II

Our Religion and Other Religions

Our religion is the Christian religion.  This is the form of faith which the church in our country is organized to promote.  Ours is a Christian country.

This is not by virtue of any legal establishment of Christianity, for one of the glories of our civilization is that first amendment to our national constitution, which declares that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jews, are just as free to exercise their respective forms of religion in this country as are the Christians.  The government neither forbids nor fosters any kind of faith.

Ours is a Christian country because nearly all the people of the country are, by birth and by choice, identified with the Christian faith.

Still it is true that the freedom extended by our constitution to other forms of faith has been claimed by some of their adherents, and we have in the United States a goodly number of groups representing non-Christian creeds.  Of these the Jews constitute much the largest number, there being, perhaps, six or seven hundred Jewish congregations in all parts of the country.  There are also sixty or seventy Chinese temples, a few groups of Parsees and Mohammedans, a few hundred companies of Spiritualists, and a few scores of societies of Ethical Culture and Free Religion.  All told there are not, probably, among the eighty millions of our people, more than a million and a half who are not either traditionally or nominally Christians.

Our contact with the Orient, on our western frontier, is likely, however, to bring us into close relations, in the near future, with other ancient forms of faith.  The Christian church in modern life will be compelled to meet questions raised by the presence of Buddhists and Confucians and Mohammedans, and to prove its superiority to these religions.  The study of comparative religion has had hitherto purely an academic interest for most of us; in the present century it is likely to become for millions a practical question.  Many a young man and young woman will be forced to ask:  “Why is the religion of my fathers a better religion than that of my Hindu associate or my Japanese classmate?” The answer, if wisely given, may be entirely satisfactory, but the question must not be treated as absurd or irrelevant.  In the face of the great competitions into which it must enter, our religion must be ready to give an intelligent account of itself.

One of the first questions to be asked when we take up this inquiry is, What is the attitude of our religion toward the other religions?  Perhaps it is better to put the question in a concrete form and ask, What is the attitude of the Christian people toward the people of other religions?