Chapter One
The Desecularization of the World:
A Global Overview
Peter L. Berger
A few years ago the first volume coming out of the so-called Fundamentalism
Project landed on my desk. The Fundamentalism
Project was very generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation
and chaired by Martin Marty, the distinguished church historian at
the University of Chicago. A number of very reputable scholars took
part in it, and the published results are of generally excellent quality.
But my contemplation of this first volume gave me what has been
called an "aha! experience." The book was very big, sitting there on
my desk—a "book-weapon," the kind that could do serious injury. So
I asked myself, why would the MacArthur Foundation shell out several
million dollars to support an international study of religious fundamentalists?
Two answers came to mind. The first was obvious and not very interesting.
The MacArthur Foundation is a very progressive outfit; it
understands fundamentalists to be anti-progressive; the Project,
then, was a matter of knowing one's enemies. But there was also a
more interesting answer. "Fundamentalism" is considered a strange,
hard-to-understand phenomenon; the purpose of the Project was to
delve into this alien world and make it more understandable. But to
whom? Who finds this world strange? Well, the answer to that
question was easy: people to whom the officials of the MacArthur Foundation
normally talk, such as professors at elite American universities.
And with this came the aha! experience. The concern that must
have led to this Project was based on an upside-down perception of
the world, according to which "fundamentalism" (which, when all is
said and done, usually refers to any sort of passionate religious movement)
is a rare, hard-to-explain thing. But a look either at history or
at the contemporary world reveals that what is rare is not the phenomenon
itself but knowledge of it. The difficult-to-understand
phenomenon is not Iranian mullahs but American university professors—it
might be worth a multi-million-dollar project to try to explain
that!
Mistakes of Secularization Theory
My point is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world
is false. The world today, with some exceptions to which I will come
presently, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places
more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians
and social scientists loosely labeled "secularization theory" is
essentially mistaken. In my early work I contributed to this literature.
I was in good company—most sociologists of religion had similar
views, and we had good reasons for holding them. Some of the writings
we produced still stand up. (As I like to tell my students, one advantage
of being a social scientist, as against being, say, a philosopher
or a theologian, is that you can have as much fun when your theories
are falsified as when they are verified!)
Although the term "secularization theory" refers to works from
the 1950s and 1960s, the key idea of the theory can indeed be traced
to the Enlightenment. That idea is simple: Modernization necessarily
leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals.
And it is precisely this key idea that has turned out to be
wrong. To be sure, modernization has had some secularizing effects,
more in some places than in others. But it has also provoked powerful
movements of counter-secularization. Also, secularization on the
societal level is not necessarily linked to secularization on the level of
individual consciousness. Certain religious institutions have lost
power and influence in many societies, but both old and new religious
beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of
individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes
leading to great explosions of religious fervor. Conversely, religiously
identified institutions can play social or political roles even
when very few people believe or practice the religion that the institutions
represent. To say the least, the relation between religion and
modernity is rather complicated.
The proposition that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of
religion is, in principle, "value free." That is, it can be affirmed
both by people who think it is good news and by people who think
it is very bad news. Most Enlightenment thinkers and most progressive-minded
people ever since have tended toward the idea that
secularization is a good thing, at least insofar as it does away with
religious phenomena that are "backward," "superstitious," or "reactionary"
(a religious residue purged of these negative characteristics
may still be deemed acceptable). But religious people, including
those with very traditional or orthodox beliefs, have also affirmed
the modernity/secularity linkage, and have greatly bemoaned it.
Some have then defined modernity as the enemy, to be fought
whenever possible. Others have, on the contrary, seen modernity as
some kind of invincible world-view to which religious beliefs and
practices should adapt themselves. In other words, rejection andadaptation are two strategies open to religious communities in a world
understood to be secularized. As is always the case when strategies
are based on mistaken perceptions of the terrain, both strategies
have had very doubtful results.
It is possible, of course, to reject any number of modern ideas and
values theoretically, but making this rejection stick in the lives of
people is much harder. To do that requires one of two strategies. The
first is religious revolution: one tries to take over society as a whole
and make one's counter-modern religion obligatory for everyone—a difficult
enterprise in most countries in the contemporary world.
