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Home > Annual Newsletter 2000-01
Religious Pluralism in Southern California
Project Funded by Ford Foundation
With a generous gift of $414,000 from the Ford Foundation (plus $40,000 of cost-sharing funds from UCSB), the Department of Religious Studies will undertake a study of “Religious Pluralism in Southern California” over the next three years. The research project is funded under the Ford Foundation’s program of study on “Globalization and Religious Pluralism,” the purpose of which is to learn more about the changing dynamics of pluralism in a time when the world’s religious populations are encountering one another at a record pace.
Southern California is of course the perfect laboratory for such study. Since 1965 when the immigration laws were liberalized, California has emerged as a place where all the world religions meet one another – and in proportions and mixes unlike anywhere else in the United States. Almost half of all Muslims and 40 percent of all Buddhists in the country reside in California. Latino traditions continue to multiply as migrants from Central and South America move into the state. What happens in California is crucial for the United States as a whole: well over half of all immigrants into this country over the past two years have come from Mexico, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea, India, and the Dominican Republic. Except for those from the latter country, these are all immigrants entering the United States primarily from the West and Southwest. And increasingly, cultural and religious trends originating in the West and Southwest move east and north, reversing the older Euro-American pattern of diffusion.
The aim of the research is to create better scholarly models of religious pluralism in a context of massive transnational movement of peoples and cultures, now possible with modern technologies of transportation and communication. Some of the questions we are exploring are: (1)How is the transnational context altering the process of adaptation and identity construction? (2)What new roles are women playing in creating networks and community-enhancing social support services? (3)What happens to American civil-religious rhetoric and practice as adopted by, and then adapted to, new-immigrant populations? (4)In the absence of a strong, unifying religious framework, how are good relations among religio-ethnic groups in California maintained in the face of international tensions and violence? How do new religious populations lay claim to time, and thus gain public presence by getting their holy days and festivals on school calendars and municipal government work schedules?
Field research will be underway for two years at 6-8 sites. In the final year of the project, a photographic exhibit and a major conference are planned at UCSB. Three research assistants, a project coordinator, and a part-time secretary are funded by the project. Wade Clark Roof and Richard Hecht are the principal investigators. For further information, see description of the project under “Local Resources” on the department’s website.
