Unit 10 · Religion and the World

A black stone pillar more than seven feet tall stands in the Louvre in Paris. It was carved for Hammurabi, king of Babylon, around 1754 BCE. At the top, the king stands before Shamash, the Babylonian sun god who oversaw justice, and receives from him the symbols of authority. Below are about 282 laws about wages, contracts, marriage, theft and injury. This is the Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest law collections in the world. From the very beginning, law and religion were carved on the same stone.

The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also contains law, mainly in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In the biblical story, God gives these laws to Moses at Mount Sinai as the terms of a covenant, a binding agreement between God and the people of Israel. Scholars have noticed that some of the Torah’s laws resemble Hammurabi’s. Both deal with an ox that gores a person, and both use the formula of lex talionis, a Latin phrase meaning the law of retaliation: an eye for an eye. The Torah’s framing is different, though. Its law is presented as a relationship, not only a royal decree, and it returns again and again to the stranger, the widow and the orphan.

How a law is read matters as much as what it says. In Jewish tradition, the rabbis of the Talmud read an eye for an eye as a rule of fair compensation, meaning the value of an eye, not the taking of one. Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments, or mitzvot, in the Torah, and the body of law worked out from them is called halakha, a Hebrew word meaning the way one walks. Christians read the same laws through the New Testament. Many Christians hold that the Torah’s moral commands still bind them while its ritual laws were fulfilled in Jesus. Jews and Christians share the text but not the way of reading it.

In a courtyard at al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the oldest centers of Islamic learning, students sit in circles around a teacher and argue about a case. What if a traveler cannot find water for washing before prayer? What makes a sales contract fair? These are questions of sharia. The Arabic word originally meant a path to water. For Muslims, sharia is the whole of God’s guidance for how to live, covering worship, family, business and conduct. The human effort to understand that guidance is called fiqh, which means understanding. Muslim scholars, the ulama, have always distinguished the two. Sharia is understood as God’s; fiqh is human work that can be debated and revised.

Sunni scholars traditionally draw on four sources. The first is the Qur’an. The second is the Sunnah, the example of the Prophet Muhammad, known through the hadith, the reports of his words and actions. The third is consensus among qualified scholars. The fourth is reasoning by analogy. For example, the Qur’an forbids wine. Later scholars reasoned that other intoxicating substances share the same harm and so fall under the same rule. Over the centuries, four major Sunni schools of law took shape: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali, each strongest in different regions. Twelver Shia Muslims follow the Ja’fari school. The schools differ on many details, such as the exact posture in prayer, and have generally recognized one another as valid.

A qualified scholar may issue a fatwa, a legal opinion in answer to a question. A fatwa is advice, not a court order, and a Muslim may seek a second opinion. Today most Muslim-majority countries use national law codes for crime and commerce, and sharia-based law applies mainly to family matters such as marriage and inheritance. How far religious law should shape state law is debated among Muslims themselves, with a wide range of views. In the United States, many Muslims follow sharia in personal life, such as prayer, fasting and halal food, in the same way that observant Jews follow halakha, under the civil law that governs everyone.

Around 1140 a teacher in Bologna named Gratian, traditionally said to be a monk, gathered thousands of church rulings that seemed to contradict one another and tried to reconcile them. His book, the Decretum, became the foundation of canon law, the law of the Christian church. The word canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring rule. Church councils had issued canons since the Council of Nicaea in 325. Today the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law, issued in 1917 and revised in 1983, governs the sacraments, the clergy, marriage cases and church courts. Orthodox churches follow ancient canons as interpreted by their synods. Protestant churches have their own governing documents, such as a Book of Discipline or a Book of Order.

Jewish communities have long kept a parallel system. A bet din, a rabbinic court of three judges, rules on conversion, on religious divorce and on disputes that the parties agree to bring before it. Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews differ on how binding halakha is and on who may interpret it. In medieval Europe, church courts, Jewish courts and royal courts operated side by side, and a person might live under two or three legal systems at once. That world of overlapping laws is the background to the American arrangement.

In 1791 the United States adopted the First Amendment. It says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of it. An established church is an official one, supported by the state; England still has one, and several American states kept establishments into the 1800s, Massachusetts until 1833. Under the First Amendment, religious communities are free to run their own law inside their own communities. A bet din or a church court can decide who is a member in good standing. But civil courts do not enforce religious law as such, though they may uphold an arbitration both parties freely agreed to, and religious law cannot override civil law. A religious wedding still needs a civil license, and no religious court can fine or jail anyone.

