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Religion and Globalization Thomas J. Csordas, UCSD

The rhetorical force of religious moods and motivations in contemporary society

and individual experience may be as compelling today as at any period in history. The

sleeping giant of religion, whose perpetual dream is our collective dream as a species, has

never died, and is now in the process of at least rolling over and at most leaping to its

feet. In the first half of the twentieth century the thoughtful appreciation of religion was

still perhaps best summarized in Freud's (1957/1928) phrase "the future of an illusion,"

anticipating that enlightened rationalism and sober secularism would render religion

obsolete. By the second half of the century, the secen of the horizon was already much

better captured by Peter Berger's (1969) phrase "a rumor of angels," anticipating a

resurgence of religious sensibility and a revitalized appeal of the transcendent. Yet

despite an upsurge of discussion within the human sciences in the past decade, the role of

religion remains understudied and undertheorized as an element in debates about

globalization and world systems (cf. Robertson and Chirico 1985, Beyer 1994).

In a book published this spring that I edited (Csordas 2009), contributors take up

this problem, and my presentation is in a sense a preview of some of the issues raised

therein. In framing the discussion, I want to emphasize the importance of taking into

account the differences among three ideas: that of “religion and globalization,” that of the

“globalization of religion,” and that of “globalization as religion.” The first phrase refers

to the relation of religion and globalization as two separate analytic domains, with the

sense of globalization being the dominant one of economic globalization. This is a

globalization the institutional locus of which are the big four of World Trade

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Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development; the ideological engine of which is neo-liberal economic

theory; and the technological apparatus of which is the Internet. If this is the way the

issue is framed, the danger is that religion will be considered insofar as it is a reaction to

global economics rather that the two domains consitute equivialent or equipotent loci of

social and cultural forces. In its crudest form this would be a return to earlier debates

about the priority of the material or the ideal, with the question being prejudiced toward

the apparent secondary nature of religious developments cast as epiphenomena or

mystifications of a primary economic reality.

Particularly misleading in this respect is the kind of metaphorical reductionism

that goes even beyond causal priority to assert that processes of religious change can be

adequately described as if they were economic, in terms of a “spiritual marketplace”

where people “buy in” to a system of beliefs or “shop for” a religious identity. This kind

of approach was developed among sociologists of American religion (Finke and Stark

1988, Roof 1999) to analyze processes of conversion, adherence, or expansion of

religions as competitive processes. The marketplace metaphor has been taken up

relatively uncritically in the popular media (Lattin 1998a,b; Micklethwait 2007), as well

as in the emerging scholarly literature on religion and globalization such as Adogame’s

(2000) discussion of the expansion of African Christian denominations to Europe. The

market metaphor might be especially seductive in the case of post-socialist Europe,

where capitalism has flooded into an economic vacuum to create an emerging global

market simultaneously with the florescence of religious freedom and a multitude of

religious possibilities ranging from orthodox to new age. However, there is more than a

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semantic difference in describing the religious situation in this part of world as a “cultic

milieu” (Kürti 2001) rather than as a “spiritual marketplace,” insofar as these terms carry

different connotations about motivation, agency, identity, and experience.

Indeed, one can talk about the economics of religion without treating religion

literally or metaphorically as a commodity, and one can recognize that religious activities

are subject to economic constraints including market forces without suggesting that

religion operates according to the laws of the market. Certainly, there is an economics of

global media and global travel with which global religious actors must contend, finance

required to support transnational congregations as well as local buildings, and a

commodity aspect to religious objects that can be purchased such as films, tapes, books,

icons, holy pictures, statues, or relics. There are even religious commodities strictly

speaking such as wheat, oil, or sugar used as payment for the services of mullahs in

Afghanistan (Roy 2004: 94). The economic dimension to the work of shrine-based

sellers of divinely inspired fortunes in the market in Hong Kong (Lang and Ragvald

1993) allows us to say that spiritual activities take place in the marketplace without

requiring us to make the conceptual leap to a spiritual marketplace. From this standpoint,

global religious activity is neither determined by economic globalization nor describable

on the model of economic decision-making. It is more productive to understand

globalization from the outset as a multidimensional process, with religion, popular

culture, politics, and economics as necessarily coeval and intimately intertwined, as they

are in the lives of actors responsible for bringing about globalization in the first place.

