When a Baptist Goes Buddhist

Religion in the American South is more diverse than most people assume. Buddhism, I recently discovered, is alive and well in Richmond, Va., a place more commonly associated with conservative evangelical culture. It turns out that the first Buddhist moved to the area over 100 years ago, and over a dozen other Buddhist groups and temples have come along since then, some of them with membership in the hundreds. As the Southern writer Sharon McKern once put it, “whatever else it may be, the South is multiple-choice … There are numerous Dixies from which to choose, and the real one is the one you perceive.”

At the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha, a multidenominational Buddhist temple founded in 1986 to serve the greater Richmond area, I met Steve, a 30-year-old Zen Buddhist whose family has deep roots in Virginia. Raised a Southern Baptist, Steve grew up in a home where there was frequent and intense religious discussion. But as a young man, he was drawn into drug and alcohol abuse, and drifted away from his church and family. Steve said that partly through Buddhist practice, to which he was first exposed in courses at a local university, he managed to get clean. Buddhism helped him understand how his anger and attachment led to suffering, and gave him tools — such as meditation — for dealing with his problems.