(Franco tried in Spain and failed; the mullahs are still at it in Iran and
a couple of other places.) And this does have to do with modernization,
which brings about very heterogeneous societies and a quantum
leap in intercultural communication, two factors favoring pluralism
and not favoring the establishment (or reestablishment) of religious
monopolies. The other possible way of getting people to reject modern
ideas and values in their lives is to create religious subcultures
designed to keep out the influences of the outside society. That is a
somewhat more promising exercise than religious revolution, but it
too is fraught with difficulty. Modern culture is a very powerful
force, and an immense effort is required to maintain enclaves with an
airtight defense system. Ask the Amish in eastern Pennsylvania. Or
ask a Hasidic rabbi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Interestingly, secularization theory has also been falsified by the
results of adaptation strategies by religious institutions. If we really
lived in a highly secularized world, then religious institutions could
be expected to survive to the degree that they manage to adapt to
secularity. That has been the empirical assumption of adaptation
strategies. What has in fact occurred is that, by and large, religious
communities have survived and even flourished to the degree that
they have not tried to adapt themselves to the alleged requirements of
a secularized world. To put it simply, experiments with secularized
religion have generally failed; religious movements with beliefs and
practices dripping with reactionary supernaturalism (the kind utterly
beyond the pale at self-respecting faculty parties) have widely succeeded.
The Catholic Church vs. Modernity
The struggle with modernity in the Roman Catholic Church
nicely illustrates the difficulties of various strategies. In the wake of
the Enlightenment and its multiple revolutions, the initial response
by the Church was militant and then defiant rejection. Perhaps the
most magnificent moment of that defiance came in 1870, when the
First Vatican Council solemnly proclaimed the infallibility of the
Pope and the immaculate conception of Mary, literally in the face of
the Enlightenment about to occupy Rome in the shape of the army of
Victor Emmanuel I. (The disdain was mutual. If you have ever
visited the Roman monument to the Bersaglieri, the elite army units
that occupied the Eternal City in the name of the Italian Risorgimento,
you may have noticed the placement of the heroic figure in his
Bersaglieri uniform—he is positioned so that his behind points exactly
toward the Vatican.)
The Second Vatican Council, almost a hundred years later, considerably
modified this rejectionist stance, guided as it was by the notion
of aggiornamento, bringing the Church up to date—that is, up to date
with the modern world. (I remember asking a Protestant theologian
what he thought would happen at the Council—this was before it
had convened; he replied that he didn't know but he was sure they
would not read the minutes of the last meeting!) The Second Vatican
Council was supposed to open windows, specifically the windows of
the Catholic subculture that had been constructed when it became
clear that the overall society could not be reconquered. In the United
States, this Catholic subculture has been quite impressive right up to
the very recent past. The trouble with opening windows is that you
can't control what comes in, and a lot has come in—indeed, the
whole turbulent world of modern culture—that has been very troubling
to the Church. Under the current pontificate the Church has
been steering a nuanced course between rejection and adaptation,
with mixed results in different countries.
This is as good a point as any to mention that all my observations
here are intended to be "value free"; that is, I am trying to look at
the current religious scene objectively. For the duration of this exercise
I have put aside my own religious beliefs. As a sociologist of
religion, I find it probable that Rome had to do some reining in on
the level of both doctrine and practice, in the wake of the institutional
disturbances that followed Vatican II. To say this, however, in
no way implies my theological agreement with what has been happening
in the Roman Catholic Church under the present pontificate.
Indeed, if I were Roman Catholic, I would have considerable
misgivings about these developments, But I am a liberal Protestant
(the adjective refers to my religious position and not to my politics),
and I have no immediate existential stake in what is happening
within the Roman community. I am speaking here as a sociologist,
in which capacity I can claim a certain competence; I have no
theological credentials.
The Global Religious Scene
On the international religious scene, it is conservative or orthodox or
traditionalist movements that are on the rise almost everywhere.
These movements are precisely the ones that rejected an aggiornamento
with modernity as defined by progressive intellectuals. Conversely,
religious movements and institutions that have made great efforts to
conform to a perceived modernity are almost everywhere on the decline.
In the United States this has been a much commented upon
fact, exemplified by the decline of so-called mainline Protestantism
and the concomitant rise of Evangelicalism; but the United States is
by no means unusual in this.