At the very least, if it is granted that religion is a given in social reality, with the addition

of a global or planetary layer of social organization religious activity will take its place

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within that layer on terms not entirely determined by other dimensions of social reality.

If instead of talking about globalization and religion our inquiry is cast in terms of

the “globalization of religion,” we are at first spared the immediate assumption of a

causal vector in favor of what might at least initially be taken for a purely descriptive

endeavor. There is caution to be sounded here, too, though, for if this is the way the

issue is framed, the assumption can too easily be that the cultural influence of

globalization is unidirectional, from globalizing center to passive periphery, with religion

a neo-colonial form of cultural imperialism. The empirical problematic in this case

would be to determine whether this centrifugal impulse is toward the imposition or re-

imposition of religious master narratives on a global scale, and whether such an impulse

is bound to fragment like a shattered mirror as it becomes instantiated in local cultural

settings. Again there is a viable alternative, which recognizes that once global channels

are open, the flow of religious phenomena - symbols, ideas, practices, moods,

motivations - is at least bidirectional, more likely multidirectional. We can think of this

either in a kind of world-as-neural-network image in which religious manifestations can

issue from any node and proceed in any direction, or in a kind of postmodern free-

floating-signifier image in which religious impulses are decentered and float like

dandelion seeds in the breeze of the cultural imaginary.

Particularly in a situation in which the globalization of religion has only begun to

be examined within the human sciences, the empirical determination of its conditions is a

necessary first step. An initial question in this respect is to identify “what travels well”

across geographical and cultural space. This issue has to do with characteristics of

religions and raises the question of what should count under the category of religion.

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Certainly we must hold in mind the critique by Asad (1993) to the effect that the category

of religion has its own history and can be given a universalized definition only at some

intellectual risk. Such a critique does not require abandonment of the category, only that

it be used wisely and reflectively. For my part I prefer a minimal understanding of

religion as phenomenologically predicated on and culturally elaborated from a primordial

sense of alterity or otherness which, insofar as it is an elementary structure of embodied

existence, renders “religion” an inevitable, perhaps even necessary, dimension of human

experience (Csordas 2004).

This being said, we can propose two aspects of religions that must be attended to

in determining whether or not they travel well, what we can call portable practice and

transposable message. By portable practice I mean rites that can be easily learned,

require relatively little esoteric knowledge or paraphernalia, are not held as proprietary or

necessarily linked to a specific cultural context, and can be performed without

commitment to an elaborate ideological or institutional apparatus. The many forms of

yoga are perhaps the archetypal instances of portable practice, explicit bodily practices

accompanied by more or less spiritual elaboration, and which may or may not form the

basis for communal commitments or transformation of everyday life (Strauss 2005).

Chinese feng shui is another recently globalizing portable practice that, although it

requires expertise in its performance, can be applied in any cultural setting in which the

felicitous orientation of energy in space can be construed as appealing (Bruun 2003).

By transposable message I mean that the basis of appeal contained in religious

tenets, premises, or promises can find footing across a diversity of linguistic and cultural

settings. I prefer the notion of transposability to those of transmissibility, transferability,

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or even translatability in part because its definition encompasses several of these ideas,

and also in part because it includes the connotations of being susceptible to being

transformed or reordered without being denatured, and the valuable musical metaphor of

being performable in a different key. In their emphasis on acquisition of material goods

through spiritual means, Melanesian cargo cults and the contemporary Christian

“prosperity gospel” would appear to have much in common. Yet cargo cults had a clear

limit of both geographical expansion and temporal viability, whereas the prosperity

gospel has found a foothold in many corners of the contemporary world (Coleman 200,

Robbins 2004).

