Tag: Religion

by Jennifer Scheper Hughes, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Amanda Lucia, and S. Romi Mukherjee

Practicing religion in public

This is an excerpt of an article from Boom Winter 2015, Vol 5, No 4. 

California is experiencing a proliferation of public religious celebrations like never before. Processions spill onto city streets. Altars summoning the spirits of the dead are erected at busy intersections. Bands of pilgrims crisscross the state as they make their sacred journeys to holy lands within our very borders. Images of gods and saints, raised aloft by devotees, now claim the urban skyline as their most natural and obvious backdrop. Mantras, chants, and songs of praise, in a cacophony of languages, summon the sacred into our public space and into our life in common. At these festivals, we pray together after a fashion—an unlikely collection of Californians from different places, different faiths—different backgrounds joined for a fleeting moment by the unity of purpose of a shared ritual. The so-called secular cities and towns of California are made sacred by these multiethnic and multifaith public performances.

The authors of this essay are part of an eclectic group of researchers, students and professors, artists, filmmakers, and journalists. We have spent the better part of three years participating in these public events; we have attended dozens of religious festivals. We have thrown colors at Holi with those who have inherited Hindu traditions and those who have adopted them in the United States. We have processed in the streets of downtown Los Angeles with Peruvian immigrants as they sway to and fro under the heavy weight of their penitential andas. We have wept at altars for the dead on Día de los Muertos. We have joined aging internees on their annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp, where we braced against the harsh winds and dust to chant, dance, and pray for forgiveness for us all.

It’s not just that the spirits cannot be contained in buildings—from tent revivals to solemn masses celebrated in sports stadiums, religious practice has brought the faithful out of doors—but that they prefer to encounter us in town centers, in public parks, open-air settings, and city streets. Across the state, Californians participate in all kinds of public rituals under the sun: rituals of re-enchantment and blessing, rituals of repair, rituals of sober ecstasy. Due in part to their public nature, almost every one of these open-air celebrations is a cross-cultural encounter as we look to each other’s cultures, each other’s religions, especially each other’s gods and spirits to discover our shared identity and our shared future as Californians. Perhaps it is through these experiences that the fears and anxieties generated by the inevitability of a truly multiethnic state are confronted and resolved.

Even as these and many other similar festivals simultaneously represent the irruption and interruption of the sacred in the public sphere, these festivals reflect the multireligious character of immigration. What propels us to put ourselves into these shared religious experiences, to throw ourselves into these festivals of spirits, especially when so often we join to celebrate religious cultures other than our own? The public religious festival has become the central nexus for the celebration of ethnic, cultural, and collective identity—identities that demand representation even in so-called secular public spaces. The festival requires that the participants step outside of their day-to-day lives, and venture into the fields of Radha and Krishna’s love play, the realm of the dead, the remembrance of the past, penance for historical sin, and the ecstasies of devotional singing. When the festival is in the open, in public, the shared act of devotion is what binds, not necessarily the shared belief.

These public rituals say something about the pursuit of belonging in California, and in the United States, within an increasingly diverse and multicultural landscape. Those who participate together as intimate strangers are often seeking only a temporary affiliation, perhaps a place for a moment to engage one another beyond the context of the marketplace. In sharing in these religious and cross-cultural experiences, we become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California, up close and personal, as physical as the bodies we encounter there. These collective public celebrations imagine a new kind of citizenship in a way that can assuage our multiculturalist anxieties. By participating in other religious and cultural realities, we break from the mundane and open up the possibility of enchantment. It is the unknown of the festival that beckons to outsiders—the potential for the experience of the ephemeral, the surreal, the transcendent.

Children throw colors at Holi. Photograph by Mario L. Iñiguez.

The Hindu Festival of Colors: Throwing Colors with Hare Krishnas in Los Angeles

Tens of thousands of young adults, mostly in their teens and twenties, clamor toward the stage at the spring Festival of Colors in Los Angeles. From a panoply of backgrounds and cultures and beliefs (or no belief at all), they gather to celebrate Holi, to reenact the colorful play of Radha and Krishna, the supreme Hindu expressions of divinity and the enchanters of the world. Radha and Krishna’s love play is relived and remembered in the crowd’s joyful “playing of colors.” As they throw brilliant, chalky handfuls of the multicolored Holi powder at each other, attendees become disguised in vibrant colors—differences of age, race, and ethnicity, their previous identities, erased. Play that begins in streaks of rainbow effervescence soon turns everyone a purplish brown blend of the colored powders.

The Festival of Colors in Southern California attracts only small numbers of Indian Hindus. The organizers of the event are Hare Krishnas, affiliated with the various temples of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON. The Hare Krishnas have had a long and fraught history in the American countercultural movement. Once the poster children for 1960s white hippie sojourns into Indian mysticism, the group became enmeshed in scandal in the 1970s and 1980s, and then became a major source of religious engagement for Indian Hindus living in diaspora.

The Festival of Colors is the brainchild of the guru Caru Das, a Hare Krishna devotee and the founder of a large Krishna community in Spanish Fork, Utah. As the organizer and producer of the festival, his purpose is to change the trend—to reach beyond the traditional Indian community and try something new among new audiences. Caru Das has created an event that is popular with teens and promoted as “good clean fun,” but he never forgets that its primary purpose is to introduce new souls to Krishna consciousness.

When asked, the majority of attendees at the Festival of Colors say that they are there for the fun of throwing colors. But there are many ways to enjoy a Saturday afternoon, and sweating colored powder in the hot LA sun is only one of them. In the murky, colored mist of the orchestrated hourly color throws, the audience of largely non-Hindu teens have their first experience of Hindu ritual and belief. In simple terms that a young California audience will understand, the festival introduces Hindu and Buddhist ideas, practices, and worldviews—all laced with universalistic ideals of peace, love, and unity. The Festival of Colors motions to Hindu religious practices as emblematic of indigenous roots and ancient wisdom. These sentiments echo those of Swami Vivekananda, who famously preached to American audiences in 1896: “When the Occident wants to learn about the spirit, about God, about the soul, about the meaning and the mystery of this universe, he must sit at the feet of the Orient to learn.”

Photograph by Mario L. Iñiguez.

Traditional temple Hinduism is not what these eager and open young people are experiencing. The Festival of Colors in Los Angeles is more like an ISKCON-inspired evangelical tent revival than any mainstream Hindu practice. Amidst color throws and playful revelry, the guru Caru Das takes the stage to focus the frenetic and playful energy of the crowd with the mahamantra, the central devotional chant of the Hare Krishnas: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare!” Caru Das actively proselytizes while playing directly to the desires and social proclivities of teens and young adults.

With music, yoga, food, and a playful atmosphere, the Festival of Colors is a brilliant marketing venture that attempts to erase the fraught political history of the Hare Krishnas and bring them back into the mainstream. There, they hope to vie for a position as the representatives par excellence of modern global Hinduism. Under the clever disguise of colored powders, the Festival of Colors represents the new proselytizing successes of ISKCON.

From the stage, Caru Das bellows to the excited crowd:

The Absolute is non-different from His name! So if you spend this day by singing and dancing the various names of the Absolute, you will be associating with the most wise, the most determined power in the universe. And that power will rub off on you and you will make better decisions and you will be in a better place in the future than you would have had you not tapped into this extra power.. . .

