It was not, however, until America s immigration policy changed in 1965 that significant communities of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains settled in the United States. Today at century s end, we the people of the United States are more religiously diverse than ever before. In the last three decades all of us have become increasingly aware of our new cultural and racial diversity, but many of us are still unaware of the religious diversity that has come with the new immigration. We are surprised to find that there are more than twice as many Muslim Americans today as Episcopalians, that there are more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, and about as many Muslims as Jews some five or six million in all. Most of us are surprised to see the range of who we the people have become.
Today there are large new mosques in cities like Toledo, Cleveland, and Houston.
Jain and Zoroastrian temples in the suburbs of Chicago. Many people are astonished to learn that Los Angeles is the most complex Buddhist city in the world, with a Buddhist population spanning the whole range of the Asian Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to Korea, and with a multitude of native-born American Buddhists as well. Some places in America, one can see it all in a single neighborhood. On New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland, for example, we find a Cambodian Buddhist monastery, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a Muslim Community Center, and the Mangal Mandir Hindu Temple all virtually next-door neighbors. As citizens, America s we today includes Buddhist Americans, like the Hawaiian born Jodo Shinshu Buddhist astronaut who died on the Challenger.