Beyond the characteristics of religions that determine whether they might travel

well lies the question of the means by which they traverse geographical and cultural

space. Briefly, these include missionization (e.g. Keane 2007, Velho in Csordas 2009),

migration (Cohen 2002 and in Csordas 2009, Matory 2005 and in Csordas 2009),

mobility of individuals (Groisman 2000 and in Csorsdas 2009, Kendall in Csordas 2009,

Froystad in Csordas 2009), and mediatization (Hirschkind 2006, Dawson and Cowan

2004). Finally, we must consider four modalities of religious intersubjectivity in global

context – what I refer to in the book as that of 1) the “Skylab” engagement of local

religious imagination with the encroachment of global culture, 2) that of pan-indigenous

interaction and crosstalk among indigenous religions as well as ecumenical or conflictual

encounter among world religions, 3) that of “reverse” religious influence from margin to

metropole, and 4) that of the re-globalization of world religions

A third aspect of the problematic is the possibility of considering globalization as

religion. There are several senses in which we could elaborate this idea, which in some

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respects is an inversion of the economic metaphor of the “global spiritual marketplace”

that we discussed earlier. Thus we can play with the notion that economic globalization

is a religion or religious movement, conceptualizing the ensemble of institutions like

WTO and IMF as a global church or ecclesium, neo-liberal economics as a kind of canon

law, world beat as a liturgical music of global culture, and cyberspace as a privileged site

of ritually altered global consciousness. Hopkins (2001) has taken this idea furthest,

arguing not metaphorically but literally that globalization is a religion the god of which is

the concentration of finance capitalist wealth in the form of a Trinity composed by the

WTO, IMF, and multinational corporations, with its own theological justifications of

neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation, its own theological anthropology, and its

distinct forms of economic, political, and cultural revelation. Strenski (2004) argues that

economic globalization is a religious phenomenon insofar as it was from its origin

embedded in and legitimized by 16th and 17th Century writings on natural law and the

law of nations by Catholic theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria and Protestant

theologians such as Hugo Grotius, and particularly that their formulation of the right to

free passage among nations for purposes of trade was a theological justification for the

imposition of colonial economic regimes. Matory (in Csordas 2009) suggests that

contemporary social theory concerned with globalization is itself often predicated on

religious conceptions and language. Beyond these interpretations, there is also a more

existential sense in which we can ask if globalization is a religious phenomenon, or at the

very least if globalization necessarily has a religious dimension. Does it possess a mythic

structure, an eschatological promise, a soteriological message, a magical spontaneity, a

moral imperative, a dogmatic inevitability, a demonic urge, an inquisitional universality,

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a structure of alterity or Otherness that is at some level inescapably religious? Perhaps

there are spiritual consequences to whether we find ourselves living in a global village of

universal intimacy or in a boundless realm of anonymous and impersonal processes.

In any case, formulating the problematic in terms of the relations suggested by the

phrases globalization and religion, globalization of religion, and globalization as religion

may provide purchase on the question of whether global culture is to be considered as

universal culture – might this mean universal in the sense of being dominated by a single

master narrative, or universal in the sense that any element can be transposed onto or

transported into any other cultural setting? Recall Arjun Appadurai’s invocation of

“transnational irony” in his anecdote of the long journey with his family back to India,

only to learn upon arriving at the Meenaski Temple in Madurai that the priest with whom

his wife had worked in previous years was currently in Houston (1996: 56-7). Barely

twelve years old, this anecdote already appears quaint. Are we witnessing in these

planetary religious phenomena the emergence of a "sanctified" global culture in the

process of generating its own mythos, or perhaps a reenchanted world characterized by

spiritual Balkanization and the eclipse of Enlightenment? Or are we merely beginning to

recognize the same age-old waters of religion as they seek their own level in the channels

that flow between the local and global (maybe old wine in new skins is the appropriate

metaphor). Perhaps in its religious dimension the edifice of globalization is a new Babel;

if so, let us hope that the analyses we produce will indeed be global, and not garbled.