To reinforce his point, the guru jubilantly exhorts the crowd to repeat once again: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.. . . ” Many in the throng are chanting along exuberantly, but others are socializing with their friends and taking selfies of their wildly colorful bodies to post on social media. But to Caru Das, the spiritual impact of the mantra works like fire—it burns whether you believe it will or not.

Pilgrims visit unmarked graves at Manzanar. Photograph by Rea Tajiri.

 

Catholics carry El Señor de los Milagros in Los Angeles. Photograph by Jonathan Ritter.

 

The Catrina at the 2015 Noche de Altares. Photograph by Bernard Gordillo.

Note

Support for this project came from UCHRI as part of its Luce-Funded Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs Initiative.

by Lois Ann Lorentzen

A lifetime scholar of religion surveys California spirituality

from Boom Winter 2015, Vol 5, No 4

Making sense of religion in California is a daunting task. California’s religious extravagance is fascinating—Heaven’s Gate, the Crystal Cathedral, Synanon, Starhawk, Harold Camping’s end-of-world predictions, Aimee Semple McPherson, Esalen, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Grateful Dead. Everything is here, it seems, and then some.

Yet, we have to ask, does California really matter in the study of religion? Is there anything special or specific about religion in California? Is religion in California indicative of broader trends in religion? Does what happens in California pose challenges for religion? Does it present opportunities?¹ I’d like to offer a few suggestions as to what we might think about when we think about religion in California.

All of California is sacred space.

Ahwahneechee, Chumash, Chilula, Cupeño, Esselen, Hupa, Karok, Maidu, Miwok, Mohave, Mono, Ohlone, Patayan, Pomo, Salinan, Shasta, Wappo, and Yana are just a few of precolonial California’s 200 tribes. An estimated 300,000 indigenous peoples lived in California before European contact in the late 1700s. By 1860 that number had plummeted to 30,000, mainly due to disease.²

Given the great diversity of tribes, too many generalizations about indigenous religions shouldn’t be made. Broadly speaking, however, indigenous religions reflected relations with natural local landscapes and animals, yielding practices, rituals, cosmologies, and myths.

Morro Rock is sacred to Chumash and Salinan. The Medicine Lake Highlands near Mt. Shasta is a site of healing energy for Shasta, Wintu, Modoc, Pit River, and Karuk. Creation took place at Mt. Diablo according to the Miwok, who also consider Mt. Tamalpais sacred.

Rapidly changing social, cultural, and religious landscapes are the norm for California.

A “sacred expedition” of Spanish military and priests was charged with settling Alta California and converting Native Californians in 1769. But Spain had little real interest in colonizing California until Russian fur traders established Fort Ross near Bodega Bay in 1812. By 1833, twenty-one missions had been founded, nine of them by Franciscan Junipero Serra.³ Mexico secularized California’s missions in the 1830s. The Mexican-American War eventually resulted in the 1848 surrender of California to the United States. California’s composition changed dramatically once again with the Gold Rush, its population growing 410 percent between 1850 and 1860 as people from all over the world rushed in.

The point of this abbreviated history is to note how populations and religions change dramatically in very short windows of time. California went from indigenous in 1769 to Catholic by 1833 and to predominantly Protestant by 1860.

The mix of religions in California doesn’t look the same as other states.

More than a decade ago, I began a research project that transformed my relation to California, the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, my academic career, and my life. The Pew Charitable Trusts had charged our research team with analyzing religion’s role in the civic incorporation of new migrants to the Bay Area. We quickly realized that cultural and religious diversity made California a rich field for the study of religious life.⁴ Roughly 13 percent of the US population is foreign born, and 25 percent of foreign-born people in the United States live in California.⁵ In 2011, 27 percent of Californians were born outside the United States—53 percent from Latin America and 37 percent from Asia.⁶

California’s mix of people from around the world is reflected in its religions. Forty percent of all US Buddhists live in California, as do most Hindus and most Muslims—70,000 Muslims in Los Angeles County alone. California is 28 percent Catholic, 20 percent Evangelical Protestant, and 10 percent mainline Protestant. This is in contrast to the United States as a whole, where 70 percent of Christians are Protestant.⁷

To study religion in California is to study the world’s religions.

Each group of new arrivals has left their religious mark on California as religious traditions, objects, and practices migrated with laborers. The Tin How temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown dates to the Gold Rush. Cameron House, a vibrant social service agency, started as a Presbyterian women’s mission to combat the indentured servitude and coerced prostitution of Chinese women. The San Francisco Buddhist Center is a Japanese Pure Land Buddhist temple founded in 1898. Stockton’s Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was founded in 1952 when Stockton boasted the largest Filipino population outside the Philippines. The state’s large Latino population has revitalized both California Catholicism and Pentecostalism.

The patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is present in churches, and on candles, murals, and tattoos. Lesser-known saints such as San Toribio Romo (the Mexican patron saint for immigrants) and Jesus Malverde (patron saint for drug traffickers, migrants, and the poor) live here, too. Our Lady of La Vang resides in Vietnamese Catholic Churches throughout the state. Los Angeles has twelve temples devoted to Santa Muerte, a rogue Mexican saint. Veneration of the Buddhist Bodhisattva Guanyin and the goddess Tianhou/Mazu flourishes. San Lorenzo Ruiz, the Filipino saint, can be found in churches, Catholic schools, and homes.

As goes California, so goes the nation.

California’s present is the nation’s future. Where migrants once moved to gateway cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, they now head to rural areas and smaller cities in new destination states—South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Delaware, North Dakota. Fourteen new destination states experienced a 49 percent growth in foreign-born population between 2000 and 2009, twice the national rate.⁸

California is a place that makes us rethink a religion’s place.

If 27 percent of California is foreign born, what is the “place” of theology and religion? Our globalized world radically changes the meaning of “place” and our experience of it. Religions transported to California change as they migrate; they are not static reflections of practices in countries of origin. Deemed transnational or diaspora, religions change as they become multi-sited.

Followers of Mazu, a goddess bound to a particular region and temple in Taiwan, demonstrate a creative response to leaving one’s place. Pilgrims from San Francisco’s Ma-tsu Temple accompany the statue of Meiguo Mazu (American Mazu) to the “mother” temple in Beigang, Taiwan. The American Mazu regularly needs her spiritual energy replenished by the mother goddess in Taiwan. The pilgrims allow her to remain a territorial goddess by returning her to her place of origin. Yet they also deterritorialize her by replacing her in San Francisco.⁹

People, religions, and cultures are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in California, often in unexpected ways.

Venerable Master Hsua Hua came to California in 1962 to reform, not replicate, Chinese Buddhism. Monastic training in Taiwan had shifted from large training monasteries to smaller temples resulting in lack of discipline, according to Hua. In California, he founded what eventually became known as the Dharma Realm Buddha Association, headquartered in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas monastery in Ukiah. A traditional, orthodox, and disciplined Chinese Buddhism is taught and practiced there, and most monks in residence are Chinese-speaking. English speakers are encouraged to learn Chinese. Thousands have been trained and prepared for ordination, both Asians and Westerners. The City also offers bilingual education at its elementary and secondary schools. Taiwanese students, American students, and students from around the world study in this remote section of northern California.

