The Globalization of Religion

Learning Objectives

Identify the relationship between religion and globalization.
Discover the effects of religion in the world and the community.
Understand the significance of the globalization of religion.

Introduction to Globalization

Globalization is the historical process of the world's people increasingly living in a single social unit.
It involves religion and religions in several ways.
It calls for religious response and interpretation from a religious or theological point of view.
Religion and religions have played important roles in bringing about and characterizing globalization.
Globalization promotes religious pluralism.
Religions identify with each other and become less rooted in particular places due to diasporas and transnational ties.
Globalization provides fertile ground for various non-institutionalized religious manifestations.
It fosters the development of religion as a political and cultural resource.

Understanding Globalization

The term "globalization" emerged recently, first appearing in business and sociological literature in the 1980s.
By the end of the century, it became a broadly used expression in academic and popular discourse.
Globalization implies that all parts of the world are increasingly tied into a single, globally expanded social unit.
Economic Globalization: Refers to recent developments in global markets, capital, and multinational corporations.
A related view includes mass media and cultural aspects, emphasizing the spread of products and ways of life, primarily Western (especially American), to all corners of the world.
Economic globalization focuses on how global capitalism incorporates the regions of the world into a single system.
Political Globalization: Involves global or international political relations, often with a focus on the hegemonic power of Western countries.
Individual states are seen as the primary actors in a globally extended system.
Some view globalization as a recent development, while others trace its origins back decades or centuries.
Opinions differ on whether the process is generally good or mostly bad.
Much literature is critical, viewing the global as a homogenizing imposition on the local, where the strong dominate the weak.
Another approach emphasizes local and global movements, networks, and organizations that contribute to making the world more interconnected.
This perspective speaks of the development of a transnational civil society, distinguishing it from economic and political globalization.

Cultural and Religious Aspects of Globalization

This perspective emphasizes the renewed importance of cultural differences under globalization conditions.
The world not only becomes more homogeneous but also more pluralistic.
Religion is seen as part of the process rather than an irrelevant bystander or victim.
Scholars have offered interpretative theories of globalization, corresponding to the term's dominant meanings (e.g., global economic capitalist system, global political system of the state).
Efforts aim to incorporate different meanings as aspects of a single process, placing the global and the local in a dialogical relationship.
Local adaptations of globalized structures (e.g., capitalism, nationalism, mass media) are constitutive of the global.
Globalization is not just an imperialist spread from one region to the rest of the world.
The particular ways people respond to globalization in different parts of the world, including rich Western countries, define globalization.
Global factors are globalized by being localized or distinguished around the world, making the local potentially global or universal.
Worldwide flows (people, ideas, information, products) move in multiple directions, not just from America and Europe.
Examples: African musical styles and Asian martial arts impacting North America and Europe; migrants from Indonesia and Bangladesh seeking work in the Middle East.
These relationships contribute to globalization as much as Coca-Cola and the World Bank.

Religion and Globalization

Dialogical approaches to globalization are particularly significant concerning religion.
Much of globalization literature ignores religion, except for attention to Islamic political extremism.
This absence may be due to the dominance of economic and political understandings of globalization.
There are two basic possibilities to consider regarding the relationship between religion and globalization:
- Religious responses to globalization and globalization's religious interpretations (part of a globalizing context of doing religion).
- Globalization analyzes aimed at understanding the role of religion in globalization and the effects of globalization on religion (observing religion in a global society).
The largest portion of literature relates to the former kind.

Religious Perspectives on Globalization

Many religious commentators view globalization as mostly economic, imperialist, and homogenizing.
They assess globalization as a threatening challenge, a manifestation of evil.
Globalization is seen as a successor term for the capitalist system.
Globalization results in violence and unjust oppression of the majority of the world's people.
It threatens local and indigenous cultures, placing a heavy burden on women.
It is a leading cause of global and local environmental degradation, significantly harming the marginalized.
Representatives of various religious traditions (Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, indigenous traditions) share similar critical assessments.
Such arguments are common in both religiously inspired and secular literature.
Globalization and religion are fundamentally incommensurate.
However, another segment of religiously inspired and secular literature sees a closer relationship between the two.
These observers share broader meanings of globalization, particularly from the perspective of dialog and from below.

The Role of Religion in Shaping Globalization

Some theologically oriented observers argue that religion plays a crucial role in shaping globalization.
Globalization's adverse outcomes point to the need for positive global ethics that beliefs can provide.
Hans Küng's efforts are well-known in this direction.
Küng argues that the globalized world requires a guiding global ethic, and harmonious relationships and dialog among religions are key to developing that ethic.
This signals a globalization dialogic understanding.
The globalized whole depends on the contribution of religion for its viability, but this contribution presupposes a plurality of particular religions that come to understand each other positively.
Unity and diversity both make up the global.
Religion is an important dimension of globalization, exhibiting dynamic tension between global and local, homogeneity and heterogeneity, universal and heterogeneity.

