GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

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 The concept of ‘globalization’ has in an extraordinarily short time become the dominant motif of
the contemporary social sciences. Central Currents in Globalization is an integrated
collection of four multi-volume sets that represent the systematic mapping of globalization studies.
The series sets out the contours of a field that now crosses the boundaries of all the older disciplines
in the social sciences and humanities. The result is a gold-standard collection of over 320 of the
most important writings on globalization, structured around four interrelated themes: Violence;
Economy; Culture; and Politics.

The series editor, Paul James (RMIT, Australia), is joined by sixteen internationally-renowned
co-editors from around the globe who bring their subject expertise to each volume, including
Jonathan Friedman, Tom Nairn, R.R. Sharma, Manfred Steger, Ronen Palan and Imre Szeman.
Together the four sets provide an unparalleled resource on globalization, providing both broad
coverage of the subject, historical depth and contemporary relevance.

Paul James is Director of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT in Australia, an editor of Arena
Journal, and on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of
awards including the Japan–Australia Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council
Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the Australasian Political Studies Association for the best
book in the field of political studies. He is author/editor of many books including Nation Formation:
Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (Sage Publications, 1996). His latest books are Global
Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism (Pluto, 2005), and Globalism, Nationalism,
Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (Sage Publications, 2006). His interests are threefold: first,
globalism, nationalism and localism, including the changing nature of the nation-state and the
effects of an emergent level of global integration; second, social theory with a concentration on
theories of culture, community and social formation; and third, contemporary politics and society
with an emphasis on debates over technology and social change.

Peter Mandaville is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs
and Co-Director of University of George Mason’s Center for Global Studies. He has authored
numerous book chapters and journal articles, contributed to publications such as the International
Herald Tribune and The New Republic, and consulted extensively for media, government and non-
profit agencies. Much of his recent work has focused on the comparative study of religious authority
and social movements in the Muslim world. His current research includes projects on Muslim
leadership in the West and the relationship between globalization and development. He is the
author and editor of a number of books including Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the
Umma (2001) and Global Political Islam (2007).

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 CENTRAL CURRENTS IN GLOBALIZATION

GLOBALIZATION
AND CULTURE

VOLUME II
Globalizing Religions

Edited by

Paul James and Peter Mandaville

Los Angeles | London | New Delhi

Singapore | Washington DC

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 Introduction and editorial arrangement © Paul James and Peter Mandaville 2010

First published 2010

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

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SAGE Publications Ltd

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Printed on paper from sustainable resources
Printed by MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall

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 Contents
Acknowledgements vii

Volume II: Globalizing Religions

Introduction: Globalizing Religions Peter Mandaville and Paul James ix

VI. Historical Developments

23. Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions,

and Global Modernity 3
Ryan Dunch
24. Islam as a Special World-System 26
John Obert Voll

VII. Conceptualizing Globalization and Religion

25. Globalization and Religion 39

Peter L. Berger
26. The Religious System of Global Society:
A Sociological Look at Contemporary Religion and Religions 48
Peter Beyer
27. Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence:
A Theoretical Exploration 66
Roland Robertson and JoAnn Chirico

VIII. Globalization and Religious Movements:

Theologies Old and New

28. Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in

a Globalizing Age 93
Robert W. Hefner
29. Religious Movements and Globalization 113
James A. Beckford
30. The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity 134
Joel Robbins
31. The Sociohistorical Meaning of Liberation Theology-
Reflections about Its Origin and World Context 159
Enrique Dussel

IX. Globalization and the Changing Boundaries of Religion:

New Spaces of Consumption, Practice and Organization

32. Globalization and the Religious Production of Space 171

Elizabeth McAlister

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 vi Contents

33. Globalization and Religious Organizations: Rethinking the

Relationship between Church, Culture, and Market 180
James V. Spickard
34. New Religions and the Internet: Recruiting in a New Public Space 194
Lorne L. Dawson and Jenna Hennebry
35. Reimagining Islam in Diaspora: The Politics of Mediated Community 215
Peter Mandaville

X. Debating the Globalization of Values and Identities

36. The Clash of Civilizations? 235

Samuel P. Huntington
37. The Clash of Ignorance 254
Edward W. Said
38. Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the
Search for Ontological Security 259
Catarina Kinnvall
39. Multiple Modernity, Nationalism and Religion: A Global Perspective 283
Willfried Spohn

XI. Critical Projections

40. Religion, the New Millennium, and Globalization 305

José Casanova
41. Notes on Religion and Globalization 329
Renato Ortiz
42. Cosmopolitan Virtue: On Religion in a Global Age 348
Bryan S. Turner

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 Acknowledgements

These volumes are framed by the work of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT Univer-
sity in Melbourne. They were produced in collaboration with the Globalization
Studies Network, an international collection of centres and institutes around the
world, and with the profound intellectual support of individuals in the Globalism
Research Centre at RMIT – in particular, Damian Grenfell, Anne McNevin, Martin
Mulligan, Yaso Nadarajah, Tom Nairn, Heikki Patomäki, Peter Phipps, Andy Scerri,
Victoria Stead, Manfred Steger, Anna Trembath, and Chris Ziguras. The editors
are particularly grateful for the wise counsel of David Mainwaring and orga-
nizational efficiency of Judi Berger at Sage Publications.

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Prilims <viii>
 Globalizing Religions
Peter Mandaville and Paul James

R
eligion and globalization are intimately intertwined – conceptually,
historically and certainly in terms of contemporary practice. In the arena
of power and politics, going back to the Crusades and earlier, globalizing
empires were passionately caught up in religious concerns; and this has recently
re-emerged subjectively in contemporary phrases such as the ‘clash of civilizations’
and the ‘clash between the crescent and the cross’.1 Religion lies not far beneath
the surface of many of our globalizing practices, from globalizing warfare and the
Olympic Games to internet communications and mass broadcasting. Prior to the
current code names for the United States’ invasion of Iraq – Operation Infinite
Justice and then Operation Enduring Freedom – the war was fought under the
name Operation Crusade. In the sporting arena, just beneath the surface of the
Olympic practice of transporting a lighted torch across the planet, resides a sacred
flame with its origins in the traditional animism of Ancient Greece and the modern
territorial aspirations of the Nazi minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. The
Nazis were aiming to give cultural depth to the 1936 Berlin Games with a
technology developed by the munitions manufacturer, Krupps of Essen, once the
world’s largest industrial globalizing corporation. In the cultural arena, religious
groupings are drawing heavily on the electronic communications revolution. Planet
Shakers, a Pentecostal evangelical group with websites in Australia and Malaysia,
uses its website to sell religious music through Word Stores. It proudly supports
the work of the missionary-based US organization, World Vision – ‘an international
partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation,
seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God.’2
Examples of the intertwining of religion and globalization abound – world
without end. However, explaining the nature of the relationship between religion
and globalization is rather more difficult. The universal and, more particularly,
the universalizing nature of most religions make for a complex and compelling
comparison with the all-pervasive dimensions of globalization, including different
ideologies of globalization (globalisms). Both religion and globalism provide
ontological and normative accounts of the world-as-a-whole, and both tend towards
a generalizing world-wide remit. The world religions, as they tellingly have been
called, variously include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism,
with others sometimes listed such as Zoroastrianism and Jainism. Across global
history, but particularly in the Common Era, they have been central to processes
of globalization. The very term ‘Common Era’ (CE), itself an explicitly globalist-