The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas sits on more than five hundred acres of meadows, orchards, and forests. Peacocks roam freely and streets bear names such as “Boddhi Way” and “Mindfulness Way.” In our migrant study, we concluded that the transnational activities of the City’s monks and congregants have contributed to an “altogether unique cultural and religious identity.”¹⁰ The City of Ten Thousand Bhuddas is a paradoxical transnational phenomenon. The Venerable Master left Taiwan for the United States to establish a place to teach pure Chinese Buddhism. Students from Taiwan travel to northern California to prepare for a traditional Chinese Buddhist ordination. For Chinese immigrants, the City does and does not remind them of “home.”

Religious migrations can also mean political migrations.

Massive internal migration has also altered California’s religious and political landscape. During the 1930s, between 300,000 and 400,000 people from Dust Bowl states arrived in California, with a third moving to the San Joaquin Valley and half to cities.¹¹ Roughly 95 percent of the new migrants were white.

Darren Dochuk analyzed the migration of evangelical white Christians from the 1930s to the 1970s. He argued that they transformed Southern California, and led to the growth of the Christian Right.¹²
Primarily from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, these mostly conservative migrants established churches, schools, courted politicians, and gave birth to a politically active evangelicalism that promoted links between conservative politics and conservative evangelism. “We are at Ground Zero,” noted political scientist James L. Taylor.¹³

African American migration to California in the 1940s overlapped with the westward migration of Southern evangelicals. Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles had a combined African American population of 50,200 in 1930. By 1950 it was 254,120.¹⁴ The first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was founded in Los Angeles in 1872. Its membership grew with the influx of new Californians, and new churches were started. Church leaders such as Reverend Cecil Williams and Reverend Amos Brown became active in San Francisco politics. Williams became pastor of Glide Memorial Church in 1963 and was an early supporter of the Black Panthers, organizing protest rallies with other supporters like Angela Davis.

California is a border state, and religions minister across borders.

California is a border state and home to the largest volume border crossing in the world. Fifty to seventy thousand people cross legally between Tijuana and San Diego every day. Ours is also the world’s most militarized border between non-warring countries. As Senator John McCain has noted, it is the most “militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”¹⁵ Over six thousand migrants have died trying to cross the border since 1998.

The border concretely symbolizes global inequality. Religious groups on both sides of the border minister to migrants in transit—providing shoes, food, and shelter; tending to battered feet; and helping organize documents. Summer 2014 witnessed an influx of Central American migrants, many of them young children. The St. Joseph Church in Fontana, in Southern California, provided food and shelter.

Religion and politics are no strangers in California.

Cesar Chavez cofounded, with Dolores Huerta, the National Farm Workers Association (now United Farm Workers). Chavez blended religious practices with political activism, consciously modeling himself after Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi.

In September 1965, the National Farm Workers Association met in Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Delano and agreed to join Filipino grape workers in their strike against deplorable conditions, including harm created by pesticide use. Chavez organized a 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, with a large banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe leading the way. He deployed religious terms like “pilgrimage” and “penance” to describe the march. Some scholars call this Chavez’s “political spirituality,” claiming la causa was a religious movement.¹⁶

Marginalized religions are not marginal in California.

In Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited, photographer Rick Nahmias collected photographs, testimonies, and texts exploring faith communities that might be considered marginal elsewhere, including a transgender gospel choir, a San Quentin Buddhist community, a deaf Mormon congregation, Cham Muslim survivors of Cambodia’s genocide, Miwok and Pomo Indians reinstated as a tribe in 2000, and a Jewish congregation of recovering addicts. Less visible does not mean marginal.

Experimental religions work wonders in experimental situations.

Religion scholar John Nelson writes that experimental religions share five characteristics: positionality (how an individual views her life in complex gender, ecological, and economic social networks); agency; negotiation with a religion; grounding religious practice in daily life; and continual reinvention.¹⁷

I was introduced to one of California’s experimental religions, Santa Muerte, known affectionately as the Bony Lady, the Skinny One, and the Powerful Lady, during fieldwork with undocumented Mexican transgender sex workers in San Francisco. Although the press sensationalizes her as a narco-saint, she is the chosen saint of marginalized peoples in Mexico and those who find themselves on the cusp of violence. A skeletal figure, she often holds a glove in one hand and a pendulum in the other. A loose robe hangs from her wrists, exposing her bony arms. A halo adorns her skeletal head. La Santa Muerte, a symbolic representation of death, draws from Catholic beliefs and practices. Santa Muerte was the chosen saint for sex workers in our study. She accepts them as they are, unlike their experience in the traditional church, and protects them.

Worship of Santa Muerte reflects characteristics of experimental religion. Santa Muerte worshippers consider themselves good Catholics. Their practices are similar to traditional rituals, prayers, and altars. Santa Muerte devotees are creating religious practice through an experimental method related to their own lives and problems, which reflects their precariousness. Santa Muerte is a saint relevant to their daily lives.

Santa Muerte “helps me in the street, to stay away from risks,” one worshipper told me. “She exists, she exists, of course; we are all going to die. Death exists and she protects me from all of the dangers around me.”¹⁸

Celebrity, consumer culture, and religion come together in California.

Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Pentecostal International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, brought Hollywood glamor to religion. McPherson was not just a religious superstar, she was a superstar period, as famous in her day as any movie star today. Large crowds flocked to her rallies and faith-healing events. Her church, Angelus Temple, held 5,300 people. Services were held three times a day, seven days a week.

The Church of Scientology has self-consciously courted celebrities since founder L. Ron Hubbard initiated Project Celebrity in 1955. Celebrity Centre International was created in Los Angeles in 1969 and has centers in major cities around the world. According to their website, they cater to “individuals upon whom society depends the most. . . the artists, politicians, leaders of industry, sports figures and anyone with the power and vision to create a better world.”¹⁹

Celebrity culture goes hand in hand with consumer culture. Consumer culture is not unique to California, yet the state pioneered prosperity theologies and the related theology of self-esteem promoted by the late Robert Schuller. Before its bankruptcy, the Crystal Cathedral, former home to Schuller’s ministry, was a monument to religious celebration of affluence. The cathedral’s soaring opulent glass structure forsakes Max Weber’s austere Protestantism, which encouraged capitalism through sober investing. This is brash, flashy capitalism in a religious guise.

California manufactures new deities.

Celebrity also helps launch new religious movements. Actor Andrew Keegan (Party of Five, 10 Things I Hate About You) cofounded Full Circle Venice as an “open source spiritual community center.”²⁰ Journalists Shyam Dodge and Shanrah Wakefield write, “The shift in Keegan’s ambitions—from stardom to spirituality—shows how the culture of celebrity is not all that far off from religion. Hollywood is an industry focused on manufacturing deities.”²¹

Keegan says of Full Circle Venice, “We have a creed. We do believe that everything is an expression of the creator and that we coming together create our own destiny, our own path.”²²
Keegan and his inner circle see themselves as being “standard bearers for an updated brand of ecstatic California spirituality.”²³ Daniel Paul, the group’s operations managers, traces Full Circle’s spiritual lineage to the Esalen Institute, which he visited growing up. “We’re doing something that borrows from what our parents taught but also innovates in a significant way.”²⁴

California saw nontraditional religions emerge from the 1960s counterculture and hippie subculture. By the end of the 1970s, New Age was a big tent that included a range of spiritual practices and beliefs. Difficult to define, it is a decentralized, heterogeneous spiritual movement that includes beliefs in divine energy, pantheism, auras, healing, alternative medicine, and the idea that social change requires deep psychic and consciousness change. Practices include channeling, crystals, meditation, astrology, divining (through runes, tarot cards, the I Ching), holistic healing, and music. Multiple roots or resources for New Age philosophy include Wicca, neo-paganism, Theosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

New religions generate new sacred landscapes.