Step inside a traditional Hindu temple and the building leads you inward. Past the porch and the pillared hall is a small dark room called the garbhagriha, a Sanskrit word meaning womb chamber, where the image of the deity is kept. A tower rises above it, often shaped like a mountain peak, because many Hindus picture the gods dwelling on Mount Meru at the center of the world. Worshipers walk clockwise around the shrine, a practice called pradakshina. Buddhist builders used a different form, the stupa, a solid mound built over relics, which pilgrims also circle. In East Asia the stupa became the tiered pagoda.

In medieval Europe, Christians built to bring in light. At Chartres Cathedral in France, mostly complete by about 1220, pointed arches and outside supports called flying buttresses carry the weight of the roof. That freed the walls for enormous windows of colored glass. Church leaders such as Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis taught that light was a symbol of God. The windows told Bible stories to people who could not read, and the floor plan formed a cross. Orthodox Christians favored a central dome, with an image of Christ as ruler of all painted at its top. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, finished in 537, is the great example. It became a mosque in 1453, a museum in 1934 and a mosque again in 2020.

A mosque is built around a direction. One wall, the qibla wall, faces Mecca, and a niche in it, the mihrab, marks the direction of prayer. Beside it stands the minbar, a stepped pulpit for the Friday sermon. A tower, the minaret, carries the call to prayer, and a fountain in the courtyard serves for washing before prayer. There are no statues or pictures of people; the decoration is geometric pattern and calligraphy from the Qur’an. The prayer hall is open floor, so that rows of worshipers can stand shoulder to shoulder. A Sikh gurdwara, by contrast, is defined by openness. The Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, the Golden Temple, has four doors, one on each side, which Sikhs understand as a welcome to people of every caste and faith.

In Wilmette, Illinois, on the lakefront north of Chicago, stands the Bahá’í House of Worship, dedicated in 1953. It is the oldest surviving Bahá’í temple in the world. It has nine sides and nine doors, because the number nine symbolizes unity and completeness in the Bahá’í faith. Its lacework dome is made of concrete and crushed quartz. Like the mosque’s qibla wall or the temple’s inner chamber, its shape is a teaching. When you read a sacred building, ask three questions: Which way does it face? Where does the light go? Who is invited in?

The Ten Commandments in Exodus forbid making a graven image. Jewish tradition has read this as a ban on images of God, and synagogue art has usually used symbols instead: a menorah, lions, a crown for the Torah. Yet an ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria, from the third century CE, had wall paintings of biblical scenes, so the rule was not always applied the same way. Islam takes a similar path. The Qur’an condemns idols, and many hadith discourage pictures of living beings, so mosques are decorated with calligraphy, geometric pattern and vines. This avoidance of images is called aniconism. It was never total. Persian, Ottoman and Mughal artists painted people in books, and some Persian and Ottoman painters even showed the Prophet, often with his face veiled.

Christians argued about images for more than a century. In Orthodox Christianity an icon is a painted image of Christ, Mary or a saint, and believers say it is a window toward heaven. They venerate it with a kiss or a bow but say they worship God alone. Between 726 and 843 the Byzantine emperors twice tried to destroy icons, a movement called iconoclasm, meaning image-breaking. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 ruled that veneration of images was right. In the sixteenth century the argument returned. Reformers such as Zwingli and Calvin removed images from churches, while Luther kept many, and Catholic churches remained full of statues and glass.

Hindu practice goes further in the other direction. A murti is an image of a deity into which, through a ceremony, the deity is invited to be present. Worshipers offer it flowers, food and light. Hindus explain that they are not worshiping a statue; the image is a form through which the formless can be approached. Buddhist art tells a story of change. The earliest Buddhist carvings, at Sanchi in India in the first century BCE, never showed the Buddha’s body. They showed his footprints, an empty seat or the tree he sat under. Around the first and second centuries CE, sculptors in Gandhara and Mathura began carving the Buddha in human form, and those images spread across Asia.

Psalm 150 lists trumpet, harp, drum, strings and cymbals and tells everything that breathes to praise God. The Hebrew Bible describes choirs of Levites singing in the Temple in Jerusalem. In the synagogue today a cantor chants the Torah using cantillation, a system of marks written above and below the words that tell the reader how each phrase rises and falls. Christian monks sang the Psalms daily. The plain, unaccompanied melody of the Western church became known as Gregorian chant. It is named for Pope Gregory I, around 600, though it was written down centuries later. Luther wrote hymns for congregations to sing. Bach composed cantatas for Lutheran services, and Orthodox churches still sing without instruments.

The word Qur’an means recitation, and Muslims hear the text far more often than they see it. A trained reciter follows tajwid, the rules for pronouncing every letter and pause, and recitation contests draw large audiences. Many Muslims do not call this music, and the distinction matters to them. Sikhs sing their scripture. The hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib are arranged by musical mode, and kirtan, devotional singing with harmonium and drum, fills a gurdwara for hours. Hindus sing bhajans and kirtan to Krishna, Rama and the Goddess, a practice that the saint Chaitanya spread through Bengal in the sixteenth century. Buddhist monks chant sutras, and Tibetan monks are known for a deep, layered chant.

