Title: New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life
Author: Bruce B. Lawrence
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231115202
Pro:
• Addresses important topics involving racism, religion, and culture
Con:
• Spends too much time with criticizing others
• Criticisms of others are not always fair
Description:
• Exploration of how new minority religions are fitting in with American society
• Discussion of how American society is affected by Asian religions
• Argues that America must come to a new understanding of religion and culture
These are very weighty questions for the future of the United States and its relationship with religion, making them an interesting topic for a recent book by Bruce B. Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life. Lawrence, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of Religion and chair of the department of religion at Duke University, argues that the relationship between new religions and American society is heavily conditioned by racial prejudices and class antagonisms. Muslims in particular are perceived as threatening to the American way of life:
- "Muslims will come to epitomize what Anglo-Americans most fear about an expanding immigrant community: they will have different values, alternative allegiances; they will not conform; they will obstruct social harmony and diminish the collective good. ...the very accent on Islam will only confirm what many flag-waving Americans have already decided: they must be wary of all foreigners but especially those who look like Arabs, those who can be identified as Muslims."
Unfortunately, rather than simply making a case for his position, Lawrence spends an awful lot of time attacking others with different ideas about the relationship between culture, religion, and civilization. One in particular, Samuel Huntington, is referred to as a "provincial patriot parading as a New Age cold warrior," hardly the sort of description appropriate to an academic text.
Lawrence's criticisms might be more convincing and relevant if they didn't over-simplify and thereby misrepresent Huntington's position. According to Lawrence, Huntington ignores the "internal diversity" of civilizations in order to square them off against each other. In fact, Huntington does acknowledge that diversity and recognizes that there can be many serious conflicts within a civilization - however, Huntington argues that those differences tend to be set aside when there appears to be a threat from outside.
Lawrence's own thesis about the role of racial prejudice in the shaping of American attitudes toward immigrants suffers from his own apparent prejudice. He seems to accept uncritically the claim by the Institute of Islamic Information and Education that "atheists, secularlists, [and] agnostics" have worked to abet the ignorance of Islam and Muslims (deliberately, it seems) due to their hostility towards Islam.
I had hoped to read a book about the ways in which new immigrants with minority religions were treated in America and dealt with American culture. Occasionally I was rewarded by interesting information and penetrating insights. Often, however, it is difficult to make those discoveries as they were lost in a sea of convoluted and, at times, seemingly irrelevant text. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to the average reader; it seems much more geared to an academic audience, but I would hesitate to recommend it to students, as well.
