What Hindu Americans Must Build

THE DIWALI BACKLASH

Diwali 2025 was a breakthrough for Hinduism in America. The ‘festival of lights’ reached a new visibility in mainstream American culture. California Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed Diwali a state holiday. President Trump held a Diwali ceremony in the Oval Office. Attending the ceremony were Indian-Americans Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, both Hindu members of his cabinet. Lawmakers across the country joined in the celebrations, issued proclamations, and celebrated along with their Hindu constituents at temples.

The subsequent backlash emerged from two distinct sources. White nationalists inundated social media with racist attacks against officials celebrating Diwali, characterizing Hinduism as a "demon religion." A viral video depicted firefighters extinguishing fireworks on a New Jersey street, prompting a surge of anti-Hindu commentary. Out-of-context versions of the video implied that the firefighters intervened to prevent a disaster. However, the complete footage revealed a different context: the fireworks were part of an annual Diwali celebration in Jersey City's India Square, officially sanctioned by local authorities. The fire department's presence was a routine safety measure to eliminate potential fire hazards following the event. The video showed firefighters extinguishing remaining fireworks as attendees observed peacefully from the sidewalks, with some beginning to depart.

Festivals and parades such as these are unremarkable in American cities, especially near New York City. The Feast of San Gennaro, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the West Indian Parade, Lunar New Year celebrations, or St. Patrick's Day turn entire neighborhoods into a mess for a day. Countless celebrations and festivals all leave debris, all require cleanup, all return to normal by morning. This is how American pluralism has worked for more than a century: ethnic communities claim public space, celebrate loudly, clean up, and resume daily life.

The decontextualized clip became perfect fodder for a narrative of immigrant disorder. Mahua Moitra, a Member of Parliament in India, endorsed a white nationalist tweet attacking Hindus by commenting, "I agree". Sadly, her comment wasn't an isolated one. Many "South Asian" influencers made videos condemning the diaspora's vulgarity. Additionally, some social media users began to link the New Jersey footage to a house fire caused by illegal fireworks in Canada. A narrative of immigrant misbehavior connected to Hinduism started to emerge across multiple time zones.

A notable example was an opinion piece by Varghese K. George, where he criticized the Indian diaspora’s aggressive exhibitionism and then shifted the blame to Hindu nationalism. This rhetorical strategy implied that Diwali celebrations in North America serve as covert vehicles for Hindutva politics. George's primary objection was that Diwali had become excessively visible and prominent in American public life, and, in his view, too associated with lower-class expressions of joy. For a segment of India’s elite, such visibility was deemed unacceptable. 

This is respectability politics writ large: white nationalists attack Hindus, and the response from India’s leftist elite is agreement and condemnation. The underlying message: You're embarrassing us. Celebrate quietly. Stop confirming their stereotypes. Mr. George’s talk of “cultural nationalism” is a cover for scoring political points at home. It’s hidden, elite resentment over the loss of authority to define what counts as Indian identity.

WHO ARE THE INDIAN ELITE?

After 1947, India was run by a post-colonial elite: English-speaking intellectuals and bureaucrats who inherited power from the British Raj and shaped the country's institutions around secular, modernizing ideals. For decades, they held a monopoly on cultural legitimacy. They represented India to the world through universities, embassies, and the New York Times. The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) electoral victories in the 1990s and after 2014 finally disrupted this established order. Rather than acknowledging that they had been outmaneuvered by a grassroots Hindu party, these elites began to characterize expressions of Hindu identity—at home and abroad—as indicative of proto-fascism.

The Indian left is appropriating the language of white nationalism and American liberalism to sneer at upwardly mobile Hindus in New Jersey. Terms such as ‘hindutva nationalists’, ‘embarrassing uncles’, and ‘gauche mega-temples' function as coded insults. What unsettles the old elite is not the potential for extremism from the diaspora, but their diminishment as arbiters of Indian-ness. 

The white nationalist backlash is easy to dismiss. It's garden-variety xenophobia that every immigrant community has faced. But the elite Indian critique warrants a different response, because it comes cloaked in the language of concern, secular virtue, and protection of ‘India's image abroad.’ It asserts moral authority while engaged in cultural policing. Moreover, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the way religious pluralism operates in America.

