UNITED STATES, July 26, 2015 (Economic Times): If you read between the lines of the vandalized signboard in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, you’ll see more than just 60 shotgun pellet holes perforating the blue sans serif lettering that reads ‘Hindu Temple’. The punctures, though ominous, do little to threaten the place of the Hindu temple – in Forsyth County, or the rest of America.
For America’s growing number of Indian immigrants, a temple is a way to transplant a bit of home in the US. The Hindu demographic is doing quite well economically. According to Pew, 36 per cent say their annual family income exceeds $100,000, compared to 19 per cent of the overall public. As America’s three million Hindus grow in stature, so do their symbols of ethnic identity – their temples.
The institution first arrived on America’s West Coast in 1906, via Swami Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society in San Francisco, writes Karen Pechilis Prentiss for Harvard’s Pluralism Project, and it concerned itself chiefly with scriptural study and meditation. It was only in the 70s when the Indian migrant population began to expand on the back of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that temples for ritualistic worship and cultural incubation developed. This was when Alagappa Alagappan, one of the leaders of the temple movement in late 20th century America, helped establish the Hindu Temple Society in 1970 in Flushing, New York. Today, the temple count in the US touches 800, according Hindu American Foundation (HAF).
In last year’s Pew survey that gauged the general American sentiment towards different religions, Hindus score 50 on a ‘feeling thermometer’ of 1 to 100, two points ahead of Mormons and three below Buddhists, which means the US public is ambivalent towards Hinduism, exhibiting no greater positive or negative attitude toward it.
Much more at source.