The 1893 World's Parliament of Religions

Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 staged dozens of ancillary congresses on everything from labor to literature, and the World's Parliament of Religions was, on paper, just one more of them, the brainchild of a Swedenborgian lawyer named Charles Carroll Bonney who had been pushing the idea of an international religious congress for years before the fair gave him a venue. What made it different from the start was scale and seriousness of intent: the Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, appointed chairman, spent two years corresponding with religious leaders worldwide to secure real representation rather than a token gesture, and for seventeen days in September 1893, Christian denominations sat on the same platform as Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Jewish and Zoroastrian delegates, several of whom had crossed oceans to attend.

No single tradition presided. That was itself the organizing principle, not an accident of scheduling, and it was new: earlier religious gatherings on this scale had assembled one tradition's own branches to argue points of internal difference, not brought essentially unrelated traditions together to speak in turn before a shared audience. Historians of religion in America now treat the 1893 Parliament as the moment interfaith dialogue became a recognizable public genre rather than a private curiosity, the ancestor of every comparative religion panel and interfaith council that followed it, including its own direct descendant a century later.

Some of the Parliament's Christian organizers had hoped the comparison would work in Christianity's favor: put the world's religions side by side before an American audience and let the superiority of the gospel speak for itself. Vivekananda's reception alone complicated that hope, but he was not the only delegate who left an impression the organizers had not planned for. Soyen Shaku's and Anagarika Dharmapala's presentations of Buddhism, and Virchand Gandhi's of Jainism, introduced American audiences to traditions most attendees had never encountered in person, let alone heard defended by their own adherents rather than described by missionaries or scholars writing about them from outside.

The effect compounded. Interest generated at the Parliament fed directly into the early spread of Buddhist and Hindu teaching in the United States, Vivekananda's own subsequent lecture tours chief among them, in ways the organizers had not designed the event to produce. Several participants and observers later wrote candidly that the Parliament had complicated rather than confirmed the assumption of Christian superiority it had been partly built to demonstrate, an outcome that did not stop the event from being judged, then and since, a genuine success on its own newer terms: not a contest with a declared winner, but the first large public demonstration that traditions could occupy the same room without either merging or fighting.