Religion and Religions in Globalization

Perspectives of globalization that seek to include religion have taken several directions:
- Analyzing religion as a global or transnational institution whose diverse manifestations operate largely independently of economic and political structures.
- Focusing on the role of religious systems, especially among less powerful populations, as powerful cultural resources to assert identity and seek inclusion in global society.
- Showing how religious formation, reformation, and spread were an integral dimension of globalization.
These directions are not mutually exclusive but imply different theoretical emphases and focus on different empirical manifestations of religion.

Religion as Transnational Institution

The relative absence of religion from many perspectives of globalization is surprising, especially historically.
Along with economic trade and political empire, religions have played a major role in binding different regions of the world together.
Hindu civilization spread across South and Southeast Asia.
Buddhist teachings and monastic traditions linked vast territories from Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent to Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia through Afghanistan and China.
The Christian church dominated and defined the northwestern portion of the Eurasian landmass (Europe) as a single social unit in the early Middle Ages.
By the twelfth century, Islam had woven a socio-religious tapestry to the far reaches of Southeast Asia from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
When European powers expanded their influence globally (16th-20th centuries), Christian religion and institutions were key contributors.
Churches accompanied European colonizers in Africa, the Americas, and Australasia.
Christian missions sought conversions globally, independently or with secular authorities.
Christian organizations and movements are the vast majority of globally extended religious institutions today.
- Examples: Roman Catholic Church, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches, World Council of Churches, Seventh-day Adventists, worldwide Pentecostal movement, Jehovah's Witnesses.
Christian missions are still crisscrossing the world.
- Examples: American missionaries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; African and Latin American Christians carrying out missions in Europe and the United States; Australians serving in India; South Koreans in South Africa.

Non-Christian Transnational Religious Institutions

Muslim movements and organizations: ūfi and neo-ūfi brotherhoods (e.g., Naqshbandiyah, Murīdīya, Qādirīyah), reform movements (e.g., Pakistani Tablighi Jamaat, Turkish Milli Görüş), foundations of unity (e.g., World Muslim Congress, World Muslim League).
Buddhist organizations: Foguangshan, Sōka Gakkai.
Hindu movements: Ramakrishna Math and Mission, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Sai Baba movement.
Other major and minor religions: Judaism, Sikhism, Baha'i, Mormonism, Scientology, BrahmāKumaris.
Specific literature on these is substantial, but perspectives of globalization have not focused on these global religious forms, except for Christian manifestations like the Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostalism.

Religion and Global Migration

A growing literature has focused on religion in the context of global migration.
The more or less permanent displacement of large numbers of people from different regions and cultural backgrounds to many other parts of the world, particularly from non-Western to Western countries, has brought attention to how much humanity lives in a single world.
Identity and difference must be renegotiated and reconstructed.
Globalization theories analyze consequences of global migration, but the issue is not missing from those who understand globalization from an economic or political point of view.
Global migrants maintain stronger and more lasting links with their countries of origin.
Approaches to globalization enable a better understanding of why they migrated, what they do after migration, and the dynamics of their integration or lack of integration into their new regions.

The Role of Religion Among Global Migrants

Religious institutions, religiously informed worldviews, and religious practice are often instrumental in these processes.
Increasing efforts are made to understand the role of religion among global migrants.
Such contributions have focused on the migrants' concrete religious institutions in their new homes, the immigration and integration policies and attitudes of the host countries, the transnational links and flows that migrants maintain, and the influence of these diasporic communities on the usually involved global religions.
Transnational religious organizations and movements are often important topics in such analyzes, as migrant communities are often instrumental in creating, developing, and maintaining their global character.
Examples used in literature:
- Senegalese murīd presence in the United States
- Taiwanese Foguangshan establishments in Canada
- Turkish Süleymanli communities in Germany
- Great Britain's Tablighi Jamaat mosques
- Brazil's Japanese Buddhist temples
- North America and Europe's African or Latin American Pentecostal churches.
The bulk of this literature reflects the fact that the majority of such analyzes of globalization are carried out by people in Western countries.
Perspectives of globalization are applied to religion, and the analysis of religion comes to inform globalization theories.

Religion as Cultural and Political Resource

People who migrate rely on their religions and religious institutions to tackle related issues.
Religion provides a strong sense of identity and integrity where they may be strangers.
Churches, temples, mosques, gurdwaras, and synagogues serve as a home away from home.
They allow migrants to speak their language, eat their food, gather with people who share their situation, and achieve a status measure denied in the new host society.
Religious institutions offer vital social services to poorer migrants that make survival and establishment even possible.
They provide a main conduit to keep ties with the places of origin.
Religion is both the means for global connectivity and makes up important content of global flows.

