Synott Road does not immediately feel like American religion’s next frontier.
As you drive down the lengthy, high-density connector, passing strip malls and subdivisions in Houston’s southwestern sprawl, you may just miss it. But if you slow down, a vision of our nation’s potential futures comes into focus. Here, on a roughly 0.7-mile stretch of road where the Houston suburb of Alief meets the neighboring city of Sugar Land, the vast, blue sky fractures into domes, minarets, steeples, and monumental statues.
The heat rises from the pavement in wavering sheets, and the sound of mufflers hums past in constant secession as the air carries a peculiar braid of petrol, incense, cut grass, and frying oil from a nearby pupusería. A white steeple gives way to a towering bronze effigy, a crescent flashes above a low stucco façade, reflecting the Texas sun, and what looks like a storage facility stands in for the riot of carved figures that might otherwise climb the face of a Hindu temple. Sneakers and flip flops pile at one doorway, pickup trucks in front of another, a woman in a sari passes a man in a Texans jersey on the way into a temple.
This is the “Union Corridor” in Fort Bend County, where less than a mile of otherwise ordinary road has become a seemingly accidental atlas of contemporary US religion—mosque, mandir, church, monastery, temple—each within a turn signal of the next.
To move along it is to feel the country reorganizing itself in real time. Houston, once shorthand for the evangelical South, home of Joel Osteen’s stadium-sized megachurch and capital of the Protestant Sunbelt, now reads like a weird and wonderful ledger of arrivals, adaptations, and rearrangements in one of the country’s most diverse metro areas.
Here are faiths multiplying, languages layering, rituals keeping time on overlapping clocks. The effect is less melting pot than polyrhythmic dance, a choreography of difference, practiced daily—block by block, congregation by congregation—where American religion is not disappearing so much as stepping into its next, vividly plural evolution.
In collaboration with the Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, I contributed to the Under Gods project, a narrative examination of the place of the plural in the history of the United States.
Leading up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I was one of the writers and scholars asked to tell stories of religious people, communities, and events throughout those two and half centuries. Each of the resulting twenty-five essays corresponds to a single decade and together they explore spiritual diversity as foundational and essential to American religious life.
For my decade — the last ten years — I was sent to Houston, where my journey in religion journalism began; and to the Buddhist temple I wrote about for my first cover story. I’ve always wanted to go back and write about “Belief on the Bayou” and how Houston might just be a prophetic glimpse of our nation’s religious futures.