Nor is Protestantism. The conservative thrust in the Roman Catholic
Church under John Paul II has borne fruit in both number of
converts and renewed enthusiasm among native Catholics, especially
in non-Western countries. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union
there occurred a remarkable revival of the Orthodox Church in
Russia. The most rapidly growing Jewish groups, both in Israel and
in the Diaspora, are Orthodox. There have been similarly vigorous
upsurges of conservative religion in all the other major religious
communities—Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—as well as revival
movements in smaller communities (such as Shinto in Japan and
Sikhism in India). These developments differ greatly in their social
and political implications. What they have in common is their unambiguouslyreligious inspiration. Consequently, taken together they
provide a massive falsification of the idea that modernization and
secularization are cognate phenomena. At the very least they show thatcounter-secularization is at least as important a phenomenon in the
contemporary world as secularization.
Both in the media and in scholarly publications, these movements
are often subsumed under the category of "fundamentalism." This is
not a felicitous term, not only because it carries a pejorative undertone
but also because it derives from the history of American Protestantism,
where it has a specific reference that is distortive if extended
to other religious traditions. All the same, the term has some suggestive
use if one wishes to explain the aforementioned developments. It
suggests a combination of several features—great religious passion, a
defiance of what others have defined as the Zeitgeist, and a return to
traditional sources of religious authority. These are indeed common
features across cultural boundaries. And they do reflect the presence
of secularizing forces, since they must be understood as a reactionagainst those forces. (In that sense, at least, something of the old
secularization theory may be said to hold up, in a rather back-handed
way.) This interplay of secularizing and counter-secularizing forces
is, I would contend, one of the most important topics for a sociology
of contemporary religion, but far too large to consider here. I can
only drop a hint: Modernity, for fully understandable reasons, undermines
all the old certainties; uncertainty is a condition that many
people find very hard to bear; therefore, any movement (not only a
religious one) that promises to provide or to renew certainty has a
ready market.
Differences Among Thriving Movements
While the aforementioned common features are important, an
analysis of the social and political impact of the various religious upsurges
must also take full account of their differences. This becomes
clear when one looks at what are arguably the two most dynamic religious
upsurges in the world today, the Islamic and the Evangelical;
the comparison also underlines the weakness of the category of "fundamentalism"
as applied to both.
The Islamic upsurge, because of its more immediately obvious political
ramifications, is better known. Yet it would be a serious error to
see it only through a political lens. It is an impressive revival of
emphatically religious commitments. And it is of vast geographical
scope, affecting every single Muslim country from North Africa to Southeast
Asia. It continues to gain converts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa
(where it is often in head-on competition with Christianity). It is
becoming very visible in the burgeoning Muslim communities in
Europe and, to a much lesser extent, in North America. Everywhere
it is bringing about a restoration, not only of Islamic beliefs but of
distinctively Islamic life-styles, which in many ways directly contradict
modern ideas—such as ideas about the relation of religion and
the state, the role of women, moral codes of everyday behavior, and
the boundaries of religious and moral tolerance. The Islamic revival
is by no means restricted to the less modernized or "backward"
sectors of society, as progressive intellectuals still like to think. On the
contrary, it is very strong in cities with a high degree of modernization,
and in a number of countries it is particularly visible among
people with Western-style higher education—in Egypt and Turkey,
for example, many daughters of secularized professionals are putting
on the veil and other accoutrements of Islamic modesty.
Yet there are also great differences within the movement. Even
within the Middle East, the Islamic heartland, there are both religiously
and politically important differences between Sunni and
Shiite revivals—Islamic conservatism means very different things in,
say, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Away from the Middle East, the differences
become even greater. Thus in Indonesia, the most populous
Muslim country in the world, a very powerful revival movement, the
Nudhat'ul-Ulama, is avowedly pro-democracy and pro-pluralism,
the very opposite of what is commonly viewed as Muslim "fundamentalism."
Where the political circumstances allow this, there is in
many places a lively discussion about the relation of Islam to various
modern realities, and there are sharp disagreements among individuals
who are equally committed to a revitalized Islam. Still, for reasons
deeply grounded in the core of the tradition, it is probably fair to say
that, on the whole, Islam has had a difficult time coming to terms
with key modern institutions, such as pluralism, democracy, and the
market economy.