The contributors to Transnational Transcendence, themselves an international

group of scholars, discuss these themes with respect to religious phenomena in Africa,

Asia, Europe North American, Oceania, and South America, including various forms of

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Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese spirituality, Santo Daime, Yoruba religion, and

Korean shamanism. In what remains of this paper, however, I will briefly discuss several

aspects of my own contribution on the global Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which

began in the United States in 1967, blending influences from the Cursillo movement that

originated in Spain and the indigenous American enthusiasm of Protestant

Pentecostalism. In the midst of 1960s cultural ferment, it promised a dramatic renewal of

Church life based on a born-again spirituality of “personal relationship” with Jesus and

direct access to divine power and inspiration through “spiritual gifts” or “charisms”

including faith healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. Institutional structures

developed, including an International Communications Office in 1975. The ICO was

organized under the auspices of The Word of God covenant community in Ann Arbor,

Michigan, subsequently moving to Brussels under the auspices of Cardinal Leon Joseph

Suenens, and finally to the center of the Catholic world in Rome. Pope Paul VI took note

of the movement's existence as early as 1971, and subsequent popoes continued to be

supportive, apparently tolerating the movement's relatively radical theology for the sake

of encouraging its markedly conservative politics, its militant activism for "traditional"

values and against women's rights to contraception and abortion, and its encouragement

of individual spirituality and contribution to parish activities and finances.

In the book I discuss three comparative cases of the Charismatic Catholicism in

India, Brazil, and Nigeria based on recently published material from anthropologists who

for the most part encountered the movement in the field without going there specifically

to look for it. The cases represent three continents, and perhaps not coincidentally come

from populous countries each of which is recognized as the most dynamic and diverse

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nation on its continent. Standing economically between the developed and developing

worlds, these three crucibles of globalization may also be points of convergence between

the fetishization of commodities and the fetishization of experience, ideal crucibles of

religious ferment and reenchantment. Part of this is certainly related to the technological

possibilities for mediatization of spirituality in these nearly-developed nations. At the

same time, specificities of the cultural milieu in these countries offer intriguing grounds

for further comparison of Charismatic permutations. Brazil is a predominantly Catholic

nation where the Renewal interacts with strong Marian traditions as well as Kardecist

spiritism and the gamut of Afro-Brazilian religions. Nigeria is an ethnically diverse

nation where Catholicism is strongest among the Igbo and the Renewal exists in relation

to traditional religion in the local setting and within the Christian/Islamic dynamic on the

national scene. India’s Catholic population tends to be concentrated regionally in the

southwest, and the Renewal exists in relation to Hindu and Muslim traditions. Although I

examine relations within this movement between the global and the local, or center and

periphery, equally interesting is to recognize in this and perhaps other contemporary

transnational religious phenomena a tension between the impulse toward a universal

culture and the tendency for postmodern cultural fragmentation. I shall frame the poles

of this tension with two images.

In 2001 I was poised to reinitiate my study of the Charismatic Renewal after a ten

year hiatus. I learned that the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services in

Rome was planning to hold a seminar in the Mediterranean on the topic of deliverance

from evil spirits led by a leading expert on this form of healing, a Portuguese-surnamed

priest from the west of India. Intended as advanced training for those from around the