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 x Introduction

historicalist reference, had its beginnings as Anno Domini or AD – ‘In the year of
our Lord’ – referring to Jesus Christ, the foundational embodiment of one of the
world religions, Christianity.3 Thus, again, just beneath the surface of contemporary
attempts to globalize and historicalize the last two millennia, is a religious
dimension. The Common Era still effectively begins with the birth of Christ. Here
the concepts of ‘globalism’ and ‘historicalism’ are treated as parallel processes: the
first to do with the generalizing of social relations across world-space; the second
referring to the generalization of connections across world-time – viz., the
consciousness of history as linking the past and present in themselves, rather than
as teleological, sacred or messianically-connected dimensions that point to
Something Else.
While this point about temporality and the Common Era seems fairly obvious
when explicitly stated, it comes into contention with what was, until recently, a
relatively uncontested and ‘obvious’ claim about the increasing secularization of
the modernizing world. The conventional notion, drawing loosely on classics such
as Max Weber’s Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism,4 was that globalizing
processes of modern rationalism brought with they a generalizing disenchantment
of the world, an increased secularization and a movement away from religion. In
this still-prevalent view, religion is either treated as anachronistic and slowly dying
or as a swirling traditionalist backwater of contemporary history.
What we actually find today has to be understood quite differently. Firstly,
participation in religious institutions on the global level is higher than at any other
time in human history. This often takes the form of expressive-charismatic or
experientially authoritative practices such as Pentecostalism and Islamic neo-
fundamentalism – even if these are nevertheless grounded in modern attempts to
respond to rationalizing disenchantment.5 Secondly, we are seeing reassertions
and public reclamations of traditional-tribal practices of the sacred, including
shamanism and witchcraft. Again, this is often spurred on by global incursions
and transnational relations. In the words of Jean and John Comaroff, they are often
related features of a transnational ‘occult economy’, a resort to an arcane economy
of magic and material gain. The Comaroffs attribute far too much power to the
ideological dimensions of global capitalism in suggesting that the occult economy
is ‘itself spawned by a brand of neoliberal capitalism that attributes to the free
market an ineluctable salvific, redemptive, even messianic quality’; however, there
is no doubt about the impact of globalization, including globalizing capitalism,
on the reassertion of neo-tribal magic and religion.6
Indeed, it becomes possible, as we will see, to view globalization – understood
as a set of processes extending social relations across world-space, including into
new mediated and virtual spaces and public spheres – as both a handmaiden to
the propagation of world religions and an impetus to local reclamations of religious
sentiment. This is rife with contradictions. Not only do processes of globalization
render access to and participation in institutionalized religion more possible for
greater numbers of people – and sometimes contribute to it being emotionally even
more compelling – they also engender forms of subjectivity as well as distinctive
communicative relations which interact with and reshape the very nature of
religious practice, sometimes in tension with itself. In other words, the creation of
a modern globalizing system based on a distinctive mode of production and

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 Introduction xi

exchange (capitalism), together with the rationalization of the dominant mode of

enquiry (techno-scientism), and a revolution in communications practices and
technologies (mediatism), has not left religion behind. Rather, globalization has
contributed to its extension, reinvigoration, and, in some important respects to its
reconstitution and destabilizing. The consolidation of techno-science as a challenge
to traditional understandings of the sacred, for example, remains a dominant trend,
but the process is an ontologically contradictory one. Rather than being charac-
terized by a single pathway to secularization – hence the national-global debates
about stem-cell technology and therapeutic cloning cutting both ways on religious
grounds – increasing secularism is also accompanied by intensifying modern and
neo-traditional reclamations of the sacred.
Our account here is primarily informed by the core definition of globalization
underpinning the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series as a whole. That is to
say, we are focusing on globalization as the extension of social relations across
world-space, taking into account how that world-space was understood in different
world-times.7 Our approach emphasizes patterns of activity such as production,
exchange, communication, organization and enquiry as they are practised and
subjectively responded to, across changing ontologies of time and space.
In this introductory essay we will examine the relationship between
globalization and religion from a variety of perspectives. After establishing working
definitions for both core concepts, we will move on to consider certain conceptual
homologies between globalization and religion, but also several points of
divergence. The universalist and universalizing dimensions of both notions will
be compared alongside some reflections on the differences between religion and
ideology – two terms often used interchangeably, and which will become
particularly important as we move on to discuss globalization and religion in the
contemporary era. The essay examines the historical role of religion in the
emergence of the global system of empires, markets, and eventually nation-states,
examining how world political powers have at times articulated their claims within
and through religious frameworks. As we enter the most immediate period of
globalization following World War II, we consider religious responses to various
dimensions of globalization as expressed through new social movements and new
theologies. We also consider the views of those who have argued that contemporary
globalization, representing as it does a relative decline in the importance of the
nation-state as an actor on the world stage, paves the way for non-state forces –
such as cultures and religions – to dominate global affairs. The essay concludes
by offering some projections regarding the evolving dynamics and undercurrents
behind globalization and religion, and the interrelation between them as they
potentially give rise to new formulations and fault-lines. Our opening argument
can be expressed in the following proposition:

Proposition 1. Religion and globalization have been intertwined with each other since
the early empires attempted to extend their reach across what they perceived to be
world-space. Processes of globalization carried religious cosmologies – including
traditional conceptions of universalism – to the corners of the world, while these
cosmologies legitimated processes of globalization. This dynamic of inter-relation
has continued to the present, but with changing and sometimes new and intensifying
contradictions.

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 xii Introduction

Defining Religion, Globalism and Ideology

Social theorists and historians have always had a difficult time defining religion.
Because, in myriad forms, religion is a phenomenon that occurs across virtually
all cultures and societies, it has proven difficult to establish a single, widely-
accepted formulation that distinctively captures the essence of all religions. One
of the most commonly-cited definitions of religion is that advanced by the well-
known anthropologist Clifford Geertz. For him, a religion is:

(1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-
lasting moods and motivations in men [and women] by (3) formulating conceptions
of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura
of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.8

Numerous commentators, but perhaps most eloquently, Talal Asad, have

pointed out various shortcomings in Geertz’s formulation – and in universal
definitions of religion more generally. Asad’s basic point is that it is impossible to
evaluate the meaning of religious symbols ‘without regard to the social disciplines
by which their meaning is secured’.9 This point will emerge as particularly salient
as we go on to examine the interplay of religion and world political-power in the
making of the global system. The second point relevant to our analysis is that much
of what is contained in Geertz’s rendering would also apply to the notion of
‘ideology’ (see also the discussion in the companion volume to this one).10 And
indeed, many commentators, concerned by what they see as a pervasive neo-
liberalism within the various normative expressions of globalization (in particular,
within market globalism), would claim that on Geertz’s account ‘globalism’ is an
ideology with religious-like claims to embrace the general order of existence. In
other words, Geertz’s definition would apply as consistently to globalism, and to
other all-encompassing ideological formations such as nationalism and fascism,
as it does to religion.
What distinguishes religion from conventional conceptions of national
sovereignty and political community is that religious community is not generally
premised upon, or limited to, a particular territorial space. For some religions,
transnationality has been part and parcel of the formation of their tradition. We
see this, for example, in the context of the Jewish diaspora, a chosen people
dispersed across the face of the earth.11 However, it is more than that. The bounds
of religious meaning are potentially limitless, or, to be more precise, they are both
immanent in and transcendent of spatiality. ‘In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void.’12 While religions
may hold particular territorial places to be sacred (immanence) – the River Ganges
in Hinduism, the Holy Land of Christianity and Judaism, or Mecca and Medina in
Islam – the scope of these religions also goes beyond those places (transcendence).
The Christian St Augustine, for example, posited a clear distinction between the
City of God, wholly divine in nature, and the base-nature of worldly polity, the
City of Man. The communion sought by the universalizing religions is, at least in
theory, one that occurs beyond the confines of nation, race or cultural difference.
Expressed most generally then, religion can be defined as a relatively-bounded
system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence,

