Religion, Modernity, Globalisation

Nation-State to Market

François Gauthier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367226237
• eBook ISBN: 9781000725971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book argues that the last four decades have seen profound and important changes in the nature and social location of religion, and that those changes are best understood when cast against the associated rise of consumerism and neoliberalism. These transformations are often misunderstood and underestimated, namely because the study of religion remains dependent on the secularisation paradigm which can no longer provide a sufficiently fruitful framework for analysis.

The book challenges diagnoses of transience and fragmentation by proposing an alternative narrative and set of concepts for understanding the global religious landscape. The present situation is framed as the result of a shift from a National-Statist to a Global-Market regime of religion. Adopting a holistic perspective that breaks with the current specialisation tendencies, it charts the emergence of the State and the Market as institutions and ideas related to social order, as well as their changing rapports from classical modernity to today. Breaking with a tradition of Western-centeredness, the book offers probing enquiries into Indonesia and a synthesis of global and Western trends.

This long-awaited book offers a bold new vision for the social scientific study of religion and will be of great interest to all scholars of the Sociology and Anthropology of religion, as well as Religious Studies in general.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Acknowledging a global shift

We live in consumer societies. From Jakarta to Nairobi, from Delhi to Sao Paulo, from Johannesburg to Lahore, from Dallas to Moscow, from Baku to Istanbul, from Casablanca to Montreal, from Paris to Bucharest, from Shanghai to Tokyo, from Sydney to Leeds, from Cairo to Santiago de Chile, from Rome to Turku, and from Dubai to Tallinn, consumerism has penetrated deeply into social strata and has contributed to transform the world, so the habits of consumption are now part of the daily life of billions of human beings. A marking trait of the last decades of the twentieth century has been the irresistible rise of economics in human lives, not only in “the West,” but everywhere in the world. The transformations of the economy into global, financialised, connected markets have been the main vector underlying the profound restructurings of international politics and the shaking of the nation-state-founded world order which had progressively emerged out of the prior centuries and their theatre of colonialism, imperialism, commerce, and wars. Every social sphere has been affected by this latest and most radical wave of globalisation. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which had contributed in structuring international relations as well as commerce and cultural fluxes for parts of the twentieth century, consumerism has continued to expand and spread across the globe, reaching even some of the most remote and unfathomable areas, thereby becoming the world’s dominant social and cultural ethos. At the same time, in the so-called ‘Global South,’ free-market capitalist ideologies rose to dominance with the neoliberal overtake of the political ideologies and doctrines that had sustained and promoted the ideal and institutions of the Welfare state.

I was born into a French-Canadian family in 1973 and grew up on the Quebec side of English majority Ottawa. In my lifetime, I have seen the rise of economics on two fronts: Consumerism and neoliberalism. I have witnessed the apparition of logos on t-shirts and on everything else. I have seen the arrival of computers and the vertiginous rise of electronic and digital communications, and the deregulation of television and airwaves. Advertising has become pervasive, including in public toilets, and the range of ‘products’ advertised has expanded to previously non-commercial objects and services. Management, marketing, and business curricula have moved from being inexistent or minor programmes in universities to becoming their most important and most profitable, while private sector members have continuously increased their power on university boards. Sectors formerly reserved by the modern state as part of its public and welfare mission such as education, health, and social services are now evaluated in economic terms of cost-effectiveness in government practice and public discourse alike. Students have become customers, individuals investing in their future. The sick and the hospitalised have become users, customers, and consumers, and the mission of the state is now commonly understood in terms of service provision. NGOs, universities, and other public sector actors are now obliged to develop brand images and communication strategies to compete for rarefied resources in an environment of increased competition, evaluation, and bureaucratisation. Talk of government has ceded to the language of governance, while private management techniques have been applied to public and non-governmental actors.

Meanwhile, religion has made a comeback in public debates, and new religious phenomena such as fundamentalisms and charismatic movements have been on the rise, taking new forms that challenge classical analyses. ‘Traditional’ religious institutions are often dwindling and made to adapt to this changing environment, while new religious authorities emerge from the media and business sector. Religion and spirituality ‘without religion,’ i.e. at a distance from inherited religious institutions, experiential, born-again, and personalised, has risen to amazing rates, including outside the West.¹ Holistic ‘spiritualities’ have become mainstreamed practically worldwide and provide health and therapeutic complements that are recognised by the state and insurance systems, while modern medicine is losing some of its authority and shifting towards a more holistic anthropology. Immigration has caused an important remix of indigenous population make-ups not only in the West but also, we tend to forget, in many other parts of the world, introducing exogenous religious practices and challenging established integration models and national identity formations.