THE PROTESTANT DNA

India's Hindu traditions developed over thousands of years alongside Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, and Christianity, producing a society where religious identity shaped marriage laws, community governance, and social organization. The Indian nation-state, first as the British Raj, then under independent India positioned itself as the arbiter of coexistence. It managed relations between religious communities and occasionally, adjudicated their internal affairs. America was founded on a fundamentally different idea: that religion belongs to the individual conscience, not to state management or communal regulation. 

When Europeans came to the New World, they also brought the wreckage of the European and English civil wars. Europe was a continent divided between Catholicism and Protestantism. The early American settlers were Protestants and Puritans who opposed the pope and the Roman Catholic Church. Faith was a private covenant between the individual and God. Each person was meant read the Bible for himself, and salvation could not be given by priests or institutions. Self-reliance, moral discipline, and personal conscience were important virtues. In short, individual moral responsibility was more important than your status in a hierarchical society. This became the spiritual DNA of the United States. 

In colonial America, towns were small and isolated. The frontier was fluid, predominantly male, and itinerant. Even the clergy sent from Europe were often unreliable. Without established churches, royal governors, or inherited institutions, survival meant cooperation as equals. Colonial Americans had no choice but to build institutions from scratch. The result was the covenant community: autonomous congregations that governed themselves through consent. People chose which church they would attend. They elected elders, hired ministers, and made collective decisions about doctrine and discipline. If anyone disagreed, they could leave and form a new congregation down the road.

This was the embryo of American civic life. The same people who elected church elders also elected town officials, formed school committees, and organized militias. Church governance and town governance used identical structures: voluntary membership, elected leadership, majority rule with protection for dissent. The parish meeting and the town meeting were dual institutions teaching the same skills.

Alexis de Tocqueville grasped this when he visited America in the 1830s. He observed that Americans had turned the Protestant habit of forming congregations into a social reflex. Faced with any problem, a fire, a school, a road that needed building, people didn't wait for the state to act. They formed an association. They elected officers. They divided tasks. It is why Tocqueville called religion "the first of their political institutions" because religious practice taught civic behavior before formal politics did. Congregational democracy trained citizens to deliberate, vote, compromise, and split peacefully when necessary. Even theological disputes were an exercise in organizing, persuading, and reorganizing without violence.

Without state churches, religious groups had to compete for followers. Churches became adept at fundraising and marketing. This experience also helped propagate abolitionist societies, temperance leagues, and mutual-aid lodges. The language of salvation matched with the language of reform. By the 19th century, America was full of Bible societies, missionary boards, and charity organizations. This was the Protestant civic language at work: belief translated into organization, Christian virtue expressed through voluntary service.

That framework has survived the fragmentation of 20th and 21st-century American society. Today’s political parties, political action committees, think tanks, and nonprofits are the institutional descendants of those congregations. Even when Americans stop going to church, they still operate within that cultural logic, believing that legitimacy comes from participation rather than inherited authority.

HOW OTHER GROUPS ADAPTED

By the time Catholics, Jews, and other non-Protestant immigrants arrived in large numbers during the 19th and 20th centuries, this structure of civic engagement was already entrenched. And here's what Indian Hindus must understand: those immigrant groups succeeded not by resisting this framework but by adapting to it.

In Europe, the Catholic Church had always operated within states that shared its faith. In America, it found itself an outsider in a republic founded by Protestants who distrusted hierarchy, ritual, and clerical authority. The Protestant ideal was ‘voluntarism’: self-organized congregations supported by donations and civic duty. The state wouldn’t fund religion, but it would assume religion was moral. To raise their children without losing their faith, Catholics had to copy the Protestant institutional model, but not its theology. 

So, they built parish schools funded by parents, not the state. They built universities like Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Fordham that taught theology, law and medicine. Catholic charities were run by nuns, not the government. These institutions were Catholic in spirit but Protestant in structure: self-sustaining and independent of Rome. It was the Catholic version of Protestant voluntarism: religion expressed through private organization, education, and service rather than through conquest or coercion. It was an Americanization of Catholicism while preserving its uniqueness. 

