Religions in Global Society

Peter Beyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134162789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Peter Beyer, a distinguished sociologist of religion, presents a way of understanding religion in a contemporary global society - by analyzing it as a dimension of the historical process of globalization. Introducing theories of globalization and showing how they can be applied to world religions, Beyer reveals the nature of the contested category of 'religion': what it means, what it includes and what it implies in the world today.

Written with exceptional clarity and illustrated with lively and diverse examples ranging from Islam and Hinduism to African traditional religions and new age spirituality, this is a fascinating overview of how religion has developed in a globalized society. It is recommended reading for students taking courses on sociology of religion, religion and globalization, and religion and modernity.

Chapter 1

Globalization and global society

Globalization: the emergence of a neologism

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, globalization stands as a highly familiar and highly charged term. In popular and mass media usage, as well as in much of the burgeoning scholarly literature on the subject, it has primarily an economic reference, signalling the observation that most regions and peoples of the world are now increasingly tied together through the operations of global capitalist markets, transnational business firms and their cultural by-products in the form of mass consumer goods, mass media and the like. The evaluation of this process varies about as much as it could, ranging from those who consider globalization as both inevitable and good for the world and humanity, all the way to those who condemn it as unjust and destructive of lives, cultures and the natural environment. What is perhaps rather strange in this currently raging debate is that the term ‘globalization’ is relatively new, whereas most of the developments that it describes have been the subject of analysis and controversy for a significantly longer period. Transnational capitalism is at least several centuries old, and its observation as such begins already in the nineteenth century, especially with Marx. Even the ecological component dates back to at latest the 1960s, two decades before this term became popular. And indeed, it was only in the mid- to late 1980s that globalization became part of our vocabulary (Levitt 1983; Robertson and Chirico 1985; Robertson and Lechner 1985), and only in the 1990s that it attained its current stature. The reasons for coining a new word for old processes are instructive.

Even a cursory look at older literature on the developments that globalization describes shows that we are dealing with a successor term. Specifically, globalization, while not simply a synonym for capitalism and modernization, in effect largely replaces them in popular and scholarly discourse (Roberts and Hite 2000). It is important to understand why this has happened. As concerns capitalism, the reasons can be read from the timing of the switch: ‘globalization’ as a word becomes popular at exactly the same time as the Soviet empire disintegrates and the state socialist alternative that it represented effectively disappears. As Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics switched to market economies and as Mao’s vilified ‘capitalist roaders’ carried the day in China, one did not have to be overly perceptive to conclude that international capitalism had become truly global capitalism. Globalization, especially in its dominant popular and media usages, is capitalism, but now without the concrete and institutionalized socialist alternative. The relation between globalization and modernization is somewhat more complicated. It includes the capitalism-to-globalization shift, but also points to a basic reassessment of all that has gone before. In a sense, changing to the idea of globalization is a way of saying that modernization is now no longer regional but rather unavoidably global. What seems to require a different term, however, is that it has become increasingly difficult to conceive modernity as singular: there are evidently multiple modernities, various ways of changing social structures and fundamental orientations to the world (Eisenstadt 2001; Featherstone et al. 1995). A similar understanding is captured in the notion that we now live in a postmodern world, one in which metanarratives of how we all got here and where we are all going are no longer convincing. In light of such pluralization of modernity, globalization suggests itself as the new singular, as the new term for the universal historical process in which we are all implicated.

If we then consider that, at a minimum, globalization indicates an awareness of this singularity, then tracing that recognition historically is one way of further understanding how the idea has replaced modernity in this capacity. Following the analyses of Roland Robertson (1992: 15–24) and Martin Albrow (1990), by the mid-nineteenth century, European thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Marx, Comte and Spencer had already taken critical steps in this direction. They felt that the processes of modernization evident in their own society were universal, which meant that they were destined to incorporate all the peoples of the world. Although they accepted the age-old distinction between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’, they transformed this social (and geographic) difference into a temporal and temporary one: those who still lived under barbaric conditions were destined to become civilized. This spread of modernity was not simply a matter of imperial conquest with the civilized powerful ruling over the barbaric subaltern. In their progressive and utopian visions, barbarism itself was to be eradicated with the spread of universal civilization to encompass the entire world. The spatial limits of this Western sociality were temporary. Nor were these intellectual elites alone in their thinking. The colonialist visions of European soldiers, administrators, explorers and merchants frequently incorporated this universalizing component. And Christian missionaries, beginning already with the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century and the Catholic missions of the seventeenth century, envisioned a universal conversion of the heathen quite analogous to what the more sociological thinkers had in mind (Mignolo 1998).

