8_Globalization of Religion

Understanding Religon

• Spiritual

• Material

Spiritual (Understanding of Religion)

• Involves the idea of transcendence

• Relates with sacredness or holiness and system of practice and language which is organized

• Concerns ultimacy on “how it relates people to the ultimate conditions of existence”

Material (Understanding of Religion)

• Capable of motivating individuals and groups to collectively mobilize to achieve political goals and suppress mass actions as a tool of repression

• Called people to action or inaction

Globalization and Religion

• Secularization Paradigm

• Resurgence of Religion

Secularization Paradigm

• Religion would lose its significance in the modern world because of economic development and modernization

• Can be teaced back to Comte, Weber, Durkheim, and Marx who posited that modernization involves a decline of religiosity among societies

3 Concepts of Secularization Paradigm

• Based on Tachannen 1991

• Differentiation, Rationalization, Worldliness

Differentiation

• Religion becomes differentiated and autonomous from other institutions

• “which thus loses its power of social control and guidance over the rest of society”

• Religion no longer controls everything, its just one part of society among many

Rationalization

• Scientization — Related to the emergence of evidence of science that would compete with religious worldviews

• Sociologization — social life is determined in a scientific and rational fashion that is free from religious influence

• Society becomes more focused on logic, science, and evidence, and less influenced by religion

Wordliness

• Religious organizations begin to cater to their members’ psychological needs

• helpless > go to church comforts you

• Religion becomes more about emotional support in daily life rather tan eternal or spiritual concerns

Auguste Comte

Society undergoes three stages as it progress:

1. Theological stage → religious belief

2. Metaphysical (things around us) → abstract thinking

3. Positivist/Scientific (understanding our environment) → scientific reasoning

Max Weber

• Modernization is a process of the disenchantment of the universe with the replacement of bureaucratization, rationalization, and secularization over the magical, metaphysical, and religious

• You blame natural processes of the world

• Modern life replaces mystery and magic with reason, rules, and science.

Emile Durkheim

• Society is increasingly becoming individualistic

• It breaks the bonds of the community

Karl Marx

• Religion as the opium of the people created by the material conditions

• Religion would have no place in a communist society

• Religion = An Escape

Clash of Civilizations

Huntington:

• Conflicts will no longer be about ideologies or economical → conflicts will be fought along cultural or civilizational lines

• Politics of civilizations

  • “the people and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history but as movers and shapers of history”

9 Civilizations

• Western

• Latin America

• Islamic

• African

• Hindu

• Buddhist

• Sinic

• Japanese

Cause of Friction

• Economic Modernization → separates societies from longstanding cultural identities

  • “unsecularization of the world” — Weigel

  • “revival of religion” — Kepels

• “Universality” + Imposition of Western Values

  • conflicts were “West vs the Rest”

  • does not find resonance with other cultures

• Clinging on to whats familiar to you

Support to the Civilizational Thesis

• Azzouzi in line with Huntington → Globalization is leading to the revival and resurgence of religion

  • Religion = act of resistance against adverse effects of globalization

  • Globalization = Hybridization of cultures and religions → but failed to be actualized and strengthened religious identities that cannot be hybridized or intermingled

• “The hegemony and dominance of these processes make religions related cultures and identities take defensive measures to protect themselves”

Critiques of Civilization Thesis

• Huntingtons Thesis

• Amartya Sen

• Norris and Inglehart

• Thomas

• Scholte

Huntington’s thesis

Generalizes fundamentalism and extremism to the entire religion of Islam

Amartya Sen

Failure to recognize “heterogeneities with cultures” as they are diverse

= oversimplification is a huge mistake

• Criticizes the thesis for oversimplifying cultures, ignoring that each culture has many internal differences

Norris & Inglehart (2011)

Resurgence of religion as a part of the international agenda caused by the accommodation of divergent attitudes toward moral issues in traditional and modern societies (womens rights, LGBT rights, divorce, abortion)

• Say religion will re-emerge because societies are debating moral issues like women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and abortion — showing tensions within cultures, not just between civilizations.

Thomas (2005)

• Global resurgence of religion is the growing saliency and persuasiveness of religion in private and public life

• the increasing importance of religious beliefs, practice and discourses, as well as the influence of religious or religiously-related individuals → Pope Francis

• Argues religion is rising because it’s becoming more influential in both personal and public life — not just because of civilizational conflict

Scholte (2005)

• Religious revivalism = anti-rationalist faith

• “Trans-planetary” relations have helped stimulate and sustain some renewals of anti-rationalist faith

• Global networks have more usually promoted activities involving rationalist knowledge

• Azzouzi → anti-rationalism may only be for fundamentalism and extremism

• Post modern perspective → we are forming an international society that is multi-cultural and reflects religious pluralism toward “multiple modernities”

• Fundamentalism, absolutists, fanatical is a distortion of a religion → to suit their agenda