ABSTRACT
As a word and a concept,“globalization” is a relative neologism, appearing in English dictionaries no earlier than the late 1950s and only attaining its current popularity as of the 1990s. “Fundamentalism” has a somewhat older history, dating back at least to the early twentieth century.Yet the meaning of the term that is currently dominant, referring to a particular kind of religious and usually also political movement, only gained widespread use after the end of the 1970s. This rough simultaneity is not a mere coincidence. Religious movements that have been labeled fundamentalisms over the past few decades are the sort of critical events that, for many, signaled the need to speak about our broader social world in new terms;“globalization” has become the term of choice in this regard (although the idea of “postmodern” arose at the same time and speaks to the same shift in perception; see Lyotard 1984, French original published 1979). They are not the only such events, to be sure. Indeed, the currently still prevailing understanding of globalization sees it in primarily economic terms, pertaining to the supposed late-twentieth century worldwide integration of capitalist markets and investment along what is sometimes called a “neo-liberal”model, which stresses minimal restriction on the global flow of trade and capital (for a introductions, see Scholte 2005;Gopinath 2008).Yet even here, when religion appears in discussions of globalization, more often than not, it does so under the heading of “fundamentalisms,” which are generally understood as reactions against the homogenizing and generally “secularizing” forces of (economic) globalization, different but analogous to other anti-(or alternative) globalization movements. A different understanding of globalization has been somewhat overshadowed by this
economic conception, although the balance has in the last decade been shifting. It stresses not just its integrative or homogenizing character, but also the way that the contemporary world simultaneously generates renewed and powerful assertions of difference or heterogeneity. In this conception, what are called fundamentalisms can appear rather more central given that one of their characteristics is an insistence on difference. In the more popular literature on this subject, this stress on and even anxiety about difference is still perhaps best expressed in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis or in Benjamin Barber’s notion of “Jihad vs. McWorld” (Barber 1996;Huntington 1996). The “civilizations” that are in conflict mostly have
a presumed “religious” basis (Confucian,Western Christian, Eastern Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on); what opposes economic neo-liberalism (McWorld) is based in religion (Jihad). One can go further with this parallel.Within globalization discussions, one of the more
persistent questions concerns when this process supposedly began and, in relation to this, through what historical phases it may have gone since its beginning (Campbell 2007; Held et al. 1999: 414-44; Robertson 1992: 57-60; Scholte 2005: ch.3;Wallerstein 1974-1980).While there is little agreement on the answers to this question, a prevailing understanding distinguishes between “modern” globalization, beginning somewhere in the late fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and antecedent developments around the world before that time and stretching back as far as the beginning of recorded human history. The modern period is associated with the beginnings of European expansion and the gradual development of what Wallerstein first called the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein 1979).Within such an economy-centered approach, phases correspond to periods of expansion and contraction or consolidation of this global economy between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, as more and more of the world becomes incorporated within the world-system. Not nearly as often noted, however, are the significant, and increasingly global, religious developments that have also characterized these same centuries. Critical among these would be the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in sixteenth century Europe; religious transformations that were also central to the development of the European state system that eventually expanded to the entire globe. To this corresponded the expansion of Christianity in the form of European colonizers, but especially through missionaries that accompanied, followed, or even preceded the economic and political bearers of European power. From the sixteenth century onward, Catholic missionaries were active in virtually every corner of the globe, in the Americas, in Africa, in the Indian subcontinent, and in China and Japan (see Neill 1986). Moreover, much as in the case of the global capitalist economy, the real “take-off phase” (Robertson 1992) came in the nineteenth century, and most especially toward the end of that century and into the twentieth. Protestant and Orthodox Christian missions joined Catholic ones to consolidate and further the spread of their religion to other regions. Perhaps even more important, the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth
century witnessed significant changes in the non-European world as well. These were in part responses to incorporation and they very much included religious transformations. Reformation movements of diverse sorts in East and South Asia, in the Middle East, Africa and in Latin America, not to mention Europe, refashioned for this increasingly globalized context the religious traditions and cultures of these regions to face up to, compete with, and in certain cases to emulate or expressly reject the Christian model presented and developed during these centuries by the Europeans (Beyer 2006). These developments,which are still very much ongoing, resulted in the gradual formation and mutual identification of the set of so-called “world religions” that are today recognized and present virtually around the world. It is in terms of these religions that twentieth century “fundamentalisms” have come to be understood. The “world religions,” in other words, both in conception and to a large degree in form, have been as much an aspect and a symptom of the historical process of globalization as has the globalized capitalist economy and the global system of formally sovereign and territorially defined nation states. Moreover, analogous to the situation in this world economy and global state system, the relations among these (re)constructed religions range along a continuum from one of mutual recognition, toleration, and collaboration in a perceived common enterprise called religion, to outright hostility and conflict as they compete for influence, presence, and adherents. Issues such as religious “conversion”, the changing of religious loyalty and participation,