American Judaism underwent a parallel adaptation, by copying the style of Protestant congregationalism. In Europe, Jews had lived as semi-autonomous minorities under empires. They were protected or persecuted depending on the ruler. The community was the unit of survival, sustained by rabbinic law. As Jews first arrived in America in the mid-19th century, they discovered that religion here was voluntary, not communal by law. There was no state-sanctioned ghetto, no rabbinic court, no coercive power of tradition. To exist, a Jewish community had to be organized from the ground up. 

So, the Jews Americanized their faith too. The synagogue was a house of worship but also democratic association run by lay boards; rabbis were hired and dismissed like ministers; and Jewish federations pooled charitable funds to sustain hospitals, orphanages, and schools. Rabbis became moral citizens, not just legal arbiters. Assimilation did not mean erasure, but faith required voluntary action and negotiation with the secular world. A Jewish immigrant didn’t need a license to pray, but if he wanted a Jewish education for his children, he had to build it himself.

In that sense, American Judaism became Protestantized in form even as it remained Jewish in spirit. Jewish-American intellectuals interpreted the ancient covenant into the civic language of responsibility and citizenship. Even in the 1930s, when American Judaism was split along regional, linguistic, and class lines, Jews responded to antisemitism by organizing simultaneously as Americans (through civic advocacy, political lobbying, coalition-building) and as Jews (through community institutions and synagogue networks). 

The history and evolution of Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) demonstrates how even radicals had to adapt to America's pluralistic framework. Founded in the 1830s by Joseph Smith, it was a uniquely American religion: frontier mysticism, claims of direct divine revelation, and utopianism. But their story demonstrates the limits of religious freedom in the American context.

The Mormons endured violent persecution, including a war with the American military, as their vision of establishing a self-governing religious state was perceived as a threat to American society. The federal government refused to recognize the Utah territory for 50 years. It ultimately forced a choice: abandon polygamy and integrate to American civic norms, or face the dissolution of the church and seizure of its property. The church chose survival. In 1890, it officially renounced polygamy. Slowly, Mormonism became structurally more Protestant: it emphasized missionary work and conversion (like evangelicals), developed a democratic priesthood where every worthy male could hold religious office (rejecting Catholic-style hierarchy), and built a culture of entrepreneurship and citizenship that mirrored mainstream American society.

Today, the LDS Church is among America's most successful religions. It maintains its distinct theology (the Book of Mormon, temple rituals, prophetic leadership) while adopting the civic behavior Americans expected: service, industry, family values, and visible patriotism. Their story mirrors the Catholic and Jewish experience: keep your theology but adapt your civic presentation to American expectations.

Black Churches also demonstrate this dynamic of civic engagement and persuasion in their history. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was founded in 1816 after Black worshippers were forced into segregated balconies in white Methodist churches. AME congregations operated exactly like white Protestant churches: autonomous, self-governing, with elected leaders and voluntary membership. But they added functions white churches didn't need: mutual aid societies, schools for freed slaves, underground railroad networks, and eventually, a platform for Black Civil Rights.

This is the pattern: Black churches used Protestant organizational tools to build institutions that could survive in a hostile society. They became engines of literacy (because Protestants read scripture), economic cooperation (because Protestant congregations took care of their own), and political mobilization (because Protestant voluntary associations trained civic leaders). During the Civil Rights Movement, Black churches provided the organizational infrastructure (meeting spaces, communication networks, trained speakers) that made collective action possible.

Even movements that rejected Christianity adopted Protestant civic forms. Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam embraced the structure of Protestant respectability politics: male members in suits and bow ties, strict personal discipline, entrepreneurship, and temperance. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other Black leaders intuitively understood that these habits were powerful persuaders of ordinary white Americans. The image of Black ministers in suits, holding Bibles and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ while being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses in the segregationist South, created a moral crisis for white America. The protesters looked and sounded like the Protestants white Americans aspired to be: disciplined, peaceful, quoting scripture, appealing to shared civic values. The segregationists, by contrast, looked like barbarians.

The most transformative movements for justice in American history, abolition, women's suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, and voting rights, all emerged from religious institutions and spoke in religious language. Consider the Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most sacred text in American civic religion. Lincoln invokes "four score and seven years ago" (biblical language), speaks of the nation being "conceived" and calls for "a new birth of freedom" (New Testament), and ends with government "of the people, by the people, for the people" (echoing Wycliffe's Bible translation). Every American schoolchild memorizes this speech.  