The Evangelical upsurge is just as breathtaking in scope. Geographically
that scope is even wider. It has gained huge numbers of
converts in East Asia—in all the Chinese communities (including,
despite severe persecution, mainland China)and in South Korea, the
Philippines, across the South Pacific, throughout sub-Saharan Africa
(where it is often synthetized with elements of traditional African religion),
apparently in parts of ex-Communist Europe. But the most
remarkable success has occurred in Latin America; there are now
thought to be between forty and fifty million Evangelical Protestants
south of the U.S. border, the great majority of them first-generation
Protestants. The most numerous component within the Evangelical
upsurge is Pentecostalism, which combines biblical orthodoxy and a
rigorous morality with an ecstatic form of worship and an emphasis
on spiritual healing. Especially in Latin America, conversion to Protestantism
brings about a cultural transformation—new attitudes toward
work and consumption, a new educational ethos, and a violent
rejection of traditional machismo (women play a key role in the
Evangelical churches).
The origins of this worldwide Evangelical upsurge are in the
United States, from which the missionaries first went out. But it is
very important to understand that, virtually everywhere and emphatically
in Latin America, this new Evangelicalism is thoroughly indigenous
and no longer dependent on support from U.S. fellow believers—indeed,
Latin American Evangelicals have been sending
missionaries to the Hispanic community in this country, where there
has been a comparable flurry of conversions.
Needless to say, the religious contents of the Islamic and Evangelical
revivals are totally different. So are the social and political consequences
(of which I will say more later). But the two developments
also differ in another very important respect: The Islamic movement
is occurring primarily in countries that are already Muslim or among
Muslim emigrants (as in Europe), while the Evangelical movement is
growing dramatically throughout the world in countries where this
type of religion was previously unknown or very marginal.
Exceptions to the Desecularization Thesis
Let me, then, repeat what I said a while back: The world today is
massively religious, is anything but the secularized world that had
been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts
of modernity. There are, however, two exceptions to this proposition,
one somewhat unclear, the other very clear.
The first apparent exception is Europe—more specifically, Europe
west of what used to be called the Iron Curtain (the developments in
the formerly Communist countries are as yet very under-researched
and unclear). In Western Europe, if nowhere else, the old secularization
theory would seem to hold. With increasing modernization
there has been an increase in key indicators of secularization, both on
the level of expressed beliefs (especially those that could be called orthodox
in Protestant or Catholic terms) and, dramatically, on the
level of church-related behavior—attendance at services of worship,
adherence to church-dictated codes of personal behavior (especially
with regard to sexuality, reproduction, and marriage), recruitment to
the clergy. These phenomena, long observed in the northern countries
of the continent, have since World War II rapidly engulfed the
south. Thus Italy and Spain have experienced a rapid decline in
church-related religion. So has Greece, thereby undercutting the
claim of Catholic conservatives that Vatican II is to be blamed for the
decline. There is now a massively secular Euro-culture, and what has
happened in the south can be simply described (though not thereby
explained) by that culture's invasion of these countries. It is not fanciful
to predict that there will be similar developments in Eastern Europe,
precisely to the degree that these countries too will be integrated
into the new Europe.
While these facts are not in dispute, a number of recent works in
the sociology of religion, notably in France, Britain, and Scandinavia,
have questioned the term "secularization" as applied to these developments.
A body of data indicates strong survivals of religion, most
of it generally Christian in nature, despite the widespread alienation
from the organized churches. A shift in the institutional location of
religion, then, rather than secularization, would be a more accurate
description of the European situation. All the same, Europe stands
out as quite different from other parts of the world, and certainly
from the United States. One of the most interesting puzzles in the
sociology of religion is why Americans are so much more religious as
well as more churchly than Europeans.
The other exception to the desecularization thesis is less ambiguous.
There exists an international subculture composed of people
with Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and
social sciences, that is indeed secularized. This subculture is the principal
"carrier" of progressive, Enlightened beliefs and values. While
its members are relatively thin on the ground, they are very influential,
as they control the institutions that provide the "official" definitions
of reality, notably the educational system, the media of mass
communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system. They are
remarkably similar all over the world today, as they have been for a
long time (though, as we have seen, there are also defectors from this
subculture, especially in the Muslim countries). Again, regrettably, I
cannot speculate here as to why people with this type of education
should be so prone to secularization. I can only point out that what
we have here is a globalized elite culture.
In country after country, then, religious upsurges have a strongly
populist character. Over and beyond the purely religious motives,
these are movements of protest and resistance against a secular elite.
