GFCH Article Flash: The Legacy of the 1893 Parliament of World's Religions

[GFCH (India)]

The Legacy of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions
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By Marcus Braybrooke
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Courtesy: The Interfaith Observer
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The Early Years of the Interfaith Movement
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The legacy of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions did not live up
to the high hopes of its organizers. The dream of a new era of
universal peace too soon became the bloody nightmare of twentieth
century battlefields and genocide.

Pope Leo XIII officially censured the Roman Catholic speakers at the
Parliament and forbade participation in “future promiscuous
conventions.” The openness to other faiths shown by many Christians at
the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh was soon obscured by
Karl Barth and Hendrik Kraemer, who stressed the distinctiveness of
the Gospel over against religions, which, they proposed, were a futile
human effort to reach God.

Yet there was a legacy. The Parliament created awareness among some
that there are “wells of truth outside Christianity.” Historian Sidney
Ahlstrom said it began the slow change by which Protestant America was
to become a multi-racial society. Swami Vivekananda and Dharmapala
established continuing Vedanta and Buddhist groups in the United
States.
The Parliament also stimulated the academic study of religions. The
Haskell lectureship endowment at the University of Chicago brought
distinguished scholars of “comparative religion” to the school and
enabled Henry Barrows, secretary of the Parliament, to lecture in
Asia.

In 1901 the first meeting of the International Congress for the
History of Religions (IAHR) was held as part of the Paris Universal
Exposition, though this was for the scientific study of religions and
not for interfaith dialogue. The distinguished scholar Joseph Kitagawa
wrote, “it becomes clear that what the Parliament contributed to
Eastern religions was not comparative religion as such. Rather Barrows
and his colleagues should receive credit for initiating what we call
today the ‘dialogue among various religions,’ in which each religious
claim for ultimacy is acknowledged.”

Initial Institutional Developments
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IARF activities continue today around the world. This recent gathering
was in Andhra Pradesh in India. Photo: iarf.netPlans for another
Parliament in 1901, possibly in India, came to nothing – although
small scale parliaments were held in Japan and elsewhere. The obvious
‘child’ of the Parliament was the International Association for
Religious Freedom (IARF), as it is now known, which held its first
meeting in 1900. The prime mover was Charles William Wendte, born in
Boston in 1844, had helped plan the 1893 Parliament. His parents had
come to the United States on their honeymoon and stayed on. Wendte’s
father became a

Unitarian after being astonished to hear “something sensible from a
preacher!” To his delight, his son became a Unitarian minister.
Besides his congregational responsibilities, Charles Wendte built up
close relations with the German Free Protestant Union. With the
American Unitarians, they were the main supporters of IARF, though
among the 2,000 participants at the 1907 Boston Congress were some
members of the Brahmo Samaj and a handful of liberal Jews, Muslims,
and Catholics. (A longer profile of the IARF will be published here
later this year.)

The World Congress of Faith can claim a more distant relationship. Its
links with the 1893 Parliament came through the “Second Parliament of
Religions,” held in Chicago in 1933, in conscious imitation of the
earlier event. The 1933 Parliament, a largely forgotten event, was
initiated by Charles Weller and Mr. Das Gupta. Weller, a social
worker, started the League of Neighbours in 1918 to help integrate
African Americans and foreign-born citizens into American life.

Das Gupta had come in 1908 from India to England. To help remedy
British ignorance of India, he organized the Union of East and West.
Then in 1920 he accompanied Rabindranath Tagore to the United States.
Das Gupta stayed on and restarted his Union of East and West in
America. Early in the 1920s he met Weller. Together they merged the
League of Neighbours and the Union of East and West to create the
Fellowship of Faiths. The Fellowship arranged in several cities
meetings at which a member of one faith paid tribute to another faith.
It also published a journal called Appreciation.

In May 1929, the World Fellowship of Faiths met in Chicago. This
revived memories of the city’s 1893 Parliament and led to a similar
event being held to coincide with the Second World Fair in 1933.
Twenty-seven gatherings were held in Chicago, with a total attendance
of 44,000 people. Preliminary meetings were also held in New York.
Bishop McConnell claimed, perhaps unfairly, that the 1933 gathering
was an advance on the 1893 event. “The first difference,” he said, “is
that instead of a comparative parade of rival religions, all faiths
were challenged to apply their religion to help solve the urgent
problems which impede man’s progress. The second difference is that
the word ‘faiths’ is understood to include, not only all religions,
but all types of spiritual consciousness.”

One of those who attended the 1933 Parliament was Sir Francis
Younghusband, who three years later arranged the first World Congress
of Faiths in London. The minutes of the first planning meeting make
clear the link with the World Fellowship of Faiths, which had arranged
the Second World Parliament of Religions in 1933. Younghusband soon
made clear to Das Gupta that, although grateful to him and the World
Fellowship of Faiths, that he – Younghusband – was in charge of the
Congress.

The World Fellowship of Faiths described itself as “a movement not a
machine; a sense of expanding activities, rather than an established
institution, an inspiration more than an achievement. It has never
sought to develop a new religion or unite divergent faiths on the
basis of a least common denominator of their convictions. Instead, it
held that the desired and necessary human realization of the all-
embracing spiritual Oneness of the Good Life Universal must be
accompanied by the appreciation (brotherly love) for all the
individualities, all the differentiations of function, by which true
unity is enriched.” This is still a fair description of the interfaith
movement.
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