Religious groups — from new Eastern groups to evangelicals — are going global, retooling their programs, even their language to reach the world community, but the move is also generating some conflict.
Those are just some of the conclusions on the relation of globalization and religion in the current issue of the quarterly Hedgehog Review (Summer). Globalization has become a catchword for several different trends and phenomenon, but in articles by sociologists Peter Berger and Jose Casanova (in an interview), the process is seen as bringing religion and all other human activities into one “world system.”
Some religions will be better able to adapt to this system than others: For example, Casanova asserts that both Catholicism, because of its international (increasingly Third World) membership and resources, and Pentecostalism, with its ability to foster international networks while remaining indigenous, are the likely to be the leading global faiths. In fact, the evangelicals, including the Pentecostals, closely resemble secular corporations and other groups in the vanguard of the new global culture, writes Joshua Yates.
The author examines the global outreach programs of such large international ministries as Focus on the Family, World Vision and Campus Crusade for Christ. He finds that they are generally “no less enthusiastic about the prospects for their faith under the conditions of globalization than [are] the captains of international finance and business…about the prospects for economic growth under the same conditions.” Most stress the capabilities of technology in their missions and have borrowed the vocabularies of the market, social sciences (especially in the need to quantify and substantiate their claims with research), human rights (they speak of the “universal human right of all people to hear the gospel”) and multiculturalism.
There is also a growing trend of evangelicals exporting the “culture wars” to foreign countries, trying to influence these societies on issues of abortion, the family and sexuality. Also active in this field are Western groups, such as Planned Parenthood attempting to foster liberal change overseas. Yates writes that a “race to win-over key decision makers is seen most clearly as opposing groups attempt to gain access to the public schools in other societies” (for instance, Focus On the Family has been very successful in getting their abstinence-based “Sex, Lies, and the Truth” curriculum in Guatemala’s Public Schools).
Meanwhile, an article on the Sai Baba movement suggests that a religion’s move to globalize its may not always please its own members. Tulas Srinivas writes that the movement, which is based around worship of the 76-year-old Indian guru and miracle worker Sai Baba, has spread all over the world with over a half a million devotees. As it has grown, the movement has increasingly taken on Western clothing. Recently, the Sai organization is attempting to “emulate the global corporate model” in the need to formalize their organizational structure.
The movement consists of “cells” representing four geographic zones covering the globe. Information and resources are controlled through the Sai movement in India. Members complain that things are more complex now; today Sai Baba performs fewer miracles, as many of his middle-class devotees are suspicious of such wonders. Most devotees prefer the older model, and persist in pressing for a more personal, disorganized approach. Cherished personal interviews with Sai Baba are still organized through personalized routes.
But there will be a major obstacle as religions, particularly Christianity, go global– the growing polarization between the conservative Christian South and the liberal Christian North. In Atlantic Monthly magazine (October), Phillip Jenkins discusses his thesis (found in his book The Next Christendom) that the gap between northern and southern world churches will concern clashing theologies and moralities. It will do no good for Northern churches to attempt to export their teachings on interfaith tolerance and other practices to the South (a problem for global faiths such as Catholicism and Anglicanism), since this part of the world is rapidly developing its own indigenous religious groups marked by an intense supernaturalism (often stressing healing and exorcism), a “Puritan” lifestyle, and a confrontational style with non-Christian faiths (particularly Islam).
Southern exports will also find a not very eager following in the North, except among very conservative groups. Added to the division is that the Southern churches are still stress the importance of the text and maintain older ideas of community and traditional authority while the technological North is moving toward “decentralized and privatized forms of faith.”