Indeed, this Christian parallel points to the possibility of seeing the forerunners to globalization even earlier and also outside the European sphere. At least after the eighth century CE, Islam became in fact as well as in principle just such a universalizing vision; and one could even make a similar argument for Buddhist and Hellenistic impulses of several centuries before that. Quite aside from showing just how far back one could extend the history of the historical developments to which globalization now refers, these precursors also raise the question of what specifically has been different about the current phase. Above all, one has to ask why the universalizing visions of nineteenth-century European men like Comte and Marx, and not those of the Greeks, the Buddhists or the Muslims, actually eventuated in the global society of the present. As with the passage from modernization to globalization as key terms, the differences between the developments initiated by the modern Europeans and those of other people in other times and places are as important as the similarities.

Looking at the views of thinkers like Marx, Comte and Spencer simply as European or Western is, in fact, somewhat misleading. For mixed into their universalism was usually (Marx is an exception) a concomitant particularism in the form of nationalism or at least nationally oriented perspectives. Certainly by the nineteenth century, and to a significant degree before, most Europeans tended to see their universal visions through national eyes, whether British, French, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, German, Italian, Swedish or Belgian. The universal in these visions also expressed itself in terms of the particular. That is vital for understanding the eventual inadequacy of modernization as an umbrella notion and the corresponding switch to globalization. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the national particularism among Europeans became rather dominant over the globalizing universalism. This development was instrumental, for instance, in bringing about World War I in the early twentieth century, an event that demonstrated just how particular and non-universal the Europeans were or had become. Moreover, in the scientific domain, we see an analogous manifestation in the eventual orientation of the new universalist discipline of sociology. There the idea took root – and is still quite strong – that the core word ‘society’ applied more or less self-evidently to national states; that the world consisted not of one society or even a small number of regional ones, but rather of a large number of societies that were more or less coterminous with these states of extremely variable sizes. The question of modernization, which is to say the ‘spread’ of the universalism, had to be asked in the first instance with reference to those states, at most in terms of clusters of these states, and not, or only in utopian fashion, with respect to the global geographic or social whole. The fact that, already by the latter half of the nineteenth century, various clearly non-European ‘national’ elites in countries such as Japan, China and India were actively adopting this vision of ‘national societies’ only contributed to the logic of the development. Yet during the same period, we see a dramatic increase in the sort of economic, political and generally communicative ties that we now regularly point to when talking about a compressed global world. This was the period of the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, of the beginnings of telephone and radio communication, of significant global migrations, as well as of sharply increased global trade and finance; not to mention that the 1914– 18 European war was called and to a real extent was in fact a world war (MacMillan 2003). Modernization, as an idea with nationally particular orientation, could not encompass this aspect. Not surprisingly, then, this period also marks the beginnings of another new discipline, that of international relations, the very title of which reflects the particularistic basic unit of analysis. The global, in effect, appeared as a matter of relations among more localized forms, as derivative, not as constitutive of them (Albrow 1990; Robertson 1992: 18–24; Stichweh 1996).

The post-World War II era marked the beginning of the end of this particularistic ascendancy, but not simply in favour of a universalistic global vision. Instead, what we have witnessed is an intensification of both faces with the corresponding realization that previous conceptualizations must at the very least be enhanced. World War II was itself more truly global than all previous wars; and yet represented a clash and thus the violent relations between incommensurate particularisms with universal pretensions. The post-war era then continued this sort of confrontation in a different guise: rather than nationalist fascisms versus nationalist liberalisms, each represented through several nation-states, there emerged the Cold War division between communism and liberal democracy in the form of two superpower states and their respectively allied states. These particularistic socio-political units, moreover, were at the same time multiplying as numerous independence movements succeeded in erecting new sovereign states upon the structures of the European colonial empires. Under these circumstances, what appeared most evident was not one world, but rather, in the prevalent jargon of the time, three: the First, the Second and the Third Worlds. Each of these seemed evidently to be composed of states or ‘national societies’. In terms of modernization, the first two denoted capitalist and socialist versions of this universalist idea(l), whereas the last incarnated the ‘not yet’ modernized, the underdeveloped but also developing world. Under the idea of ‘development’ the older universalizing impulse of spreading modernity, ‘civilizing the barbarian’ and even ‘converting the heathen’ (cf. Mignolo 1998) received a new incarnation.