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 Introduction xiii

and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in
and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment
and knowing.13
This definition, we suggest, is responsive to the various debates that have led
many commentators to give up on defining the term. For one, it takes into account
the issue that the modernist dualism of immanence/transcendence is a socially-
framed dualism that would not, for example, make sense to a tribal sorcerer or
traditional shaman. The question of how different religions handle the relation
between immanence and transcendence is, in other words, context-dependent.
Secondly, by using the term ‘relatively-bounded system’ the definition makes no
claims about the distinction in any particular social setting between a religious
and non-religious practice, or between one religion and another. These are similarly
context-dependent questions. Thus, without going down the path of Peter Beyer’s
version of ‘systems theory’, we have some sympathy with his argument that the
process of differentiating religious expressions/communities as religions was a
modern and modernizing process (see his chapter in this volume).14
To sum up the import of this, while the terms by which we distinguish religion
and religious universalism from globalism and globalizing extension may be utterly
obvious, the subtleties in expressing that difference remain strangely complicated.
The task of spelling out the differences and intersections is thus worth pursuing a
little further in order to illuminate both concepts. Both religion and globalism, at
least in their traditional/modern expressions, are universalizing systems of
meaning and practice that project a general order of existence. By comparison to
religion, however, globalism as an ideological projection and globalization as an
extension of social relations across world-space may socially transcend places, but
always remain framed by a historically-understood spatial configuration of the
globe.
Having said that, it should be added that neither religion nor globalization can
be reduced to one or other of their ideologically-charged projections. In a related
volume in this series we make explicit the argument that globalization is a matrix
of objective and subjective relations that has been articulated by the ideologies of
globalism ranging from cosmopolitanism and internationalism to neo-liberal
globalism.15 This does not mean that globalization can be reduced to its dominant
ideological expressions. Similarly, although religious orders and themes can be
articulated in ideological terms, that does not mean that religion can be reduced
to its ideological expressions. This brings the concept of ‘ideology’ back into
contention.
While both religions and ideologies – to invoke some of Geertz’s terminology
– use symbols to create powerful and pervasive motivations in connection with
an apparently factual account of human or social order, there are certain defining
characteristics to religion which require us to treat it differently from ideology,
including ideologies of globalization. Post-tribal religion and religious discourse
are usually implicated in the creation of boundaries between that which is sacred
and that which is profane, in the sense of being mundane or worldly. The notion
of the ‘sacred’ is crucial to traditional and traditional-modern religions in that it
refers to that which transcends and/or adds a further life-dimension to the
phenomenally and sensually experienced world of the everyday. Modern globalism
in its various ideological guises makes no such distinction. The religious sacred is

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 xiv Introduction

about imbuing ideas and sometimes objects with a very particular sense of
otherness that connects them to a realm of existence (or, in some mystical for-
mations, a realm beyond immediate existence) invested with unique significance,
authority or power. Thus, while religion and ideology share many features in
common, in terms of their discursive dimensions, religion entails very particular
(ideological) appropriations of symbolic space and practice.
A second feature that is common to religions – or at least to traditional and
traditional-modern religions – is that they tend to provide an account of how the
world came into being. These ‘creation myths’, as they are often termed, offer all-
encompassing narratives describing the very order of existence. In this sense, we
can say that such religions offer a cosmology: that is, they present an all-embracing
account of the origins, meaning, and sometimes also the fate of the world. There
is a significant exception to this tendency. Tribal religions by contrast – to the extent
that they have not been overlaid by narratives and practices of traditionalism or
modernism – tell stories of existence, meaning, and even creation, without drawing
(abstracting) those myths into a cosmological and universalizing whole. Each story
has its own integrity without requiring a cosmological consistency.16 Ideologies of
globalism, by contrast to all religions, do not tend to depend upon accounts of the
beginning or end of the world. Within narratives of modernist enquiry there are
of course theories of origins such as ‘the evolution of the species’ or ‘the big bang’,
but not since the ideology of Social Darwinism have ideologies of globalization
relied upon foundational stories of the world to give credence to their world-view.
Thirdly, as we began to explore earlier, although the cosmological concern of
traditional-modern religions with the world-as-a-whole appears to be coterminous
with globalist concerns with the whole world, this is not essentially so. In most
religions the earth – global or otherwise – is framed by the cosmological or
something beyond the mere global. By comparison, in global imaginaries
conceptions of world-space are self-framing. That is, for globalisms without a
religious dimension, the global has its own ‘flat’ imperative. In a related point,
while both religions and ideologies share the very possibility of objectifying the
world or imagining it as a thing in itself with a beginning and an end, they have
very different epistemological foundations. If, as we have suggested, religious
discourse tends to be grounded in a cosmology, non-religious ideologies of globalism
might better be thought of as forms of cosmography – that is, a particular way of
conceptualizing and mapping the spatial lines of interconnection in the world and
its prevailing order. This is quite distinct from an account of the origins and being
of the world as an expression of Something Else such as God(s), Nature, or Being.
In social formations dominated by traditional conceptions of world-space – pre-
modern empires, papacies and absolutist states – cosmologies and cosmographies
tend to coalesce. However, with the emerging dominance of modernism, jarring
disjunctures arise between them.
A fourth dimension of both religious imaginaries and global imaginaries that
merits further examination lies in their universalist aspirations. Beyond the obvious
point made earlier about the limits of globalization being the globe, the difference
is elusive. It turns on the relation between the universal and the personal. While
not all religions share a universalizing ethos in terms of a proselytizing impetus
or in terms of what is required to gain entry as a participant – Judaism, for example,
is less missionary by nature than either Christianity or Islam – most religions do

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 Introduction xv

hold their truths as relevant and equally accessible for all persons who turn to
faith. Persons are called to faith, and the universal community accepts them if they
profess that faith. Hence, for example, the literal sense of ‘catholic’, referring to
an all-encompassing faith capable of embracing a wide variety of persons and
particularities. Likewise in the Islamic tradition, one finds the Qur’anic injunction
for disparate peoples to ‘come to know one another’ through religion.17
Within several world religions we can also identify concepts that seek to embody
this universalizing tendency in social reality. In Islam we find this in the notion of
the umma, the universal community of personal believers which is potentially
global in scope. In Christianity there is the fairly generic sense of ‘Christendom’
and the more worldly political notion, in early modern Europe, of the Respublica
Christiana. When these examples are compared to the ‘universalist’ aspirations of
globalism, they can be said to have globalizing implications. Perhaps that is why
we read tautologous overstatements such as Saïd Amir Arjomand’s claim that ‘In
the old pattern of religious universalism, religion is the motive force, the cause, of
universalization and globalization’.18 The difference between globalizing and
religious universalism, however, is that for various globalisms the universalistic
inclusion of all persons into the processes of globalization tends to be assumed
and the emphasis is reversed. Rather than petitioning for the entry of all persons
into the fold, globalism, particularly market globalism, advocates allowing the entry
of more abstract processes and institutions into the life-worlds of persons-in-
general. In Manfred Steger’s discussion of the core contemporary contentions of
globalism, for example, he lifts out the claims that ‘globalization benefits everyone’
and that ‘globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world’, but even in
these cases it is not persons qua persons that are being called to be more global.19
It is rather a call for the opening up of processes and boundaries to allow
globalization to run its natural course.

Religion and the Making of the Modern Global System

Religion has long been a global historical force. In particular, the institutionalization
and extension of religious faith have been critical in the making and growth of
traditional empires, and vice versa. The major world civilizations – such as the
ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Mayans – have all been richly imbued
with religious cosmologies, even if not all of those cosmologies went on to become
globalizing religions. Religious-based cosmologies have overwhelmingly been
bound in a symbiotic relationship with traditional polity-cultures. That is, religion
(now treated as part of the domain of culture) and governance (as part of the
domain of politics) were not separated out into distinct domains – a process that
was not to develop until the emerging dominance of the modern. This symbiosis
took various and changing forms.
Ancient Rome, for example, was initially founded on intersecting animist
religions based in Greek and Etruscan mythologies; it drew in hundreds of different
tribal belief systems. In the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, Rome
was hostile to Christians whom it viewed as little more than dissident Jews.
However, by the fourth century CE, Emperor Constantine had made Christianity
the official religion of the Roman Empire, appealing, in part, to its universalizing

Intro-Vol-2 <xv>
 xvi Introduction

aspects as a way to hold together an increasingly fragmenting polity. Islamic

empires were no less universalizing in their pretensions. In these traditional polities,
a sacred order came to be enacted or embodied in the world through ritual, norm,
and/or law. As we suggested in the first volume in the overall ‘Central Currents in
Globalization’ series, this intertwining (though not the inextricable symbiosis) of
religion, traditional empire and globalization continued into the early modern
empires of Spain and the Netherlands, and through to the classically modern
empires of the second expansion of Europe in the late-nineteenth century.20