Chicago gave the world a new sacred music. In 1932 Thomas A. Dorsey, a blues pianist who had turned to church music, began directing the choir at Pilgrim Baptist Church on the South Side. That year, after the deaths of his wife and infant son, he wrote Precious Lord, Take My Hand. He joined the harmonies of the spirituals to the rhythm of the blues, and the result was gospel music. Mahalia Jackson, who had moved to Chicago from New Orleans in 1927, became its most famous voice. In 1963 she sang at the March on Washington just before Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. Gospel spread from Chicago’s Black churches to the whole world.

Islam gave its scholars mathematical problems to solve. Muslims pray five times a day at times set by the sun, so they needed accurate tables of sunrise, noon and dusk. They pray facing Mecca, so they needed to calculate that direction from any city on a round earth. Their calendar follows the moon, and the shares of an inheritance are set in the Qur’an as fractions. In Baghdad in the early 800s the caliph al-Ma’mun supported the House of Wisdom, where scholars translated Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic. There al-Khwarizmi wrote a book on solving equations whose title gave us the word algebra; his own name became the word algorithm. Muslim astronomers refined the astrolabe, a brass instrument for finding the time and the stars. Ibn al-Haytham tested how light and vision work with experiments, and Ibn Sina’s medical textbook was taught in Europe for centuries.

In Christian Europe the monastery was the library. Benedict’s Rule, written around 530, set monks to prayer and work, and the work often meant copying books by hand in a room called the scriptorium. Monks preserved Roman and Greek texts that would otherwise have vanished. The English monk Bede, who died in 735, worked out the calculation of the date of Easter, a science called computus, and popularized counting years from the birth of Jesus. Cathedral schools and church scholars helped give rise to the first universities, at Bologna, Paris and Oxford, which trained the clergy and lawyers that church and rulers needed. Much later, Gregor Mendel, a friar in Brno, bred pea plants in the monastery garden and founded genetics with a paper published in 1866. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest and physicist, proposed in 1927 that the universe is expanding, the idea that became the Big Bang.

Other traditions have their own stories. Indian mathematicians such as Brahmagupta, writing in 628, developed rules for zero and negative numbers, and the oldest Indian geometry appears in texts about building Vedic altars. The Buddhist monk Yi Xing measured the length of a degree of the earth’s meridian for the Tang court in the 720s. Jesuit missionaries ran the imperial astronomy bureau in Beijing in the 1600s. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides was a physician to the sultan’s court in Cairo. For most of these people, studying nature was a religious act. Psalm 19 says the heavens declare the glory of God, and many scholars in the Abrahamic traditions took that as an invitation to look closely.

In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, a Catholic church official in Poland, published a book arguing that the earth moves around the sun. He dedicated it to the pope, and for decades it caused little stir. Then, in 1609 and 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the sky. He saw four moons circling Jupiter and saw Venus go through phases like the moon. Both fit a sun-centered system far better than the old earth-centered one. Galileo was a devout Catholic whose two daughters became nuns, and at first church astronomers in Rome welcomed his discoveries.

The trouble was the Bible. Verses such as Joshua’s command to the sun to stand still, and a psalm that says the world cannot be moved, seemed to place the earth at rest. After the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church had ruled at the Council of Trent that individuals must not interpret Scripture against the agreed reading of the early church fathers. In a 1615 letter, Galileo argued that the Bible teaches how to reach heaven, not how the heavens move. In 1616 church officials declared heliocentrism contrary to Scripture and told Galileo not to hold or defend it. In 1632 he published a Dialogue that clearly defended it anyway. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition tried him, found him vehemently suspect of heresy, and made him recant. He lived under house arrest until his death in 1642, and his book stayed on the Index of Forbidden Books until 1835.

The story is more tangled than a simple fight between faith and reason. Some Protestant leaders had also rejected Copernicus. Jesuit astronomers went on doing careful science, and the Church never condemned mathematics or observation as such. Historians point to politics, personal quarrels and the pressures of the Thirty Years’ War. In 1992 Pope John Paul II accepted the report of a commission that acknowledged the errors of the theologians who judged Galileo. The affair remains the classic case for one question: when a reading of a sacred text and a finding about nature seem to conflict, who decides, and how?

