Download NEW RELIGIONS AND GLOBALIZATION

New ReligioNs
aNd
globalizatioN
Edited by Armin W. Geertz and Margit Warburg
Assisted by Dorthe Refslund Christensen
New Religions and Globalization
RENNER Studies on New Religions
General Editor
Armin W. Geertz, Department of the Study of Religion, University of Aarhus
Editorial Board
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Institute of Information and Media Studies, University
of Aarhus
Annika Hvithamar, Institute of Philosophy, Education and Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark
Hans Raun Iversen, Department of Systematic Theology, University of Copenhagen
Viggo Mortensen, Department of Systematic Theology, Centre for Multireligious Studies, University of Aarhus
Mikael Rothstein, History of Religions Section, Department of Cross-Cultural and
Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Margit Warburg, History of Religions Section, Department of Cross-Cultural and
Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
RENNER Studies on New Religions is an initiative supported by the Danish Research
Council for the Humanities. The series is established to publish books on new religions
and alternative spiritual movements from a wide range of perspectives. It includes works
of original theory, empirical research, and edited collections that address current topics,
but will generally focus on the situation in Europe.
The books appeal to an international readership of scholars, students, and professionals in the study of religion, theology, the arts, and the social sciences. It is hoped that
this series will provide a proper context for scientific exchange between these often
competing disciplines.
NEW RELIGIONS AND GLOBALIZATION
EMPIRICAL, THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Edited by Armin W. Geertz & Margit Warburg
Assisted by Dorthe Refslund Christensen
| AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright: Aarhus University Press, 2008
ISBN 978 87 7934 681 9
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Published with the financial support of the Danish Research Council for the
Humanities and the Humanistic Faculty of the University of ­Copenhagen.
Renner Studies on New Religions:
Vol. 1:
Robert Towler (ed.), New Religions and the New Europe, 1995
Vol. 2:
Michael Rothstein, Belief Transformations, 1996
Vol. 3:Helle Meldgaard and Johannes Aagaard (eds.), New Religious Movements
in Europe, 1997
Vol. 4:Eileen Barker and Margit Warburg (eds.), New Religions and
New Religiosity, 1998
Vol. 5:
Mikael Rothstein (ed.) New Age Religion and Globalization, 2001
Vol. 6:Mikael Rothstein and Reender Kranenborg (eds.), New Religions in
a Postmodern World, 2003
Vol. 7:Margit Warburg, Annika Hvithamar, and Morten Warmind (eds.),
Baha’i and Globalisation, 2005
Vol. 8:Armin W. Geertz and Margit Warburg, assisted by Dorthe Refslund
Christensen, New Religions and Globalization, 2008
Contents
Preface
Armin W. Geertz & Margit Warburg
7
New Religions and Globalization: An Introduction
Margit Warburg, Dorthe Refslund Christensen & Armin W. Geertz
9
Part I: Approaches to Globalization
1.
Religious Interaction in a Global Context
James A. Beckford
2.
Religion and Globalisation, or Globalisation
and Religion?
Margit Warburg
43
3.
Purity and Mixture – Religious Plurality and the
Domestication of Alterity
Olav Hammer
61
4.
Globalization, Bourdieu and New Religions
Lene van der Aa Kühle
5.
Organizational Transformation in Global Religions:
Rethinking the Relationship between Organization,
Culture, and Market
James V. Spickard
23
95
109
6Contents
Part II: Globalization before Globalization
6.
Orbis terrarum Romanorum est:
Globalization Processes in the Roman Empire
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
7.
Early Christianity as a Global Religion
Ulrich Berner
131
145
Part III: Globalization around the Globe
8.
Systemic Struggle between North American Indians
and New Age
Armin W. Geertz
9.
Mapping Globalization with the Lens of Religion:
African Migrant Churches
in Germany
Afe Adogame
10.
Archangel Gabriel Online: The Salamullah Movement
in Indonesia and Globalisation
Frida Mebius Önnerfors
11.
Managing Deterritorialisation, Sustaining Belief:
the Bochasanwasi Shree Akshar Purushottam
Swaminarayan Sanstha as Ethnographic Case Study
and Theoretical Foil
Hanna H. Kim
12.
Religious Globalisation: A Material Perspective.
Assessing the Mormon Temple Institution
in Terms of Globalisation
Mikael Rothstein
165
189
215
225
243
Index
261
Contributors
275
Preface
It is a pleasure for us to publish this selection of top quality papers
that were originally presented at the con­cluding conference of the
Research Network on New Religions (RENNER) in Aarhus, Denmark,
September 23-26, 2002. All of the papers have been up-dated to reflect
events as of late 2007. Even though it is our last publication, it is a fitting celebration of some 12 years of successful events and publications.
