Globalization and Religion Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Globalization describes the historical process by which all the world’s people come to live in a single social unit. Religion constitutes an important dimension of globalization through its worldwide institutional presence, its importance in structuring individual and collective cultural difference, and as an effective resource for local and global social mobilization for various goals. Religion is a highly contested, occasionally powerful, and often conflictual domain of some consequence in the global social system.

Although explicitly religious institutions are the foundation of religion’s global social presence, it is the implication of religion in other social, but especially political, movements that has thus far received the most attention in social scientific literature. It is no mere coincidence that the political impact of religion in developments ranging from the Islamic revolution in Iran and the New Christian Right in the USA to the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the religiously defined cleavages of Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim in the former Yugoslavia, appeared on the global scene at roughly the same time as the notion of globalization. The often invidious term fundamentalism has gained a corresponding popularity, referring to religious movements like these, ones that advocate the public enforcement of religious precepts or the exclusive religious identification of state collectivities. Characteristic of such movements is that they seek to enforce highly particular and frequently absolutist visions of the world in their countries, but with explicit reference to the globalizing context which they deem to be the prime threat under such epithets as ”global arrogance” (Iran) or ”one-worldism” (USA). The religious visions that inform them are the basis for this combination of a claim to universal validity with being centered in a particular part of the world among a particular people. Thus does religion serve as a globally present way of making cultural difference a prime structural feature of a globalized world that also relativizes all such differences by incorporating everyone in a single social system.

The explicit study of religion in the context of globalization is only in its beginnings. The sociological neglect of this topic may be due to the fact that religions usually ground themselves in tradition as opposed to contemporary developments, to the close relation between religion and local and regional culture, and perhaps to the lingering effect of secularization perspectives which have led many social scientists to expect religion to be irrelevant in the modern world. Be that as it may, a now rapidly growing literature that sees religion as an important player in today’s global context heralds a much needed new direction in this regard.

Bibliography:

Beyer, (ed.) (2001) Religion in the Process of Globalization (Religion im Prozess der Globalisierung). Ergon Verlag, Wurzburg.
Esposito, J. L. & Watson, M. (eds.) (2000) Religion and Global Order. University of Wales Press, Cardiff.