Religions in Movement

The Local and the Global in Contemporary Faith Traditions

Robert Hefner, John Hutchinson, Sara Mels, Christiane Timmerman, Robert W Hefner, John Hutchinson, Sara Mels, Christiane Timmerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136681073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión comparada

There has long been a debate about implications of globalization for the survival of the world of sovereign nation-states, and the role of nationalism as both an agent of and a response to globalization. In contrast, until recently there has been much less debate about the fate of religion. 'Globalization' has been viewed as part of the rationalization process, which has already relegated religion to the dustbin of history, just as it threatens the nation, as the world moves toward a cosmopolitan ethics and politics. The chapters in this book, however, make the case for the salience and resilience of religion, often in conjunction with nationalism, in the contemporary world in several ways.

This book highlights the diverse ways in which religions first and foremost make use of the traditional power and communication channels available to them, like strategies of conversion, the preservation of traditional value systems, and the intertwining of religious and political power. Nevertheless, challenged by a more culturally and religiously diversified societies and by the growth of new religious sects, contemporary religions are also forced to let go of these well known strategies of preservation and formulate new ways of establishing their position in local contexts. This collection of essays by established and emerging scholars brings together theory-driven and empirically-based research and case-studies about the global and bottom-up strategies of religions and religious traditions in Europe and beyond to rethink their positions in their local communities and in the world.

Part I

Global Perspectives on Religion, Nationalism and Politics

1

Introduction

Global Perspectives on Religion, Nationalism and Politics

John Hutchinson

Many scholars of globalisation consider that revolutions in technology and communications have ushered in a new period of human history (Albrow 1996; Castells 1996; Giddens 1990). Such is the scale, speed and intensity of interactions that the world’s populations are being united into a single time and space, giving rise to a global consciousness as they face common problems that require planetary-wide solutions, such as nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, long-distance economic migrations and refugee flows, and climate change. Scholars may disagree about when this new era emerged, but there is rough agreement about its distinctive institutions: a global liberal economy, world political and legal organisations such as the United Nations (UN), a global civil society of transnational nongovernmental agencies putting forward a human rights agenda, diaspora communities as economic and ideological actors, a world language (English) and transnational media organisations promoting a universal popular culture.

There has been a vigorous debate about the implications of globalisation for the survival of the world of sovereign nation-states, and the role of nationalism as both an agent of and a response to globalisation (Halikiopoulou & Vasilopoulou 2011). There is broad agreement that there is a general weakening of the relationship between nation and the territorial state; that to attain national objects, political elites now have to operate increasingly at the transnational level; that national minorities use democratic norms to achieve greater autonomy; and that mass migration has made nations into plural communities, some of which maintain diasporic identifications with homelands outside their host state (Guibernau 2001).

In contrast, until recently, there has been much less debate about the fate of religion. ‘Globalisation’ has been viewed through Enlightenment spectacles as part of the rationalisation process that has already relegated religion to the dustbin of history, just as it threatens the nation-state and as we move to a more cosmopolitan ethics and politics.

The following chapters, however, make the case for the salience and resilience of religion, often in conjunction with nationalism, in the contemporary world in several ways. First, religions can be viewed not just as reacting to globalisation, but as active agents in its making, in global fora, and in their use of new forms of economic and communication systems to advance the diffusion of religious ideas. The contributions by Jeffrey Haynes—‘Islam, Politics and Globalisation: What Are the Issues and Outcomes?’ and Jeremy Carrette—‘The Paradox of Globalisation: Quakers, Religious NGOs and the United Nations’ examine the interaction of religious communities and organisations with global processes and institutions, assessing how far they offer coherent responses to continuously changing environments.

Second, a dominant assumption is that the rise of the modern state results in a privatisation of religion, whereas we now witness the re-infusion of religion into the public sphere in many regions, including Europe. This is explored with reference to Eastern Orthodox Churches, by Inna Naletova— ‘European Secularity and Religious Modernity in Russia and Eastern Europe: Focus on Orthodox Christianity’, and Suna Gülfer Ihlamur-Öner—‘The Orthodox Tradition in a Globalising World: The Case of the Romanian Orthodox Church’.

Third, global religious networks have contributed to the crystallisation and politicisation of ethno-religious minorities, which elites in nation-states can find a security threat. Maja Veselič in ‘Good Muslims, Good Chinese: State Modernisation Policies, Globalisation of Religious Networks and the Changing Hui Ethno-Religious Identifications’ explores a case where, by contrast, a minority combines a loyalty to Islamic values as well as the Chinese nation-state, and the state encourages the religious networks of the Hui to advance its own developmental goals. On the other hand, an ethnic revivalism can also lead to fissures in migrant populations largely defined by transnational religious attachments that are reinforced by the secular, assimilationist pressures of contemporary European states. This is explored by Norah Karrouche in ‘Where National Histories and Colonial Myths Meet: ‘Histoire Croisée’ and Memory of the Moroccan-Berber Cultural Movement in the Netherlands’ in examining the case of the Moroccan Berber population in the Netherlands.

