North America, in United Nations’ usage, comprises the USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. This essay will focus on inter-religious relations in the USA and Canada, with the lion's share of attention given to the former, and takes ‘relations’ to mean both theological dialogue and institutional initiatives. It discusses inter-religious relations between the Christian churches on the one hand and the other two Abrahamic religions – namely, Judaism and Islam – and the major Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other.

Inter-religious Relations in the USA

The need for inter-religious relations in the USA is best expressed by the title of Diana L. Eck's 2001 book, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, a result of the Pluralism Project she directed at Harvard University beginning in 1991. The USA has been called a ‘Christian country’, and the moniker is still justified since Christianity is the most prevalent religion in that country.

The US religious landscape has, however, changed significantly, especially after the ‘new immigration’ precipitated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act, which abolished the National Origins Formula that favoured people from Northern and Western Europe and opened the doors to immigrants from the other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. With these newcomers from Asia and Africa came various religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and African and Afro-Caribbean religions. Of course, several of these religions had been represented at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (renamed in 1993 as the Parliament of the World's Religions), the first attempt at creating a global dialogue of faiths. However, religious diversity displayed at the 1893 Parliament was, for most Americans, just a curious assortment of far-away religions. Today, thanks to migration and globalisation, it has become a fact of life. In 1955, the sociologist Will Herberg published a book on the American religious diversity of his day with a simple title: Protestant, Catholic, Jew. As of 2021, not only Christian churches and Jewish synagogues but also Muslim mosques, Buddhist pagodas, Hindu mandirs, Sikh gurdwaras, Jain derasars, Zoroastrian gujaratis, Confucian temples and Daoist miaos dot the American landscape in both urban and rural areas. Multiculturalism and religious pluralism have become the norm.