Globalization

views updated

Globalization

Human history has been a process of integration in which social units progressively grew from the hunter-gatherer band, to the tribe, to the nation, and finally to a global socioeconomic unity. Simultaneously, fundamental human needs demand small-scale social organizations, so countervailing forces work against integration and toward societal differentiation. Religion feels pressure from both directions, so in the world today we see evidence of religious unification and of fragmentation. Globalization exposes people to all the great religious traditions of the world, but also encourages making choices and intensification or faith commitments.

A century ago it was still possible to believe that Christianity would soon become the one world religion. Although today Christianity claims the largest number of adherents, Islam is in a strong second place, and the penetration of Christianity into most regions of Asia has stalled. Christianization of the Americas was largely achieved through military force and immigration. Without these factors, success in other parts of the world has been quite limited. When the American Baptist martyr Adoniram Judson arrived in Burma in 1813, he gained essentially no converts at all from the dominant Buddhists, and only after six years of effort translating parts of the Bible into the local language did he gain his first converts, from peripheral groups. When Burma went to war with Britain, he was tortured despite his protestations that his own nation also had struggled against British imperialism. For many Burmese, Christianity was an unwarranted intrusion from an alien culture, and even today the nation remains largely inhospitable to religious colonialism.

Korea is a very different story. The period of rapid Christian conversion was also a time of dominance by Japan, so Christianity could be embraced as an ally in Korea's great national struggle, rather than rejected as an invader. Most importantly, many of the missionaries adopted a strategy—sometimes called the Nevius Plan—that respected local culture and society. Presbyterian missionary John Nevius arrived in China in 1854 and set up a mission station at Chefoo (Yantai), directly across the Yellow Sea from Korea. He immersed himself in every aspect of Chinese culture and often blended it with American ideas. For example, he improved the fruit of the Chinese pear by grafting, and he redesigned the passenger-carrying Chinese wheelbarrow for use on his frequent missionary tours. He relied on his Chinese assistants to spread the faith throughout their communities. By the time of his first visit to Korea, in 1890, his three-part evangelism plan had already influenced the work of Presbyterian missionaries there. First, native Christians and their churches should be self-supporting, rather than relying on material help from the United States. Second, they should recruit new members through active participation in the community. And third, they should limit construction of church buildings to structures of native architecture they could afford without U.S. contributions. Over the following decades, this strategy of self-reliance fostered the building of strong Presbyterian churches across Korea, and other denominations imitated the Presbyterian success.

Although we tend to think of the nineteenth century as the great period of American overseas missions, in fact far more missionaries are working today. The one undeniable revolution accomplished by these missionaries is the growth of Protestantism in Latin America. Rather than introducing a new tradition, the missionaries offer variety within the existing Christian culture, appealing to many constituencies in modernizing Latin societies, from oppressed peasants to the rising middle class. At the same time, Protestant evangelists are linking their converts into transnational denominations and increasing the diversity of religious groups in their nations. At the sectarian end of the denominational spectrum, one result is the emergence of a large number of autonomous, local groups in such North American traditions as Pentecostalism and Holiness, not to mention the indigenous but Protestant-influenced Spiritist tradition. Thus the result of Protestantization is a combination of globalization and localization.

The symbolic opening of America to foreign faiths was the World's Parliament of Religions held at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (world's fair) in Chicago. Among the Asian representatives who spoke at this well-publicized gathering were Hindus, Buddhists (including Zen), and a Jain. The star of the show was Vivekananda, a Hindu working for the amalgamation of the major world religions. Vivekananda subsequently toured several cities, establishing Vedanta in the United States.

Asian religious influences in the United States have gone through several stages in response to changing immigration restrictions, patterns of overseas travel by Americans, and indigenous U.S. cultural trends. The Theosophy movement, with all its offshoots, was created by Westerners who radically transformed Asian religious ideas as they introduced them to a public that was largely ignorant of authentic Asian beliefs. World War II and the subsequent occupation of Japan facilitated the importation of Zen Buddhism, which harmonized with the postwar intellectual milieu of the Beat and existentialist movements. Relaxation of immigration quotas in the 1960s made it easier for evangelists from Asian religions to operate in America. Westerners who possessed positive stereotypes of Eastern religion may have been especially open to these evangelists and may not even have realized that many of them represented deviant groups in their homelands. For example, the Hare Khrishna movement was a splinter of a radical sect in India, rather than representing the central traditions of Hinduism. Some imported movements were westernized to increase their appeal. For example, Transcendental Meditation is a diluted form of Hinduism that employs scientific metaphors and that has specifically targeted university students.

Ironically, when Western missionaries adapt mainstream Christianity to local conditions, they make it easy for local innovators to create radical sects. The Unification Church is a natural outcome of the Nevius Plan. Its founder, Sun Myung Moon, was the son of a Korean family that converted to Presbyterianism. He encountered Adventism, blended its ideas with traditional Korean spiritual concepts, and then sought to bring this Koreanized version of Christianity to the United States. Thus globalization inevitably creates many new religious movements that are amalgams of separate traditions. Whether or not the great world religions will ever successfully invade each other's territory, globalization increases the religious choices rather than uniting everyone in a single faith.