Globalisation of religions

The term “globalisation” is often used in economic contexts and its impact on social issues are rarely given as much space. In “Levels of globalisation vs levels of religious participation” an article claims that “Some clerics and theologians argue that globalisation is tantamount to an assault on religious faith, because it undermines traditional morals and supplants local values with a culture of materialism and excess common in the West.” Does global integration lead to secularisation? In order to explore this question, the rankings of 50 countries have been compared in the Globalisation Index (2001) with a ranking of countries according to levels of religious participation. (This ranking is derived from results of the World Values Survey from 1981 to 2001, which asked respondents “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days?”)

As the chart indicates, several of the countries clustered near the bottom of the Globalisation Index exhibit high levels of religious participation. Yet, there is a significant number of exceptions. For instance, Ireland and the United States, which both rank in the top 10 in 2001 Globalisation Index, are among the most religious societies in the world. Conversely, Greece (ranked 28th) and Ukraine (ranked 43rd), exhibit low levels of religious participation. And Iran, which ranks last in the index, is actually less religious than highly globalised countries such as Canada (6th) and Portugal (16th). Pope John Paul II indirectly addressed this question of globalisation and its impact on religions in a recent publication. Pope John Paul II criticises Western democracies for abandoning God’s laws hinting as the reason for globalisation. Of course the Pope, however, champions the cause of secularism in Hindu India where it suits his agenda.

Sophie Arie’s “Must democracy rest on faith? (The Christian Science Monitor) writes “just as democracy is celebrating its first victories over tyranny and fear in the Middle East, one of its greatest advocates in the 20th century, Pope John Paul II, has issued a stark warning that self-rule does not always work. In a new book published last week, Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums, the Pope attacks Western democratic society for being so obsessed with freedom that it has lost its sense of good and evil. In the “negative” society of the West, the Pope writes, “the principle to which people aspire is to think and act as if God did not exist.” There are such “enormous economic forces” behind the Western antigospel campaign, which supports divorce, free love, abortion, and euthanasia, that the Pope wonders whether the Western way of life is in fact a “new totalitarianism cunningly disguised as democracy.”

He noted that it was a democratic parliament in Germany that allowed the election of Hitler in the 1930s. “We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present-day democracies,” he wrote. The main question the Pope is raising, is whether humans should be free to make laws as they please or is there a law of God that nobody can breach? For the Pope, the evolution of some Central and Eastern European countries who have embraced capitalism without restraint, is cause for concern. “We are now at a peak of the domination of so-called freedom values,” said Ingo Friedrich, who is vice-president of the European parliament, where he represents the People’s Party. “When you have very high levels of wealth, the danger of freedom overload is always higher,” he says. “We are definitely at a time when people are wondering how far this freedom thing will go.”

Luis Yerovi Jr <mailto:cafezero- @aol.com> declares that “Living in the 21st century is a complex predicament for the human psyche. Technology and globalisation have put us in uneasy contact with everyone in the world. Deprived of isolation, our self-identity is threatened. Furthermore, ‘pop’ culture, ‘pop’ politics and ‘pop’ markets swamp our already saturated neurons. Not only is our identity in chaos, but the reality of our world is hidden behind an industrial propaganda fog. There is an inherent threat to the concept of ‘identity’ as we normally define it with a perpetual struggle between the new ‘globalised world’ and the old primitive world.” Yerovi goes further to observe that human evolution is part of natural history. As opposed to other species, human history reflects not only the evolution of genes but the evolution of memes or transferable ideas.

Memes make up human culture and their evolution is termed cultural evolution….Confounding these instinctual and biological roots of identity come those identity markers arising from our cultural or meme evolution. Foremost amongst these memes are religious identity. These identity markers are unique to humans. For example, gazelles are neither Buddhist nor Muslim, they are just gazelles. Religion survived in its many forms because it helped to ensure the survival of the group by giving identity to the individual. The question is: In a globalised world, are these cultural adaptations, which mold our identity, still advantageous to the survival of the individual, of the group and, ultimately, of the species — homo sapien? Unlike religion, the memes of capitalism, industrialisation and corporate globalisation are not beneficial to human. They put corporate health — the survival of the likes of McDonald’s, Nike, the oil industry — over human well being. We must invoke the mantra that Humans were meant to survive, not memes.