Development of Transnational Religious Institutions

Globalization provides conditions for the development of new and expanded transnational institutions whose primary reason for existence is religious but which also serve a range of other purposes.
They are important local institutions where people go for everyday reasons in their daily lives.
Example: A Christian church founded in Atlanta by Mexican migrants is an important community resource for its participants but may also have links with the church back in the Mexican village from which most of them originate, providing financial and other resources for that village church as well.
Religious institutions include both localities, and perspectives of globalization afford this inclusive view.
The role of religion in providing cultural resources in a global context is not limited to migrants.
Globalization implies a compression of space in which the upheaval and uprooting characteristic of the migratory experience is a lot of a great many of the world's people, whether they leave their homes or not.
Religion and religious institutions are important resources to respond to this situation.
The rapid rise of Pentecostal Christian churches in Latin America, along with growth in Afro-Brazilian religions and Roman Catholic movements, is because these provide people with ways to understand themselves and cope in a changing world.
They provide narratives and life practices through which people can give themselves a meaningful and dignified place in this world.
Religion provides people with a measure of power.
Christian and Islamic organizations, centers, networks, and movements in sub-Saharan Africa offer many people at least some access to an institution that works reasonably for their benefit.
They have links to and represent access to the wider globalized world.
Christianity's and Islam's attractions are that they have been world religions for many centuries and continue to fill this role.

Religio-Political Movements

The proliferation of effective religio-political movements has attracted the greatest attention to the global significance of religions.
From the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and the political involvement of some Buddhist organizations in Japan to the many highly politized Islamicist movements in countries as diverse as Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, politized religion has been a constant feature of the global world since the 1960s.
Two basic features illustrate their relevance to globalization theories:
- They arose in many different countries, based on globally recognized religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism).
- Such movements invariably involve one of the broadly homologous modern states and represent an explicitly global view.
Even the Islamic Taliban in Afghanistan saw itself very much globally when the U.S.-led invasion overthrew its government in 2001.
Localized religion does not need to be extended globally, let alone positive towards the process of globalization, to be relevant globally.

Religion and Religions as a Globalizing System

Another theoretical approach focuses on the degree to which the manifestations of globalization are both modern institutional forms and modern understanding of religion.
With the development of a globally expanded society, religion has come to inform a globally expanded religious system consisting of mutually identified and widely recognized religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism).
Other religions receiving wide legitimacy: Judaism, Sikhism, Daoism, and Jainism.
Less consistently or more regionally accepted religions: Bahai, Shintō, Candomblé, African Traditional Religions, Scientology.
The idea that religion manifests itself through distinct religions may seem self-evident but is a recent notion, dating back to the seventeenth century in Europe.
Its development and spread coincide with the primary centuries of globalization.
The construction of the religious system is recent and selective; not every possible religion counts.
One outlook is that religion is an abstract term, useful for some kinds of analysis, but not something real.
The ideas of religion as a separate domain of life and separate religions are products of recent history and associated with the spread of Christian and European influence.
Another argument is that religions are empirically too narrow.
A peculiar way of understanding religion and institutionally embodying religion has developed as an expression of the globalization process.
Similar to global capitalism and the sovereign state global system, the idea and its implementation also exclude and include.
Like all human institutions, it involves power and imposition.
Anti-globalization movements are themselves important manifestations of that which they seemingly oppose.

Dynamics and Challenges

New religions will continuously try to form, and much religiosity will escape the system due to the selective nature of the religious system.
The existence of this global religious system spawns its constant development and the continual challenge of how it operates.

Religion, Globalization, and the Human Condition

Globalization theories address how it shapes people's understanding of the world's nature and purpose and its place in it.
This ideal dimension can be conceived as its religious dimension, not necessarily referring to religious traditions and institutions.
Analyzes of this globalization dimension can be divided according to whether it is viewed as a positive or negative feature, and whether unity or diversity prevails.
Positive and unitary interpretations see globalization as inevitably moving the world towards ever-increasing material prosperity, political democracy, and equitably shared technological progress.
Many share ideals such as equality and inclusion of all people in the advantages of global society but consider that human society has a long way to go.
Several perspectives based on institutionalized religion fall under this heading (e.g., the Global Ethics Project by Hans Küng, the World Council of Churches' Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation program).
These consider values such as peoples, religions, classes, and gender equality to be unquestionable.
They exhibit strong ecological sensitivity.
Social-scientific approaches that emphasize the global preponderance of idealized models also belong in this category.

Negative and Pluralistic Visions of Globalization

Unitary but negative visions share most of these features but reject the idea that any of these developments can have a positive result.
Sometimes they take communitarian directions that reject the world.
They may embrace precisely the kind of egalitarian values typical of the positive versions but insist that this is possible only in a separate and usually quite small society.
Rejections of unitary globalization insist on a particular culture or society's unique validity.
Some so-called fundamentalist views fall into this category.
Afghanistan's Taliban may have been one of the few examples.
The world's pluralistic visions are variations on the unitary ones, placing greater emphasis on the difference or irreconcilability of various world views.
The clash of civilization model made famous by Samuel Huntington is representative of a negative version.
Positive pluralist perspectives are variations on the unitary variety, emphasizing the value of pluralist and egalitarian inclusion more strongly.
Representations of the ideal dimension of globalization are close to each other.
This apparent narrowing of alternative world views may ultimately be one of the most powerful symptoms of the world.