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world who already had experience in the deliverance ministry, this appeared to present an

ideal opportunity for me to gain an initial sense of cross-cultural variation in the

encounter with evil spirits as well as to develop a set of contacts that could be pursued

with subsequent visits to the field. Mobilizing some of my old contacts among

movement leadership, I obtained the letter of sponsorship required to register for this

seminar – this precaution was to ensure the necessary level of spiritual maturity and

legitimacy among participants who were to deal with the sensitive issues of casting out

demons, and was certainly necessary for a movement outsider such as myself. Then just

as the preparations were underway I learned that the seminar had been cancelled for lack

of sufficient participants. The reason, however – and this is the point of the story – was

not that there was insufficient interest, and neither that the likely candidates could not

afford the expense of travel, but that the Portuguese Indian priest had already presented

his experiences among so many Charismatics in so many settings around the world that

those who would have participated appear to have judged that the experience would be

redundant. The voice for a universal culture of healing had pre-empted itself from

drawing into the center that which it had already sallied forth to touch in its indigenous

setting, thus at the same time pre-empting an encounter among healers with diverse

experiences that could have potentially called into question some of the homogenizing

goals of the event.

The image of cultural fragmentation, on the other hand, is contained in the story

of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Lusaka, Zambia. Quite independently of any

broader movement, begun to practice faith healing in 1973 (Milingo 1984, ter Haar 1987,

1992). In 1976, however, he established a relationship with The Word of God Catholic

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Charismatic Community in the U.S. and founded his own Divine Providence Community.

By 1979 the archbishop was a prominent participant in a Charismatic pilgrimage to

Lourdes. The Archbishop's teachings exhibited a simultaneous "indigenization" of

Charismatic ritual healing and a "Charismatization" of a distinctly African form of

Christian healing. More remarkable, however is that within a decade, his healing

ministry had created such controversy that in 1983 he was recalled to Rome. There he

was detained and interrogated, and eventually relinquished his ecclesiastical post. In

return he was granted an appointment as Special Delegate to the Pontifical Commission

for Migration and Tourism, with the freedom to travel (except to Zambia), and was

reassured by the Pope that his healing ministry would be "safeguarded" (Milingo 1984:

137). Ironically, given that the overt goal of his recall was in part to protect Zambian

Catholics from what must have appeared to Church officials as a kind of neo-paganism,

Milingo subsequently became immensely popular as a healer among Italian Catholic

Charismatics. With established followings in ten Italian cities, and already a figure on

national television, in 1987 he moved his public healing service from the church of

Argentini of Rome to a large room in the Ergife Hotel. Once again in 1989 his

controversial ministry was temporarily suspended by the Church, and later renewed

outside Rome (Lanternari 1994). In 1994 the Bishop's conference in Tuscany issued a

pastoral note on demonology and witchcraft quite likely targeted at Milingo's ministry.

The archbishop next reemerged into the public spotlight at the turn of the millenium as a

new devotee of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. As much of a scandal

as was his apparent defection from the church – or perhaps from his own standpoint a

new level of ecumenism – was his ritual marriage to a nubile Korean follower of Moon in

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a ceremony central to the Unification doctrine. Only after a great deal of effort that

doubtless included coaxing, negotiation, and threat did Milingo recant and return to the

fold. Archbishop Milingo contributes to a decentering of meaning that cannot but take

place in a global movement whose key symbol is, after all, speaking in tongues.

Although Lanternari (1987) describes the effect as a "religious short-circuit" between

Africa and Europe, there is less, not more anomaly in the Milingo case if it is

acknowledged that the contemporary situation is best represented not as a modernist

circuit diagram but as a global, postmodern montage of transposable spiritualities.

Neither of these two images allows us to conclude that the global Catholic Church

simply served as a kind of institutional trellis upon which the florescence of the

Charismatic movement easily climbed. What is at stake is the fate of that particularly

powerful master narrative called “salvation history” which, rather than being undermined

by the decentering force of postmodernism, is now globally promulgated in a charismatic,

sensuous immediacy and in a multiplicity of idioms, not least among which is that of

glossolalia. The differences between the early globalization of Catholicism and the

globalization of the contemporary Catholic Charismatic Renewal lie in changed

conditions having to do with mass media and the ease of travel that dramatically affect

interaction between local adherents and the central leadership, as well as in changed

idioms of interaction with indigenous religions. A movement such as the Charismatic

Renewal weaves the cosmic time of salvation history into the fabric of everyday life,

speeding it up and lending it a sense of urgency with the notion that the movement is part

of a preparation for the “end times” before Christ’s second coming, but also providing the

discipline of a carefully reconstructed habitus that structures the rhythms of everyday life,

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particularly in the more highly elaborated Charismatic intentional communities.