To deny this truth, to insist that American civic life should be purely secular or that religious identity should remain private, is to remain willfully ignorant of how legitimacy and moral authority actually function in America. You don't have to become a Christian. But you do have to understand that American civic engagement speaks a Protestant dialect, even when it advocates for secular goals.

This isn't an argument for one-way assimilation or cultural stasis. Each immigrant wave continuously remakes American culture. Italians and Northern Europeans built the labor movements that created America's middle class. Jewish-Americans built Hollywood, reshaped the legal profession, and dominated higher education. The question isn't whether immigrants change America (they always do), but whether they do so from a position of confidence or apology.

INDIA'S STATE-MANAGED SECULARISM VS. AMERICAN PLURALISM

The post-colonial Indian state treated religion not as a domain of conscience but as combustible material to be contained. It inherited the British colonial habit of governing through communities. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, each was carefully managed and played off the others. Secularism really meant paternal supervision: the state regulated temples, subsidized pilgrimages, and intervened in family law. Famous legal controversies like the Shah Bano case revealed its limits and selective nature. The state was not beyond protecting minority conservatism for electoral reasons while constraining the majority in the name of harmony.

Where Americans see religious competition as healthy, Indian elites see it as anarchy. Shut out of the corridors of power after 2014, they've internationalized their grievances. Foreign newspapers now carry their warnings about India's 'authoritarian turn,' and concern for minority rights. But there is little scrutiny of the Nehruvian elites' record: entrenching caste identity through perpetual social welfare, encouraging regional and linguistic movements that spawned violent separatism, treating religious communities as clientelist networks rather than citizens. The irony escapes them: they decry threats to pluralism while defending a system where Indians couldn't practice their faith without the state as referee.

The new class of India’s elite, the Hindu nationalists, has learned this lesson in power. Like any new group that has taken control, the cure for decades of hostility is vengeance. The expectation is that a Hindu nationalist government will now defend temples, censor critics, and punish adversaries. Hindu nationalists and their supporters project this sentiment abroad, assuming that political power should favor their religion rather than merely protect it. Sadly, many first-generation immigrant voices operate within that mental framework. But in the United States, the state role is to step aside. The First Amendment protects everyone from heresy, schism, and religious tests. Otherwise, faiths must compete, persuade, and succeed on their own. 

The California textbook controversy over Hinduism is a perfect example of these divergent worldviews. When Indian-American parents objected to how Hinduism was portrayed in public school textbooks (depicted as caste-obsessed and backward), they sought redress through political intervention. Expecting the state to side with them, they treated the curriculum as a question of “representation” rather than a contest of scholarship and institutional legitimacy. But the terrain of educational authority in America belongs to the academy, not the legislature. After a brief campaign, the definitions advanced by professional Indologists prevailed. The Hindus who had mobilized as petitioners found themselves dismissed as reactionary outsiders rather than co-authors of the public narrative. It was a lesson in how, without independent intellectual capital and institutional presence, appeals to state power in America almost always reinforce the dominance of its elite.

Among Indian immigrants, seeking state legitimacy has also fueled internecine lobbying. Some Muslim and separatist Sikh activist groups have pressured state governments and members of Congress to pass resolutions denouncing Hindutva or criticizing Indian leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In response, first-generation Hindu advocacy groups have mobilized to counter discriminatory legislation in places like California and Chicago. The instinct to lobby the state is understandable, but it misses the spirit of American pluralism: cultural legitimacy comes from civil society, not government decrees. 

DUAL POLICING

The moral policing of the diaspora doesn't just come from the left. Vishal Ganesan's essay, "The Hindu Case Against 'Hinduism,'" critiques the diaspora's defensive traditionalism, arguing that appeals to "inclusivism" have become shields against the difficult work of defining what Hinduism means in America. What enrages many of his critics is his admonition that Hindu-American identity cannot simply replicate India's Hindu nationalism. In India, Hindu nationalism pursues political power through majoritarian mobilization, which requires playing caste politics, accommodating regional orthodoxies, and managing communal grievances for electoral advantage. Those strategies don't translate to America, where Hindus are a tiny minority with little demographic weight. Worse, importing that framework means American Hindus get tarred as reactionaries defending a foreign political movement, precisely the reputation that makes institutional legitimacy impossible.