The so-called culture war in the United States emphatically shares
this feature. I may observe in passing that the plausibility of secularization
theory owes much to this international subculture. When intellectuals
travel, they usually touch down in intellectual circles—that
is, among people much like themselves. They can easily fall into
the misconception that these people reflect the overall visited society,
which, of course, is a big mistake. Picture a secular intellectual from
Western Europe socializing with colleagues at the faculty club of the
University of Texas. He may think he is back home. But then picture
him trying to drive through the traffic jam on Sunday morning in
downtown Austin—or, heaven help him, turning on his car radio!
What happens then is a severe jolt of what anthropologists call culture
shock.
Resurgent Religion: Origins and Prospects
After this somewhat breathless tour d'horizon of the global religious
scene, let me turn to some the questions posed for discussion in this
set of essays. First, what are the origins of the worldwide resurgence of
religion? Two possible answers have already been mentioned. One: Modernity
tends to undermine the taken-for-granted certainties by
which people lived through most of history. This is an uncomfortable
state of affairs, for many an intolerable one, and religious movements
that claim to give certainty have great appeal. Two: A purely
secular view of reality has its principal social location in an elite culture
that, not surprisingly, is resented by large numbers of people
who are not part of it but who feel its influence (most troublingly, as
their children are subjected to an education that ignores or even directly
attacks their own beliefs and values). Religious movements
with a strongly anti-secular bent can therefore appeal to people with
resentments that sometimes have quite non-religious sources.
But I would refer once more to the little story with which I began,
about American foundation officials worried about "fundamentalism."
In one sense, there is nothing to explain here. Strongly felt
religion has always been around; what needs explanation is its absence,
rather than its presence. Modern secularity is a much more puzzling
phenomenon than all these religious explosions—if you will, the
University of Chicago is a more interesting topic for the sociology of
religion than the Islamic schools of Qom. In other words, the phenomena
under consideration here on one level simply serve to demonstrate
continuity in the place of religion in human experience.
Second, what is the likely future course of this religious
resurgence? Given the considerable variety of important religious movements
in the contemporary world, it would make little sense to venture a global
prognosis. Predictions, if one dares to make them at all, will be more
useful if applied to much narrower situations. One prediction,
though, can be made with some assurance: There is no reason to
think the world of the twenty-first century will be any less religious
than the world is today. A minority of sociologists of religion have
been trying to salvage the old secularization theory by what I would
call the last-ditch thesis: Modernization does secularize, and movements
like the Islamic and the Evangelical ones represent last-ditch
defenses by religion that cannot last; eventually, secularity will triumph—or,
to put it less respectfully, eventually Iranian mullahs,
Pentecostal preachers, and Tibetan lamas will all think and act like
professors of literature at American universities. I find this thesis singularly
unpersuasive.
Having made this general prediction—that the world of the next
century will not be less religious than the world of today—I will have
to speculate very differently regarding different sectors of the religious
scene. For example, I think that the most militant Islamic
movements will find it hard to maintain their present stance vis-à-vis
modernity once they succeed in taking over the governments of their
countries (this, it seems, is already happening in Iran). I also think
that Pentecostalism, as it exists today among mostly poor and uneducated
people, is unlikely to retain its present religious and moral
characteristics unchanged, as many of these people experience upward
social mobility (this has already been observed extensively in
the United States). Generally, many of these religious movements are
linked to non-religious forces of one sort or another, and the future
course of the former will be at least partially determined by the
course of the latter. In the United States, for instance, militant
Evangelicalism will have a different future course if some of its causes succeed
in the political and legal arenas than if it continues to be frustrated
in these arenas. Also, in religion as in every other area of
human endeavor, individual personalities play a much larger role
than most social scientists and historians are willing to concede.
There might have been an Islamic revolution in Iran without the
Ayatollah Khomeini, but it would probably have looked quite different.
No one can predict the appearance of charismatic figures who
will launch powerful religious movements in unexpected places.
Who knows—perhaps the next religious upsurge in America will occur
among disenchanted post-modernist academics!
Third, do the resurgent religions differ in their critique of the secular
order? Yes, of course they do, depending on their particular belief systems.
Cardinal Ratzinger and the Dalai Lama will be troubled by different aspects
of contemporary secular culture. What both will agree upon, however,
is the shallowness of a culture that tries to get along without any transcendent
points of reference. And they will have good reasons to support
this view. The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends
the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has
been a perennial feature of humanity. (This is not a theological statement
but an anthropological one—an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher
may well agree with it.) It would require something close to a
mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good. The more
radical thinkers of the Enlightenment and their more recent intellectual
descendants hoped for something like this, of course. So far it has
not happened, and as I have argued, it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable
future. The critique of secularity common to all the resurgent
movements is that human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished
and finally untenable condition.
