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Priests circle the temple with water to be used in the consecration ceremony, the "mahakumbhabhishekam," in May 1990.

The diversity of New Hampshire Avenue, however, is not simply a curiosity for a Sunday drive. What it represents has profound implications for every aspect of American public life. What is happening to America as all of us begin to renegotiate the "we" of "We, the people"? That "we" in the United States is increasingly complex, not only culturally and racially, but also religiously. What will this religious diversity mean for American electoral politics, for the continuing interpretation of "church-state" issues by the Supreme Court, for American public education and the controversies of school boards, for hospitals and health-care programs with an increasingly diverse patient population, and for colleges and universities with an increasingly multireligious student body? While many Americans are only dimly aware of the changing religious landscape, the issues this new diversity has raised are already on the agenda of virtually every public institution, including Harvard.

New Hampshire Avenue dramatizes the new diversity, but building a pluralist society from that diversity is no easy matter in a world in which the "politics of identity" is busy minting our identities in smaller and smaller coins, and in a world in which religious markers of identity are often presumed to be the most divisive of all differences. American public debate is charged with the power of these issues. Some say such a multicultural and multireligious society is impossible. Their voices have been raised at each and every stage of American immigration-too many Catholics, too many Jews, too many Chinese and Japanese. Those voices are present today, and some of the most extreme have called for the repeal of the 1965 immigration act. Others have insisted there is simply too much pluribus and not enough unum. And still others would insist that this is a secular society, so why make a point of looking at religious differences at all?

But to ascertain how we-all of us-are doing in this new struggle for America's soul, we have to look not only at race, not only at ethnicity, but at religion. The history of prejudice and stereotype demonstrates that religious insignia and institutions often become key markers of "difference." The persistent attacks on synagogues and Jewish graveyards provide ample testimony to the tactics of hatred. So does the long and continuing history of racist attacks on black churches. Religious insignia, religious markers of identity, and religious institutions come to stand in a public way for the very heart of the community and often become the most visible targets for bigotry and violence.

And so it is as America's new immigrants become increasingly visible as religious minorities. In New Jersey, the dot or bindi on the forehead, worn by many Hindu women, stood for the strangeness of the whole Indian immigrant community in the eyes of a racist group calling themselves the "Dotbusters." Those who beat Navroze Mody to death in 1987, shouting "Hindu, Hindu, Hindu," did not know or care whether he was a Hindu, but conflated race, religion, and culture in one cry of hatred.

The Pluralism Project has documented the ways in which today's minority religious communities have experienced the violence of attacks on their visible religious institutions. In February 1983, for example, vandals broke into the newly constructed Hindu-Jain Temple in Pittsburgh and smashed all the white marble images of the Hindu deities. The sacred scripture of the Sikhs, housed on a side altar, was torn to pieces. "Leave!" was written across the main altar. In 1993, the temple of a tiny Cambodian Buddhist community in Portland, Maine, was vandalized with an axe, its doorjambs hacked, its doors broken, the contents of the Buddha hall strewn in the front yard, and the words "Dirty Asian Chink, Go Home!" written on the walls. In September 1994, a nearly completed mosque in Yuba City, California, was burned to the ground, leaving its dome and minaret in the ashes of a fire that the sheriff deemed to be arson. There are dozens of these incidents every year, some of them now documented by such groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but most of them noted only in the pages of local newspapers.

The documentary register of acts of violence is easier to assemble than the register of new initiatives of cooperation and understanding, for violence is still deemed more "newsworthy" than cooperation. Yet assembling the evidence of new patterns of interreligious encounter, cooperation, and relationship is also important in discerning how the "we" is being reconfigured in multireligious America. For example, on April 2, 1993, a groundbreaking in Sharon, Massachusetts, brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims together from the Greater Boston area. There on a hillside overlooking the fields of a former horse farm, rabbis and priests, imams and Muslim leaders each turned a shovel of earth for the new Islamic Center of New England. Two weeks later, across the country in Fremont, California, Saint Paul's United Methodist Church and the Islamic Society of the East Bay broke ground together for a new church and a new mosque, to be built side by side on the same property. They named their common access road "Peace Terrace," and they are now next-door neighbors. "We want to set an example for the world," said one of the Muslim leaders.

All across America, there are new interreligious councils-in cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lincoln, Nebraska. The Interreligious Council of Southern California supported the appointment of a Buddhist chaplain in the California State Senate and backed the Sikhs in their petition to the Los Angeles Police Department to be allowed to wear the turban while serving as policemen. The Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, D.C., brought people of all religious communities together in March 1994 in the wake of the Hebron massacre. Because of new relationships of trust, the head of the Washington board of rabbis offered prayers right there on New Hampshire Avenue at the Muslim Community Center.

The public symbolic acknowledgment of America's diversity is also becoming more visible. In April 1990, for example, the city council of Savannah, Georgia, issued a proclamation in which Islam was recognized as having been "a vital part of the development of the United States of America and the city of Savannah." On June 25, 1991, for the first time in history, a Muslim imam, Siraj Wahaj of Brooklyn, opened a session of the U.S. House of Representatives with prayer. On February 20, 1996, at the end of the month of Ramadan, Hillary Clinton welcomed Muslims to the White House for the first Eid celebration ever to take place there. She said, "This celebration is an American event. We are a nation of immigrants who have long drawn on our diverse religious traditions and faiths for the strength and courage that make America great."

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