Several occurrences conspired to make this vision less convincing after the 1960s and thus make room for the rising notion of globalization; not, as I say, as a replacement for the universalist notion of modernity, but rather as an enhancement and to some degree as a counterpoint that allowed the particularity of modernization to come to the fore. As a concept, globalization would account much better for the relative differences in how the supposedly universal modern project manifested itself from one place to another. More critically, it put into much sharper profile the extent to which the relations among ‘societies’ were not merely derivative, but just as much constitutive of them. To better appreciate the ‘societies’, they also had to be treated as subunits of an encompassing unit of analysis, whether that was to be called a ‘system’ or also a ‘society’.

A catalogue of the post-1960 events and developments that encouraged the semantic shift to the idea of globalization can be quite long (see Beyer 2002). My selections from the possibilities are somewhat arbitrary and are meant only to illustrate the difficulty of maintaining the national society as the basic unit of understanding. One could begin with pre-1960s events such as the already mentioned world wars, the fact that the Cold War divisions effectively included the entire globe, the proliferation of international governmental and non-governmental organizations in the immediate post-war era, or the advent of television and regularly scheduled air service around the world. It is, however, the intensification and multiplication of such phenomena in the period after 1960 that have been the real triggers. The 1969 moon landing with its indelible image of the globe floating in space might be a place to start as a symbolic event. Of greater real effect were probably other developments. These include the first wave of worldwide environmentalism; nuclear proliferation and the corresponding peace/ban-the-bomb movements; the already mentioned extension of sovereign statehood status to virtually all inhabited parts of the world; the definitive accession of the first non-Western country, Japan, to ‘First World’ status; and changes in the immigration laws of various Western countries that enlarged the prime sources of migrants to include the entire globe. The rapid intensification of numerous other communicative processes could be added, such as the explosion of tertiary education; the continued increase in the number and complexity of international non-governmental organizations; much greater density of telecommunication, travel and tourism; and, related to this, the computerization of business, government, education, science and media. During the 1980s and 1990s, when globalization took on its current popularized meaning, key trigger events could include, for instance, Black Monday in October 1987, the recognition of the East Asian Tiger economies, the resurgence of a now sustained environmental activism and concern in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the AIDS pandemic, the 1991 Gulf war, the advent of the Internet, and, of course, the fall of the Soviet empire with its seeming victory of capitalism. The catalogue could be increased almost at will. Of key importance in the present context is what social-scientific theories have made of this, which is to say how globalization has come to be understood.

Theorizing globalization: the global and the local

Accepting that a concept like globalization is necessary does not by itself already say what the new term means. Globalization intends to capture vital aspects of contemporary social reality which notions like capitalism and modernization do not address satisfactorily; but what exactly are those aspects? Theories of globalization in fact vary a great deal. A quick survey of the relevant literature, however, reveals the clear dominance of one particular perspective, which sees globalization as in essence the worldwide extension and intensified operation of the capitalist economy. This orientation owes a great deal to and can even be said to have its origins in the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, whose publications beginning in the early 1970s are among the first to theorize the entire globe as a single social whole (Wallerstein 1974–80, 1979). World-system theory shows a decidedly Marxian influence, not least in the priority it gives to economy as society and in its use of class divisions as a basic organizing principle. The Marxian flavour of this relatively early globalization theory is perhaps not surprising given that Marx was himself one of a very few classical nineteenth-century social thinkers who did not display a noticeably national orientation; and, indeed, like Wallerstein, treated the modern nation-state as a phenomenon derivative of supposedly more fundamental economic processes. Correspondingly, many of the contributions to the literature that adopt the globalization-as-capitalism approach are highly critical, seeing globalization as an ideology of the global capitalist class which is having devastating effects on the majority subaltern populations of the world. Philip McMichael’s formulation is typical: globalization is ‘a set of institutional and ideological relations constructed by powerful social forces (e.g., managers of international agencies, states and firms, academic ideologues)’ (McMichael 2000: 275). There are, of course, formulations of this position that see globalization as generally positive (e.g. Levitt 1983). What all these approaches have in common is that globalization for them amounts to the intensification of the global reach of capitalism and its concomitant universalizing project of modernization. Yet, dominant as this perspective is, it does not go unchallenged by other views. It is, in fact, rather seriously lacking if it proposes to be a theory of the global social whole. Such economistic theories of globalization, if stretched to that point, are forced to explain everything that has been happening in the contemporary world as an expression of global capitalist modernization, as resistance to it, or as irrelevant. The result is that significant globalizing domains of social life are underanalyzed, ignored or accounted to the residual categories of irrelevance or resistance. That applies especially to the main subject of this book, religion.