To the extent that secularity today has a specifically modern form
(there were earlier forms in, for example, versions of Confucianism
and Hellenistic culture), the critique of secularity also entails a critique
of at least these aspects of modernity. Beyond that, however, different
religious movements differ in their relation to modernity. As I have
said, an argument can be made that the Islamic resurgence strongly
tends toward a negative view of modernity; in places it is downright
anti-modern or counter-modernizing, as in its view of the role of
women. By contrast, I think it can be shown that the Evangelical
resurgence is positively modernizing in most places where it occurs, clearly
so in Latin America. The new Evangelicals throw aside many of the traditions
that have been obstacles to modernization—machismo, for one,
and also the subservience to hierarchy that has been endemic to Iberian
Catholicism. Their churches encourage values and behavior patterns
that contribute to modernization. To take just one important case in
point: In order to participate fully in the life of their congregations,
Evangelicals will want to read the Bible; this desire to read the Bible
encourages literacy and, beyond this, a positive attitude toward education
and self-improvement. They also will want to be able to join in the
discussion of congregational affairs, since those matters are largely in
the hands of laypersons (indeed, largely in the hands of women); this
lay operation of churches necessitates training in administrative skills,
including the conduct of public meetings and the keeping of financial
accounts. It is not fanciful to suggest that in this way Evangelical
congregations serve—inadvertently, to be sure—as schools for democracy
and for social mobility.
Religious Resurgence and World Affairs
Other questions posed for discussion in this volume concern the relation
of the religious resurgence to a number of issues not linked to
religion.
* First, international politics. Here one comes up head-on against
the thesis, eloquently proposed not long ago by Samuel Huntington,
that, with the end of the Cold War, international affairs will be affected
by a "clash of civilizations" rather than by ideological conflicts.
There is something to be said for this thesis. The great ideological
conflict that animated the Cold War is certainly dormant for the moment,
but I, for one, would not bet on its final demise. Nor can we be
sure that new ideological conflicts may not arise in the future. To the
extent that nationalism is an ideology (more accurately, each nationalism
has its own ideology), ideology is alive and well in a long list of
countries.
It is also plausible that, in the absence of the overarching confrontation
between Soviet Communism and the American-led West, cultural
animosities suppressed during the Cold War period are surfacing.
Some of these animosities have themselves taken on an
ideological form, as in the assertion of a distinctive Asian identity by a
number of governments and intellectual groups in East and Southeast
Asia. This ideology has become especially visible in debates over
the allegedly ethnocentric/Eurocentric character of human rights as
propagated by the United States and other Western governments and
governmental organizations. But it would probably be an exaggeration
to see these debates as signaling a clash of civilizations. The situation
closest to a religiously defined clash of civilizations would come
about if the world-view of the most radical branches of the Islamic
resurgence came to be established within a wider spectrum of countries
and became the basis of the foreign policies of these countries.
As yet this has not happened.
To assess the role of religion in international politics, it would be
useful to distinguish between political movements that are genuinely
inspired by religion and those that use religion as a convenient legitimation
for political agendas based on quite non-religious interests.
Such a distinction is difficult but not impossible. Thus there is no
reason to doubt that the suicide bombers of the Islamic Haws movement
truly believe in the religious motives they avow. By contrast,
there is good reason to doubt that the three parties involved in the
Bosnian conflict, commonly represented as a clash between religions,
are really inspired by religious ideas. I think it was P. J. O'Rourke
who observed that these three parties are of the same race, speak the
same language, and are distinguished only by their religion, which
none of them believe. The same skepticism about the religious nature
of an allegedly religious conflict is expressed in the following
joke from Northern Ireland: As a man walks down a dark street in
Belfast, a gunman jumps out of a doorway, holds a gun to his head,
and asks, "Are you Protestant or Catholic?" The man stutters, "Well,
actually, I'm an atheist." "Ah yes," says the gunman, "but are you a
Protestant or a Catholic atheist?"