and the “accommodation” of different religions have become persistent and controversial issues in virtually every part of the world,making the question of religious pluralism one of the most central concerns of religious insiders and outsiders alike (Giordan and Pace 2014). Much as in the domain of the global economy and the global system of states, the religious
dimension of globalization has therefore also been, to say the least, conflicted and contested. Contestation among religious actors, in religious terms, and implicating religion have been and continue to be a characteristic feature as the idea of the religions has formed and taken hold; and as religious cultures themselves have taken shape and reformed for the globalizing context. Such contestation has concerned chiefly three sorts of boundary questions. First, which religions are to legitimately count among the religions? Second what, internally, is the proper content of those religions and, relatedly, which subdivisions of these religions are to be recognized? Third, what should be the range of religious influence or operation? Moreover, certain periods in modern global history have witnessed a far greater presence and frequency of such religious contestation than others, and these periods correspond more or less to certain phases of globalization. Among these, two stand out for our purposes here, the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century period that, as noted, Robertson identifies as the “take-off ” phase of globalization; and the later-twentieth to early-twenty-first century period in which we find ourselves now.Not at all coincidentally, the first witnessed the advent of the word “fundamentalism” and the second its global application beyond the realm of American Protestant Christianity. The arrival of fundamentalism as a descriptive term occurred in the context of early-twen-
tieth century American Protestant Christianity. The Fundamentalists represented a movement that opposed a different and “liberal” form of Christianity (Marsden 1980); it was an example of inner-religious contestation over, roughly speaking, “orthodoxy” or “correct religion.” Just as important, however,was why the Fundamentalists thought that liberal Christianity was problematic, namely that liberals supposedly were allowing a “de-Christianization” and thus, for the Fundamentalists, a critical weakening of the influence of religion and thereby an undermining of the health of American society. Fundamentalism was in that sense a dispute about the content of a religion and how determinative religious understandings should be in society. It was an attempt at religious re-formation or re-assertion at a critical juncture in not only the history of the United States but, as already outlined, in the development of today’s global system. While the American case marks the advent of the word “fundamentalism” and refers to such
re-formation and re-assertion processes, it was by far not the only significant religious occurrence worldwide during the “take-off ” phase. In China, the New Text movement was leading to an eventually completely unsuccessful attempt to re-imagine the Confucian tradition as the religion of Confucius (kongjiao), or, to use Lionel Jensen’s term,“Confucianity” (Jensen 1997). In Japan, the post-Meiji Restoration elite was busily refashioning Shinto into what one could call a “state orthodoxy,” thereby relegating all other religions (shukyo) to a privatized domain and expanding State Shinto beyond the category of religion to make it a foundational ideology of the society (Josephson 2012). In India, movements like the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Math and Mission sought to imagine a reformed and united Hinduism for the first time in history, bringing to one of its high points a process of religion formation that had begun earlier in the century and that featured a corresponding assertion of a counter-orthodoxy in the form of what was becoming known as Sanatana Dharma, the eternal teaching (Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995). Here reform movements, much as in the case of American Protestant Christianity, engendered counter-orthodoxy responses. In the Punjab region of India, the Singh Sabha movement in the late nineteenth century and its successor Akali
movement of the early twentieth century not only succeeded in asserting a renewed Khalsa Sikh orthodoxy and thereby progressively marginalizing other forms; they also for the first time in Sikh history brought about a clear distinction between Sikhism and Hinduism as religions (Oberoi 1994). A bit farther south, the early twentieth century saw the rise in Sri Lanka/Ceylon of Angarika Dharmapala’s attempt to reform Buddhism in a way that attenuated the distinction between monastic and lay Buddhism (Roberts 1997). In sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous Christians gradually became the dominant missionizing force among their fellow Africans, leading both to the explosive growth of this religion in that region and to the rise of a number of indigenous Christian movements, above all the African Instituted Churches that today are such a significant part of the African Christian landscape (Isichei 1995). Across the Muslim world from Northern Africa to Southern Asia, various reform movements associated first with names like Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in the ninteenth century, and then Rashid Rida, Hasan al-Banna and Mawlana Mawdudi in the twentieth century initiated a revisioning of Islam that formed the basis of many and even most subsequent Islamic and Islamist movements of the later twentieth century (Voll 1982; Jung 2011). The late ninteenth and early twentieth century also witnessed the rise of the Zionist movement among Jews in Europe, a development that eventually led to the foundation of the State of Israel in the mid twentieth century, but just as importantly to assertions of Jewish orthodoxy, such as Agudat Israel, to counter the secularist Zionists; and the beginnings of specifically religious Zionism under Rabbi Kook (Lustick 1988). This is only an incomplete list of important examples, but what is particularly noticeable