A further group of influential approaches to globalization that goes some way to addressing the one-dimensionality focuses on the worldwide system of political states. Consonant with international relations perspectives, these see states as prime actors in the global system, but further focus on how states actually constitute themselves with reference to this system (Defarges 2002; Luard 1990; McGrew and Lewis 1992). One particularly well-developed version of this direction, represented by John W. Meyer and his collaborators (Meyer et al. 1997; Thomas et al. 1987), even refers to this system explicitly as a ‘world polity’, paralleling the Wallersteinian ‘world economy’. Political orientations of this sort address the problem of one-dimensionality by adding and emphasizing an inherently plural global unit of analysis, the state. They thus introduce heterogeneity, not as victim or attempted negation of globalization, but as constitutive of it.

In their emphasis on more than one dimension and on the constitutive role of heterogeneity, politically oriented theories of globalization are examples of a wider group of theories that see it principally in terms of a dialogical and mutually constructive relation between the universal and the particular, or, as it is expressed more frequently, between the global and the local (Beyer 1998a). The global, in these perspectives, is not simply an imposition, as it were from the top down; it is at the same time the product of the reconstruction of the local. In addition, the local is not merely what was or is there in the absence of the global; it is a consequence of how the global constitutes itself. My somewhat paradoxical formulation signals what is different in these cases. It hearkens back to the discussion in the previous section on the historical simultaneity of nationally particular and globally universal visions. And in as much as the world-system model of Wallerstein and his school represents the first explicitly global version of globalization as capitalism, so has the work of Roland Robertson (see Robertson 1992; Robertson and Chirico 1985; Robertson and Lechner 1985) pioneered this dialogical orientation.

Robertson’s way of expressing this core idea is to say that globalization is at the same time the universalization of the particular and the particularization of the universal. Translating somewhat, one can express the basic idea like this: globalization has consisted and consists in the simultaneous and sequential operation of three logical moments. There is (1) the spread of various particular social forms across the globe, which constitutes their universalization. Those forms were at one point in their development the particular products of a certain region or a certain subgroup, albeit frequently already with reference to matters outside that region or subgroup (see moment 3). These universalized forms, however, do not simply spread as such, but (2) become particularized to various other local situations. That particularization of the universal repeats the universal, but also transforms it, thus relativizing the original. Such transformation, in turn, can become the particular subject of (3) another universalization, which in turn becomes reparticularized in other contexts and other times. And so on. The global expresses itself only as local, and the local expresses itself in global terms.

Several aspects of this basic model should be underlined. First, it very much includes unequal power relations and conflict. Sometimes universalization involves imposition, with the possibility of resistance. That resistance, however, may also be an active form of appropriation; or the form of resistance itself may become a particularization subject to universalization or spread elsewhere. Even anti-globalization movements have become rapidly global, as such and in localized and transformed versions. In this sense, they further globalization in its most obvious sense of the increased communicative or social connection of the whole world; and in the awareness of that world. Moreover, the idea that particular resistance to certain universalizations can itself become the subject of further universalizations points to another dimension of the overall process. Although the most obvious universalizations may be the particular products and impositions of the most powerful regions, groups or actors on the rest, the sources of universalizing particulars and the direction of their ‘flow’ need not be and are not in fact uniformly of that sort. There are also ‘reverse flows’ (from seemingly subaltern to dominant) and ‘cross flows’ (not involving the dominant) which make their own real contribution to the development of a more global social world.

These features are not difficult to illustrate. The development of a globalizing capitalist economy in Europe already produced a resistant form there, namely socialism which turned out itself to be a capitalist variant. Rather than receiving its most typical concrete form in the dominant capitalist countries, however, the eventually most concretely elaborated versions of socialism arose elsewhere, in Russia and then in East Asia, principally the Maoist variant. In the latter half of the twentieth century, these then spread in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Globalization and global society
• 2 The religious system of global society
• 3 Formation and re-formation of Abrahamic religions: Christianity and Islam
• 4 The realization of Hinduism
• 5 Refusal and appropriation in East Asia: Confucianism and Shinto
• 6 New religions, non-institutionalized religiosity and the control of a contested category
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index