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1 Religion in America One of the first things we all learned in elementary school was that America is the land of freedom—specifically, that people in the United States are allowed to practice whatever religion they want, because our nation grew out of a quest for religious freedom. This is one of the most enduring and powerful misconceptions about religion in American history: that America was created so that all religions could practice freely. In fact, the Puritans fled England in search of a place where they could practice their own religion without fear or oppression. I suspect—and early religious leaders such as Roger Williams would probably agree—that the Puritans couldn’t have cared less about Catholics, Lutherans, and Quakers, much less Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Whatever the precise contours of the truth behind this American creation myth, one thing is clear: Every facet of American society is shaped, informed, defined, or given its vocabulary and structure by religion. Concepts of religiosity and religious freedom are among those considered our most foundational. Indeed, the First Amendment’s clauses on the free exercise of religion and the separation of church and state are among those most strictly applied by the courts. A Brief History of Religion in America Throughout American history, the experiences of immigration have been shared by new Americans of all national and denominational backgrounds, from Italian Catholics to Russian Jews to Norwegian Lutherans (Gaustad and Schmidt 2002). Indeed, religiosity itself—in addition to its role in cultural maintenance and perpetuation—is central to the formation of an American identity. Although the colonial era is traditionally associated with a single immigrant faith, Puritanism, in truth even that period was more complex: Quakers, Anabaptists , and other sects followed the Puritans in their own search for refuge. 15 VVVVVVVVVVV Each immigrant community brought with it the sociological bundle of ethnic and religious traditions specific to its place of origin. Religion shaped, transformed , unified and divided these and subsequent ethnoreligious communities arriving on American shores. Like earlier immigrants, the post-1965 Indian immigrants brought their religions with them and used those religions as their primary vehicle for the retention and transmission of ethnic culture to the second generation.1 The primary distinctions between the pre- and post-1965 eras involve not the religiosity of the new immigrants but the breadth and quantity of regions, religions, and races represented in the newest immigrant waves. The Indian American story is one of new roots in American soil, because the majority of Indian immigrants did not arrive until after the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 reopened a door slammed shut half a century earlier. The presence not merely of Indians but specifically of married couples was crucial, as the homes and families they established gave these individuals relatively more ties with the U.S. and relatively fewer incentives to return to India permanently. These families built ethnoreligious communities and sent their children into the American school system in substantial numbers. The majority within each Indian American religious group is currently an immigrant and second-generation cohort. However, the pre-1965 religious history of America belongs not only to Christians and Jews; adherents of each religion represented in this study were present on American shores two hundred or more years ago. Each religion— its theology, global history, and encounters with the American milieu—gives unique characteristics to the experiences of its adherents and their place in contemporary American society. Although Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism have all been present throughout the history of the United States, the breadth of their impact on American society and culture has come about since 1965. The signposts on the historical path for Indian Americans include four crucial pieces of federal legislation. Spurred the nativistic sentiment born of the “ethnic” immigration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by particular anti-Asian biases, the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Barred Zone Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, made immigration from Asia illegal. Just before the latter act was made law, Indian Americans were stripped of their U.S. citizenship by the Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. In 1946, the passage of the Luce-Cellar Act granted naturalization rights to Indians and also set an annual quota of one hundred immigrants to arrive from India in 1952, the McCarran Walter Act relaxed some of the immigration restrictions...

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