As flawed as it always was, the secularisation narrative did function to provide a unifying frame for understanding religion in modernity and organising public and academic discourses. The scientific validity, heuristic potential, and overall plausibility of secularisation theories may be rattled; it is still the epistemological frame from which religion is commonly interpreted in public discourse and political debates, and it still understands most policy efforts in dealing with the new challenges brought by today’s social environments and the profound reconfiguration of religion. Secularisation is still the dominant cultural narrative through which religion is apprehended, and a more up-to-date alternative has failed to emerge as of yet. None of the propositions currently on the table have managed to provide a unifying frame, a new narrative to structure and orient how we understand religion. This evaluation is probably only half-true if one considers that the ‘postmodern’ epistemologies that value fragmentation and hyper-relativism function as a paradoxical yet powerful narrative that unifies on the grounds of the impossibility of unification. This state of affairs certainly plays in favour of the unhindered spread of market ideologies, as it emasculates critical thought, which becomes, if anything, busied with the critique of itself and the abandonment of any general endeavour.

Curiously, the omnipresence of economics-related rationalities and social realities and the prominent part they play in the dynamics of globalisation have been highly neglected by the social scientific study of religion. The transformation of post-industrial capitalism into a financialised and globalised brand of consumer capitalism is all but absent from the bulk of academic discussions that continue to focus on the rapports between politics and religion. This is particularly true of ‘post-secularity’ scholarship, which simply ignores the role of neoliberal ideologies and practices in the establishment of supranational regulative institutions. Similarly, studies of religious practices, rarely if ever, take into account the ways in which today’s cultures and social practices are drenched in consumerism. At best, neoliberalism and consumerism appear as independent factors amongst others, of which the development of electronic modes of communication, in research concerned with the effects of globalisation and transnationalisation on religion. Although critical of secularisation theories, these works remain inscribed within the wider frame of the secularisation paradigm, and privilege a political reading of religious transformations that downplays the social, cultural, political, and religious effects of the dominance of market economics over social life.

This book argues that the recent changes that have affected religion can best be understood against the backdrop of the combined emergence of ‘consumerism’ and ‘neoliberalism.’ According to this approach, consumerism and market ideologies (including neoliberalism, but also governance, finance, marketing, and management) are driving forces behind the processes of globalisation. This proposition does not mean to reduce social realities to economic determinations (as did Marx-inspired materialism), nor does it entail that we understand social realities with economic theory (as does Rational Choice), but rather that we understand the non-economic dimensions and effects of market economics and its correlates in our globalising societies. Ideal-typically, the concept of consumerism allows us to analytically grasp these recent transformations from ‘below,’ i.e. from the ways in which a consumerist cultural and social ethos helps shape social realities at the level of social actors and affects their rapport to religious organisations. The concept of neoliberalism, on the other hand, allows for an analysis in which the institutional and political aspects of these same global trends come to the fore and find a comprehensive explanation. Neoliberalism enables an approach from ‘above,’ in which the transformations at the macro level affect the meso level of religion in its societal environment and institutionalisations.

Such an approach is not new to this volume. It has been explicitly in the making for the last decade in a series of publications, edited volumes, and articles. It is best exemplified by two edited volumes under the title Religion in the Neoliberal Age and Religion Consumer Society.² Yet, it is important to stress that consumerism and neoliberalism must be understood together as participating in a single, complex, and multi-layered phenomenon that drives globalisation. The dynamics that are described in this book are not intended to be understood as a massive and homogenising process (in the singular), but rather as a variegated, localised (‘glocalised’), equivocal, non-linear, and multi-speed set of processes (in the plural) that are context-dependent and contingent. Yet, contrary to the analyses published to date, this book claims that a recognisable, coherent, and systematisable set of logics are operating beneath the surface. The perspective outlined here differs from former interpretations of religious change by insisting on the systematic character of the major global reconfigurations affecting religion by recasting them against the backdrop of the globalisation of economic ideologies and consumer practices, which have gone hand in hand with the development, democratisation, and dissemination of communication technologies, namely digital media. Moreover, the pretention here is that this is a global, and not just a Western, phenomenon. In fact, while the present logics find their origin in Western modernity and its cultural programme, the cases presented in this book tend to show that the West is perhaps no longer the main driver for the ongoing transformations, and even less so for what may lie ahead.

From Nation-State to Global-Market

While the development of consumerism and neoliberalism is usually analysed separately, they can best be understood as forming a complex and multifarious set of processes through which economics have dislodged politics as a structuring and embedding force. These processes traverse the whole fabric of the social, affecting all social spheres, including religion, on the institutional as well as the social and cultural levels. With respect to the aforementioned edited volumes, this book adds a more profound social and historical account of the changes of the last half-century by contrasting them with what existed before. This narrative is therefore an attempt to understand how the ideals of Modernity and the processes of modernisation have shaped religion, and vice versa. Taken together, I argue that this perspective can not only help us better understand recent transformations, but also provide a more comprehensive interpretation of the global religious landscape for the preceding period, which stretches from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, than what secularisation-embedded perspectives have allowed for until now. What follows captures the main thrust of this proposition.