Islam as a Religious Polity and Globalizing System

The Muslim world deserves some special attention here, in that it represents the
first globalizing polity of the Common Era to be defined primarily in religious rather
than ethno-racial, communal, or other socio-political terms. Its emergence pre-
dated even the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne in the early medieval period.
In the first few decades following the death of the Prophet Muhammad (570–632),
lands under Muslim control grew from a small section of Western Arabia to
encompass an expanse reaching from North Africa across to parts of Persia, in
addition to the central heartland of the Middle East. While this was arguably an
Arab, or even Western Arabian, empire in terms of the provenance of those holding
meaningful power, the legitimacy of these successive Muslim dynasties ultimately
lay in the religious mandate of the caliph – a combined religio-political office
charged with implementing and enforcing the law of Islam throughout Muslim
lands. This does not mean that during this early stage the expansions of Islam were
religiously motivated or ideologically defended as such. ‘Jihad of the sword’, a very
particular subcategory of the broader Islamic concept of jihad, the struggle to lead
a holy life, did not arise in a straightforward manner.21 Nevertheless, once the
expansions occurred, religious rule was extended as Muslim culture was localized.
In Bryan Turner’s words, ‘The history of Islam revolves around these problems of
local and global authority, giving rise to periodic social movements of Islamization
in which the aesthetic and literary codes were imposed on local forms of Sufism’.22
The emergence of a Muslim world-society during this period is significant. By
the twelfth century, although Muslim lands were ethnically and linguistically quite
diverse, and political control had devolved to a variety of regional – and eventually
even non-Arab – empires, Islam as embodied in theology, law, and social norms,
continued to provide a common cultural grammar across these widely varied
societies. This made Islam, in John Voll’s conception, ‘a special world system’ (see
his chapter in this volume).23
If globalization is expressed in part through the existence of an integrated and
interdependent system of production and exchange, then the Indian Ocean in the
fourteenth century – dominated by Muslim merchants – must certainly qualify as,
at least, an early globalizing system.24 The maritime trade routes linking East Africa
with southern Arabia, India, and across to the ‘Far East’ constituted a rich space of
transnational exchange, with Islam as its cultural lingua franca.25 Europe was, at
best, wholly peripheral to this early incarnation of the world system, a situation
that was of course about to change with the advent of the Enlightenment, the
emergence of modern capitalism and the beginnings of so-called ‘Age of Discovery’.

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Christianity and the ‘New World’

Religion was likewise intimately implicated in the emergence of European

modernity and the growth of the most extensive modern empires. During the Age
of Discovery, when European maritime powers ventured further and further across
the face of the earth in search of riches and resources, religion accompanied them
and often framed their engagement with this wider world. One example of this is
to be found in a practice of the Spanish Conquistadors known as ‘The Requirement’.
Earlier in this period, the killing of indigenous American populations by the Spanish
was regarded by the Catholic Church as problematic because these peoples had
not been given the opportunity to embrace Christ as their saviour and, in doing
so, to save themselves. The presumption here was that if they accepted Christianity
then they were servants of the Church and Crown, and it would be illegitimate to
kill them. There were no such problems surrounding Christian encounters with
Muslim forces since Muslims had knowledge of Jesus but had rejected his status
as God. The Requirement, then, was a document that the Church mandated be
read to all indigenous peoples in America before any military activity against them
could take place. This text, often read in Latin to a wholly uncomprehending
audience or, in some cases, an isolated and empty beachhead, informed anyone
listening of the history and nature of Christianity and invited them to accept Jesus
and the authority of the Spanish King as the political representative of the Catholic
Church. They were also told that if they did not accept the Christian religion then
any deaths that might subsequently ensue from Spanish action were wholly their
own fault.
Religion and religious dispute in the wake of the Protestant Reformation were
also at the heart of the formation of the modern system of states in Europe. The
Peace of Westphalia of 1648, generally described as marking the inception of
political modernity defined in terms of state sovereignty, contained provisions that
permitted princes to determine the religion of their subjects free from the
intervention of church authorities. This brought to a close, decades of religious
warfare in which monarchs and various religious denominations competed for
allegiance and territory, resulting in the deaths of millions.
At the same time, however, it is important to take note of the fact that this same
period marked the emergence of secularism in the European context. The formal
separation of church and state was its political expression, whereas in the realm
of philosophy it was to be seen in the rise of an ‘Age of Reason’. Humanism rather
than theology – with the new exclusive humanism stressing the rationalizing and
transformative potential of human agency – became the dominant form of
epistemology and this found concordance in the rise of empiricism and the modern
sciences.26 In a much overlooked point we can also talk of the globalization of
secularism as a modern imaginary. That is, ironically, the world religions were
dramatically globalized in the context of a globalizing secularism – and both were
extended back and forth across world-space in relation to a deeper current of
globalizing modernism. It meant that even the staunchest religious adherents had
to take account of (early) modern understandings of temporal progress – witness
the allegory of the Pilgrim’s Progress from ‘this world to that which is to come’
(1675) – and abstracted spatiality (territory), exemplified in what has been
described as ‘the competition for presence in space’ despite the ‘Truth’ that the
Kingdom of God is extra-territorial.27

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Secularism linked to a rational-analytic mode of enquiry (science) spread across

the world as the dominant understanding of both the natural and the social worlds.
In this context, continuing traditions of religiosity had increasingly to legitimize
their once taken-for-granted standing as based on faith or belief. That is, a modern
notion of epistemological ‘return’ to the Truth had to reject self-consciously the
diversions of Mr Worldly Wiseman in favor of a traditional cosmology. Thus, while
religion continued to be an important social force and a profound source of
authority, it found itself increasingly competing within a ‘marketplace’ of
worldviews. The notion of the ‘marketplace’, used here advisedly, is a vitally
important metaphor in another sense too. This is the period which saw the
emergent formation of the capitalist economy that eventually became the basis of
the contemporary world economic system.
It is worth recalling the insights of some of the classical sociologists of religion,
such as Max Weber or R.H. Tawney, in their accounts of the relationship between
religion and capital accumulation as expressed in The Protestant Ethic28 or Religion
and the Rise of Capitalism.29 Rather than claiming determinative priority for either
capitalism or religion, they noted a more embracing change that in our terms might
be called the great transformation from the dominance of the traditional to the
dominance of the modern. In that change, to use the concepts of Max Weber
without taking on his methodology, both capitalist economic and certain religious
relations (Calvinist in particular) moved from being predominantly closed and
communal, to being open and associational. In our terms, this process involved
firstly an abstraction of the levels of integration from the dominance of face-to-
face interchange to that of institutionalized networking, and secondly it involved
a shift in the dominant ways of living ontologies of time, space, embodiment and
knowing.
As the age of European imperialism began to take form from the eighteenth
century, religion, and in particular Christianity, was an integral part of the process
of global extension. It was common for missionaries to accompany and sometimes
precede the state-based and commercial agents of empire into Asia, Africa and
the Indian subcontinent – Christianity being viewed by them as a key aspect of
the ‘civilizing missions’ undertaken by the French and British, Spanish and
Portuguese, in these regions. Christianity was thus a crucial dimension of the brutal
process of extending European imperial power. However, we need to qualify this
in a couple of respects. Firstly, as Ryan Dunch rightly argues (see his chapter in
this volume), theories of cultural imperialism often reduce the role of missionaries
in carrying processes of globalizing modernization to one of domination from
above.30 The founding of new religious communities in North America, such as
the one established at Plymouth Rock on Cape Cod in 1620, in one sense opened
the way for the violent displacement of indigenous peoples across a new continent.
That needs to be said with political directness. At the same time, we need to be
recognize that religious persecution in Europe was the basis for the globalizing
movement of many religious groups, including the Pilgrims, even as they became
part of the foundation of a new oppression.
These globalizing movements are continuous with the original use of the term
refugié, from the Old French term refuge, used to describe the thousands of
Huguenots who in 1685 had migrated after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

