Religion in the Neoliberal Age

Political Economy and Modes of Governance

François Gauthier, Tuomas Martikainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138274921
• eBook ISBN: 9781317067474
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book, together with a complementary volume 'Religion in Consumer Society', focuses on religion, neoliberalism and consumer society; offering an overview of an emerging field of research in the study of contemporary religion. Claiming that we are entering a new phase of state-religion relations, the editors examine how this is historically anchored in modernity but affected by neoliberalization and globalization of society and social life. Seemingly distant developments, such as marketization and commoditization of religion as well as legalization and securitization of social conflicts, are transforming historical expressions of 'religion' and 'religiosity' yet these changes are seldom if ever understood as forming a coherent, structured and systemic ensemble. 'Religion in the Neoliberal Age' includes an extensive introduction framing the research area, and linking it to existing scholarship, before looking at four key issues: 1. How changes in state structures have empowered new modes of religious activity in welfare production and the delivery of a range of state services; 2. How are religion-state relations transforming under the pressures of globalization and neoliberalism; 3. How historical churches and their administrations are undergoing change due to structural changes in society, and what new forms of religious body are emerging; 4. How have law and security become new areas for solving religious conflicts. Outlining changes in both the political-institutional and cultural spheres, the contributors offer an international overview of developments in different countries and state of the art representation of religion in the new global political economy.

PART I
Religions in the New Political Economy

This section considers relations between religion and the new cultural political economy. What opportunities and constraints does it provide? How have both new and old religious organizations responded and made use of these new opportunities? The chapters explore a variety of ways in which beliefs, practices, theologies, symbols and rituals function within it.

Joanildo A. Burity’s chapter looks at two different cases in South America, a continent that has undergone significant neoliberal reforms. He considers how neo-Pentecostal spirituality embodies ‘neoliberal ideas and values of entrepreneurialism, self-assertiveness and transactional spirituality’, and how ecumenical organizations and networks act as mobilizers in the anti-globalization movement. Both operate with a local/global nexus of neoliberal ideology, including the neo-Pentecostals’ promise of ‘God’s superabundant wealth’, which stands in contrast to ecumenical efforts to undermine the current political economy.

James V. Spickard continues Burity’s exploration of the religious critique of neoliberalism by looking at resurgent religion in the context of the simultaneous growth of neoliberal ideologies among both Western intellectuals and comparable elites in the global South. He points to the liberal churches’ ability to disentangle neoliberal ideology, while simultaneously being marginalized in public debate.

Jens Schlamelcher looks at processes of transformation within the German Evangelical Church in the age of neoliberalism. The Church is both a moral agent critiquing the marketization of society, but is also itself in a financial crisis caused by shrinking membership. The connection between the Church and its members is becoming increasingly distanced, to such an extent that the latter are increasingly seen as ‘customers’. Through ‘city-churches’, the Church tries to reach out to its ‘clientele again’ by presenting novel types of religious spaces, which, according to Schlamelcher, ‘de-Christianizes’ these spaces in the process. The consumerist city-churches remain ‘a social form without any obligations, which makes no demands with respect to religious affiliation or on individual ethical conduct’.

Breda Gray’s chapter offers a powerful and synthetic post-Foucaudian analysis of governmentality. Gray analyses the shifting role of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland with specific reference to the governmental project of immigrant integration. She unveils the neoliberal mode of governing ‘at a distance’ whilst enrolling individuals in new forms of regulation. The ‘risks’ of social exclusion are outsourced to civil society, where the scandal-ridden Catholic Church is attempting to claim new legitimacy. But religious and faith-based organizations become increasingly embedded in an ‘audit culture’ and, in the process, become instrumentalized by the state.

Jason Hackworth analyses the links between neoliberalism and the privatization of welfare in the United States. He considers how certain evangelical Christian theologians began to re-evaluate their views on welfare to make alliance with the neoliberal right – an uneasy alliance from which the Religious Right has nevertheless benefited. Hackworth analyses faith-based organizations and their many manifestations, providing a fourfold typology: FBOs as extensions of the welfare system, FBOs as enhancements of welfare, FBOs as catalysts for change and FBOs as alternatives to the state.

Chapter 1
Entrepreneurial Spirituality and Ecumenical Alterglobalism: Two Religious Responses to Global Neoliberalism

Joanildo A. Burity

The relationship between religion and neoliberalism is far from unidirectional. As the latter spread globally, it produced impacts on, but also responses from, religious identities and organizations. In the process it has become clear that a one sided ‘impact’ theory is insufficient to render intelligible the relational, a(nta)gonistic settings in which new forms of spirituality and religious organization have emerged, changed and proactively faced the challenges posed by recent transformations of the social bond and the public sphere. The need for a contextual analysis is not required, in a situation such as this, just for the sake of ‘richer’ and more nuanced pictures of the situation. Rather, it is only through the actual entanglements and intimations of global/local dynamics that one can properly capture the complex configuration of the relationship of religion and neoliberalism in globalizing times.

Given the hegemonic nature of neoliberal ideology, which has crystallized in various ways in terms of economic, political and cultural practices/policies wherever it has spread, while not relying on any single or centralized source of dissemination or control but supported by powerful actors, the link between religion and neoliberalism goes beyond consumerism. It is clearly more than a question of how market and managerial practices have infused the logic of religious organization and personal spirituality. As the grip of neoliberal ideas, motifs and propositions morphed into a governmentality of entrepreneurship, competition, deregulation, privatization of public services and stimulus to public-private partnerships driven by efficiency and competition, networked governance, risk-taking and consumerism, hegemony becomes a key explanatory factor. As such, it spans across very different dimensions of the social, is sanctioned by and through state policies and various forms of media and educational discourses and reaches or relates to different social logics,1 including religious ones.