Among sections of the Indian Hindu right, there's a persistent tendency to view the American religious landscape through a prism of fear rather than understanding. When they see public figures like Vivek Ramaswamy (currently running for Governor of Ohio) struggle to explain their Hindu faith before a Protestant audience, they interpret it as evidence of weakness or compromise. The same with Vishal’s article, taken as proof that Hindus in America want to dilute their traditions to be accepted. They mistake the challenge of translation for surrender. 

This anxiety manifests in a particularly counterproductive way: the importation of historical grievances that carry no currency in American discourse. Many of the voices opposing Vishal cite the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, Partition violence, terrorism, and forced conversion to explain their defensiveness about religious survival. These are documented historical traumas. But most Americans have never heard of them, and the academic gatekeepers who control how Hinduism is taught in schools actively minimize or dismiss them. The California textbook controversy revealed this clearly. When parents organized to contest biased portrayals of Hinduism, they were dismissed as Hindutva proxies trying to whitewash caste oppression. Whether fair or not, the association with Indian political movements made it easy for academic gatekeepers to ignore their concerns. This creates an impossible situation: you can't build institutional legitimacy by constantly relitigating historical grievances that your audience either doesn't know about or has been trained to dismiss as propaganda.

The fact many fail to grasp is the subcontinent’s mental framework doesn't apply in America. When an American Christian befriends a Hindu and hopes they'll convert, they're not trying to shift the local balance of power or deny Hindus access to public space. They genuinely believe they're offering salvation. You can find it presumptuous, even offensive, but it's not the same as the communal dynamics that make conversion politically fraught in India. 

American evangelicals can't prevent you from building temples or celebrating Diwali. They're just individuals expressing theological beliefs that, in America's framework, they have every right to hold, just as you have every right to reject them. It's not that Americans think Hindus are wrong to care about their community's welfare. It's that the specific framing of a religious population as a political resource requiring defense reads as alien and counterproductive. It's the language of groypers, white nationalists, and far-right movements obsessed with replacement theory. When those groups talk about demographic preservation, Americans correctly identify it as toxic ethno-nationalism. Hindu immigrants shouldn't borrow their vocabulary or their worldview.

What I’m rejecting is the demand for ideological conformity imposed from abroad. When diaspora Hindus build temples and celebrate Diwali publicly, they’re beginning to participate in American pluralism. But they won’t be able to fully participate in American civic life if they’re treated as extensions of interests back home. Indian American legislators already face protests from Muslim and Pakistani groups calling them RSS stooges; now they’re also getting angry tweets from Hindu nationalists in India whenever they step on issues claimed by the homeland’s protectors. 

Ro Khanna’s politics may be misguided (according to me), but he has a role to play as an Indian American legislator; instead, he gets nothing but abuse from Indian nationalists with zero grace given. This defensive, henpecking attitude from India isn’t productive for the diaspora. The far-right wants Indians to disappear or ‘remigrate.’ The progressive elite wants Indians to privatize their religion and subordinate their identity to the racial coalitions that govern the left. Hindu nationalists want diaspora Hindus to echo the political language of the homeland and treat their talking points as inseparable from religious identity. 

Vivek Ramaswamy’s description of Advaita Vedanta as monotheism at a TPUSA event may have been theologically questionable. Still, it was his right to speak in his own voice. Notably, few other Hindus have shown up at conservative forums the way he has. When a Protestant asks Vivek why he's Hindu, that's not an insidious tactic or an insult; it's standard American discourse. This kind of questioning may strike Hindus in India as offensive, but American civic life has always involved robust theological debate in the public square. Madison and Jefferson argued about Christianity's role in government. Lincoln was challenged about his irregular religious beliefs throughout his career. Kennedy had to defend Catholicism to Protestant ministers. The market of ideas includes the market of faiths. This is not a threat to pluralism, but its very mechanism. If you find that sentence objectionable, the idea that open religious discourse is how pluralism works, then you've approached this entire argument in bad faith. The case has been made; the question is whether you're willing to consider it.