In November 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. He argued that living things change over vast time through natural selection: individuals with helpful traits survive and reproduce more, so species slowly change and new ones arise. In 1871 he applied the idea to human beings. Religious readers split at once. Charles Kingsley, an Anglican priest, wrote to Darwin that a God who made creatures able to develop themselves was as noble as one who made each separately, and Darwin quoted him in the next edition. Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist and devout Presbyterian, defended Darwin in America. Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary answered in 1874 that Darwinism, by removing design, amounted to atheism.

In the United States the argument moved into the schools. The fundamentalist movement, named for a set of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915, defended the literal truth of the Bible. In 1925 Tennessee banned the teaching of human evolution, and a teacher named John Scopes was tried in Dayton that July in a trial that drew reporters from around the world. He was convicted and fined. In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled such bans unconstitutional. Today American Christians hold a range of views. Young-earth creationism reads Genesis as literal history and dates the earth to a few thousand years. Old-earth creationists accept the age of the earth but not common descent. Theistic evolution accepts the science fully and holds that God works through it.

The range runs through other traditions too. In 1950 Pope Pius XII permitted Catholics to study the evolution of the human body, and in 1996 John Paul II said the theory was more than a hypothesis. Most Reform and Conservative Jews and many Orthodox Jews accept evolution; some in the strictest communities do not. Among Muslims opinion is divided. A ninth-century scholar in Baghdad, al-Jahiz, wrote about animals changing to fit their surroundings, while in 2017 Turkey removed evolution from its high school curriculum. Many Hindu and Buddhist thinkers find long ages and changing forms easy to accept. The Dalai Lama has written that he accepts evolution but questions whether it is truly random. The lesson is that no tradition speaks with one voice on this.

Before the Eid prayer that ends Ramadan, every Muslim household that can afford it gives a small gift of food or money so that the poor can celebrate too. That is one form of zakat, the third of the Five Pillars of Islam. The main zakat is yearly. Muslims who hold savings above a set minimum for a year give about 2.5 percent of that wealth. The Qur’an, in chapter 9, names who may receive it: the poor, the needy, those who collect it, those whose hearts are to be won over, captives, people in debt, those working in God’s cause and stranded travelers. Beyond zakat, Muslims give sadaqa, voluntary charity of any size. Wealthy Muslims have long set up a waqf, an endowment whose income funds a mosque, a school, a hospital or a public fountain forever.

The Hebrew word for charity, tzedakah, comes from tzedek, which means justice. In Jewish tradition, giving is a debt owed, not a favor granted. The Torah commands farmers to leave the corners of their fields and the fallen grain for the poor and the stranger, which is how Ruth gathers food in the book named for her. A tithe, a tenth of one’s produce or income, is set aside. Many Jewish homes keep a small box for coins to give away. In the twelfth century, the philosopher Maimonides ranked eight levels of tzedakah. The lowest is giving grudgingly. Near the top is giving so that neither giver nor receiver knows the other. The highest of all is a loan, a partnership or a job that lets the person no longer need help.

The two systems share a shape. Both make giving a duty of justice rather than a mood of pity. Both protect the dignity of the receiver: the Qur’an warns against spoiling a gift with reminders and insults, and Maimonides prizes anonymity. Both build institutions. Christians took over the tithe as a standard for church giving, and the weekly collection remains a fixture of most congregations. Today zakat flows through organizations such as Islamic Relief, and Jewish federations gather tzedakah for schools, elder care and emergencies. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, founded in 1900, is one of the oldest in the country.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus describes a final judgment in which the king says that whoever fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked and visited the sick and imprisoned did it to him. Christians call these the works of mercy. The English word charity comes from the Latin caritas, which means love, and the King James Bible uses charity to translate the love that Paul praises in 1 Corinthians 13. The early church appointed deacons to distribute food to widows. Benedict’s Rule told monks to receive every guest as Christ. In modern times, William Booth began in London in 1865 the mission that became the Salvation Army, Dorothy Day began the Catholic Worker houses in 1933, and Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata in 1950.

Sikhs call service seva, and the plainest form of it is the langar, the free kitchen attached to every gurdwara. Guru Nanak began the practice in the early 1500s, and the third Guru, Amar Das, made it a rule that anyone who came to see him, rich or poor, must first eat in the langar. Everyone sits in rows on the floor, because no one is higher than anyone else. The langar at the Golden Temple in Amritsar feeds tens of thousands of people every day, and every meal is cooked and served by volunteers. Sikhs are also asked to give a tenth of their income, called dasvandh. Since 1999 the Sikh charity Khalsa Aid has carried the langar idea into disaster zones and refugee camps.