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In this regard we can understand religion as an important part of the expansion

of Europe and European peoples into new territories, both as religious groups
sought to practice their faith in freedom and as religious discourses gave legitimacy
to extensions of power by more brutal means. Embodied in concepts such as
‘Manifest Destiny’, territorial expansion in early United States’ history would come
to take on an important religious valence that was at once full of glorious promise
and ugly portent.
A second qualification to the globalizing-religion-as-imperialism equation needs
to be made in relation to the place of religion and religious discourse in non-Western
responses to the rise of European modernity and colonialism that drew upon the
world religions. This happened from ‘below’ as religious groupings at the edges
of empire, such as for example in the African churches, were indigenized and
themselves became active agents of the extensions of new forms of Christianity,
including back into Europe and North America. From ‘above’, including in the self-
consciously globalizing institutions, the sense of dominance from Europe was
qualified by hybridizing developments. The World Parliament of Religions, for
example, which first met in Chicago in 1893, was a Western ecumenical movement,
but it is often mentioned in the literature because of a speech by the Hindu Swami
Vivekananda asking that we ‘break down the barriers of this little world of ours’.
For figures such as Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), the universal values that cut
across traditions such as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity were posited as proof
of the essential commonality and equality of humankind. Gandhi’s method of non-
violent resistance to colonial oppression – satyagraha, or ‘truth force’ – was heavily
informed by Hindu teachings regarding karmic balance and self-sufficiency.31
Religion, empire and globalization were thus caught in a complex web.
The Muslim response to European colonialism is also illustrative of the tensions.
The two major Islamic responses, commonly known as ‘revivalism’ and ‘reformism’
both understood the decline of Islamic civilization relative to Europe as indicative
of a failure by Muslims to live according to their religion. For the revivalists, Islam
was failing because Muslims had strayed away from the true teachings of their
religion and allowed various distortions and dangerous cultural innovations to
enter their religious thought and practice. The solution – an early antecedent to
the austere Salafi/Wahhabi variant of Islam found in places such as Saudi Arabia
today – was to return to, or ‘revive’ the model of the Prophet and his early
companions. This approach found its expression in a strict and literalist
interpretation of Islam. It was advanced as a method to counteract the moral
erosion that was believed to grip Muslim society. The Reformists, on the other hand,
took their analysis and prescribed solution in a rather different direction. For them,
Islam, which had already in the tenth and eleventh centuries proved itself capable
of making major scientific and philosophical advances, was perfectly in tune with
the rational and innovating aspects of modernity. The problem was that Muslims
were actually failing to make use of their problem-solving capacities and were
relying too much on the obscurantist and insular discourse of religious scholars
(ulama) whose ideas and formulations had little relevance for the modern world.
Muslims were therefore to embrace modern science and technology, as the West
clearly had done, but to reinvigorate also the moral component of their culture –
something most Europeans had, in their account at least, wholly abandoned.

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As the final European and Islamic empires dissolved, however, it was not the
religious worldview that prevailed in political terms, but rather the model of
national secularism. In Turkey and Egypt after World War I, and one by one in
much of the rest of the formerly colonized world over the next decades, we saw
the emergence of various regimes premised on a modernizing (and secular)
nationalist order. As these new states were incorporated over time into the political
economy of globalization, we began to see various political-religious responses to
what was perceived as the persistence of power asymmetries between North and
South, and globalization as a form of neo-imperialism.

Globalization and Religious Practice

Having provided an overview of the role of religion in the emergence, consolidation

and critical response to the contemporary global system, we now want to consider
various aspects of globalization’s impact on why and how individuals conceptualize
and practice religion today. Some general qualifying points can be used to frame
the discussion.
Firstly, in relation to a changing dominant mode of communication, the impact
of information and communications technology on religion, and in particular
religious authority, continues to be profound. Satellite television and the World
Wide Web allow voices of religious authority – new and old – to reach new global
audiences. Simultaneously, new classes of religious authorities are emerging and
challenging the monopoly of traditional ‘privileged interpreters’ over the
reproduction of religious knowledge. As Lorne L. Dawson and Jenna Hennebry
argue in the present volume, the effects of this process are uneven. For example,
the radically-enhanced possibilities for disembodied circulation of meaning are
probably sufficient in themselves without continuing embodied engagement for
recruiting new members of faith communities.32 Nevertheless, those new religions
– from Scientology, Shambhala, Shirdi Sai Baba, Sikh Dharma, and Subud to the
Wiccan Church of Canada – which developed extensive websites in the 1990s over
and above their local embodied engagement, have extended or maintained their
place in the world of competing religions, while over the last two decades many
face-to-face tribal religions, like many localized languages, have been quietly
subsumed or have disappeared. What we can say overall is that the effect is contra-
dictory with the new electronic media adding to the immediacy and communication
of religious content, but also contributing to an ‘excessive pluralism’ of their truth
claims. In other words, religious authority is being reduced to one kind of authority
among many. A wealth of alternative claims and explanations – secular, scientific
and anti-religious – intersect with an overlay older of claims to Truth.
Secondly, in relation to a changing dominant mode of production, across the
last 50 years, there has emerged a strong normative discourse around a conception
of capitalist globalization which sees the global economy as having a vernal
potential to produce economic growth and prosperity for the people of the world.
Against this trend, and notwithstanding the increasing number of critical writings
on this discourse that suggest that there is a tendency in neoliberal discourse to
proclaim ‘One Market under God’,33 the relative comfort in the nineteenth century
with moving between political economy and theology has shifted to the edges of

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mainstream discussion.34 A range of counter-discourses – many emanating from

the Global South including Liberation Theology – see in globalization qua market
economics new forms of hegemony. These forms of power are said to work
primarily to reproduce and reinforce global structures of inequality. In this
perspective, globalization is pernicious, alienating and disempowering.
As we will discuss in a moment, a number of responses to what is commonly
perceived as the darker side of globalization have been couched in religious terms.
Other responses have sought to mobilize those aspects of certain religions which
stress social justice and equity as discourses of resistance in the face of large-scale
social forces beyond the control of the individual. In recent years we can point to
various examples where the agendas and activism of religious movements and
those social forces seeking to resist market-based globalization have converged.
However, overall, the nature of modern high-tech production has tended not to
become subjectively important to debates over the sacred and secular, except when
techno-scientific intrusions on the human body are involved. For example, killing
animals for food through Dhabiha or Shechita rituals remains fundamental to
Islamic or Judaic believers respectively, but neither tradition has anything to say
about the best way to produce cars, computers, telephones or nano-machines. This
nevertheless involves many contortions about how technology is used. Kosher
mobile telephones provided by all major Israeli companies can receive and send
calls across the world, but they have had their capacity to browse the World Wide
Web or to take photos disabled, because of the possibility of immodest acts such
as seeing images of women. Linking back to the earlier discussion of the
consequences of electronic communication, because photographs of women can
be a violation of modesty in ultra-orthodox Jewish faith, two newspapers recently
used photo-editing techniques to expunge the presence of two female ministers
in a photograph of the Netanyahu Israeli cabinet.35
Thirdly, in relation to the related question of the dominant mode of exchange,
there are some observers who see globalization as productive of particular pressures
towards commodification and high mass-consumption.36 For them, global culture
is intrinsically a culture of commodified ideas and images. It is a setting that creates
a particular sort of consuming subjectivity. The desires and tastes of these
consumptive patterns then come to restructure the ways in which individuals
engage various spheres of human activity, including religion. Examples of
consumption-religion include televangelism, New Age religions, and religious
observance as embodied in lifestyle rather than as a distinctive realm of the
sacred.37 This discourse tends to equate globalization with a particular set of
neoliberal political-economic values and their evolving structural manifestation
in the world. These values and practices are most commonly identified with the
world-economy that emerged in the nineteenth century and, in the present era,
the consolidation of a set of liberal norms around free markets, trade, and ever-
more closely integrated spaces of world-commerce.