Mt. Shasta has become a sacred mountain and pilgrimage destination for many New Age groups. Legends exist about the mountain as one of the only homes to the Ascended Masters (enlightened beings who used to be human). St. Germain, an Ascended Master, appeared on the mountain in 1930 to a hiker, Guy Ballard. Ballard and his wife formed the I AM foundation to introduce followers to St. Germain and the teachings of other Ascended Masters. Since 1950, this foundation has held an annual pageant depicting the life of Christ, without a crucifixion.

Mt. Shasta is also believed to be home to Lemurians, beings from the lost continent of Lemuria, who live in a hidden city beneath the mountain. Lemurians occasionally emerge from the mountain and interact with humans. Numerous testimonies and stories can be found in bookstores in Mt. Shasta City, which has become a hub for New Age retreats, workshops, bookstores, healers, and pilgrimages.

Religions can go very wrong.

Thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate killed themselves in 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe. Founded in the early 1970s by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles (aliases “Bo and Peep” and “Do and Ti”), Heaven’s Gate mixed New Age concepts with Christianity. They believed the Earth would be “recycled,” that is destroyed, and that human bodies were mere vehicles to be shed in order to reach the “Next Level.” Applewhite convinced the group that a spacecraft trailing the comet Hale-Bopp would pick them up. Mixing phenobarbital with vodka and covering their heads with plastic bags, thirty-nine people killed themselves in order to leave their bodies and enter the spaceship.

To my knowledge, California is the only state that has been home to groups that ended in religiously motivated mass suicides. We’ve had two, including one of the largest mass suicides in modern history.

The other has alternately been called a mass suicide or mass murder. More than 900 people died in the agrarian commune “Jonestown” in Guyana in 1978, all but two from cyanide poisoning. Jim Jones founded the People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ in Indiana but relocated to California in the late 1960s. During the 1970s, it was located in San Francisco’s largely African American Fillmore district. An interracial congregation, it prided itself on its progressive politics. Jones preached a Christianity that was egalitarian, emphasized social justice, and believed the church could embody a utopian socialist vision on Earth. In the early 1970s after prominent Temple members defected, the press began investigating allegations of fraud, kidnapping, beatings, and misuse of funds, Jones fled to Guyana to create an agrarian, utopian socialist community with full racial and economic equality. In the years that followed, hundreds of Temple members joined him there.

After a group calling itself “Concerned Relatives” brought media and government attention to Jonestown, claiming that all communication with the outside was cut off, an investigative team led by Congressman Leo Ryan arrived in Guyana in 1978. Several Jonestown residents asked to be taken back to San Francisco. As the group started to board two planes to return, Jonestown security guards appeared, shooting and killing five people and wounding ten more. Jones then gathered the community together, informed them that Ryan had been killed and claimed they were about to be tortured, raped, castrated, and killed by the Guyanese Defense Force; 907 people drank a cyanide-laced drink and died.

Religions can go bad without ending in mass suicide.

Charles E. Dederich started Synanon in 1958 as a drug rehabilitation program. By the 1960s it became a utopian community. Dederich allegedly coined the phrase, “Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life,” which adorned millions of posters, cards, and coffee mugs from the 1960s to the present. The early iteration of Synanon fit with the 1960s hippie and New Age ethos, but soon took a darker turn. A form of group therapy, called the “Synanon Game,” involved intense and often brutal criticism, in hours-long sessions.

Synanon petitioned to become recognized as a religion in 1974, but the petition was never granted. The more religious Synanon became, the more violence increased, including the physical abuse of young people. In 1977, Dederich declared that men should get vasectomies and women, abortions. In 1978, Synanon members assaulted Phil Ritter, a man who was trying to remove his daughter from the Synanon property in Marin County, putting him in a coma for a week. Imperial Marines (Synanon’s militia) Lance Kenton and Joseph Musico placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of Paul Morantz, an attorney who was prosecuting Synanon. Kenton and Musico received jail time; Dederich received five years of probation. Synanon closed its doors in 1991.

The University of San Francisco, where I work, generously sponsors writing retreats for faculty at the former site of Syanon, the beautiful Marcone Center overlooking Tomales Bay. As I relish the beauty, the calm, the peacefulness of writing with colleagues and friends in a lovely environment, I sometimes feel haunted as I roam the tranquil grounds.

Gender, sexuality, and religion come together.

In 1979, three men in traditional nuns’ habits appeared in San Francisco’s Castro District. The following year they were joined by twelve others, naming themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters perform street theater, organize protests, and are a charitable organization designed to combat sexual and gender intolerance. Currently, there are orders in all parts of the United States, as well as in Latin America, Australia, and Europe. The Sisters’ website proclaims, “We believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty and we use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency, and guilt that chain the human spirit.”²⁵

Highlights from over thirty-five years of creative political activism include a public exorcism of Pope John Paul II in Union Square during his 1987 visit to San Francisco; Sister Vicious’s posting of demands on St. Mary’s Cathedral doors with her press-on nails (“Martin Luther would have been proud!” she said);²⁶
and the Sisters’ Queer Army’s “holy wars” against homophobia in which pink-camouflaged army members invaded the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, to distribute condoms after being invited by students. The sisters were quickly escorted off campus by police.

Rev. Troy Perry was kicked out of his Pentecostal church due to his homosexuality. After years of struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with his Christianity, he founded the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) in 1968. From small beginnings—the first group of twelve met in a living room—the church now has at least three hundred congregations in twenty countries. Perry and MCC have challenged “clobber texts” in the Christian Bible that are used to justify gay-hating attitudes and practices. Currently, UFMCC is the largest religious group in the world serving the LGBTQ community.

I’m not claiming California is the only place with LGBTQ-friendly religious groups. It isn’t. There are branches of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the Metropolitan Community Church around the world. Yet MCC, the Sisters, and other groups like the Transcendence Gospel Choir began in California.

Religion is embodied and disembodied.

Religion is an embodied phenomenon, a thing people do, in part, for and with their bodies. Meredith McGuire asks us to consider postures, ways of focusing attention, food, eating, food preparation, and healing rituals. The Ecstatic Dance movement is possibly a too obvious example of California embodied spirituality. Although originating in Hawaii, its popularity took off after Ecstatic Dance events began in Oakland in 2008. Now considered a global movement, California still has more ecstatic dance venues and events than anywhere in the world.

