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The article discusses the U.S. as a religiously diverse nation. It mentions that the U.S. is the most diverse country in religion in the planet. It also states that Los Angeles, California has the most varieties of Buddhism in the world. In addition, it provides information on the history of various religions in the country that is influenced by other nations. According to the author, the complication in North America worsens because of globalization. Moreover, he examines the impact of global factors on different religions in the U.S.

This paper addresses religious pluralism as an academic, civic, and theological challenge. Looking at religious communities in their connections and interrelations is a critical academic challenge for students of religion who would gain insight into the dynamics of religious life and identities today. The encounter of people from different religious traditions in hometown America has reshaped the context of religious life, calling for attention and serious study. In short, the study of a complex city like Fremont, CA, might well be the study of today's Silk Road, today's convivencia. Religious pluralism is also a critical civic issue for citizens of increasingly diverse societies, raising fundamental questions about the nature of civic polity, the "we" of our civic life. And, to be sure, religious pluralism is a critical theological issue for people of faith, raising fundamental questions about one's own faith in relation to the religious other. Scholarly, civic, and theological issues have their own distinctive realms of discourse and require us to think carefully about the meaning of "voice" in our work. We cannot evade the question of voice in thinking theoretically about pluralism, for diversity is not only the characteristic of the worlds we study but of our own identities, our multiply-situated selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that church membership rates are lower in contemporary US counties having greater religious pluralism and that the same negative relationship is found in most historical data on US church membership. Finke and Stark find a positive relationship but in most cases only after statistically controlling for the percent of the population that is Catholic and/or Mormon. Breault has shown that these statistical controls create multicollinearity problems that distort the true, negative effects of pluralism. Finke and Stark counter that such multicollinearity is unavoidable because the statistical controls measure important substantive characteristics of Catholicism that are necessary to accurately observe pluralism's true, positive effects. This paper shows that the statistical controls do not measure substantive effects of Catholicism and that the resulting multicollinearity problems are the result of a mathematical artifact of the way pluralism is calculated and the cases Finke and Stark select for analysis Without these problematic statistical controls, most contemporary and historical analyses of US data reveal a negative association between religious pluralism and church membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]