The Contemporary World

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 LESSON 9: Globalization of Religion PAGE \*
MERGEFOR

Lesson 9
Globalization of Religion
Lesson Overview
Religion, much more than culture, has the most difficult
relationship with globalism because the two are entirely
contrasting belief systems.
In our previous topic, you have learned how various media
drive different forms of integration. In this lesson, you will be
introduced to the globalization of religion, how globalization
affects religious practices and beliefs, and the relationship
between religion and global conflict and conversely, global
peace.

Intended Learning Outcomes

At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
1) Explain how globalization affects religious practices and
beliefs.
2) Analyze the relationship between religion and global
conflict and conversely global peace.

Offline/Online Recitation
1. What is religion?Religion is a collection of cultural
systems, belief systems, and worldviews that relate
humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.
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Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and

sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or
to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to
derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred
lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human
nature. […] Many religions have organised behaviours,
clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or
membership, congregations of laity, regular meetings or
services for the purposes of veneration of a deity or for
prayer, holy places (either natural or architectural), and/or
scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include
sermons, commemoration of the activities of a god or gods,
sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary
services, matrimonial services, meditation, music, art,
dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture.
However, there are examples of religions for which some
or many of these aspects of structure, belief, or practices
are absent.1
2. How does it affect globalization?
More specifically, religions maintain the Golden Rule: “what
you do not wish done to yourself, do not do to
others.”Therefore, through such religious values, globalization
engenders greater religious tolerance in such areas as politics,
economics, and society.
3. How does globalization affect religion?
Globalization give for regular contact, religion gets in the
sphere of argument in which religion proves to become
more anxious towards them as being world religions.
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Globalization also provides a culture of pluralism, meaning

religions that overlapping but distinctive ethics and
interests interact with one another.

Religion and Globalization

Religion is concerned with the sacred, while globalism
abides by human-made laws. Religion assumes that there is
“possibility of communication between humans and
transcendent.” Globalism’s yardstick, however, is how much of
human action can lead to the highest material satisfaction and
subsequent wisdom that this new status produces.
Religious people are less concerned with wealth and all that
comes along with it. They are ascetics precisely because they
shun anything material for complete simplicity - from their
domain to the clothes they wear, to the food they eat, and even
to the way they talk. A religious person’s main duty is to live a
virtuous, sin-less life such as that when he/she dies, he/she is
assured of a place in the other world.
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On the other hand,

globalists are less worried
about whether they will
end up in heaven or hell.
Their skills are more
pedestrian as they aim to
seal trade deals, raise the
profits of private
enterprises, improve
government revenue
collections, protect the
elites from being
excessively taxed by the
state, and, naturally, enrich themselves. If he/she has a strong
social conscience, the globalist sees his/her work as contributing
to the general progress of the community, the nation, and the
global economic system.
The religious aspires to be saint; the globalist trains to be a
shrewd businessperson. The religious detests politics and the
quest for power for they are evidence of humanity’s weakness
and the globalist values them as both means and ends to open up
further the economies of the world.
Religion and globalism clash over the fact that religious
evangelization is in itself a form of globalization. The globalist
ideal, on the other hand, is largely focused on the realm of
markets. The religious is concerned with spreading holy ideas
globally, while the globalist wishes to spread goods and
services.
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Globalization has “freed” communities from the

“constraints of the nation-state,” but in the process, also
threatened to destroy the cultural system that bind them together.
Religion seeks to take the place of these broken “traditional ties”
to either help communities cope with their new situation or
organize them to oppose this major transformation of their lives.
It can provide the groups “moral codes” that answer problems
ranging from people’s health to social conflict to even “personal
happiness.” Religion is thus not the “regressive force” that stops
or slows down globalization; it is a “pro-active force” that gives
communities a new and powerful basis of identity.
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Religion in Global Conflict1

‘In the last decades of the twentieth century and the

beginning of the twenty-first, religion has often been in the
news, and when it has, it has been bad news. The rise of
xenophobic right-wing Christians in Europe and the United
States, the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India, extreme
Jewish political movements in Israel, Buddhist confrontations in
Sri Lanka and Thailand, and radical Muslim movements
throughout the Middle East have branded all religious traditions
as potential conveyors of strident political activism. This is all
the more surprising in the modern era when some of the best
minds of the early twentieth century predicted that religion
1 Juergensmeyer (n.d.)
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would eventually wither away. But even those who expected it

to persist did not anticipate such a vigorous public appearance at
this moment in late modernity.’2
‘The contemporary conflicts with which religion has been
associated are not solely about religion, however, if one means
by ‘religion’ a set of doctrines
and beliefs. The conflicts have
been about identity and
economics, about privilege and
power – the things that most
social conflicts are about.
When these conflicts are
religionized, when they are
justified in religious terms and
presented with the aura of
sacred combat, they often
become more intractable, less susceptible to a negotiated
settlement. Thus, although religion is seldom the problem, in the
sense of causing the tensions that produced the conflicts in the
first place, it is often problematic in increasing the intensity and
character of the struggle (Juergensmeyer, 2004b).’ 3 Hence what
is peculiar is not conflict but religion's role in it.
‘Since the religionization of conflict is appearing all over
the planet at roughly the same time as the emergence of
increased globalization, one might suspect that globalization has
something to do with it. And yet religious activism is intensely

2 Juergensmeyer (n.d)
3 Juergensmeyer (n.d)
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local. Could the two be related? An abundant number of new

studies argues that this is the case, that religious conflict is a by-
product of the global age (see Crockett, 2006; Hassner, 2009;
Kippenberg, 2012; Lincoln, 2002; Ter Borg and Van Henten,
2010; Toft, Philpott and Shaw 2011; Wellman, 2007; and
Juergensmeyer, 2003, 2008).’4

Different Stages of Relationship Between Religion and

Globalization
1. Revolt Against Global Secularism
The first stage of the encounter was characterized by
isolated outbursts. It began in the 1970s by a variety of
groups – Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Muslim – that were
revolting against what they regarded as the moral failing of
the secular state.

2. Internationalization of Religious Rebellion

The next stage of the developing warfare between religious
and secular politics was the internationalization of the
conflict in the 1980s. This stage is best represented by the
ad hoc international coalition of jihadi Muslim radicals that
developed in the Afghan war.
3. The Invention of Global Enemies

4. Global war

4 Juergensmeyer (n.d)
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As the pace of globalization increases, the world's religions

find themselves in a per ilous dilemma that they have yet to
resolve in either practical or conceptual terms. On the one
hand, the globalization of markets exerts a powerful
pressure toward consumerist and materialist values, which
undermine and undercut religious per spectives and
sensibilities. On the other hand, the globalization of war
heightens the intensity of these religious perspectives and
sensibilities, and distorts them in the direction of violence
and religious extremism. This dilemma plays itself out in
dif ferent ways in the developed and developing world, but,
as the term "globalization" indicates, it is a problem for all
of us. Governments, in developing countries espe cially,
often find themselves forced to choose between one horn of
the dilemma or the other, with often disastrous results as
they take one or the other side in a "West versus the rest"
scenario. In the long run, the only viable solution is one
that addresses both horns of the dilemma at the same time,
and this is possible only if, in turn, religions themselves
become truly global.