Fourth, religious beliefs, symbols and practices in their transnational reach can provide a powerful new repertoire for insurgent popular movements against ‘alien’ states. Francesco Marone addresses this in ‘Self-Sacrifice and Martyrdom in Terrorist Violence: Political and Religious Motives’.

In these chapters, we see ‘religion’ entwined with ‘globalisation’ in many different ways, in considering things such as the likelihood of religiocivilisational political blocs, the capacity of religious actors to affect ‘global governance’, the impact of a world of religious pluralism, the relationship of specific religions to contemporary modernity, the role of ethno-religious networks in world trade, long-range migration patterns and new community formation, and the transmission of innovative repertoires of political violence.

Religions as Global Actors

Religious political activism has often been presented as a reactionary response (captured in the term ‘fundamentalism’) of backward regions to the acceleration of globalisation after the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). One of the canonical analyses in this mode was Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations (1997), which warned of a likely backlash against the imposition of a unipolar Western concept of the world after the Soviet collapse that would take the form of oppositional cultural blocs, in many cases defined by religion. Many outside the West have taken Huntington’s claims to heart in viewing ‘globalisation’ as a form of covert Western neo-imperialism (Juergensmeyer 2008). Nonetheless, the chapter by Jeffrey Haynes makes clear that to understand contemporary religious activism in this way is misleading on at least three grounds.

First of all, Haynes observes correctly that globalisation is not just a contemporary phenomenon but has a long historical lineage, takes many different forms, is episodic, and that religious actors have used it to their advantage. Although global processes can be perceived by some traditionalists as neo-imperialist in promoting Western principles and institutions, the great religions have also exploited opportunities to use improvements in communications, wealth, educational provision and diaspora networks to diffuse their messages to believers (Bayly 2002, 2004). Such religious engagement, then, often seeks to reconstruct the world on its own terms. While this can be interpreted as a reaction to earlier (Western-imperial) global encroachments, it is, however, more intelligible to perceive the relationship between religions and global processes as dynamic and interactive.

Second, the current wave of activism long predates the Cold War. Haynes offers a useful periodisation of the various phases of Islamic engagement with ‘modernity’. This, of course, raises the question of whether we can speak of contemporary religious politics as a ‘resurgence’ or whether we are witnessing a shift in how religious understandings of the world and institutional practices can be applied to current problems. Certainly, we can argue that religious forces have been midwives of epochal global change: in conjunction with major geopolitical actors, such as a revitalised United States, they have played a significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union that has enabled the triumph of Western neoliberalism. Jeffrey Haynes notes the importance of the election of a Polish pope in 1978 that emboldened a political as well as spiritual resistance to Soviet rule well beyond Catholic Poland and Lithuania. Another factor was the defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan by the Mujahidin assisted by the United States. Mujahidin resistance drew crucial support from surrounding Muslim states and from recruits from across the Muslim world. Many of these had been radicalised by the Shi’ite Iranian revolution of 1979, itself of global significance in establishing a state based on Islamic principles that in the process had humiliated the United States. These two events in Iran and Afghanistan became an inspiration for disaffected Muslims, Sunni and as well as Shi’a, throughout the Middle East and Asia, fretting at the long subservience of their societies to Western and Soviet power. They appeared to offer an alternative model of development as well as restoring Muslim pride. Today, competing conceptions of the global, secular and religious are at play.

Third, as Haynes remarks of Islam, it is simplistic to view religions in their vision of the world as in outright hostility to modernisation. Although there are strong neotraditionalist tendencies, notably in Iran and Saudi Arabia, there are also reformist and modernist groups that do not regard Islam as antagonistic to liberalism or democracy. It is too early to say what the fruits of the Arab spring will be, but in Indonesia, religious parties have been prominent in the establishment after Suharto of democratic institutions. To explain outcomes, we must also look at a range of other variables, including the degree to which political systems are hierarchical, the strength or otherwise of civil societies and so forth. One can make similar points about other religions, which take diverse stances often linked to the social origins of their personnel. Although much of the Catholic hierarchy, recruited from upper social strata, collaborated with militarist dictatorships in Argentine and Peru, sections of the lower clergy (generally closer to the peasantry) were attracted to a Marxian liberation theology, which gave legitimacy to the Nicaraguan revolution. In the Philippines, the Catholic Church was central to the overthrow of the Marcos regime and the establishment of democracy.

Why are religious belief systems so socially and politically resonant in many parts of the world? A few generations ago, the intellectuals of non-Western countries were drawn instead to secular nationalist ideologies, often informed by socialism, because religion seemed to offer no capacity to resist European imperialism. As Haynes suggests, part of the answer lies in the failures of the soi-disant nation-states after independence to realise the dreams of liberating their populations from poverty and dependence. Their state capacities were too weak to regulate global economic, cultural and military processes where the rules of the game continued to be made by Western powers. This is, of course, only part of the answer as it may suggest reductively that religion is simply a vehicle of an oppositional politics, whereas, as the following chapters reveal, it also offers an alternative moral vision of how political life should be ordered, defining the role of families, gender relations, and social justice.