Paradoxically, California has been on the forefront of embodiment and disembodiment. If San Francisco has been a capital for exploration of gender, sexuality, and embodiment, Silicon Valley could be considered the center for disembodied reality. Samuel Loncar writes that the “religion of Silicon Valley” has “a more-or-less orthodox theology, and plenty of rites and institutions to keep its priestly caste employed and relevant.”²⁷ He looks to futurist Ray Kurzwell’s 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, as one piece of evidence supporting the existence of a religion of technology. Kurzewell predicts that by 2045 technological progress will be so great that humans will no longer be able to comprehend or direct it. In the process, humanity will be transformed and no longer limited by biological bodies. According to Kurzewell, “Humans will become functionally immortal as spiritual machines, no longer dependent on our embodied condition.”²⁸ Kurzewell and Peter H. Diamandis founded Singularity University in 2008 “to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges. SU is committed to creating positive global impact through the billions of people who benefit from our programs and activities.”²⁹

Nature is religious.

Manuel Vasquez asks how “our embeddedness in a particular physical landscape, a bioregion, is linked with our religious ideas, practices, and institutions” and “how do religious narratives and practices shape our lived landscapes?”³⁰ California is blessed with spectacular, extravagant nature. John Muir called Hetch Hetchy Valley a “sacred temple” prior to its damming. Numerous environmental groups and movements began in California including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Rainforest Action Network, Earth Island Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, and more. It is no surprise that nature religions and “green” religions also found homes here.

Bron Taylor coined the term “dark green religion” to describe beliefs or ways of life that “resemble” religion, primarily considering groups and practices in North America and Europe emerging since Earth Day 1970.³¹ The July 2008 Surfing magazine featured Taylor’s ideas in a special issue, “Nature=God It’s Official: Surfing is a Religion.” Here’s a description of surfing as “Aquatic Nature Religion” from the issue’s foreword:

From our first whitewater to our final curtain call, surfing works in mysterious ways. It can serve as a gateway to eternal life (just ask Doc Paskowitz, who will still paddle circles around you). Our daily baptism (“The only thing that washes my troubles away,” says Matt Archbold). Our confessional booth (Nothing is more honest than a 20-footer on the head). And, of course, it can serve as our sanctuary, our church and our connection to the Supreme Being itself.³²

Hollywood also entertains this dark green picture. In the movie Avatar, the indigenous Na’vi of paradisiacal Pandora hold ecocentric worldviews and worship their planet as the goddess Eywa. Taylor writes, “I suspected not only that Avatar was a reflection of the global emergence of dark green religions but that it might even effectively advance such spirituality and ethics.”³³

Is there anything special about religion in California? As a teenager in northern Minnesota, I fantasized about California a lot; I knew it was special. I wanted it, the mountains, the oceans, the freedom, the diversity, the tolerance, the experimenting. Did I romanticize and essentialize? You bet! But now I am a Californian, with an ongoing love/hate relationship with this place. An academic, I’m still unsure about the answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of this essay. I have concluded, however, that California matters a great deal when we think about religion.

Notes

by Jim Hinch

from Boom Winter 2015, Vol 5, No 4

The postcolonial cosmopolitan future of evangelism

Saturday mornings, as the sun rises over the master-planned streets of the city of Irvine, a fleet of dusty pickup trucks bearing peaches, carrots, tomatoes, bok choi, and other farm-fresh produce trundles into the parking lot of one of California’s largest evangelical megachurches.

Therein lies the future of American Christianity.

The farmers in the trucks set up stands for the Irvine Certified Farmers Market, staged weekly by the ninety-eight-year-old Orange County Farm Bureau. The market—the largest in Orange County—moved to the church in December 2014. Before then, the farmers had leased a shopping center parking lot across the street from the nearby University of California, Irvine, where for two decades well-heeled customers “in everything from burkhas to bikinis,” as market manager Trish Harrison put it, stocked up on produce grown on local farms. Harrison said the shopping center welcomed the market in the 1990s, when the city was half its present size. But the market grew and the city grew until “people were saying, ‘I can’t find a parking space, I’m going home.'” Merchants complained. The shopping center complained. “I knew we had to move,” Harrison told me.

The farmers couldn’t afford to move. “It’s a high-rent district, let’s be honest,” Harrison said. She tried the university. “So much bureaucracy.” She considered a nearby high school. Too small. Then, one day, Harrison thought of a parking lot that “looked like Disneyland.” The 2,100-seat space, tree-lined lot sloped gently from a fifty-acre landscaped campus of glass and steel buildings arranged around a lake, a stream, waterfalls, and a playground with a climbable Noah’s Ark and a smiling life-sized whale opening its mouth to swallow little Jonahs. The lot belonged to Mariners Church, one of the most influential evangelical megachurches in the United States, with more than 13,000 members, four worship centers in Orange County, and a network of global church partners in Kenya, Uganda, Congo, China, Egypt, Haiti, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Germany. Harrison checked out the lot one Saturday morning and noticed something else. “They have tons of bathrooms.. . . We [wouldn’t] have to wait to pee.”

Harrison told customers that she was thinking of calling the church. “They said, ‘You will not get an appointment with them. They will not speak to you.'” Harrison called the church. A few days later, she was touring the parking lot with senior pastor Kenton Beshore and some other staff members. “You want this lot?” they asked. “I said that would be perfect. They looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I almost fell on the floor.”

There is nothing outwardly remarkable about a farmers market in a church parking lot—not even a Southern California farmers market, with its requisite nonsectarian kaleidoscope of aging hippies, Persian soccer moms, skate punks, Vietnamese restaurateurs, immigrants in minivans, and real estate flippers in Audis. Mariners Church doesn’t profit from or proselytize at the market, although church volunteers do run a free miniature train ride for kids. What is remarkable in this scenario is the chain of events that led to Kenton Beshore’s casual “Let’s do it.” A few years ago, no one at Mariners would have seen the point of welcoming a secular institution onto its grounds. But that was before the missionaries arrived, and before Mariners, once dubbed by a Los Angeles Times reporter “the Dallas Cowboys of churches,” began modeling itself on a thriving, social-service-oriented megachurch in a middle-class neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. The story of that unlikely transformation—which happened to prove fortuitous for Trish Harrison and her farmers—is a California story, a story of America’s immigration bellwether showing the nation’s churches a possible path forward in a rapidly secularizing nation. “God is throwing a global party, and it’s in the southern hemisphere,” Beshore told me when I asked him about the immense changes Mariners has undergone since the day eight years ago it hired a young Kenyan pastor to help with missionary work. Actually, the global party has been coming to California for years. That an evangelical megachurch noticed and decided to throw open its doors to the multitude might give the rest of America’s beleaguered Christians something to celebrate—and emulate.

By evangelical megachurch standards, Mariners is a venerable congregation. It began in 1963 as a Bible study group in a Newport Beach tract house. The study group grew, expanded to other nearby houses, and then hired a full-time pastor in 1967. The church took its name from a local elementary school where early services were held in an auditorium. The congregation was classic Orange County—white, well-to-do, informal, fond of worship services at the beach, and prayer breakfasts with the mayor and city officials. The church remained medium-sized until 1984 when Kenton Beshore, a native Southern Californian who had arrived at Mariners six years earlier as a college pastor, was promoted to lead the church. Beshore, who at the time looked and talked like the star of a 1960s surfing film, transformed Mariners into a magnet for spiritually seeking baby boomers. The church joined other notable innovators—including Saddleback Church, also in Orange County, and Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago—dubbed by a 1996 Atlantic magazine story as exemplars of an emerging “Next Church” movement. These churches, super-sized with thousands of members, had experienced spectacular growth by sweeping aside fusty church traditions to make way for up-tempo music, sleek sanctuaries, and a seven-day-a-week menu of activities and programs designed, in Beshore’s words in the Atlantic, to give people “what they want.” By the early 2000s, Mariners had more than 10,000 members and a multimillion dollar budget.

