The scholarly Reverend Alfred Momerie of the Church of England came to Chicago in September 1893 to take part in the first World’s Parliament of Religions. Afterward. he called it “the greatest event so far in the history of the world.”
The parliament did inspire a rapturous if not entirely justified optimism. Paul Carus thought it signaled “the dawn of a new religious era” in which “the narrow Christianity will disappear.” Buddhist abbot Soyen Shaku called it “the forerunner of the future universal religion of science.” Reverend John Henry Barrows, the parliament’s chairman and driving force, believed it was “a grand field for Christian apologetics” and that it would speed recognition of Jesus Christ as the sole savior of humanity.
Bonney himself adhered to the gentle, universalistic, and somewhat mystical teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem Church. Bonney’s 1890 statement about the parliament-to-be meshed well with the Swedenborgian credo: he said the parliament would attempt “to unite all Religion against all irreligion; to make the Golden Rule the basis of this union; [and] to present to the world . . . the substantial unity of many religions in the good deeds of the religious life.”
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Barrows himself was a fascinating compound of “generosity and arrogance” (to use Richard Seager’s phrase in his 1986 Harvard dissertation on the parliament). He not only left his imprint on the parliament but afterward compiled and edited a two-volume written record of the proceedings, prefacing them with his own 250 pages of chronicle and summary. Barrows was by all accounts personally warm and open-minded, a spellbinding speaker and not a man to stickle over small points of dogma. He had no trouble working with the liberal Reverend David Swing, who had been driven out of the Presbyterian fold in a heresy trial some years before. Barrows could have played it safe with the parliament and limited it to the then-noteworthy feat of getting Catholics and Protestants and Jews to share a stage amicably. But he went to considerable effort to attract representatives of non-Western religions.’
Nuts, replied social critic Matthew Mark Trumbull, skewering the parliament’s Western chauvinism in the Chicago-based weekly Open Court: “It is only half an incident, and it will not be complete until five Presbyterian ministers assist at the Buddhist service on the Sunday following. This ‘benign incident’ we shall never see. . . .”
Despite this home-field bias, the 1893 parliament is far better remembered in India than in Chicago because it gave Orientals a platform before a Western audience. Even parliamentary equality was better than what they had had before. And they definitely had something to say. Besides expounding their own credos, some brought a radical religious pluralism to the Chicago gathering. “Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid,” said the charismatic Swami Vivekananda, by all accounts the parliament’s number-one media sensation. “Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.” An eloquent and even more pointed criticism of Western chauvinism came from the Japanese Buddhist Kinza Riuge M. Hirai:
Contrary to the expectations of some, the comparative tolerance of the parliament did not shame uncooperative fundamentalists into silence either. They came back strong, condemning the parliament’s apparent openness to heathen superstition. “It puts new hindrances in the way of Christian missions,” complained Arthur T. Pierson, editor of Missionary Review of the World. “The tendencies of our times are towards a fellowship broader than the Word of God allows.”