Jeremy Carrette’s chapter examines the United Nations as one of those institutions responsible for ‘global governance’ and investigates the extent to which religious actors can make a difference. He defines global governance as a myriad of global, regional and transnational systems of authoritative rule making and implementation that is intrinsically coupled with (contemporary) globalisation. He is pessimistic about the prospects for such actors. As he states, the United Nations, particularly the UN Secretariat, attempts to work to a universalist agenda, but as an organisation of 192 member states, it is constrained by an internationalist framework, in which strong (nation-) states offering formal adherence to agreed rules are dominant. Faced with these constraints, successive Secretary-Generals have looked for support to NGOs, as embodiments of an emerging global civil society, to advance the causes of peace and development. Religious organisations such as the Quakers have (like the Holy See and the Bahá’ís) been influential through their knowledge of UN procedures and their commitment to long-term goals in many policy areas, and, working outside the state framework, have been valued neutral mediators in conflict-torn situations. He examines in some detail the record of the Quakers in their support of antidiscrimination campaigns, arms reduction and the rights of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to contribute to international affairs.

However, in contributing to the proliferation of non-state actors and while participating in the UN, the Quakers get caught up in what he calls ‘the paradox of globalisation’. A key aspect of global governance is that there is no single system but rather a mass of interacting networks and institutions. As the processes of global governance have become ever more complex with the expansion of the numbers of non-state, regional and transnational actors of all kinds, the UN itself is now a site of many and competing systems (including the Security Council, the General Assembly, the UN Secretariat) at the centre, as well as a diverse set of practices, operations and structures at country and regional levels. He argues there is a danger of dilution and absorption as religious organisations seek to participate in a bewilderingly complex global geography. If the number of religious NGOs has increased, so too secular equivalents have multiplied. From one perspective, this might be seen as a widening of democratic voices at the transnational level. In reality, state interests in UN fora dominate and inequalities of power remain: in contrast to the case of the Quakers, new religious NGOs from the ‘two-thirds world’ find it increasingly difficult to gain access to power because of a lack of knowledge of processes and resources. Moreover, NGOs, as mostly single-interest causes, fail to exercise an overview of an enormously complicated policy-making environment. Not least, as unelected bodies, their claims to represent global democratic agenda are problematic. They represent a form of ‘courtier politics’ parasitic on the ready-made agenda of international institutions.

The Re-Infusion of Religion into the Public Sphere

Some Islamists may envision a millenarian overthrow of the system of nation-states, but most radicals have worked towards a religious transformation of their existing state. The animus of the Hindutva in India, religious Zionists in Israel, and Hamas in Gaza is directed against the enemies within—secularists who have imposed an alien Western ideology on the people and religious minorities. Where their targets are external, they are primarily threatening neighbours. These struggles may actually re-enforce identification with a national territorial state (unless the radicals belong to a religious minority). Nonetheless, they highlight the fragility of secularism when it is unable to deliver development, justice and security, as well as the embedded character of religion in the life of populations outside the West.

To this story of the religious ‘re-enchantment’ of public life, Europe has been characterised as the great exception, notably in enforcing a separation of church and state. Adopting a ‘multiple modernities’ perspective, Inna Naletova argues this is not so, at least in Eastern and Central Europe where, after the fall of Communism, a nonsecular vision is being advanced by means of the creative insertion of religious symbols and practices into public life. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence, she maintains this is particularly visible in the Orthodox countries of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Moldova and, to a lesser extent, in Catholic countries such as Poland. This is not explicable as a conservative resistance to a western secularist individualism to which these populations are newly exposed. Instead, she suggests Orthodox populations as much as clergy are engaged in a determined and innovative effort to redefine their societies, at local, national and global level after the Communist ‘hiatus’. We are speaking then of a popular rather than an elite-led process in which a spirituality is taking place outside a formal church setting, taking the form of religious practices and insertions in the workplace, leisure pursuits, schools and the market place. Orthodox churches are responding to the expectations of their populations, who exhibit an optimism about the future of religion, supporting the Church’s initiatives across a broad spectrum of public life, in education, health, justice and the media. Religious icons stand in the public sphere next to symbols of (nation-) state, thereby redefining a sense of political belonging.

Naletova offers plausible explanations for the popular vitality of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy played a historic role as definer of national identity so that religious affiliation is not just a matter of individual choice. Whereas modernisation in Western Europe was linked with individual freedom and pluralism, in Eastern Europe it was imposed by an atheist Communist dictatorship so that the allegiances to Orthodoxy (expressed, for example, in icon worship) were bound up with the defence of the traditional nation. Finally, the concept of ‘symphonia’ historically justifies an alliance of Church and State, which aft...