It was then that Christian Mungai, born in a village in Kenya and raised near a Nairobi slum, appeared in Mariners’ 3,400-seat worship hall as part of an African gospel group called Milele. The five-year-old group, modestly successful on the African gospel circuit, was touring American churches to sing and, in Mungai’s words, help American evangelicals “learn how to do missions” in twenty-first-century Africa. Mungai had recently returned to Nairobi after earning a divinity degree at Claremont School of Theology in California. His time in America, he said, had solidified his view that many American evangelicals’ understanding of contemporary Africa was woefully out of date. “It’s a form of neocolonialism,” he said of some Americans’ approach to missionary work. “For someone to come and think they can bring the gospel and God—previous generations of Western missionaries already did that. They did their job and raised up leaders. We don’t need people coming to do that anymore. Why not support the leaders already there?”

After their concerts, Milele’s members—Mungai and three childhood friends—sat down with host pastors and urged them to shift the focus of their church’s missionary work toward supporting African-led efforts to ameliorate the continent’s problems. The message was not well received. “It’s hard for Americans to learn from other people,” Mungai said. Mariners Church was the last venue on Milele’s 2003 tour. Given the chilly reception the group had just received at nearby Saddleback Church, Mungai said he was not surprised when Mariners’ pastors politely told him they saw no need to alter their approach.

Mungai returned to Kenya discouraged but unwilling to give up. He remained in contact with American pastors and booked more concerts, including a 2004 reappearance at Mariners recorded live for a music video. As before, Milele’s music was more warmly received than its post-concert lectures.

Then, in 2006, Mungai learned that Mariners had hired a new director of international missions, a thirty-three-year-old pastor named Matt Olthoff. Mungai emailed Olthoff to ask if he’d like to meet. Later that year, the two sat down in Olthoff’s office. To Mungai’s dismay, even this new, young pastor was uninterested in pursuing partnerships with African-led Christian social-service initiatives.

Walking out of the meeting, Mungai wondered whether he was partly to blame for his lack of success. “I went in with an agenda just like the Americans do,” he said. “I needed to lead from a place of relationship.”Impulsively, he called Olthoff back and asked to meet again—no agenda, just to get to know one another.

Olthoff, it turned out, had just gone through a divorce. “I was broken, feeling isolated,” he said. Mungai, thirty-two at the time and single, was and remains an ebullient personality, with a ready smile and a head sometimes shaved, sometimes topped with finger-sized dreadlocks. Sitting in the Mariners’ campus café, Olthoff found himself telling Mungai the story of his divorce. Mungai, in turn, shared his frustrations about American missionaries.

“Who else talks like you, about a new Africa?” Olthoff asked.

Mungai mentioned the pastor of his church, a rapidly growing Nairobi megachurch called Mavuno, which had expanded in part by encouraging its members to become what the pastor, Muriithi Wanjao, called “fearless influencers of society”—people who solve local problems by harnessing the resources of the church. Mungai said he wished more American evangelicals were willing to learn what churches like Mavuno were already doing and join them in that work. “Americans offer strategy and resources,” he said. “But Africans offer a sense of resilience. They are the most resilient people in the world. They love music and culture and dance and family and community, things that in America are breaking down.” Mungai said to Olthoff: “I can help you. Come to our church and see what we’re doing.”

A few months later, Olthoff was in Nairobi. He spent time with Mungai and met Wanjao. Taken aback by the size of Mavuno Church and the number of members who had committed themselves to social service projects, Olthoff impulsively offered Mungai a job. “I’m like, what if we brought Africa to Mariners?” he recalled. “We’re always sending people to Africa. But that person would change our church forever. I remember thinking I was new on the job and I was going, ‘I don’t know how to do African ministries. Wouldn’t it make sense to bring someone who knows the culture? Wouldn’t that make sense? Maybe this is crazy.'”

Mungai said yes. “I literally went home and cried,” he said.

Mungai started work at Mariners in November 2007 as coordinator of missions to Africa. Soon after, Muriithi Wanjao, pastor of Mavuno Church, invited Kenton Beshore and other senior Mariners leaders to visit Kenya and learn more about how Mavuno worked. A group of Mariners pastors, including Kenton Beshore and his wife, Laurie, traveled to Nairobi in early 2008. Arriving amid widespread violence following a contested election, the pastors were as struck as Olthoff had been by Mavuno’s size, rapid growth, and level of spiritual commitment. They were even more surprised when the Kenyan pastors delivered a blunt lecture about the changing power dynamics in global Christianity. “Churches in the western hemisphere are dying,” one of the pastors said. “But in the global south they are growing. Shouldn’t it be that we should be the ones sending people your way and revitalizing your churches? Your world is post-Christian. We are growing.”

Oscar Muriu, the Kenyan pastor who delivered that message, was in fact not from Mavuno, but rather was the leader of another even larger church called Nairobi Chapel, which had spun off Mavuno as one of numerous start-up congregations a few years earlier. Beshore and the other Mariners pastors realized that the megachurch they had come to visit, growing faster than their own, was just a small part of an even larger and more rapidly growing Christian network.

“Kenton felt like Oscar slapped him,” Mungai recalled. “He says to me, ‘I have never heard anything like this.'” The Mariners pastors attended raucous worship services at Mavuno. They met church members who had started a micro-finance loan network in a nearby slum. Beshore said he realized Mavuno thrived not by giving its members what they wanted, but by demanding from them a total commitment to Christian life, especially Jesus’ call to serve others. “They have things we don’t have,” Beshore told me. “They’re killing it doing what they’re doing.” At the end of the visit, Beshore invited Muriu to come to Mariners to show him how to make his church more like Mavuno. “It’s so arrogant to say we’re the best country in the world,” he said. “It’s so unattractive. And it’s not true.”

