Christian maidens and heathen monks: Oratorical seduction at the 1893 world’s parliament of religions

Held in the Hall oj Columbus on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in September 1893, the World's Parliament of Religions, an auxiliary event at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, attracted a total of almost 150,000 spectators who came over a two-week period to hear nearly two hundred speakers representing twelve world religions. Many observers and participants, including the fair's chief of construction Daniel Burnham, confidently predicted that in a hundred years the fair would be forgotten, while the parliament would long be remembered. The event's chairman, John Henry Barrows, a Presbyterian minister and professor of religion at the University of Chicago, claimed that "while the fair was no novelty, the parliament was unique and unexampled."I As the most heavily attended of all the fair's twenty supplementary congresses, the parliament was the first of its kind to invite participants from all over the globe to take part in an interreligious forum that was open to the general public. For the majority of audience members, who were overwhelmingly middle-class and Protestant, the parliament marked their first encounter with representatives of Asian religions, or what were then referred to as "ethnic religions." Despite the novelty and popularity of this international congress, Burnham was wrong to predict that the parliament would be remembered long after the fair was forgotten. Over a century later, the fair has become a favorite topic of historians and literary scholars, while the parliament, except for the work of a few historians of religion, has fallen into relative obscurity at a time of increased scholarly interest in multiculturalism.