Neoliberalism has also acquired a certain historical trajectory which calls for attention to time and space. The initial ‘dogmatic’ and ‘destructive’ phase bent on antagonizing statist discourses was followed by other configurations in many places, depending on the degree of opposition faced by neoliberals or on how (un)successful neoliberal-inspired policies were.2 There is, in this context, much to be learned by attending to the deployments of such entanglements and intimations in peripheral and emergent regions of global capitalism. The criss-crossing and disseminative nature of asymmetric social, economic and political exchanges in the current juncture encounters place and context in ways that both evince (counter)claims from the underside of global processes aimed at the ‘centre stages’ of world politics and bring those dynamics ‘home’ to advanced capitalist societies. This comes about through the impact of migration on domestic attitudes to national identity and otherness; resonances of perceived (sometimes relentlessly fabricated) global threats; global financial crises; outbreaks of conflicts and acts of violence reverberating from ‘outside’ national boundaries or the margins of society; expressions of global solidarity and the impact of transnational networking or social activism; implementation of decisions and policies agreed at the level of existing structures of global governance under pressure from emerging societies; or changes in international law.

Those claims can take various forms and shapes and generally name distinct patterns of emergence of new global actors, such as states, civil groups/movements and religions. To name only a few: demands for global justice coming from social and religious movements; religious ‘reverse missions’ from the periphery; intellectual critiques of colonial complicities in knowledge production by Global North academics; or political demands for participation in the institutions of global governance.

The following analysis will examine the proactive way in which religious positions relate to neoliberalism and its economic and political expressions. I will stress the comprehensive, but decentred, multilayered and contested nature of global neoliberal hegemony, and the importance for Northern contexts of developments taking place in the South.

Two particular Christian discursive formations stand out in the spaces where religion meets neoliberalism; a) Pentecostalism and b) ecumenical organizations and networks acting as mobilizers in the alterglobalist movement. Both discourses operate within a local/global nexus, as their articulatory character involves a non-territorial focus based on their understandings of mission and religious mobilization, but is also firmly rooted in territorial experiences of community and individualization. Pentecostalism and religious alterglobalism also operate according to logics which seek to extend their reach and grasp over large spatio-temporal domains through equivalential or differentialist practices, thus relating to wider clusters of social relations and hegemonic practices by activating (agonistic) aggregative or particularistic strategies and by engaging other social forces, religious or not.

Through equivalential practices Pentecostals and alterglobalists ‘translate’ different religious, social, economic or political demands or identities into a particular discourse of spirituality which is presented as capable of addressing personal and collective crises; and they offer material provision and subjective recomposition/reassurance in situations of uncertainty, risk and dislocation. Religious discourse thereby seeks to articulate a variety of social demands, organizing and mobilizing them under a new principle, and disputing existing hegemonic discourses. In contrast, through differentialist expansion those discourses stress the specificity of their identities or their nonconformity with an existing state of affairs. Differentialist discourses claim access to representation and recognition, thus challenging ‘invisibility’, ‘marginalization’ and ‘discrimination’.3

Neoliberalization and Religion: Complicating the Narrative

The last few decades witnessed unforeseen and unstable relations between neoliberalism and religious movements. They were unforeseen to the extent that new (religious) actors came to the fore in several parts of the world who had long been minoritized and/or confined to their national bounds. This negative minoritization which involves the activation of asymmetric attempts to reduce some identities, groups and discourses to a marginal position, to refuse them access to the public sphere, also produces a positive counterpart as some of those agents strive to shape a pluralistic public sphere where difference and equality are simultaneously asserted. The emergence and spread of minority groups/discourses and attempts to subordinate these to a ‘minor status’ are important aspects of the picture, highlighting another way of grasping the scalar nature of social agency in a globalized world. According to Connolly,4 drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, minoritization is a process whereby ‘numerous constituencies of multiple types cross old borders and enter into relations with a “majority” culture that often makes up an actual minority of the populace’.5 He links the intensification of this process to the prevalence of global capital, though he rejects claims that the latter on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Religion in Market Society
• Part I Religions In The New Political Economy
• 1 Entrepreneurial Spirituality and Ecumenical Alterglobalism: Two Religious Responses to Global Neoliberalism
• 2 Making Religion Irrelevant: The ‘Resurgent Religion' Narrative and the Critique of Neoliberalism
• 3 The Decline of the Parishes and the Rise of City Churches: The German Evangelical Church in the Age of Neoliberalism
• 4 Catholic Church Civil Society Activism and the Neoliberal Governmental Project of Migrant Integration in Ireland
• 5 Faith, Welfare and the Formation of the Modern American Right
• Part Ii Political Governance Of Religion
• 6 Neoliberalism and the Privatization of Welfare and Religious Organizations in the United States of America
• 7 Multilevel and Pluricentric Network Governance of Religion
• 8 Regulating Religion in a Neoliberal Context: The Transformation of Estonia
• 9 Neoliberalism and Counterterrorism Laws: Impact on Australian Muslim Community Organizations
• 10 From Implicitly Christian to Neoliberal: The Moral Foundations of Canadian Law Exposed by the Case of Prostitution
• 11 Religious Freedom and Neoliberalism: From Harm to Cost-benefit
• Bibliography
• Index