among so many of them is their close association with corresponding nationalist movements in the respective regions. In other words, just like in so-called fundamentalist movements of the late twentieth century, religion (re)formation and state (re)formation have usually been closely associated and often even intimately related. Most of the movements just mentioned were an important moment in how particular parts of the world responded to their increasing integration into a single social system that today so many people analyze under the rubric of globalization. These religious developments were often aspects of a “reaction against,” usually against the domination of Western powers; but they were for the most part not specifically “reactionary,”meaning that they did not seek to re-establish some prior situation, some “ancien régime,” as it were. In point of fact, to the extent that many of them could be styled as defensive, they were also innovative and historically unprecedented even as concerns their religious content. The expansion in meaning of the word “fundamentalism” from one that refers for the most
part to a certain direction in American Protestant Christianity to a globally applicable term corresponds roughly with the advent of late-twentieth century religio-political events in different parts of the world, especially two of them virtually simultaneously in two different religions: 1979 saw the rise of the New Christian Right in the United States, signaled especially through the foundation of the Fundamentalist Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority; and the Iranian revolution with its theocratic face in the person of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was in the aftermath of these occurrences that one sees the rather sudden and much more widespread use of the term “fundamentalism.”Where before, the word was occasionally used to refer in general to rigid ideological orientations and in some cases to certain Islamic directions (such as those of Mawdudi in Pakistan; see Binder 1957), from this time forward one witnesses, first, widespread reference to “Islamic fundamentalism,” and then more generally to fundamentalism in the form of various other religio-political movements that sought to move religious orientations and determinations (back) into the state-political arena (for earlier collections, see Hadden and Shupe 1986, 1989; Robertson and Garrett 1991; Shupe and Hadden 1988). In
subsequent years, “fundamentalisms” appeared to arise from virtually every one of the recognized “world religions”: Jewish fundamentalism in Israel with the radicalization of religious Zionism in Israel after 1977 (but see the earlier use by Charles Liebman (Liebman 1966)); Sikh fundamentalism in the context of the Punjab crisis of the early 1980s; and then a few years later, Hindu fundamentalism in the form of the Hindu nationalist movement embodied in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its associated “family of organizations” (Sangh Parivar)). The term was even applied to Buddhist movements such as the Soka Gakkai and its associated Komeito party in Japan, and the Sinhalese nationalism embroiled in the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka (for a wide range of examples from around the world, see Marty and Appleby 1991-95; also Almond et al. 2003). To a large degree, the movements in question did indeed arise at this time, and therefore it may not be surprising that observers paid so much attention to them.Yet, equally as significant is what all these otherwise very diverse movements supposedly had in common that would warrant using a single and such a singular descriptor for them. Much like the co-arising idea of globalization, applying the term fundamentalism to such a
wide variety of religious, and generally religio-political, movements pointed to what was perceived to be unprecedented or special about them all. Globalization, appearing as a concept at the same time, seemed a necessary neologism because of a realization that, somehow, all of us on the globe were living in a single social world in a way and with an intensity that had not existed before or that we had not noticed as clearly before. Fundamentalism signaled an analogous realization: religion and the religions seemed to be taking forms that, for most of the observers who used the term, were not just unexpected, but perhaps even out of place and out of time. For most, but not all, of those using the term, the kind of religion that claims to be at the center of human affairs, that successfully seeks to have its religious precepts exert determinative influence in the “public” realm of “modern” and supposedly secular societies should not have been happening, but it was and it was happening all around the very same world that now appeared to be increasingly integrated. It was not a great leap from here to see the two as related, and specifically to see fundamentalisms as a reaction against globalization or – what amounts to the same – against the “secularity” of the dominant forces in this worldwide social world: the modern state, the capitalist economy, and scientific rationality (Almond et al. 2003; Juergensmeyer 1993; Keddie 1998;Marty and Appleby 1991-95). Initially, especially before the fall of the Soviet empire and the collapse of state-centered socialism as a believable alternative to global (neo-liberal) capitalism, the idea of fundamentalism could help sustain the (still) widespread notion that, somehow, the “religious” and the “modern” were at odds, that a “modern” society is ipso facto a secularized or secularizing society, where religion at best maintains itself as a privatized concern. To the extent that “globalized” society was also modern – and its understanding as globalized capitalism pointed in this direction – the “resurgence” of something that was decidedly “unmodern,” perhaps even“medieval,” could be understood as “reaction against.” Since then, however, as globalization has taken on the status of a buzzword as much as an understandable concept, that mode of understanding may be becoming less convincing. In the age of the “clash of civilizations” and the “war on terror,” fundamentalisms now appear, not simply or even primarily as “reaction against,” but more as – still often problematic – “symptom of” globalization. In a post-ColdWar context where popularized terms like “NewWorld Order,”“clash of civilizations,” and “the war on terror” seek to capture what are now the key characteristics of the current global order, religion more generally, but religio-political fundamentalisms in particular, appear increasingly as a regular feature of that order, something expressive of it rather than a rearguard action on the part of those who hanker for the communal and isolated security of a bygone world.
