(RNS) — Days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his most recent executive order, one that would raise the application fee for H-1B visa hopefuls to $100,000 from $10,000, Indian immigrants, who make up the bulk of recipients of the H-1B visas, noticed a spike in anti-Indian rhetoric on social media. Curiously, some posts leveled their outrage at a 90-foot-tall bronze cast of a Hindu deity that has stood outside Houston for more than a year.

“Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas?,” wrote a Republican congressional hopeful in Texas in a popular X post on Monday (Sept. 22). “We are a CHRISTIAN nation!”

The statue the candidate, Alexander Duncan, referred to is a bronze cast of Hanuman, the divine monkey who is recognized in the Hindu pantheon as a symbol of protection and courage. The fourth-largest statue in the United States, the “Statue of Union” was erected outside of the Sri Ashta Lakshmi temple in Sugar Land, Texas, last August. Shortly afterward, a group of about 25 Christian protesters circled the statue for hours, praying and preaching against the “demon god.” 

Shrinivasachary Tamirisa, a retired gynecologist and founder of the temple, said Hindu culture teaches knowledge in response to ignorance. Tamirisa said he was not upset by the protest and instead offered information about the faith and the deity to any of the protesters who would listen. “Our belief system is worship your own and respect all,” he told Religion News Service last year. “People of other religions will have a problem with us; that is always constant. But the power of Hanuman is that evil cannot come there. Evil cannot stand Hanuman.”

Hanuman is one of at least five towering statues of Hindu gods that have been built in the past decade.

On Sept. 6, North America’s tallest Shiva, a 54-foot-tall statue of the god many Hindus worship as the supreme God, or source of creation, was built at the Bhavani Shankar Mandir in Brampton, Ontario.

Shawn Binda, a Canadian Hindu community leader, argued that the mammoth Shiva should not disturb its neighbors. “It’s not imposing,” he said. “It is not trying to convert. But we are now becoming more comfortable in sharing that with the rest of the world. This is now setting up a new normal.”

These very public displays of Hinduism come as Indian immigrants have been carving out a larger part of the public square, from politics to entertainment. As they become more vocal participants in the life of their new countries, Hindus are becoming more open about their faith.

Hardat Ashwar, the founder of the temple in Brampton, the largest Indo-Caribbean Hindu congregation in Canada, said Lord Shiva’s statue — “tall, towering, handsome and very masculine” — is a representation of the strength, force and power that Hindus now hold in numbers and in influence. “Political leaders need to understand that we are not people who just pray,” said Ashwar, who immigrated from Guyana.

“We see how other religions are very out there in the face of people,” Ashwar said, pointing to Christian symbols in public places. “There’s crosses everywhere on the intersection of big churches. I thought that, you know, Hinduism deserves to have that platform as well.”

Having such a large, visible murti, as figures of deities are called in Sanskrit, has inevitably led to a large number of hateful comments online, many suggesting “tearing the statue down,” Ashwar said.

But pushing back against anti-Hindu sentiment is precisely the point, he said. “Our children who are afraid to talk about Hinduism and religion in their school, and who are sometimes shy to be a Hindu, they will be proud now to know that we are here,” he said. “We are global. We’re in the mainstream. We have a Shivji murti, and the world is talking about it.”

Some of the hate, said Binda, comes from Indians themselves, who say the public displays of Hinduism are “too much.”

Journalist Rupa Subramanya said in an X post recently that the Brampton Shiva statue was an “unnecessary assertion” that “reeks of insecurity and religious chauvinism.” Texas’ Hanuman has also been assailed for diverting millions of dollars that could be spent on good works. 

Behind many of the Canadian statues is Naresh Kumar Kumawat, who comes from three generations of sculptors and artists. He has designed and built more than 600 statues of Hindu gods and figures from Indian legends in more than 45 countries, including the 369-foot-tall Statue of Belief in Rajasthan, India — the fourth-largest statue in the world.

Kumawat, who attended the Shiva inauguration in Brampton, said it gives him “goosebumps” to see Hindus in the diaspora honoring their deities in this way — more, maybe, than Hindus in India. “It gives me pleasure to say that my statues are being celebrated in such a way where they’re uniting Hindus from every corner of the world,” he said. 

According to Hindu tradition, the presence of a deity outside a mandir’s walls means the devotees inside “have elected a god to protect the temple itself,” said Ramnaresh Vajpayee, resident priest of Hari Om Mandir in Medinah, Illinois, which has its own 15-foot-tall Hanuman statue.

“In Hinduism, it is said that Hanuman safeguards Ram’s temple along with safeguarding everyone else,” he said in Hindi. “He listens to everyone’s prayers at the doorstep of the temple, and those get relayed to the god inside.”

Budhendranauth Doobay, founder of the Vishnu Mandir in Richmond Hill, Ontario, began building larger-than-life murtis at the temple in 2016. Today the campus boasts a 50-foot-tall Hanuman statue, an 18-foot-tall Shiva and, most recently inaugurated, a 25-foot duo of Lord Krishna and his wife, Radha. “People are coming here just to take photographs,” Doobay said, “and many of them are non-Hindus!”

Though he did not foresee the trend taking off, he is proud of what it means for the visibility of the Hindu community, especially in the face of internet trolls. “Lots of Hindus are very proud to see these murtis towering up into the sky,” he said. “On the other hand, Canadians are saying, ‘These foreign people are coming here and putting all these foreign things.’ There are repercussions, as one would expect with anything, because in a Judeo-Christian society, it can cause a little bit of turmoil among their people.

“But a huge statue of Christ, yeah, no one says anything about that.”