Beshore’s—and Muriu’s—assessment of global Christianity is correct. Roughly 60 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of the world’s religious populations.¹ That share is forecast to grow to nearly three-quarters by 2050. Meanwhile, in the United States, Christianity is steadily contracting. Just two-thirds of Americans are expected to be Christian in 2050, with a quarter of the nation claiming no religious affiliation at all. Already 35 percent of Americans born after 1980 are nonreligious. The unchurched are America’s fastest growing religious demographic.²

American Christianity is changing as it shrinks. Smaller, older churches, especially those affiliated with once-dominant Protestant denominations such as the Southern Baptists and various Presbyterian groups are struggling. Catholic dioceses in the Northeast and Midwest are closing parishes and schools. Only two kinds of churches continue to grow: those that attract immigrants, such as Pentecostal congregations and Catholic parishes in the Southwest; and megachurches, whose big budgets and robust programming have drawn Christians fleeing smaller, dying congregations. Studies by Leadership Network, an evangelical research organization specializing in large churches, show that over the past decade megachurches have grown and remained financially stable even as smaller churches shrink and struggle to make their budgets.³

The trend toward consolidation has been good for megachurches but not for Christianity as a whole. Megachurches have proven adept at wooing Christians dissatisfied with traditional forms of religious expression. But like evangelicalism itself, megachurches mostly have not adapted to America’s rapidly changing demographics and cultural mores. More than four-fifths of megachurches are majority white, according to a 2011 Leadership Network study.⁴ Hispanics and Asians—America’s fastest-growing demographic groups—are underrepresented in American evangelicalism by wide margins.⁵ Millennials are the least likely of any age group to be Christian.⁶

At a time when America and Christianity are globalizing, most evangelical churches are organized to meet the needs of an older, whiter population that, in a few decades, will no longer be the American majority. “The West has the money, but the numbers are in the non-west. That’s our context,” said Ryan Bolger, professor of intercultural studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

A decade ago, Mariners Church was mostly indistinguishable from America’s other successful megachurches. The budget was big, the programming was robust, the worship services were high-tech, and the congregation was mostly white and financially well-off. Mariners differed from other megachurches in supporting a robust array of local community service initiatives both at the church and in four church-run community centers in low-income areas of Orange County. The initiatives were largely overseen by Laurie Beshore, wife of Kenton, the senior pastor. They were popular in the congregation but not central to the church’s agenda. “The irony is, my husband doesn’t have a big heart for the poor in the community,” Laurie told me. She meant Kenton’s focus at the time was on bringing people to Jesus, not solving Orange County’s economic problems.

When Oscar Muriu arrived at Mariners with several other pastors from Nairobi, he brought with him an approach to Christianity that is difficult to categorize in American terms. According to historian Philip Jenkins, who has written extensively about the global shift in Christianity’s center of gravity, African Christians combine beliefs and practices that straddle—and sometimes transcend—Western churches’ often debilitating divide between liberalism and conservatism.⁷

African Christians have supported repressive anti-homosexuality laws in Uganda and practiced forms of spiritual healing that, to Western observers, verge on witchcraft. But churches in Africa also have played prominent roles in struggles against colonialism, and they continue to view themselves as engines of social and economic development for their communities. The unifying thread is their wholehearted response to the Bible—to Scripture’s traditional sexual mores, its call to redeem the world, and its assumption that God is powerfully active in everyday life. That unreserved embrace of faith as a means of both personal and social liberation has contributed to explosive growth in non-Western churches.

While visiting Mariners, Oscar Muriu immediately asked why the church’s community outreach initiatives were not center-stage. “Why do you have Laurie where you have her?” he said, referring to Laurie Beshore’s social service ministry. “She should do things at an all-church level.” (Laurie now serves as a senior pastor alongside her husband.) Muriu preached at Mariners’ weekend services, telling the assembled Orange Countians what he had told Kenton Beshore in Nairobi: “There’s a global party, and the American church has not been invited.” Beshore warned the congregation to expect changes. “I want to be part of this global party,” he said. “I don’t want to be left behind.” Muriu received a standing ovation.

Change in the church world, especially at large churches, is generally slow. Churches are inherently conservative institutions, run by governing boards of longstanding members often wary of innovation. By these standards, the changes at Mariners following the arrival of Christian Mungai have been rapid and far-reaching. A year after Muriu’s first visit, Mariners implemented a spiritual development program pioneered by Mavuno Church called Mzizi, a Swahili word meaning “rooted.” For ten weeks, Mariners members met weekly in small groups to help one another discern how they were being called by God to serve their community. The goal was not simply to produce a new crop of soup kitchen volunteers. Mungai said Mariners wanted its members to “become known for their radical generosity. You give and there are no strings attached to people who never give to you or don’t have an ability to give to you. We want people to say, ‘I’m a fearless influencer of society wherever I am.'”

The church began offering no-strings-attached money and volunteers to local nonreligious service organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club, a local public continuation high school, and a nonprofit called Women Helping Women that helps formerly drug-addicted or incarcerated women find jobs. Two Mariners members, one a former Muslim, formed a group to visit local mosques and forge ties with Muslims. The group helped to stage a series of forums about Islam at Mariners and at a mosque in Mission Viejo. Mariners then partnered with mosque members to feed the homeless in downtown Santa Ana. When the pastor of Templo Calvario, a Spanish-language megachurch in Santa Ana, asked Laurie Beshore if she and Kenton would consider joining a national group of evangelicals to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform, the Beshores said yes, breaking a longstanding vow Kenton had made to himself to keep Mariners out of political debates. “It’s a dangerous subject, no doubt about it,” Laurie told me. But conversations with the Kenyans had changed the Beshores’ view of advocacy work. “Our strategy is to serve, starting with the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten,” Kenton said. “In this church, there are lots of wealthy people. I tell them, ‘You need the poor more than the poor need you. You’re poor in spirit.’ People who come to this church think money and power is the solution to everything in this world. Jesus said by being willing to get down and serve, you’re transformed.”

Mungai began taking groups of Mariners members to visit Mavuno Church. Some were initially confused when Mungai told them they would not be bringing money, food, school supplies, or any of the other donation items typically offered by American evangelicals traveling to Africa. “I had to say, ‘This is not just what you’re going to do. You have to ask what is God going to do in you?'” The Mariners visitors attended services at Mavuno, learned how the church worked, and met laypeople who had started successful community service initiatives. Bob Drobish, a technology startup CEO and member of Mariners’ board of elders, recalled his surprise meeting Daisy Waimiri, a Mavuno member and mother of three who had started a thriving community-based micro-loan program in Kibera, Nairobi’s—and Africa’s—largest urban slum.

“Isn’t she a force of nature?” Drobish said of Waimiri. The loan program, called Maono (“Vision”), grouped local businesspeople—hairdressers, coal sellers, sweepers—into accountability groups who borrowed and repaid collective loans together. Waimiri said she conceived of the program after attending Mavuno’s Mzizi classes. “My church has this thing. . . they take you through trainings, and at the end they expect you to go to the community and do something,” she told me via Skype. Waimiri’s first investor was her husband. When she met Drobish, she told him she needed more investors to expand the initiative. Five years later, with help from Drobish and other Mariners’ members, Maono has loaned roughly $100,000 to more than one thousand businesspeople in Kibera. “They haven’t imposed anything on us,” Waimiri said of her Mariners partners. “They don’t tell us what to do. Even when they give the money they say, ‘You’re on the ground, you know better.’ Which is very rare with Western donors.”

Robyn Williams, a forty-three-year-old former corporate publicist who attended Mariners as a child, said she remembered returning to the church after college in the 1990s and thinking, “Everyone here drives a Mercedes. . . they’re not really doing much for the poor.” Williams was one of thousands of Mariners members who signed up for the Rooted spiritual development program, inspired by Mavuno Church’s Mzizi program. In her Rooted meetings in 2011, Williams began “exploring what has God created me to do and how am I going to make an impact on other people’s lives in the community?” She joined Christian Mungai on one of his trips to Nairobi, where she met a Mavuno member named Ken Oloo, a marketing executive who had helped children living in Kibera earn money as videographers by supplying cameras and teaching the children how to use them. Suddenly, Williams said, her work for a mid-sized Orange County public relations company seemed disconnected from social justice by comparison.