RENNER is a network established in Denmark to coordinate research on new religions and alternative spirituality. It is a corporate
body with scientific goals funded by the Danish Research Council for
the Humanities and was neither information center nor hotline. RENNER was an experiment awarded by the Council in 1993 to a coordinating committee that consisted of scholars from different disciplines in
the humanities, theology and the social sciences within a fairly neutral
arena. The existence of RENNER as an institutional network with no
other priority than to secure the best possible conditions for scientific
research on new religions placed us in a position of accessibility to
researchers, government officials, civil servants and the general public.
Relative neutrality was the key to the RENNER network, but did not
mean that its individual scholars were unengaged. It simply meant
that RENNER as an institution was a forum for encouraging the fair
exchange and publication of scientific research.
The results have appeared in a variety of journals and in our two
monograph series RENNER Studies on New Religions (Aarhus University Press) and its Danish equivalent Gyldendal - Nye religioner (Gyldendal, Copenhagen). The Research Council supported RENNER for
4 years, but in 1998 several members of the RENNER group were
awarded further funding for a project entitled “Globaliseringen og de
nye religioner – lokalt og globalt” (“Globalization and New Religions
– Local and Global”) – dubbed “RENNER II”. This publication is the
third and last in the RENNER II project.
The current board of directors consists of the following: Dorthe Refslund Christensen (Histori­an of Religions, Aarhus), Armin W. Geertz
(Co-Chair, Historian of Religions, Aarhus), Annika Hvithamar (Soci-
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8Preface
ologist of Religion, Odense), Hans Ravn Iversen (Systematic Theologian, Copenhagen), Viggo Mortensen (Systematic Theologian, Aarhus),
Mikael Rothstein (Historian of Religions, Copenhagen), and Margit
Warburg (Co-Chair, Sociologist of Religion, Copenhagen). They have
been a great team, and we extend our gratitude to them.
Gratitude is also extended to earlier members of the RENNER board,
Johannes Aagaard (Ecu­menical and Missionary Theologian, formerly
Aarhus, now deceased), Steffen Johannessen (Study of Religion, Royal
Danish School of Educational Studies, Copenhagen), Finn Madsen
(History of Religions, Copenhagen), Helle Meldgaard (History of Religions and Theology, Multimedia Consultant, Aarhus), and Ole Riis
(Sociologist of Religion, formerly in Aarhus).
We wish to thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities
for its support throughout RENNER’s history and for support of this
volume. We also thank the Faculty of the Humanities, University of
Cophenhagen for publication support and the Faculty of Theology,
University of Aarhus for facilities and publication support.
Our gratitude is also extended to Director Claes Hvidbak at
the Aarhus University Press for his continued moral support of the
RENNER series and to Mary Waters Lund for diligent editing.
Armin W. Geertz
Margit Warburg
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New Religions and Globalization:
An Introduction
Margit Warburg, Dorthe Refslund Christensen,
Armin W. Geertz
As mentioned in the Preface, the Danish Research Council for the
Humanities granted us the funding for the project “Globalization and
New Religions – Local and Global” for a period of four years, from
1998 to 2002. In that period the research council identified globalization
as one of its main themes in its research strategy for the humanities,
realizing that globalization is not only a political-economic process
but has profound cultural significance. This view cannot come as a
surprise to scholars of globalization; in dealing with religion and globalization, the cultural aspects of globalization are obviously central.
We note with satisfaction that the humanities quite early on realized that globalization is an important theme to study, also for other
researchers than specialists in globalization studies. Certainly, the
impact that globalization has had on the international political scene
has proven this stance to be correct. Our publication helps highlight
a much needed balance between technical, social and cultural factors.
Globalization is a process that may be spelled in two different ways
– with a ‘z’ or an ‘s’ – but may be described in many more! Among
other things, globalization is a term taking note of the fact that contemporary nations and their citizens are in varying degrees involved in a
world-wide process of integration where money, goods, cultural items
and people are moving more and more freely across borders. This
integration would not be possible without revolutionary technological
innovations in physical transportation, electronic communication, and
data processing. Internationalization of the economy and rapid growth
in international communications are salient features of globalization,
but a global political integration of societies is also a discernible feature.
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10Introduction
All these processes indicate a historically unique compression of spacetime into a single world space, a process that one of the pioneers in the
study of religion and globalization, Roland Robertson, has allegorically
described as the world becoming a ‘single place’.1 A consequence of
this increase in supraterritorial social relations of all kinds is that the
space demarcated by a person’s social relations – the person’s social
space – to some extent becomes independent of physical space. In his
critical review of approaches to globalization, Jan Aart Scholte regards
this as the most distinctive aspect of globalization.2
When we chose ‘globalization and new religions’ as the theme of
the project, and not ‘globalization and religions’, it was not just because this is a main concern of RENNER-partici­pants. We argued that
studying especially new religions in a globalization perspective offered
theoretical and methodological advantages both for the general study
of religion and the general study of globalization. Religions are often
cosmopolitan and universal in their overall message, yet they may at
the same time be utterly engaged in local interactions, and this is often
clearly expressed among the minority religions, at least in Europe. The
contrast of the local and the global has been accentuated by globalization, and in particular many new religions follow suit.