Globalization and Ontological Insecurities

In this context of countervailing practices and ideologies we thus need to add

another layer of explanation in response to the question as to why religion is not

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only a relevant part of the contemporary world but in some respects an active and
intensely reproducing phenomenon. How does it relate to intensifying globali-
zation? Globalization as the extension of social relations across world-space may
in itself be a relatively simple process, but one of the effects of such extensions on
social identities and ways of addressing nature-culture is to add layers of tension
and complexity to cultures, communities and polities. This has consequences for
religiosity. A weak and unsatisfactory ‘version’ of this argument is that religion is
above all a defensive reaction against a globalizing and homogenizing modernity.38
This is not our argument at all, although such a proposition points to one aspect
that needs to be taken into account.
There are a number of evocative ways of taking this further. Numerous
sociologists and social theorists such as Anthony Giddens have pointed to the
reflexive qualities of the modern social order.39 Roland Robertson has posited the
existence today of a relativization of identity and ‘society’, a condition that
accentuates a consciousness of the globe as a single space, and the human as a
new and dominant category to which persons belong.40 Catarina Kinnvall has linked
the religious revival to the search for ontological securities.41 These are all evocative
ways of approaching the issue, and have a critical bearing on our approach, but
they are also linked, in our view, to the contemporary accentuation of ontological
contradictions between different ways of being-in-the-world.
In relation to the nature of knowing (the ontology of epistemology), either
having the capacity to stand elsewhere and look back upon one’s ‘place’ in the
world, or having others come in from the outside and make comparisons across
ways of being, affects taken-for-granted social imaginaries. In various ways, as
patterns of interchange become more endemic in a globalizing setting, layers of
interchange across ontological boundaries can destabilize belief systems and
relativize cultural differences. But just as importantly, it can, in Karl Marx’s terms,
force people to reflect on the conditions of their existence. These two processes of
the relativization and heightened reflexivity about ontological meaning thus need
to be seen in relation to each other, 42 but they also relate to the deepening
ontological contradictions.
This point can be developed in relation to other categories of being such as
spatiality. Drawing on the same evidence that leads one to emphasize relativisation/
reflexivity we can say that not only are traditional religious geographies
(cosmological maps of the universe) overlaid by a generalized and more abstract
spatiality-temporality – empty global space-time to be ‘filled’ with meaning – but
also that religious geographies are brought into intense contestation both within
themselves and without.43 This has given rise to tensions and cleavages of a new
kind. For example, modern mapping, the marking of territories-as-such with
abstract lines of distinction, has come to be employed to defend traditional or even
customary tribal understandings of religious difference, with all the ontological
contradictions that this entails. As Elizabeth McAlister illustrates in her contribution
to this volume, Haitian Vodou spirituality, which once mapped its mythological
worlds across a tribal-traditional synthesis of place-based spirits in relatively
comfortable tension with a remote God, has recently come into violent contention
with a traditional-modern evangelical Protestantism. This Pentecostalism, by
contrast, treats space at one level in much the same way that modern nation-states
map their territories – exclusive and homogenizing. It therefore sets out to contest
and homogenize all places in a way that traditional religions never did:

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 Introduction xxiii

Since the 1970s, many US evangelical parachurch groups, such as AD2000, the
Joshua Project, and others, have produced a cognitive global mapping not only of
what they call ‘people groups’, but also of territories. This mapping goes beyond –
or is a crude enchantment of – ‘moral geography’ as Shapiro uses the term.
Contemporary Pentecostal discourse maps space into unambiguous theological
geographies: territories are either Christian, or they are demonic.44

When we combine this insight with that of other sociologists who emphasize
the ways in which the elaboration of modern modes of practice extend social
relations across space and time,45 with a concomitant increase in the complexity
and risk that inheres in the extension of social relations,46 we begin to understand,
firstly, some of the ways in which globalization can be experienced as an alienating
set of forces imposed ‘from above’ over which one has little control and whose
effects are often difficult to control. And just as importantly, we can understand,
secondly, how this process is much more comprehensive than a top-down
imposition.
To the extent that this ontological tension also involves forms of
deterritorialization, some scholars of cultural studies have described this as a
‘postmodern condition’ in which the subject becomes fragmented in the absence
of cohesive, comprehensive narratives that can provide a reliable sense of one’s
identity and one’s place in the grand scheme of things. This is a condition that has
led one writer to describe the immediate post-Cold War environment as a ‘world
without meaning’.47 That phrase ‘world without meaning’ is not accurate of course
– a world of intensifying fast globalization is, to the contrary, full of meaning,
including ideologically contested matrices of swirling intersecting meanings that
come together as new social imaginaries, including a sense of the global itself.
Nevertheless, taking that qualification as given, the underlying and important point
can be linked to the earlier discussion and rewritten in a way that is not so self-
evidently wrong.

Proposition 2. Contemporary religion needs to be understood in the context of a

globalizing world in which given meanings have become radically destabilized and
old ontological securities have been shaken to the core. Under these conditions,
religion – as a relatively closed and ordered system of symbols, values, and moral
purpose – is both fundamentally challenged and begins to take on a new appeal
either as a radical critique of the mainstream world (through, for example,
emancipatory theologies) or as mainstream reassertions of neo-traditional religiosity
such as in the examples of contemporary Pentecostalism.

Thus, different reassertions of religious enchantment become alternative

answers among many others in response to ontological insecurity, with those
alternatives ranging from neo-tribalisms, modern secularism to postmodern
nihilism. In short, the complexity of processes that contribute to increasing
ontological insecurity, including globalization as one factor among many, have
become the context for reassertions of religiosity (as well as anti-religiosity). In
this context it is worth looking a little more closely at two examples of emancipatory
religious discourse in the face of globalization: firstly, the rise and re-combination
of liberation theology, and secondly, the bourgeoning of militant Islamism.

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Liberation Theology

Emerging in Latin America in the late 1950s and active through the 1970s, the
liberation theology movement represented an attempt by certain factions within
the Catholic Church in Latin America to emphasize those elements of Christian
doctrine that reflexively espoused social justice and human equality. In the words
of Enrique Dussel (see his chapter below), liberation theology emerged for young
Christians experiencing a ‘crisis of faith’.48 Most fully theorized in the work of
writers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theology sought to redress existing
structures of socio-economic disparity and to challenge aspects of the centralized
authority of the Church, which its proponents saw as complicit in the maintenance
of these hierarchies.49 Early texts in liberation theology tended to be explicitly Latin
American in sensibility rather than global. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s,
as a fusion of Catholic theology and Marxist thought, and as an expression through
religious discourse of some of the ideas to be found in the school of dependency
theory, writings in liberation theology became increasingly global in their self-
conscious sense of mission and projection.
Ironically, the globalizing movement lost public momentum in the 1990s,
despite, or perhaps because of the growing evidence of renewed affiliations
between religious groups that similarly stress social justice – Christian, Muslim,
and Buddhist alike – and the broader alter-globalization or global justice
movement. At a global level, the internet has allowed continuing communications
of the movement. For example, the website www.LiberationTheology.org is a global
space where black liberation theology such as espoused by Barack Obama’s former
minister, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, extends
concerns for the global poor. However, these expressions do not have the social
power of the movement in the late-twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the local
level, liberation theology continues to be strong with 80,000 reported ‘base
communities’ in Brazil, the most populous Roman Catholic nation globally.50 The
Muslim and Jewish traditions have also produced variants of the same intellectual
project in recent years.51 Jewish liberation theology, for example, takes the Exodus
of the Chosen People from the bondage of the Egyptians as paradigmatic of the
struggle against global capitalism.

Militant Islamism

While the initial intellectual and activist formulations of Islamism (from the late
1920s) were not aimed specifically at globalization as we understand it today, there
is an important sense in which the protests of Islamist movements in the Arab world
and elsewhere against the Western-backed secular national regimes in countries
such as Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, echo aspects of the discontent expressed elsewhere
through discourses such as liberation theology. The Islamists, however, were more
politically revolutionary insofar as they sought to replace the secular order with
an alternative Islamic system that would simultaneously achieve greater socio-
economic equality while also enforcing religiously-mandated morality. In recent
years, more militant forms of Islamism – such as that represented by Osama bin
Laden and al-Qa’ida – have explicitly sought politically and violently to engage

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 Introduction xxv

what they perceive as the sources of hegemony and secularism on a global scale,
and to reassert an ontological security that contradictorily requires a return to
totalizing religiosity. This process, in other words, has been constituted as a modern
globalizing project for ‘returning to’, or rather projecting a Golden Age of
universalizing traditionalism. Olivier Roy puts it dramatically when she says that
‘Neofundamentalisms transmute their weakness (a by-product of globalisation)
into a strategy for building the ummah on the ruins of vanishing cultures, including
Western ones.’52 We should also note that within the Islamic tradition we can
identify various other strands of response to globalizing forces such as the work
of Farid Esack, a South African Muslim who finds in the Qur’an a call for progressive
politics and social activism – an Islamic variant, as he has called it, of liberation
theology.