In Hinduism and Buddhism the word for giving is dana. Each morning in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Buddhist monks walk through the streets with bowls, and laypeople place cooked food in them. The gift feeds the monks, and Buddhists teach that it also earns merit, good karma that shapes the giver’s future. Hindu temples serve free meals to all comers; the temple at Tirupati in South India feeds enormous crowds daily. Buddhist Tzu Chi, founded in Taiwan in 1966 by the nun Cheng Yen, is now one of the largest charities in Asia. Confucian teaching speaks of ren, usually translated as humaneness. The Analects sum it up as not doing to others what you would not want done to yourself. Mencius added that anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm, and that this feeling is the seed of humaneness.

The word hospital shares a root with hospitality. Around 370 Basil, the bishop of Caesarea in what is now Turkey, built a complex outside the city to house and treat the sick and the poor. In the Islamic world the bimaristan, a Persian word meaning place of the sick, appeared in Baghdad and Cairo by the 800s and 900s. The hospital founded in Cairo by Ahmad ibn Tulun in 872 treated patients free of charge, and later bimaristans had separate wards for fevers, wounds and mental illness, all funded by waqf endowments. Medieval Europe’s hospitals were run by religious orders. Chicago’s own story begins with the Sisters of Mercy in 1852. Today religious health systems remain large; by one estimate about one in seven hospital patients in the United States is treated in a Catholic hospital, and Jewish, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist and Adventist hospitals serve millions more.

Schools followed the same path. The madrasa, a college of Islamic learning, spread across the Muslim world after the founding of the Nizamiyya in Baghdad in 1065. Christian cathedral schools became universities. In 1780 Robert Raikes opened a Sunday school in England to teach reading to working children. In the United States, Catholic parochial schools, run by parishes, grew into one of the largest private school systems in the country, with Chicago’s among the biggest. Jewish day schools, Sikh Khalsa schools and Buddhist temple schools in Thailand tell the same story. The record is not all bright. Missionary schools spread literacy but often served colonial powers, and in the United States and Canada, church-run boarding schools separated Native children from their families and languages.

Modern disaster relief is heavily religious in origin. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began in 1914 to aid Jews caught in the First World War. The Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, founded in 1917, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. Catholic Relief Services dates from 1943, World Vision from 1950, Islamic Relief from 1984, and the Sikh Khalsa Aid from 1999. Such faith-based organizations are among the largest aid groups in the world. They also raise a hard question: should aid ever be tied to religion? In 1994 the Red Cross and major relief agencies, including many religious ones, adopted a code of conduct promising that aid would not be used to promote a political or religious point of view.

In November 1095, at a church council in Clermont, France, Pope Urban II called on the knights of Western Europe to march east. The Byzantine emperor had asked for help against the Seljuk Turks, and Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule since the 600s. Urban promised that those who went would receive an indulgence, the removal of the penance owed for their sins. Crowds are said to have answered with the cry God wills it. The wars that followed are called the Crusades, from the cross that fighters sewed on their clothing. To the men who took the vow, the journey was both a war and a pilgrimage, a sacred journey to a holy place.

The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in July 1099, and the crusaders killed many of the city’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Even before they left Europe, crusading bands had attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096, in Speyer, Worms and Mainz, and Jewish memory still mourns those towns. In 1187 the Muslim ruler Saladin, Salah al-Din in Arabic, retook Jerusalem after defeating a crusader army at Hattin. Muslim and Christian chroniclers alike noted that he allowed most residents to ransom themselves rather than be killed. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade turned aside and sacked Constantinople, a Christian city, deepening the split between Catholic and Orthodox Christians. The last crusader stronghold on the coast, Acre, fell in 1291.

Historians describe mixed motives: sincere devotion, the hope of forgiveness, family honor, land and plunder. Arab writers of the time called the invaders al-Ifranj, the Franks, and often treated them as one more foreign army. In the modern era the word crusade has been used for political purposes, and many Muslims hear it as a symbol of Western attack. Churches have also looked back. In 2001 Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow to the Orthodox Church for the sack of Constantinople. The Crusades show a pattern historians see again and again: religious ideas gave war a purpose and a promise, while politics and power shaped how it was fought.

After Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church in 1517, Western Christianity split into Catholic and Protestant churches, and each ruler’s choice became a political question. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 settled the matter with a rule later summed up in a Latin phrase, cuius regio, eius religio: whose realm, his religion. Each prince chose Lutheran or Catholic, and his subjects had to follow or move away. Calvinists and other groups were left out. In France, Catholics and Protestant Huguenots fought eight civil wars, and in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 Catholic mobs killed thousands of Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 finally gave Huguenots limited rights.

