The 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions

The 1893 Parliament of Religions was never repeated as a standing event. For a hundred years it existed only as a single, celebrated occasion, cited constantly and reconvened never, until two monks of the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago proposed marking its centennial with a second gathering. The organizers who took up the idea did something the 1893 event had not attempted: they founded a permanent body, the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, explicitly so the centenary would not become another single occasion.

More than 8,000 people came to the Palmer House hotel in Chicago in 1993, roughly the scale of a modern academic conference rather than the more intimate 1893 gathering, drawn from a wider spread of traditions than the earlier Parliament had managed to seat, including movements and communities the nineteenth century organizers had never thought to invite. The Council has convened further international assemblies since, in Cape Town, Barcelona, Melbourne, Salt Lake City and beyond, none of them replacing the 1893 original in significance but each extending a pattern the 1993 gathering was the one to establish: that the Parliament of the World's Religions is now a recurring institution rather than a Chicago memory.

"Towards a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration" did not try to invent new common ground among the traditions gathered in Chicago; it tried to name ground the drafters believed already existed. Hans Kung, the Catholic theologian who wrote the bulk of the text, built the declaration around commitments its signers could recognize inside their own traditions rather than import from outside them: a rejection of violence, a demand for economic solidarity and fair dealing, a commitment to tolerance and truthfulness, and equal rights and partnership between men and women. More than 200 religious and spiritual leaders across more than 40 faith communities put their names to it, the broadest simultaneous endorsement any single ethical statement had drawn from that many traditions at once.

The declaration's own drafters were explicit that it was not meant as a new universal creed replacing each tradition's particular teaching, the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount were not being retired in favor of it, but as a floor: the minimum the traditions already held in common, stated once so it could be pointed to rather than assumed. Whether a document broad enough for that many traditions to sign could also be specific enough to guide any one of them in a hard case became its own subject of debate among religious ethicists in the years after 1993, a debate the declaration's signers had, in a sense, already agreed to have by putting their names to language general enough to survive it.