Recently, I visited the grounds of the Cambodian Buddhist Society in Silver Spring. The golden wedding cake of a shrine and towering relic-filled stupa were incongruously capped with snow. At first, the place seemed deserted—but in the squat brick monks’ quarters out back, I found a hive of activity.

Dozens of workers and volunteers, some speaking Khmer and others Spanish, were preparing a meal for the temple’s seven resident monks, who don’t cook for themselves. The society is the oldest Cambodian Buddhist temple in the United States, founded by a group of adherents who fled Cambodia in the 1970s during a genocide that included the mass execution of monks and an effort by Pol Pot’s regime to eliminate the religion from Cambodian society.

The group was one of the first Buddhist communities in the Washington area. Today, it has company: Across the street is a Vietnamese Buddhist temple, while Burmese and Thai temples can be found just a few miles down the road.

And those temples have company, too. Locals call this stretch of New Hampshire Avenue the “Highway to Heaven.” Rife with houses of worship, it’s also known as the “Embassy Row of Religions” and the “Road to Damascus,” the latter nickname referring to the Apostle Paul’s journey of Christian conversion. (Follow the road far enough and you will indeed reach Damascus—in Maryland.) Once, the strip was mainly known for its various protestant congregations, but now there are Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches; Islamic centers of multiple sects; Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples; an Ethiopian Orthodox church; a Vietnamese Roman Catholic church; and various other Christian denominations preaching in dozens of languages.

As the Trump administration pursues an aggressive agenda of mass deportation and otherwise making America less diverse, houses of worship remain both refuges and reminders of the nation’s cultural richness. According to a recent study, Montgomery County is the most religiously diverse county in the US. When you drive around Silver Spring and Rockville—past onion domes, minarets, stupas, Stars of David, and all sorts of crosses—you feel it.

Within that landscape, the Highway to Heaven is a particularly striking microcosm. Since 2024, photographer Lance Lokas has been visiting and documenting its religious institutions. He’s sat in on salat al-jummah prayer, watched as umbandistas communicate through spirit mediums, and stayed up all night for a Hindu festival.

Lokas’s images capture the vast variety of people and faiths sharing the same stretch of suburban road. Taken together, they encompass the kaleidoscopic tapestry of culture—particularly, culture brought by immigrants—that breathes color and community into our region and beyond.