In 1618 Protestant nobles in Prague threw two Catholic imperial officials out of a castle window. Both survived, but the event, called the Defenestration of Prague, set off the Thirty Years' War. It spread across the German lands and drew in Denmark, Sweden, Spain and France. Armies lived off the land, and hunger and disease followed them. Estimates vary, but many regions lost a fifth or more of their people. The war was never only about religion. Catholic France, ruled in practice by a cardinal, paid Protestant Sweden to fight the Catholic Habsburg emperor, because France feared Habsburg power more than it cared about the faith of its allies.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the war. It recognized Calvinists alongside Lutherans and Catholics and allowed some private worship for religious minorities. Many historians see it as a step toward a Europe of sovereign states that did not go to war over doctrine. The long bloodshed also moved thinkers to argue for toleration, the acceptance of beliefs one does not share. In 1689 the English philosopher John Locke, a Protestant Christian, wrote A Letter Concerning Toleration. He argued that belief cannot be forced, so governments should protect lives and property and leave the care of souls to churches. Those arguments crossed the Atlantic and shaped the American founders.

At midnight on August 14 and 15, 1947, British rule in South Asia ended and two countries were born: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, created as a homeland for Muslims. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had argued that Muslims would be a permanent minority in a united India. The Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, had wanted one country for people of all faiths. A British lawyer who had never been to India drew the new border in a few weeks. It split the provinces of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived in the same villages for centuries.

The Partition set off one of the largest migrations in history. Estimates vary, but roughly fifteen million people crossed the new borders, Muslims moving to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs moving to India. Mobs on every side attacked trains, villages and refugee columns. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to two million, and tens of thousands of women were abducted. Sikhs lost much of their homeland in western Punjab, including Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, which now lies in Pakistan. Families on both sides still tell stories of neighbors who hid them and neighbors who turned on them.

Gandhi spent the days of independence in Calcutta, living in a Muslim neighborhood to calm the violence. In September 1947, and again in Delhi in January 1948, he fasted until leaders promised to stop the killing. On January 30, 1948, he was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who blamed him for being too generous to Muslims. Scholars of Partition stress that religion marked the communities, but fear, politics and the speed of the British exit turned neighbors into enemies. In 2019 India and Pakistan opened the Kartarpur Corridor, which lets Indian Sikh pilgrims cross into Pakistan without a visa to visit the gurdwara where Guru Nanak spent his last years.

In the early 1600s the English crown settled Protestant colonists from Scotland and England on land taken from Catholic Irish in the northern province of Ulster. When most of Ireland won independence in 1921, six counties of Ulster stayed in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with a Protestant majority. Many Catholics there faced discrimination in jobs, housing and voting. In the late 1960s a civil rights movement marched for equal treatment, and violence followed. The period from about 1968 to 1998 is called the Troubles. More than 3,500 people were killed, many by armed groups on both sides and some by British soldiers, as on Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972.

The two sides are often called Protestant and Catholic, but most people there use political names. Unionists, mostly Protestant, wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom. Nationalists, mostly Catholic, wanted it to join the Republic of Ireland. Few fighters argued about doctrine, such as the Mass or the authority of the pope. Scholars therefore describe religion here as an identity marker: it told people which community they belonged to, which school they attended and which neighborhood was safe. The same pattern appears in many conflicts where faith and nationality overlap.

Religious people also worked for peace. In 1965 a Presbyterian minister, Ray Davey, founded the Corrymeela Community, where Catholics and Protestants met for reconciliation. A Catholic priest, Father Alec Reid of Clonard Monastery in Belfast, carried secret messages between political leaders for years. The Good Friday Agreement, signed on April 10, 1998, created a shared government and was approved by voters in both parts of Ireland. For students of religion the case raises a lasting question: when a conflict is labeled religious, what exactly is religion doing in it?

In March 1930 Mohandas Gandhi, sixty years old, set out on foot from his ashram near Ahmedabad with about eighty followers. British law made it a crime for Indians to make their own salt, and salt was taxed. Over twenty-four days the group walked about 240 miles to the sea at Dandi, and thousands joined along the way. On April 6 Gandhi picked up a lump of natural salt from the shore and broke the law. Across India, people made salt and filled the jails. The Salt March made his method visible to the world.

Gandhi called the method satyagraha, a word he coined from the Sanskrit for truth and holding firmly: truth-force. It meant resisting injustice openly, accepting punishment without striking back, and trying to win over the opponent rather than defeat him. Its root was ahimsa, nonharm, a central teaching of Jainism that runs through Hinduism and Buddhism as well. Gandhi grew up in Gujarat, where Jain influence was strong. He read the Bhagavad Gita daily and took from it the ideal of acting for duty without attachment to reward. He also said the Sermon on the Mount went straight to his heart, and he corresponded with the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose books on that sermon had moved him.

Gandhi developed satyagraha in South Africa, where he lived from 1893 to 1914, before leading the Indian independence movement. Not every Indian agreed with him. Some wanted armed revolt, some thought his religious language excluded Muslims or lower castes, and B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, opposed him on caste. India won independence in 1947. Gandhi’s method crossed religious lines. A Pashtun Muslim, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, raised a nonviolent army in the northwest, and a generation later Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India in 1959 to learn from Gandhi’s legacy.

