repeated government efforts to wipe it out. Some bright students are concluding that the grass is greener in theological yards that once were far away but are now next door. Buddhism is attracting those turned on by the mythology of zen or the radiance of the Dalai Lama and his struggle against oppression. Hinduism has sunk deep roots since the time a generation ago when Hari Krishna devotees first danced along the Boston Common. Judaism, particularly in its Orthodox variety, is attracting some Jews who were highly secularized and others as well. As we will see, each of these religions generally receives more favorable press coverage than that offered concerning Christianity. Islam also is growing, helped along by the surprisingly favorable treatment accorded it in the press and in schools. A recent report from the American Textbook Council entitled “Islam and the Textbooks” concluded that “on significant Islam-related subjects, textbooks omit, flatter, embellish and resort to happy talk, suspending criticism or harsh judg- ments that would raise provocative or even alarming questions.” For example, the primary historical meaning of jihad—according to Bernard Lewis, the Princeton professor emeritus who is America’s most distinguished scholar of Islam—has been the requirement “to bring the whole world under Islamic law.” Yet the most-used world history text, 3 OlaskyReligions2ds.qxd 4/23/04 4:27 PM Page 4 The Religions Next Door Prentice Hall’s Connections to Today, merely tells students that jihad is an “effort in God’s service” such as an “inner struggle to achieve spiritual peace.” The number of Hindus in America has increased during the past thirty years from 100,000 to almost a million. The number of Buddhists has similarly climbed, and perhaps five million Muslims now live in the United States, up from about 800,000 three decades ago; America may have almost as many Muslims as Jews. Religions that once were exotic in America are now next door, and pressures to clothe “the naked public square” will now come from not only conservative Christians but from others as well. We have come out of an era, unusual in the history of the world, where many intellectual leaders boasted of nakedness. I grew up in that era and for a while dressed up in nakedness.

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