Today's Church in America, Part One, Page Six

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In 1959, what AA calls the big book or the blue book went on sale in bookstores for the first time. For the first time, you could go buy one without going to an AA meeting. That is the birth of the self-help movement. Ten years ago, we didn't have a religion editor at Publishers Weekly. We had a guy who did one page once a month, because religion didn't matter in adult publishing much at all. It was just a tiny blur. But over those 30 years, from 1959-1989, you can watch the increase in self-help sales. I've had bookstore seller after bookstore seller say to me, even in the early 90s, what they used to take to the pastor's study they bring here to me.

The bookstore owners say when a customer goes to the back left-hand corner and stays more than an hour, they’ve got a big problem, and they're cruising my books to see which one of the books is going to address their particular problem. They'll always come out of here with at least one, and sometimes two books. It was the beginning of religion publishing when that blue book went on sale. After that came Hazleton, and all of those movements. The shrieking and the hollering movement and all of that.

In 1965 we changed the immigration laws. It doesn't sound like it's significant, but it was very significant. At the close of the 19th century we were building a lot of railroads in this country, and those railroads were all being built by Chinese.Because Asians, as a culture (if one can generalize), are marvelously productive and beautifully disciplined, the American labor force demanded that we close our borders to all people of Asian descent. That happened back at the turn of the century. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not. We demanded that anybody of Asian descent be sent back. You could not come into this country. So for that period of time, there was no Asian influence in American culture. Even those who were here, many of them were deported back to China.

Then we hit three mid-century wars, all occurring in Asia. American boys, then later American girls, went into those wars, and they met folk who were very good folk. They were so good they married a bunch of them, and they brought them home, and they became Asian war brides, or they became Asian war husbands with Vietnam. There began to be a softening of that Anti-Asian feeling, so that in 1965, in response to a great deal of public sympathy for the Asian folk, we changed the rules and opened the borders. What happened? They flooded in. And thank God. I say it reverently. They flooded into Hollywood and the West Coast, because that's the coast that's nearest to Asia. But this meant they flooded in where the media was. They flooded in, bringing with them Buddhism, Hinduism, and a culture that was totally comfortable in talking about the world of the spirit.

Buddhism is not a theistic faith. It's a non-theistic faith--only one branch, the Mahayana has a god that we would recognize as a god, but Theravada and the others do not. They are a system of conduct. They are a philosophy. They are a rope of meaning without a god figure. But they have enormous conversation with the interior world. So, with the flood of Asians, for the first time what has been a largely rural Protestant American experience, one that had no time or energy in its physicality for any kind of spiritual conversation, came face to face with the exclusive beauty, peace and strength of people who comfortably talked about the world that is nongeographic, who recognize that the space that's not here is still very real, is still very there. You can watch Buddhism begin from the West Coast and spread. How many movie stars do you remember from 30 years ago who converted to Buddhism, who carried out the message. It swept across the country. It didn't convert us all to Buddhism. I began to get these wonderful books about [for example] how to be a Buddhist Jew. My favorite was how to be a Christocentric Jewish Buddhist. It was a mishmash. But it was the beginning of our having a rhetoric, if you will, a lexicon, a grammar for talking with each other about what it is to have a spiritual life. It is a big part of why, once the rope had been cut open, we reached in and grabbed spirituality out and began to play first with it.

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