In December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, and Black residents began a boycott of the city buses that lasted more than a year. They chose as their leader a twenty-six-year-old Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott was organized in churches, and its mass meetings mixed hymns, prayer and planning. King told the crowds that they would resist with love. In 1956 the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The civil rights movement that followed drew much of its strength and language from Black churches.

King described a goal he called the beloved community, a society where former enemies are reconciled and every person’s dignity is honored. He drew it from the Hebrew prophets, especially Amos’s call to let justice roll down like waters, from Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies, and from Gandhi, whose methods he studied in seminary and in India. In April 1963, jailed in Birmingham, he answered eight white Alabama clergymen who had called the protests unwise and untimely. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail he argued that a just law agrees with the moral law and that people have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws, openly and accepting the penalty.

King brought the movement north. In 1966 he rented an apartment in North Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side and led marches against housing segregation. In Marquette Park a thrown rock struck him in the head. He said he had never seen hostility as fierce as he found in Chicago. King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The movement included many faiths, and also people of none. Jewish leaders such as Heschel marched with him, and so did Catholic nuns and Protestant ministers, while many white churches opposed him.

From 1948 South Africa’s government enforced apartheid, a system of racial segregation that denied Black South Africans the vote and forced millions from their homes. Some white churches defended it. Others, and most Black churches, opposed it. Desmond Tutu, an Anglican priest, became a leading voice against it. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and in 1986 he became the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town. When apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, the new government asked Tutu to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The commission, which began hearings in 1996, invited victims to tell what had happened to them in public. It offered amnesty to people who confessed political crimes fully. Tutu often wept at the hearings. He explained the work through ubuntu, a southern African idea he summed up as a person is a person through other persons: my humanity is bound up with yours. He also spoke of Christian forgiveness, which he said was not forgetting and not excusing evil. Critics, including some victims’ families, felt that amnesty let the guilty go free and that too little was paid in reparation. The commission became a model and a debate for other countries emerging from violence.

In Liberia in 2003, after years of civil war, Christian and Muslim women began to pray together in public. Led by Leymah Gbowee, a Lutheran social worker, and working with Muslim women’s groups, they dressed in white and sat day after day by a fish market in Monrovia, demanding peace. They followed the peace talks to Ghana and blocked the doors until the negotiators reached an agreement. Gbowee shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Such interfaith work, people of different faiths acting together from their own traditions, has become a recognized part of peacemaking around the world.

Many colonies had official churches. Massachusetts taxed residents to support Congregational churches, and Virginia jailed Baptist preachers who preached without a license. Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts, founded Rhode Island in 1636 on the principle of liberty of conscience. In 1786 Virginia passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and pushed through by James Madison. It declared that no one could be forced to attend or support any church. Baptists, Presbyterians and other minority churches were among its strongest supporters, because they had felt the weight of an official church themselves.

The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, begins with two clauses about religion. The Establishment Clause says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The Free Exercise Clause says it shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion. The first keeps government from sponsoring, funding or favoring a faith. The second keeps it from punishing or burdening people for practicing one. In an 1802 letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, Jefferson described the First Amendment as building a wall of separation between church and state. Courts and citizens still argue about how high and how solid that wall should be.

At first the First Amendment limited only the federal government. After the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, the Supreme Court applied it to the states as well, the Free Exercise Clause in 1940 and the Establishment Clause in 1947. The two clauses can pull against each other. If a state pays for school buses to religious schools, is that establishment, or fair treatment of religious families? Judges on the Court have answered differently over the decades. Americans of every faith, and of none, have taken such questions to court.

In 1940 many public schools required students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Jehovah’s Witnesses refused, because they believe saluting a flag breaks the commandment against bowing to images. Their children were expelled, and some Witness families were attacked. In 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court ruled that no official can force citizens to profess a belief. Justice Robert Jackson wrote that no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, religion or other matters of opinion. Jehovah’s Witnesses brought dozens of cases in those years, and many of them expanded freedoms for everyone.

In 1972, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Court sided with Amish parents who would not send their children to school past the eighth grade. The Amish teach separation from worldly life, and the Court held that the state’s interest did not outweigh their faith. But in 1990, in Employment Division v. Smith, the Court ruled against two members of the Native American Church. They had been fired and denied unemployment pay for using peyote, a cactus eaten as a sacrament in their ceremonies. The Court held that a law that applies to everyone and does not target religion can be enforced even if it burdens a religious practice.