Critical Projections

The disembedding of cultural and political identities from their place predomi-
nantly in local, regional and national contexts could give rise to a number of
scenarios in which social relations are restructured not only across space and time,
but also through significantly different understandings of the religious and the
secular. The relevant undercurrents of dynamism are a combination of broad,
ambient global trends and a number of emergent forces in the realms of religion
and ideology more specifically.
These undercurrents make a striking list. We have seen the uneven disem-
bedding of political and cultural identities from national contexts and geopolitical
configurations with the development of ever-more pluralism – but not necessarily
more tolerance – in the sources and bases of social affiliation. The religious and
the sacred have come to be associated with varying concepts, knowledge-regimes,
practices, and life-style choices not traditionally thought of in religious terms. The
once-given religious-secular boundaries around certain, but not all, socially
differentiated domains of social life such as politics and economics is blurring. The
intensifying demographic shift towards a ‘youth bulge’ in the Global South has
meant that responses to heightening ontological insecurity and the search for
meaning is often being undertaken by the most active and volatile segment of the
various age-cohorts. The simultaneous hybridization and purification of religious
and ideological traditions has intensified to the point that global ideo-diversity
has become pushed out to extremes of conservative literalism or highly pluralistic
syncretism. The exponential growth in traditional-modern religiosity in the Global
South has resulted in an increased tendency to understand Southern identity in
sacred and eschatological terms.
It is these undercurrents and potential-associated cleavages that have led
commentators in two equally problematic directions. The first is to advocate that
any analysis of the double process of the globalization of religion and secularism
needs to be done through notions of ‘multiple modernities’. The problem here is
the starting point rather than the suggestion that we need to rethink the whole
question of what is meant when we say ‘modernity’. The problem is with how
‘modernity’ is defined in the first place. In our approach ‘modernity’ is not a series
of factors or developments; it is no more than the contingent name given to an

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historical period when ontologies of the modern are in dominance – that is, when
technical-abstracted modes of time, space, embodiment and knowing come to
frame other ways of being, particularly in terms of extensive power. It does not
imply that traditional ontologies are simply swept away. It does not assume a
modular process of expansion of the modern from the West to the Rest. It does
not suggest that dominance entails a homogenous or totalizing singularity. And it
does not divine that tensions between different practices and understandings of
being-in-the-world will be resolved along given pathways of ‘development’. Perhaps
it is indicative of the limits of the metaphor of ‘multiple modernities’ that when
Robert W. Hefner writes an article called ‘Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam,
and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age’ (reproduced in this volume), the term ‘multiple
modernities’ disappears behind a subtle description of the tension between
homogenizing pressures and the pervasiveness of ‘porous pluralism’. He writes:

Even as homogenizing pressures have grown, the Muslim world has witnessed a
counter-resurgence of pluralized expressions of faith. In Indonesia, Iran, Syria and
Turkey, among other nations, there is a growing interest in Islamic poetry, art, and
other personalized vehicles of divide wonder. Indeed, some Muslims call openly for
a civil Islam that renounces state-enforced standardization of faith … This struggle
between monolithic and pluralistic interpretations of Islam has its counterparts in
Hinduism and Christianity. Developments in all three religions underscore that the
real ‘clash of civilizations’ in our era is not between the West and some homogenous
‘other’ (cf. Huntington 1996) but between rival carriers of tradition within some
nations and civilizations.53

This leads us to the second problematic account of the ontological tensions

and cleavages – the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis.54 This approach associated with
Samuel Huntington has been so roundly criticized that there is no point here in
rehearsing all the points of criticism. (See the section in this volume on ‘Debating
the Globalization of Values and Identities’.) In our terms it is much more important
to recognize the ‘clash of ontologies’ within and across different cultural formations,
polities and communities than to posit an increasing tendency to violence between
singular, supposedly age-old communities of culture such as Confucianism, Western
culture and Hinduism. Though the ‘clash of civilizations’ argument is not
sustainable, it is likely that a number of these cultural and ontological undercurrents
will give rise to new points of tension and potential clashes over the next
decade, the contours of which are already discernible in some cases. Many of
these fault-lines derive at least in part from certain of the dynamics described
above, and are – again – a mixture of religion-specific themes and wider global
tensions:

• Global/local pressures are increasing as individual adherents find themselves

torn between the particularism of their own religious practice and the
universalist dimensions of certain faith traditions as articulated by emergent
global authority figures;
• Debate and unsettledness are intensifying around the meaning and practice
of secularism and religion. Seemingly settled conversations and definitions of
what constitutes religion and where it belongs have once again emerged as a
source of vigorous debate;

Intro-Vol-2 <xxvi>
 Introduction xxvii

• Tension is increasing between quietist-personalized and active-public

conceptions of religiosity with the reopening of this debate, potentially mapping
onto or inserting a religious dimension into a number of global conflicts;
• Generational schisms have opened in some settings as sections of the younger
generation in some places increasingly reject what is seen as the unworldly or
culturally-tainted religious practices of its parents in favor of a more politically
engaged, and sometimes more puritanical or intolerant, conception of religion;
• Islam-West tensions are fluctuating in intensity, while tensions between Western
(monotheistic) and Eastern (polytheistic) faith traditions are also emerging as
a new terrain of global competition, leading people to view the globalization
debate, at least in part, as a battle between divergent cosmologies and myth
systems;
• The globalization of alternative or non-traditional lifestyles (e.g., being gay)
continues amidst the persistence of traditional cultures of faith leading to
opposition to these shifts to be framed more intensively in religious terms.

Given these shifting developments, some speculations might be useful as to the

specific socio-political forms arising from shifting configurations of globalization,
religion and secularism over the coming decades. Some of these speculations are
well-founded; others much less so.
Global South Christianity: We are already seeing the massive expansion of
Christianity in the Global South and, in the context of persistent North-South
tensions, different configurations of common political cause might give more
weight to developments into the realm of the sacred and the cosmological. For
example, religious leaders in Africa and China, the two regions in which Christianity
is growing the fastest, could find common cause to articulate new forms of Third
World Christianity quite distinct from Liberation Theology in reflection of growing
geopolitical affinities between the two regions.
Alter-globalism and Liberation Theology. It is possible that we will see the rise
of religious movements that frame their agenda primarily in terms of social justice
join forces or co-ordinate ever-more closely with elements of the global justice
movement. A rejuvenated liberation theology might emerge that takes the
sensibilities of the late-twentieth century movements and the energy of
contemporary local expressions of liberation theology into a thoroughly global
movement.
Alter-globalism and Ecotheology: There are growing ties between religious
groups and the global environmental movement. It is possible that we might see
an intensification and coming together of segments of the environmental movement
and spiritualist groups who understand the protection of the earth in terms of the
custodianship of divine creation.
Political Buddhism: With the growth and spread of Christianity in Asia,
Buddhism’s natural heartland, the traditionally ‘peaceful’ Eastern faith could come
to feel itself increasingly under siege and begin to adopt a more overtly politicized
agenda. This is a theme commonly expressed by religion scholar Philip Jenkins.55
Islamic Anarchism and Punk Islam: A rejection of orthodox sources of Islamic
authority, as expressed through forms such as hip-hop and Muslim ‘beat’ novels,
have been mixed with a dose of Bakhunian anarchism. Here the novels and zines
of Muhammad Michael McKnight are relevant.

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Techno-Christianity. The fusion of a particular professional class and knowledge

community with a conservative and puritanical moral vision, might give rise to
something similar to the New Victorians as envisaged by Neal Stephenson in his
novel The Diamond Age – moralists with late-nineteenth-century values wielding
twenty-first century nanotechnology. Such a group might have the power to make
access to particular technologies (or medical treatments) contingent on conformity
with particular moral prescripts. Precursors exist today in certain American charities
which buy and distribute HIV retrovirals only to those who accept to lead a
Christian lifestyle. As subset, perhaps, we might see religious movements mix
elements of mystical Judaism or Gnosticism to produce theo-genetic sects seeking
evidence of divine truth in DNA codes.
Global Millenarianism: The development of transnational millenarian groups
remains on the agenda, groups modelled loosely on Aum Shinrikyo or the Branch
Davidians but operating on a global scale.56 At its most extreme, a group could
emerge in the form of malignant evangelical offshoot intent on ‘destroying the
world to save it’, a group treating greater regional integration and global
governance institutions as the means of fulfilling prophecies about Armageddon
or the Day of Judgment. Already we have seen the development of what Assaf
Moghadam has called ‘globalized suicide attacks’ as distinct from the relatively
localized martyrdom associated with attacks organized by Palestinian groups, the
Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah and the Parti Karkerani Kurdistan.57
The common theme to all these possible trajectories is that religion will continue
to be important under conditions of intensifying globalization, but that it will show
up in unconventional places or in unexpected associations with disparate social
forces and causes. Globalizing capitalism makes us all into good consumers and
choosing actors, but its complex alienating effects also lead us to search for certainty
– here religious re-enchantment offers sanctuary in a soulless world, but it is also
much more than that.