Returning home from the Nairobi trip, Williams began looking for a new job. Through a banking client, she met the CEO of Women Helping Women. A few months later, Williams was hired as the nonprofit’s program director, working longer hours for less money but feeling “at the end of the day, what brings me the most joy and reward is that I’m making a difference and helping someone else become who God created them to be.” She has returned several times to Nairobi, where she says she now hopes one day to start an equivalent of Women Helping Women. Earlier this year, Williams was in the Women Helping Women booth at a clinic in Anaheim where mostly Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq were offered free medical care and job assistance. The clinic was a partnership between Mariners and an Anaheim Arabic-language church. “My friends tease me and say I’m half Kenyan,” Williams said. “What’s exciting is, it’s not just happening in Nairobi. It’s happening in Newport Beach.”

Encouraged by the results of exchanges between Mariners and Mavuno, Mungai sought out other international church partners. Those partnerships—now with nine churches on three continents—are not structured like traditional missionary relationships. Mariners’ members visit partner churches and help with local service initiatives. But the partner churches also send members to Mariners. A residency program Mungai started two years ago invites pastors of partner churches to live and work at Mariners for one year, mostly for the purpose of broadening Mariners’ international perspective. It was one of those visiting clergy residents, a Mexican pastor named Daniel Nuñez from a church near Tijuana, who happened to remark one day last year, “I can’t believe the grass at Mariners is always so green.”

Puzzled, Mungai asked what Nuñez meant.

Nuñez said that in Mexico, no church lawn stays green for long because it is always being trampled by “people playing, eating, and doing community.”

Mungai gazed with embarrassment at Mariners’ immaculately landscaped grounds. “What he was saying is that to have green grass means it’s not being used,” Mungai said, “Whereas to us it means beauty. It’s a totally different mindset. We realized we have to use our campus for community.”

Not long after that exchange, Trish Harrison from the Irvine farmers market called looking for a parking lot.

Mariners has lost some members since it began its Nairobi-inspired transformation. Volunteers have left the missionary program because “they’ve resisted working alongside African leaders. They want to be the leaders,” Mungai told me. Kenton Beshore said “a few hundred people” walked out of the church when an evangelical immigration-reform activist was invited to preach. Three years ago, when Beshore and other Mariners pastors joined the national evangelical immigration-reform movement, enough Mariners members withdrew financial pledges that the church ended the year with a $500,000 budget shortfall.

And yet, the changes continued. Today, bolstered by new members offsetting the departures, Mariners is larger and more ethnically diverse than it was a decade ago. (The church does not track the ethnic identity of members. Pastors I spoke to estimated the church’s nonwhite population at anywhere from 20 percent to 35 percent of the congregation.) Church staff members speak Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Swahili. Mariners remains a leading partner in the Evangelical Immigration Table, a national coalition of evangelical churches and para-church organizations advocating comprehensive immigration reform. “We got crazy tight Republicans to change their views,” Beshore told me. While volunteering at Mariners’ outreach centers, “They get involved with kids and the kids grow up and their parents get deported and they say, ‘This isn’t right.’ They’ve had a change in their world view.”

It is a change that could happen anywhere in America but was most likely to happen in California. Orange County today, like neighboring Los Angeles and California’s other major immigrant landing zones, is a spiritual gazetteer, one of the most religiously diverse places on Earth. The county is home to one of America’s fastest growing Catholic dioceses, where three-quarters of parishes celebrate at least one mass in a language other than English; one of the nation’s largest mosques; Buddhist temples and a Buddhist university; Korean- and Spanish-language megachurches; and a predominantly Asian megachurch, called NewSong in Irvine, started by a half-Korean pastor who envisioned a Christian community that transcended race entirely. The ideas brought by Mungai and his mentors from Nairobi felt revolutionary when they arrived. But, really, they were inevitable. What historian Philip Jenkins calls the “Next Christendom” has been taking shape in Orange County for years. The Kenyans simply helped the rich, white Christians at Mariners Church wake up to their new demographic reality.

Now it is Mariners’ turn to help. Three times each year, the church hosts a conference teaching other congregations how to implement their own Mzizi spiritual development programs. To date, roughly fifty churches, some from Southern California, others from as far away as Wyoming, have attended the conference. Mariners’ partner churches abroad also have adopted Mzizi programs. Last year, inspired by Mariners’ example, Concordia University, a conservative Lutheran college in Irvine, began hosting annual gatherings of international clergy and scholars to teach students how to minister in a globalizing America. Christian Mungai, Pastor Wanjau from Mavuno Church, and historian Philip Jenkins headlined the inaugural gathering. This year, speakers included the director of research for the Southern Baptist Convention, the pastor of one of Orange County’s largest African American churches and the director of faith formation for the Catholic Diocese of Orange.

“Our engagement with the global south has taught us that we don’t have all the answers, that there’s much to be offered by the rest of the world,” Mungai said. “It’s not from west to east. It’s from everywhere to everywhere.. . . The vision for the church starts with the vision of a lost world, and the church is not for the church but for the world.. . . The Kenyan way of looking at discipleship is a lifelong process. It’s not a few weeks and you’re done. It’s a whole life transformation.”

Notes

Shari’a in the Golden State

“Getting Religion,” the winter 2015 issue of Boom: A Journal of California, features three articles on Muslims in California, their diverse backgrounds, daily lives, education, religious beliefs, and practices. The print edition will be out over the holidays. We offer this triptych to our readers in advance online as a contribution to deepening our understanding of each other in the midst of a powerfully important, sometimes troubling, and moving conversation in our state, our nation, and our world.

“Rethinking Shari’a: Voices of Islam in California” by Mark Fathi Massoud and Kathleen M. Moore.

‘‘Really?’’ Khadija, an elderly Muslim woman in Los Angeles, looked up at us when she heard that California may have more Muslims than any other American state. We were interviewing Khadija for a research project documenting American Muslims’ experiences of shari’a—roughly translated as ‘‘Islamic law.’’ Unconvinced, she probed, ‘‘Even more Muslims than in Michigan?’’ We nodded in reply. Khadija paused, her eyes relaxed, and her lips parted to reveal a smile.

“Thinking Outside the Mosque: On learning to be Muslim in America” by Anna Challet

If the American Muslim community has a tendency to isolate itself, to retreat from the rest of American society, Zaytuna College is where that insularity comes to die. At the only accredited Muslim college in the United States, students spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be American.

“The Path to Water: Shari’a revisioned” by Mustafa Rony Zeno.

One Friday my Christian girlfriend joined me for prayers at the mosque and asked me why she found a watering can in her bathroom stall. The Prophet Muhammed instructed us to clean our anuses with water, I told her. To me, growing up around Muslim families in Southern California, a watering can evoke a bidet, not plants. The conversation led me to consider all those objects that I, and other Muslims in California, have repurposed for shari’a—which literally means ‘‘the path to water’’ (although is usually translated as ‘‘Islamic Law’’).

“Getting Religion,” the winter 2015  issue of Boom: A Journal of California, is guest edited by Jason S. Sexton, a lecturer in the honors program of California State University, Fullerton, and a visiting fellow at University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society.