Establishing a religious community's intellectual authority and moral legitimacy requires the construction of independent voices and parallel institutions. When Indian voices scold the diaspora for failing to build a robust lobbying infrastructure, they're making the same category error as George and Moitra. They're expecting Indian immigrants to behave like a managed community serving the homeland’s interests rather than as immigrants building mundane lives. AIPAC exists because it rests on deep institutional foundations: synagogues, federations, charities, think tanks, and decades of civic participation. Jewish Americans learned to negotiate power through persuasion, philanthropy, and political engagement. That infrastructure took generations to build, and it was built by people who saw America as home, not a temporary posting.

The irony is that the group wagging its finger at the diaspora has done almost nothing to strengthen India's presence abroad. No major Indian media outlet maintains a Washington bureau. There is no sustained advocacy presence on Capitol Hill comparable to that of other nations. When India sends delegations, they conduct symbolic meetings and fly home. Meanwhile, Germany runs Goethe Institutes, Japan funds cultural programming like Cherry Blossom Festivals, and China, until recently, operated Confucius Institutes across American universities. India's soft power infrastructure in America is virtually nonexistent, and then Indian politicians like Shashi Tharoor have the audacity to scold the diaspora for not building an "Indian AIPAC.”

Mr. Tharoor himself highlights the contradiction. His children live in America, fully assimilated into elite institutions. His son, a Washington Post columnist, has written critically about India's government while remaining notably silent on diaspora concerns. If the children of India's political class have chosen American lives over Indian advocacy, why should the children of engineers and doctors feel differently? And if India's own intellectuals spend decades delegitimizing Indian identity, why are they surprised when the diaspora declines to organize around it?

THE WAY FORWARD

So what is the way forward? What must emerge from the Hindu-American diaspora? Sociologists Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston, who co-authored influential studies on immigrant assimilation, may have an answer. Their research on Vietnamese and Chinese communities in America demonstrates again the thesis of this article: the most resilient immigrant groups do not seek legitimacy through elite patronage or state protection, but through the creation of dense community networks such as temples, neighborhood associations, language schools, and credit circles. Success begins with self-organization. Political influence follows only after a community has built the internal trust, moral norms, and civic habits that make it intelligible to American institutions.

Zhou and Bankston found that children who were most engaged with temples and language schools were more academically successful and more engaged with America at large. These weren't ethnic enclaves but launchpads to assimilation. Strong cultural institutions gave working-class immigrants the confidence to integrate by deepening identity rather than erasing it. This is what Indian-Americans must continue to build: temples that function as community centers, schools that teach civic engagement, teachers who articulate how dharmic concepts like seva and ahimsa strengthen American democracy. The goal must be to build institutions so robust that the Hindu-American presence becomes ordinary rather than controversial.

This requires intellectual infrastructure as much as organizational capacity. Think tanks that articulate Hindu public philosophy. Academic programs that train scholars who can engage Indology on equal footing rather than as supplicants. Media outlets that cover American politics from Hindu-American perspectives. Legal defense funds to protect religious freedom (some already exist). None of this requires New Delhi’s coordination or elite approval. It requires what every thriving American religious community has demonstrated: the conviction that your tradition has something universal to offer, combined with the humility to translate it into language your neighbors can understand.

The competition will be messy. There will be missteps and internal debates over what "Hindu values" mean in the American context, as well as arguments between first and second-generation Americans over political priorities. That's healthy: a sign of a living tradition adapting to new circumstances, not a defanged ‘spirituality’ modified for elite approval. When religion becomes too comfortable, it declines. The diaspora’s goal is not to be respectable but to be alive.

The gigantic Hanuman statue, the Diwali celebrations, or cultural programs aren't corruptions of 'pure' Hinduism, as the elites back home want to believe. They're necessary adaptations that create communal cohesion, which American individualism otherwise dissolves. Communities that build these institutions will transmit Hindu identity to future generations. Those that don't will watch it evaporate into nothingness.

The competition of ideas will test Hinduism’s confidence, but that is precisely what will make it endure. The measure of success will not be whether America accepts Hinduism as an exotic ornament, but whether Hinduism can speak in an American voice without losing its soul.

Every faith that has taken root in America has had to pass through this test of fire, shedding its hierarchies, refining its conscience, and discovering what it means to speak in the language of citizens rather than subjects. If Hinduism can do that, it will surely become part of the American story. 

Anang Mittal is a public affairs professional in Washington, DC. He was previously a staffer for Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.