The authors of this volume represent two groups of researchers:
The largest group counts those whose main concern is religion, in
particular new religions. The other group of scholars are mostly sociologists and sociologists of religion who have a stronger footing in
general globaliz­a­tion studies, but who also have a special interest in
those aspects of globalization that are salient when studying religion.
The study of globalization and new religions calls for a combination
of the scholarly expertise represented by the two groups of researchers
mentioned above. Leading scholars in the history of religions, theology,
sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and other disciplines in
the humanities and social sciences met to contribute their reflections
on important aspects of globa­lization processes with regard to new
1Roland Robertson, “Globalization, Modernization, and Postmoderniz­
ation”, in Religion and Global Order. Religion and the Political Order, Volume
IV, eds. Roland Robertson & William R. Garrett. New York: Paragon
House, 1991, 281-291 (quotation, p. 283).
2 Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization. A Critical Introduction, Houndmills: MacMillan Press, 2000, 45-56.
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Introduction
11
religions and new religiosity. The participants addressed questions of
vital importance for various disciplines in cultural studies. Whether
approached as a reflection of world economy and power dynamics,
new possibilities of communication and cultural exchange in the light
of mass media and technology, increased cultural plurality in the
wake of migration or as a combination of any of these, globalization
challenges the academic study of religion – as indeed in many other
disciplines – to renewed theoretical and methodological reflection.
Religious ideas, practices and ways of organizing and communicating are (and have always been) constantly in the process of finding
their place between continuity and change, between being transformed
and innovated, and yet claiming to be traditional and original. However swiftly the world seems to be changing, groups and individuals
continuously attempt to produce more or less coherent worldviews,
organize themselves accordingly and communicate with the world
at large. Many new religions are, or claim to be, deeply rooted in a
local tradition or cultural environment, while others seem to identify
themselves as global and transcultural. In fact, the rise and spread of
many new religions and new religious movements seems to be closely
identified with globalization. No religion, however, is without local
roots, and, equally, no religion is separate from global development.
Approaching the study of new religions by means of globalization
theories and methodologies can help illuminate a number of themes.
1. Different theories of globalization processes and consequences have
produced different tools and approaches. Thus an analysis and evaluation of different theories and methodologies in terms of their adequacy
and productiveness in the study of new religions may provide important correctives.
2. How does globalization influence the organization and management
of new religions and how can these issues be studied? Globalization
adds new perspectives to the study of religious mobility, be it a result of migration or because ideas, practices and traditions ‘migrate’
out of their original contexts and are transformed and innovated by
new practitioners in new cultural contexts. Of relevance here are the
interrelatedness of local and global culture, center and diaspora, networking, religious centers without physical location, and changes and
innovations in the organization and management of new religions.
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12Introduction
3. In a globalized world where migration, for instance, leads to the
meeting and confrontation of religions, how do religious individ­
uals and groups interact? Multiculturality is a growing factor in many
countries with the result that new communities and new religions (or
old religions in new cultural and geographical settings) challenge the
‘old order’. This plural situation affects the interaction of religious
groups and individuals, ranging from confrontation to interreligious
dialogue and, in some cases, symbiosis.
4. While some scholars see globalization as a modern, or even postmodern, cultural pheno­menon, others claim that globalization premises and processes have a long history. What consti­tutes globalization
in a historical perspective and when can a cultural, social, or religious
pheno­menon be said to be influenced by such premises and processes?
Are there historical periods which give us an analytical advantage in
the study of new religions and globalization?
A Presentation of the Papers
The selected papers presented in this collection are arranged in terms
of three overriding themes. The first concerns discussions of various
theoretical approaches to globalization. The second provides evidence
for a much broader historical background for globalization or for
drawing historical parallels to present-day globalization. The third
theme concerns examples of globaliza­tion in various parts of the world.
The section on approaches to globalization begins with a paper by
sociologist of religion James A. Beckford. Beckford argues that not only
the term globalization but also its assumed characteristics should not
be accepted at face value without critical scrutiny. Globalization does
have an impact on interactions between religions but the impact is
hardly uniform. Furthermore, globalization is not necessarily equivalent to standardization or universalization. In discussing the strikingly
different situations that new religious movements have in the United
Kingdom and in France, Beckford shows that a proper analysis of the
effects of globalization need to take into account historical precedence,
the foundational ideology of each country, the judicial context of religion in each country, and, finally, the myriad ways that countries
deal with global influences.
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