The Smith ruling alarmed religious groups across the spectrum. In 1993 Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, almost unanimously. It requires the federal government to show a compelling reason before it substantially burdens someone’s religious practice. In 1994 Congress also protected the sacramental use of peyote by members of Native American tribes. Later cases have used these laws and a related 2000 law covering prisons. In 2015 the Court ruled that an Arkansas prison had to let a Muslim prisoner grow a short beard. The pattern is steady: minority faiths, whose practices a majority may overlook, bring most free-exercise cases.

Until the 1960s many public schools opened the day with a prayer or a Bible reading. In Engel v. Vitale in 1962 the Supreme Court ruled that a prayer written by New York state officials for students to recite broke the Establishment Clause. The next year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, it ruled the same about required daily Bible reading. The families who sued in the two cases included Jews, Unitarians and nonbelievers. The Court did not forbid the Bible in school. Justice Tom Clark wrote that a person’s education is not complete without studying comparative religion and the history of religion, and that the Bible may be studied for its literary and historic qualities.

That distinction is the rule this course follows. Scholars sum it up this way: a public school may teach about religion but may not practice or promote it. Teaching about religion, the academic study of religion, describes what adherents believe and do, attributes every claim, and treats all traditions fairly. Devotional teaching aims to bring students to faith, and that belongs to families and religious communities. A lesson that says Muslims fast in Ramadan is academic. A teacher leading students in prayer is devotional, and in a public school that crosses the line.

Students have religious rights too. A student may pray alone or with friends, say grace before lunch, read a sacred text during free time, and write about faith in an assignment if it fits the topic. Under the Equal Access Act of 1984, if a public high school allows student clubs that are not about classes, it must allow religious clubs on the same terms. Students may wear religious clothing, such as a hijab, a kippah, a turban or a cross, with room made for their practice. In 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the Supreme Court ruled that a football coach’s brief, quiet prayer at midfield after games was protected private speech, a decision that has been debated since.

After the Second World War and the Holocaust, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted it, and its members came from many faiths and none. Article 18 protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change one’s religion. The declaration is not a treaty, but later treaties and many national constitutions built on it. Religious freedom in this sense covers believers of every kind and people who hold no religion.

Persecution means harming people because of who they are or what they believe. It continues today, and researchers track it. In August 2014 the militant group that called itself the Islamic State attacked the Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq, killing thousands of men and enslaving women and girls; a UN commission called it genocide. In 2017 more than 700,000 Rohingya, a mostly Muslim people, fled Myanmar’s army into Bangladesh. In China’s Xinjiang region, a 2022 UN human rights report described the detention of large numbers of Uyghur and other Muslims as possible crimes against humanity; China’s government rejects that account. In Iran members of the Bahá’í faith have long been barred from universities.

Persecution falls on many groups, including Christians in several countries, Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, Jews facing antisemitism and Muslims facing anti-Muslim hatred in Europe and the United States, and people who leave religion in countries that punish it. Sometimes governments do it, and sometimes armed groups or mobs do. Researchers such as the Pew Research Center measure both government restrictions and hostility from society. Scholars caution that the same group can be a majority that persecutes in one country and a minority that suffers in another. Describing persecution accurately means naming the victims, the perpetrators, the place and the date.

In September 1893, while the World’s Columbian Exposition filled Chicago’s South Side, the World's Parliament of Religions met downtown from September 11 to 27, in the new building that now houses the Art Institute of Chicago. It was the first formal gathering of representatives of the world’s religions in the West. Most speakers were Protestant Christians, and its organizers hoped Christianity would be seen at its best. But the speakers who drew the most attention came from Asia. Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from Bengal, opened his first speech with the words Sisters and Brothers of America and was greeted with a long ovation.

Other voices made history too. Anagarika Dharmapala of Sri Lanka spoke for Theravada Buddhism, and Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Zen master, came from Kamakura. Virchand Gandhi presented Jainism, and Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb, an American convert, spoke about Islam. Jewish rabbis and Catholic bishops took part, and so did women speakers. The Parliament also had limits. Some groups were left out, and Native American religions were not presented by their own practitioners. Still, historians date the American interest in Hinduism and Buddhism, and the modern interfaith movement, to that September in Chicago.

In 1993 Chicago hosted a centennial Parliament, where thousands gathered and many leaders endorsed a statement called Towards a Global Ethic. The Parliament has since met in cities such as Cape Town, Barcelona, Melbourne, Salt Lake City and Toronto, and it returned to Chicago in 2023. The Chicago area is one of the most religiously diverse places in the country. It has the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Hindu temples in the suburbs, the Buddhist Temple of Chicago in Uptown, and large mosques in the southwest suburbs. KAM Isaiah Israel continues the oldest Jewish congregation in the city, founded in 1847. Interfaith councils and student groups bring these communities together to serve and to learn.