Religions evolve and accommodate as they migrate around the globe. What works in one time and place may not in another for a host of cultural and political reasons, forcing adjustments that facilitate their establishment or survival.
Historical examples abound. Not the least of which are the monumental transformations that occurred within early Christianity as it migrated across the Roman world from the Levant, and within early Islam as it spread from the Arabian Peninsula west to the Atlantic coast and east across Asia.
Here are two more recent examples of religious accommodation.
The first occurred in the late 19th Century when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a corporate decision to jettison its public practice of polygamous marriage to smooth the way for Utah’s full acceptance into the expanding United States. This despite plural marriage remaining part of the church’s scriptural doctrine to this day. The practice, though illegal under secular law, is still followed by some breakaway Mormon sects.
The second example was the melding of Roman Catholicism and West African tribal beliefs in the Caribbean and South America by Black slaves and their descendants. This gave rise to syncretic faiths such as Santeria and Voodoo. They persist today side by side with the church in ways that would scandalize the hierarchy, were it happening on a similar scale in the United States.
It’s not unusual for Mass-going Cuban, Haitian and Brazilian Catholics to also draw meaning from West African-derived rituals that to outsiders might appear hard to reconcile with core church beliefs.
A contemporary religious travel story is the Westernization of Asian Buddhism. Tricycle, a leading American Buddhist publication, deconstructed the phenomenon in its Spring 2021 issue.
The piece is well worth the time of journalists interested in moving beyond today’s often superficial religion headlines. To understand a group’s sociology is to better understand why members act as they do in the public square, journalism’s primary purview.
I suggest you view the Tricycle essay — which weighs in at more than 3,600 words — as a sort of crash course in the adaptation of religions to new circumstances. This will help reporters spot stories in the communities served by their newsrooms.
The report concludes that congruence, or agreement, and relevance, or importance to immediate concerns, are at the core of which aspects of a religion readily transfer across time and space.
Westerners, for example, care relatively little about the intricacies of ancient Buddhist concepts concerning rebirth and reincarnation. The details are so foreign to their cultural (read, Abrahamic) understanding as to be incongruent, or generally irrelevant to their immediate needs.
What are those needs? To gain high-level psychological and philosophical skills, often redefined as spirituality, that help them better navigate an increasingly complex and uncertain world.
Here’s a key excerpt from the piece:
What kinds of issues bring Westerners to Buddhism? Some are our personal litanies of woes, frustrations, anxieties, disappointments, failures, and losses. People want to suffer less and hope to gain instead some sense of ease and equanimity. Other issues reflect ongoing fault lines in our common social heritage. Western culture faces a set of interrelated crises that are the consequences of modernity. The signs of these crises are evident in a number of ways: (1) science’s clockwork view of the universe can’t account for consciousness, meaning, purpose, and value; (2) the decline of mainstream religions has left a spiritual void; (3) science and technology evolve faster than ethics; (4) hyper-capitalism drives all values—except money—from the workplace, the marketplace, and the public sphere; (5) modernity alienates us from Nature; (6) the relentless pace of technological change destabilizes social structures; (7) hyper-individualism undermines our deep connection to kin and community; and (8) the confluence of these trends puts our survival as a species at risk.
The resolution of these crises requires a change in consciousness that will restore our fundamental sense of connection to ourselves, Nature, and all beings; help us creatively cope with change and impermanence; and reaffirm meaning and value. Buddhist themes that are relevant to such a change in consciousness are the themes that tend to be emphasized.
The Tricycle article goes on to explain how European colonization began to bend Asian Buddhism toward the western paradigm even before the religion itself came to the West. Protestant ideas about group polity in particular, it notes, were injected into traditional Asian settings via European colonization and remain visible until today.
(While not mentioned in the article, Buddhist Churches of America, headquartered in San Francisco and with a largely Japanese-American membership, is a prime example of this East-West structural blending — at least on the West Coast and in Hawaii. However, virtually every American region has some kind of Buddhist sangha, or group, attracting primarily non-Asian practitioners.)
The piece also covers similarities in thought between various Buddhist schools and a broad swath of Western thinkers — including Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. These intellectual similarities, it emphasizes, helped grease the way for Buddhist thought’s growth among Westerners.
The author, judging by his name, appears to be a convert to Zen Buddhism from a Jewish background. He’s also identified as a psychologist. Not unexpectedly, his essay — running under the headline, “The best possible life: As the dharma [Buddhist teachings] grows in the West, it will be shaped by our rooted ideas about human flourishing” — is highly sympathetic toward Buddhism’s worldview.
I realize that at least some GetReligion readers with a more traditional monotheistic, Christian or Abrahamic outlook will find the writer’s enthusiasm for his chosen path to be off putting. Don’t let that keep you from reading the article in its entirety.
This is not about proselytization.
It’s about continuing education for journalists and news consumers. And that, to my way of thinking, is at the core of the never-ending journalistic quest to stay ahead of the story curve.