Notes
1. The first comes from Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs,
vol. 72, no. 3, 1993, pp. 22–49 (reproduced in the present volume); the second comes
from the introductory note in the History Channel’s television documentary, The Crusades:
Crescent and Cross (2005). See also the DVD Twenty-First Century Crusaders: A War on
Muslims in Iraq and Palestine.
2. http://www.wvi.org/wvi/about_us/who_we_are.htm, accessed 16 May 2007.
3. The term Anno Domini (AD) first began to be used in early Medieval Western Europe;
the term Common Era (CE), still bound to the Gregorian calendar, has early antecedents
in the nineteenth century, but really only came into mainstream use in the first years of
the twenty-first century, coinciding with the new reflexivity about globalization as a
phenomenon.
4. Max Weber, Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York
(1904–05), 1958.
5. See Joel Robbins, ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, vol. 33, 2004, pp. 117–43 (reproduced in the present volume).
6. See Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial
Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction’, Ethnography, vol. 4, no. 2, 2003, pp.
147–79, quoted from p. 150 (reproduced in an earlier volume in the ‘Central Currents

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 Introduction xxix

in Globalization’ series: Paul James and Phillip Darby, eds, Globalization and Violence:
Vol. 2, Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations, Sage Publications, London 2006). Here
the term ‘magic’ is intended in the anthropological sense of based on an analogical mode
of enquiry crossing nature and culture.
7. See the more extended discussion in the introduction to Paul James and Tom Nairn,
eds, Globalization and Violence: Vol. 1, Globalizing Empires, Old and New, Sage
Publications, London, 2006, xlix + 368pp. (ISBN 1 4129 1954 1)
8. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Cultures, Basic Books, New York, p. 90.
9. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993: p. 54. Peter Beyer similarly
begins his book Religions in Global Society (Routledge, Milton Park, 2006) with the
Weberian disclaimer that ‘the conception of religion is a main outcome of analysis and
not something defined at the beginning’. (p. 4.)
10. Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, eds, Globalization and Culture: Vol. 4, Ideologies of
Globalism, Sage Publications, London, 2009.
11. Gerald Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, Penguin, New
York, 1997.
12. The opening passage of the Christian Bible and Judaic Torah: Genesis, Article 1:1–2.
13. This definition is intended for example to get away from the dichotomous understandings
of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and sacredness/secularity.
14. See Peter Beyer, ‘The Religious System of Global Society’, Numen, vol. 45, no. 1, 1998,
pp. 1–29 (reproduced in the present volume).
15. James and Steger, Ideologies of Globalism, Introduction.
16. As an aside we can say that this simple point provides one line of insight into why tribal
religions, as opposed to traditional-modern religions, are fundamentally not globalizing
in either practice or aspiration.
17. Qur’an, 49:13.
18. Saïd Amir Arjomand, ‘Islam, Political Change and Globalizations’, Thesis 11, no. 76, 2004,
p. 10.
19. Manfred Steger, Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism, Rowman and Littlefield,
Lanham, 2nd edn 2005, ch. 3.
20. Paul James and Tom Nairn, eds, Globalization and Violence: Vol. 1, Globalizing Empires,
Old and New, Sage Publications, London, 2006.
21. Richard Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2004, ch. 3;
Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1999.
22. Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Routledge, London, 1994,
p. 85.
23. See John Voll, ‘Islam as a Special World-System’, Journal of World History, vol. 5, no. 2,
1994, pp. 213–26 (reproduced in the present volume).
24. See Janet Abu-Lughod, ‘The Shape of the World System in the Thirteenth Century’,
Studies in Comparative International Developments, Winter 1987–88, pp. 3–25,
reproduced in a prior volume in the present ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series:
Paul James and Barry Gills, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 1, Global Markets and
Capitalism, Sage Publications, London, 2007.
25. Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean,
Boulder: Westview Press, 1995; Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility
Across the Indian Ocean, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
26. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
27. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ‘Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in
Modernity’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002,
pp. 99–105.
28. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
29. R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study, London, John
Murray, 1925.

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30. Ryan Dunch, ‘Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions and
Global Modernity’, History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 3, 2002, pp. 301–25 (reproduced in
the present volume).
31. Manfred B. Steger, ‘Comparative Nationalisms in Gandhi’s Global Village’, in James
Goodman and Paul James, eds, Nationalism and Global Solidarities: Alternative Projections
to Neoliberal Globalisation, Routledge, London, 2007.
32. Lorne L. Dawson and Jenna Hennebry, ‘New Religions and the Internet: Recruiting in a
New Public Space’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 14, no.1, 1999, pp. 17–39
(reproduced in the present volume).
33. Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the
End of Economic Democracy, Anchor Books, New York, 2000.
34. See, for example Richard Whately’s Introductory Lectures on Political Economy, B.
Fellowes, London, 1831, a book infused with religious sentiment and redolent of the
other side of Adam Smith expressed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
35. BBC News, 3 April 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7982146.stm
accessed 12 July 2009. See also The Jersualem Post, 14 February 2007, on the use of
kosher phones in the military. With thanks to Alan Roberts for the references and critical
comments on the contortions of the new and the old.
36. Jonathan Friedman, ed., Consumption and Identity, Taylor & Francis, London, 2007.
37. Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture,
New York: Continuum, 2005.
38. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from
Christian Militias to al Qaeda, University of California Press, 2008, for a mapping of
religious movements and their accounts of themselves projecting a positive alternative
to Western decay.
39. For example, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization:
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994.
40. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, Sage Publications,
London, 1992. See also his article with J. Chirico, ‘Humanity, Globalization and the
World-Wide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Explanation’, Sociological Analysis (now
Sociology of Religion), vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 219–42 (reproduced in the present volume).
41. Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity and the Search
for Ontological Security’, Political Psychology, vol. 25, no. 5, 2004, pp. 741–67
(reproduced in this volume).
42. For example, with the modernization of Christianity ‘faith’ became the means by which
reflexive theologians such as Karl Barth explained the move from modern interpretation
to believing in universal Truths.
43. As a speculative aside it would be worth pursuing the question as to why it was Roland
Robertson as a sociologist of religion (or in other words as a theorist of a universalizing
spirituality) who wrote the first major book on globalization, and why he now argues
for a conflation of globalization and localization in the concept of ‘glocalization’.
44. Elizabeth McAlister, ‘Globalization and the Religious Production of Space’, Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 44, no. 3, 2005, p. 252 (reproduced in the present
volume).
45. This was first developed by Anthony Giddens in A Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism, Macmillan, London, 1981, ch. 4, though at that time, just as in the work
done by David Harvey, he was developing the concept of ‘time-space distantiation’ as a
much broader social process than the term ‘globalization’ implies. More recently see
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, Verso, London, 2006.
46. Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.
47. Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics,
London: Routledge, 1998; cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man,
New York: Free Press, 2006.

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48. Enrique Dussel, ‘The Sociohistorical Meaning of Liberation Theology’, in Dwight Hopkins
et al., eds, Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases, Duke University Press, Durham,
2001. (Pages 33–45 are reproduced in the present volume.)
49. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teologia de la Liberacion, (A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics,
and Salvation) Ediciones Sigueme, Salamanca, 1972.
50. Larry Rohter, ‘As Pope Heads to Brazil a Rival Theology Exists’, New York Times, 7 May
2007.
51. Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism, Oxford: Oneworld, 1997; Hamid Dabashi,
Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, London: Routledge, 2008; Marc H. Ellis,
Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004.
52. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Hurst & Company, London,
2002.
53. Robert W. Hefner, ‘Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a
Globalizing Age’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 27, 1998, pp. 83–104, quoted from
p. 92.
54. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ (reproduced in the present volume).
55. See for example, Phillip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, p. 185.
56. Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence
and the New Global Terrorism, Metropolitan Books, New York, 1999.
57. Assaf Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad and the Diffusion
of Suicide Attacks, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2008.

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