I am convinced that consideration of this movement will allow us to pose, if not

yet to answer, some of these issues central to an understanding of religion as a global

phenomenon in the 21st century. In my early analysis of the global implications of the

movement, I proposed three hypotheses. A cultural hypothesis was that the Charismatic

Renewal was a potential vehicle of class consciousness for a transnational bourgeoisie

insofar as it could be assumed that a world political-economic system must be

accompanied by world religious and ideological systems. A structural hypothesis

(particularly relevant to Latin America) was that the appeal of the movement leap-frogs

over the working classes to link the bourgeoisie with the very poor, with the excluded

middle being the group with the greates class antagonism to the bourgeoisie and to which

the appeal of both classical pentecostalism and socialism are strongest. It thus may be an

ideological articulation of preexisting social relationships in terms of “transcending class

and cultural barriers” in the name of Christianity, and also (as appears now to have been

quite true) of appealing to communitarian sentiment while advance conservative values in

opposition to liberation theology. Finally, a historical hypothesis was that the

Charismatic Renewal may play a role on a global scale analogous to that played by

Methodism on a national scale in 18th-century England, insofar as it can be argued that

both played a role in providing a moral framework and motivational language for the

emergence of a new socioeconomic order (Csordas 1992).

On another level -- that of bodily experience -- consider only one theme

reflecting consequences for the self in global religious phenomena. Charismatics place a

premium on bodily events and practices ranging from revelatory sensory imagery to the

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sacred swoon of being overcome by the Holy Spirit to ritual gestures such as laying on of

hands and prostration in prayer (Csordas 1990, 1994, 1997, 2002). To understand the

central place of embodiment in the global Charismatic resacralization it is useful to turn

to the concept elaborated by Mellor and Schilling (1997) of the “baroque modern body”

characteristic of contemporary Western society. For Mellor and Schilling, the baroque

modern body is characterized by a heightened sensuality, and is in addition “internally

differentiated, prone to all sorts of doubts and anxieties, and to be arenas of conflict”

(1997: 47). Such a description fits the Charismatic body perfectly, and given examples

such as we have seen in the above from and India and Brazil, we can suggest that the

Charismatic renewal, and perhaps other planetary religious forms, are promulgating this

variant of embodiment in the global arena. Certainly, the tendency to associate the

contemporary upsurge of sensuousness with that of the baroque cultures of Counter-

Reformation Catholicism is telling, insofar as in much of the Third World charismatic

healing and various spiritual manifestations are likewise playing the role of a bulwark

against the enthusiastic spirituality of Protestant Pentecostalism, to say nothing of the

sensuality of contemporary indigenous religions.

In sum, the Charismatic Renewal and other global religious phenomena lead us to

ask whether we are witnessing an era of resacralization or reenchantment. Studying them

provides the occasion to ask whether the increasing articulation of the world social

system in fact generates an ideological impulse toward formulations of universal culture,

religious intersubjectivity, and modalities of experiencing alterity. At the least such

phenomena are of interest because they contribute to the constitution of an

ideological/religious dimension of a global social system that also includes a global

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economic order, global communications, global population movements, and diasporas.

Not merely reflections or reflexes of the global social reality, such religious phenomena

constitute a significant part of the consciousness of the postmodern world system, and

this can be judged to be a false consciousness in no more or less a sense than was religion

in the classic era of industrializing nation states.

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