* Second, war and peace. It would be nice to be able to say that
religion is everywhere a force for peace. Unfortunately, it is not. Very
probably religion in the modern world more often fosters war, both
between and within nations. Religious institutions and movements
are fanning wars and civil wars on the Indian subcontinent, in the
Balkans, in the Middle East, and in Africa, to mention only the most
obvious cases. Occasionally, indeed, religious institutions try to resist
warlike policies or to mediate between conflicting parties. The Vatican
mediated successfully in some international disputes in Latin
America. There have been religiously inspired peace movements in
several countries (including the United States, during the Vietnam
War). Both Protestant and Catholic clergy have tried to mediate the
conflict in Northern Ireland, though with notable lack of success.
But it is probably a mistake to look here simply at the actions of
formal religious institutions or groups. There may be a diffusion of
religious values in a society that could have peace-prone consequences
even in the absence of formal actions by church bodies. For
example, some analysts have argued that the wide diffusion of Christian
values played a mediating role in the process that ended the
apartheid regime in South Africa, even though the churches were
mostly polarized between the two sides of the conflict, at least until
the last few years of the regime, when the Dutch Reformed Church
reversed its position on apartheid.
* Third, economic development. The basic text on the relation of
religion and economic development is, of course, the German sociologist
Max Weber's 1905 work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Scholars have been arguing over the thesis of this book for
over ninety years. However one comes out on this (I happen to be an
unreconstructed Weberian), it is clear that some values foster modern
economic development more than others. Something like Weber's
"Protestant ethic" is probably functional in an early phase of capitalist
growth—an ethic, whether religiously inspired or not, that values
personal discipline, hard work, frugality, and a respect for learning.
The new Evangelicalism in Latin America exhibits these values in
virtually crystalline purity, so that my own mental subtitle for the research
project on this topic conducted by the center I direct at Boston
University has been, "Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala."
Conversely, Iberian Catholicism, as it was established in
Latin America, clearly does not foster such values.
But religious traditions can change. Spain experienced a remarkably
successful period of economic development beginning in the
waning years of the Franco regime, and one of the important factors
was the influence of Opus Dei, which combined rigorous theological
orthodoxy with a market-friendly openness in economic matters. I
have suggested that Islam, by and large, has difficulties with a modern
market economy; yet Muslim emigrants have done remarkably
well in a number of countries (for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa),
and there is a powerful Islamic movement in Indonesia that might
yet play a role analogous to that of Opus Dei in the Catholic world.
I should add that for years now there has been an extended debate
over the part played by Confucian-inspired values in the economic
success stories of East Asia; if one is to credit the "post-Confucian
thesis" and also to allow that Confucianism is a religion, then here
would be a very important religious contribution to economic development.
One morally troubling aspect of this matter is that values functional
at one period of economic development may not be functional
at another. The values of the "Protestant ethic" or a functional equivalent
thereof are probably essential during the phase that Walt
Rostow called "the take-off," but may not be so in a later phase.
Much less austere values may be more functional in the so-called
post-industrial economies of Europe, North America, and East Asia.
For example, frugality, however admirable from a moral viewpoint,
may actually be a vice economically speaking. Although undisciplined
hedonists have a hard time climbing out of primitive poverty,
they can do well in the high-tech, knowledge-driven economies of
the advanced societies.
* Finally, human rights and social justice. Religious institutions
have, of course, made many statements on human rights and social justice.
Some of these have had important political consequences, as in the
civil-rights struggle in the United States and the collapse of Communist
regimes in Europe. But, as mentioned previously, there are different
religiously articulated views about the nature of human rights.
The same goes for ideas about social justice: what is justice to some
groups is gross injustice to others. Sometimes it is very clear that positions
taken by religious groups on such matters are based on a religious
rationale; the principled opposition to abortion and contraception
by the Roman Catholic Church is such a clear case. At other
times, though, positions on social justice, even if legitimated by religious
rhetoric, reflect the location of the religious functionaries in
this or that network of non-religious social classes and interests. To
stay with the same example, I think that this is the case with most of
the positions taken by American Catholic institutions on social-justice
issues other than those relating to sexuality and reproduction.
I have dealt very briefly with immensely complex matters. I was
asked to give a global overview, and that is what I have tried to do.
There is no way that I can end this with some sort of uplifting sermon.
Both those who have great hopes for the role of religion in the
affairs of this world and those who fear this role must be disappointed
by the factual evidence. In assessing this role, there is no alternative
to a nuanced, case-by-case approach. But one statement can be made
with great confidence: Those who neglect religion in their analyses
of contemporary affairs do so at great peril.
