Long before the current phase of globalization, religious communities globalized. From northern India, adherents inspired by the Buddha carried his vision of spiritual enlightenment and personal discipline to many parts of Asia, ultimately linking millions of people, from Japan to Afghanistan. Later, followers of Jesus Christ instructed by St Paul carried the Christian gospel of salvation from West Asia to North Africa as well as parts of Europe. Relative latecomers among the world religions, followers of the Prophet Muhammad globalized Islam perhaps even more dramatically in a short period, spreading the Koran and its teachings from the Arabian heartland as far east as what is now Indonesia and as far west as Spain. Each religion had its own kind of mobile messenger, each its own universal message, and each its own impulse to include new adherents. Each created a translocal community among physically distant strangers who nevertheless shared a common identity. To varying degrees and in varied forms, each community also organized its adherents, with the Roman Catholic Church standing out as perhaps the oldest and strongest of the religiously specialized organizations deliberately focused on a global mission. In religion, globalization is nothing new.
Of course, religious globalization did not stop in antiquity. Islam continued to make inroads in southern Europe into the 1600s. Allied with European powers, the Catholic Church spread its influence in the Americas. With less political backing, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), itself a transnational religious order, made a classic though ultimately futile attempt to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Upstart Protestant sects followed suit, first moving to North America in search of refuge, later venturing to other continents in ambitious missionary campaigns, planting churches on all continents. Driven less by religious than by worldly motives, recent migration by Hindus and Muslims has created diasporas in Europe and North America, further “deterritorializing” the great religions of old. To some extent, the world religious map still displays the legacy of premodern globalization, and the resilience of that legacy hampers globalization to some extent by the barriers it creates – Christian church planting is prohibited in Saudi Arabia, and Muslim conversion is uncommon in Latin America. But the results of missionary activity and more mundane migration have also complicated that map, as numerous global communities of faith span the continents – we find Buddhists in California, Pentecostals in Papua New Guinea, and Alevi Muslims in Germany. Again, this is not entirely new, but it is fair to say that religious connections have expanded and intensified along with many other types of interconnection. In the twenty‐first century, religious globalization is going strong.
This form of globalization matters first and foremost as a global fact in its own right: faith connects billions of people to distant others. Their vision of another world shapes their view of this one. In relation to the world around them, many identify themselves above all as adherents. The religiosity of a majority of the world’s people is a dominant feature of world culture. The religions that bind them together have themselves evolved along with the world society of which they are a part, and scholars like Peter Beyer, in his book Religions in Global Society, detect a standardizing trend among them, constituting a small set of comparable religious “options.” At the same time, the globalization of religions, today perhaps even more than in the past, allows for considerable experimentation: the Americanized version of Hinduism common in the Atlanta suburbs is not quite like that practiced across India, and the fervent Charismatic Renewal that has swept through many Christian churches takes all sorts of “indigenized” forms. In religion, as in other parts of the global cultural economy described by Appadurai in the essay excerpted in the “Explaining Globalization” section, homogenizing trends run into “heterogenizing” ones, creating a varied religious landscape in which many individuals can compose their own mixed identities.
Religious faith, identity, and practice also matter because of the way they intertwine with the affairs of the world. Religious communities command resources and put them to use, for example when American evangelical churches fund social services abroad. Many seek, support, or rely on state power, involving adherents in everyday political and social struggles, most obviously in places like Iran, where an “Islamic Republic” is guided by a cleric as “supreme leader” and maintains close ties with a clerical establishment. By virtue of their specific principles, communities and their spokespersons also address issues of wide public concern, entering areas of moral controversy; opposition to homosexuality among many conservative Christians in the global South is a case in point. Precisely how this plays out varies from community to community and from place to place, of course. But understanding globalization at least requires some grasp of this religious involvement in world society.
The items in this section illustrate a few aspects of that religious involvement, focusing on Islam, evangelical Protestantism, and the Catholic Church. They have some themes in common. For one thing, from their different vantage points, religious actors often adopt a critical view of at least some aspects of the worldly globalization they observe. Though sometimes perceived as marginal in more secularized Western societies, they also attempt, with varying success, to articulate their own vision and exert some influence on a number of issues. In doing so, even actors that rely on a very old tradition, including those trying militantly to restore its greatness, tend to be nimble globalizers, navigating the various channels of communication offered by world society. Sacred texts may be ancient, and ritual practices old, but key players in world religion are often quite up to date.
This point applies to some Muslim groups once called “fundamentalist,” now often labeled “Islamist,” that aim to restore the rule of Islamic law in an Islamic state. They seek to unify the whole Islamic community and perhaps even transform the world of the unbelievers, the more radical among them advocating violence as a proper means of struggle. To some extent, this brings longstanding intra‐Islamic disputes to the global fore, pitting a minority of militants against a moderate majority. But, as American sociologist Charles Kurzman shows, even seemingly “anti‐modern” Muslims, such as Osama bin Laden, are in fact “thoroughly modern.” By contrast with the traditionalist Taliban in Afghanistan, many Islamists attended secular schools, employ modern communications, and do not intend to eliminate the modern state. Kurzman notes that Islamists cannot count on widespread public support but may seek to benefit from the war on terrorism provoked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States. Olivier Roy, a French political scientist, complements this diagnosis by noting a change among Islamists: in Muslim countries, they increasingly turn to normal politics, while a more radical, rootless wing pursues global jihad through a loose network of militants. In response to globalization, which disconnects religion from territory, they try to formulate a model of Islam that could work beyond any culture, paradoxically fostering a kind of secularization in the process.
Regarding Christianity, Philip Jenkins, a Welsh‐American historian, argues that the early twenty‐first century is “one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide.” As he puts it, “the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.” By comparison with their fellow believers in the West, Christians of the global South are poorer, more conservative, strongly supernatural in their thinking, and focused on personal salvation. They therefore change the content and complexion of Christianity, which, if they unite, will have global implications. Joshua J. Yates reinforces Jenkins’s points by describing the success of evangelical Protestants even in societies traditionally uncongenial to Christianity, turning this emotional brand of Protestantism into a “thoroughly indigenized global phenomenon.” Though seemingly out of sync with some contemporary mores, under the influence of American proselytizers evangelical or charismatic Christians are also at home in the market economy and attuned to the language of multiculturalism, thus unintentionally preaching the “gospel of modernity.”
Frank J. Lechner further illustrates newly vital Catholic involvement in global affairs by showing how, along with other religious groups, the church became deeply involved in the Jubilee movement to reduce the onerous debts of Third World countries and, through the voice of celebrity Pope John Paul II, expressed a nuanced yet critical perspective on secular globalization, arguing ultimately for a “globalization of solidarity.” This tendency of the Catholic Church is growing even stronger under Pope Francis, elected in 2013 as the first Latin American pope, who chose his papal name to emphasize his commitment to social justice and concern for poor people of all faiths.
In the last selection, Brooke Schedneck invokes some of Appadurai’s ideas to show how originally Asian religious practices like yoga and meditation become “decontextualized” from their respective traditions and “flow” to other regions to serve psychological and therapeutic purposes. Non‐Asian adopters tend to focus on care of the self rather than religious devotion, showing yet another way in which cultural globalization produces hybrid results. As such practices “travel,” involving new forms of communication between Asian leaders and a wider international community, they are “reimagined.”