The hypothesis here is that a political-embedded, National-Statist regime has ceded to a Global-Market one in which economics now play a structuring, embedding role. By regime, I mean a macro-level ideal-type of social regulation that allows for comparative analyses and the objectivation of social realities. A regime is a multi-dimensional, relatively stable, and discernible constellation organised around a series of structuring characteristics or principles.³ Regime here has a more extensive signification than ‘political regimes,’ which are meso-level institutionalisations. I prefer to think of regimes here on the macro level, as a set of conditions and structures within which such institutionalisations occur. In linguistic terms, a specific regime would be like the grammar which structures expressions and their syntax. I argue that we can distinguish two such regimes since the nineteenth century. The first of these regimes, which I call the National-Statist regime, emerged around the structuring principles of the State as the natural modern political institution and political form, and the Nation as its community of reference. The State inherited the verticality of the previous Ancien régime,⁴ which was founded on absolute monarchic rule and theological-political principles. The Nation was more or less painfully constructed in the place of former familial, clanic, and hierarchical social bonds which the processes of modernisation progressively broke down. As an encompassing characterisation of modern societies during this period, the National-Statist regime corresponds to a specific formatting and localisation of religion. In a nutshell, religion in the National-Statist regime is characteristically rationalised, institutionalised, scripturalised, dogmatic, belief-centred, differentiated, (mono)theistic, hierarchical, centralised, ideological, homogenised, institutionalised, territorial, and nation-bound. Its corresponding regime of authenticity is grounded in claims of Truth and Rationality, and is pillared on belief and institutional regulation—Weber’s ‘legal-rational’ mode of authority.⁵

Starting roughly in the 1960s in the West, the Global-Market regime emerged from the former National-Statist regime as a result of the radicalisation and accentuation of certain modern cultural logics brought to the fore by the rise of the Market as the main social and societal structuring actor instead and place of the State. What has happened since then has been the progressive embedment of all social spheres within economics, and their reshaping according to the logics of the latter. One of the main effects of the shift from the National-Statist to the Global-Market regime has been the renewed visibility of religion or, more precisely, the transformation of religion into constitutively visible forms. This trend has been widely appreciated, starting with José Casanova’s diagnosis of the ‘de-privatization,’⁶ or re-publicisation of religion. Yet, another coextensive trend has been widely ignored, especially by authors who mobilise an essentially political perspective: That of the blurring and de-differentiation of social spheres.

Modern societies as embedded and integrated wholes

Casanova famously argued that the secularisation paradigm contained three distinct propositions: Religious decline, social differentiation, and privatisation. Of these, only the second, i.e. differentiation, is the ‘defendable core.’⁷ If modernisation can indeed be said to imply the differentiation of social spheres into distinct, institutionalised, and (relatively) autonomous wholes, this process has probably been much exaggerated. Central to some of the most influential sociological theories, such as those of Max Weber, Talcott Parson, Niklas Luhmann, and Immanuel Wallerstein, differentiation has been taken for granted more than it has been an object of enquiry.

One effect of the secularisation paradigm and its assumptions about the differentiation process has been the validation of the idea that modern societies can no longer be thought of as integrated wholes. This is the essence of Max Weber’s “polytheistic” conception of modern, disenchanted societies. Differentiation is also foundational to Parsons and Luhmann’s functional systems theory, which are, in many respects, Weberian interpretations of Durkheim. Yet, there is another interpretation of Durkheim which is truer to his work in my opinion. Such a reading is best exemplified by Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew, who only diverged from his uncle on a limited yet important set of elements.⁸ The fact that human societies—all human societies, including modern ones—can be thought of as integrated wholes is not one of them. Scholars, especially in the English world, have tended to blur the evolution of Durkheim’s thought, from his emphasis on the division of labour and social differentiation in his earlier work to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life⁹ and its emphasis on social integration. Nothing illustrates this better than Mauss’ own concepts of ‘the gift’ and ‘total social fact.’¹⁰ With both of these, Mauss aimed to draw attention to the ways in which the different dimensions of social facts, for instance political, economic, cultural, aesthetic, judicial, religious, and so on, are traversed by common logics which, once grasped, allow to seize a given society in its totality.¹¹

Social sciences of religion have been massively Weberian in their preference for a differentiation-grounded approach and a substantive definition of religion. In the face of recent changes, I believe that there is much to gain by adopting a Durkheimian (and Maussian) perspective. Here, I propose to cross a Durkheimian approach with Karl Polanyi’s idea of the embedment of social spher...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: acknowledging a global shift
• Part 1 Analytical framework
• Part 2 First analyses
• Bibliography
• Index