The Parliament of Empire: Charles Bonney's American Vision

ABSTRACT This article places the World's Parliament of Religions in its social-political milieu of Gilded Age Chicago. It takes up the Parliament not to rehash arguments that scholars have made about its particular performance of religion but, rather, to locate its pluralist production in finer-grained material expenditures and extractions that made it possible. It tells this story through an examination of the Parliament's organizer, Charles Carroll Bonney. Employed as a federal judge in Chicago, Bonney's life reflects the coterminous boundaries of capital, state-building, and aspirations for the reconciliation of human conflict through multireligious unity. His tenure as the organizer of the Parliament, and as the President of the World Congress Auxiliary of which it was a part, was riddled by raging conflict with Chicago's union leaders, who saw the events as an indirect attack on the city's labor movement. To analyze the Parliament in light of these factors is to begin to understand the history of American religious pluralism as constituted by—and, thus, inextricable from—histories of labor, capital, and the state.