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Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Religion in a Globalizing World
Pluralism, not Secularism is the Dominant Trend in an 'Age of Explosive, Pervasive Religiosity.'
Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla. for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. At the conference, Peter Berger, professor emeritus of religion, sociology and theology at Boston University examined the globalization of religious pluralism. Berger, author of numerous books on sociology, theology, and international development, argues that peaceful coexistence of different racial, ethnic and religious groups -- pluralism not secularization -- is the best model for understanding religion in a globalizing world.
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center
In the following edited excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading.
PETER BERGER: We live in an age of overwhelming religious globalization, and I don't think that one has to justify that statement to this group. Coming down here from Boston I realized I could be in Istanbul if it were a direct flight. But before that, I was in Los Angeles about five weeks ago, and three weeks ago I was in Europe, and both [trips] had to do with religious globalization.
In Los Angeles, the Templeton Foundation ran a very successful conference on global pentecostalism to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Mission, the origin of modern pentecostalism. [Now] in terms of worldwide pentecostalism, the estimates range between 250 million and 450 million adherents, which must be the fastest growth of any religious movement in history. It's an unbelievable phenomenon.
My first stop in Europe was Amsterdam. A little factoid: the majority of children in the incoming grade school class in Rotterdam public schools are Muslim. I think there is no major world religion that is not globalizing in an impressive way. The Roman Catholic Church actually could be called the oldest global institution, and certainly is continuing this today, although it is very much changing its character. Many of you, I'm sure, know Philip Jenkins' writings on the new Christendom. The geographical and demographic center of Christianity is moving from north to south, and within a very few years European and North American Catholics, and Christians of any sort, will be in the minority in the world.
We -- and when I say "we," I don't mean the royal "we," I mean our research center at Boston University -- use the term "popular Protestantism," which is a little vague, but when you see it you know it. So for example, the Mormons, who most people would not consider exactly Protestant, are still very similar to this broad family of religious groups in terms of social characteristics. Mormonism today is probably the fastest growing denomination worldwide -- pentecostalism is not just one denomination. The explosion of Islam, especially in Europe, doesn't have to be elaborated upon here, but the same is true of every other major religion. Judaism is certainly globalizing, American Hasidic agents have been very influential in Eastern Europe -- "agents" is the wrong term; missionaries or whatever you want to call it. Buddhism is spreading in the oddest places; the estimate now is that about 800,000 Americans are converts to Buddhism from other religions. Hinduism is spreading through a number of organizations like the Hare Krishna movement, [and] the Sai Baba movement, in a very interesting way.
I suppose that of the major world religions, the only one that does not globalize is Shinto: It can't, it's too linked to Japan. Even Confucianism, if you want to call it a religion, is globalizing and for a short and rather inglorious period, it became the state ideology of Singapore.
[M]y major thesis this morning is that what is happening with the globalization of religion is a globalization of pluralism. Pluralism, which was a much more geographically, much more limited phenomenon 150 or 200 years ago, has become a global phenomenon, and that has enormous implications. What is pluralism? The term, as far as I know, was coined by Horace Kallen, an American philosopher of the 1920s, whom I think has justly been forgotten. I don't want to be unkind. I once tried to read Kallen and I found him unreadable, but he used the term pluralism in a very normative sense, to celebrate the peaceful coexistence of different ethnic, racial and religious groups in the United States.
The term pluralism [can also be used] in a less value-laden sense, simply as a value-free description of a situation. And I would define pluralism very simply as the coexistence in civic peace -- that's very important -- of different racial, ethnic and religious groups, with social interaction between them. That, I think, is very important. You can have a plurality of religious groups that do not interact, and then it's a little confusing to talk about pluralism.
I recently was on a panel with a very good Turkish sociologist and I talked about modern pluralism. She said, well, pluralism existed in the Ottoman Empire, the millet system where you had Christians and Jews and various groups being sort of self-contained and given certain rights; that was pluralism. And I said, well, not really, because they didn't interact very much. Or India for example: Many Hindus are very proud of the fact that India has always been pluralistic. Well, there's the caste system, which made it extremely difficult for people to interact. The interaction is important in my concept of pluralism because as people talk to each other, , they influence each other, and that is the real challenge of pluralism.
Now, my proposition is that modern pluralism is different not because it's unique, but because of its global spread and its pervasiveness. There have been pluralistic situations, as I defined pluralism, in earlier periods of history – [and they were] very important for the history of Western civilization. The late Roman Empire was pluralistic. Not so incidentally, Christianity came in at that period.
So if you were in metropolitan centers of the Roman Empire -- like, let's say, Alexandria -- you had a very pluralistic situation. Or in the Book of Acts when the Apostle Paul went to Athens, he found temples and altars to every conceivable god. And if you look at the literature from that period, it strikes us as very modern. But stay with the example of Alexandria: If you went up the Nile for 50, 60 miles, I think you would have come on a world of villagers and towns which were totally non-pluralistic, which were very self-contained. Today it is extremely difficult to find places in the world that are self-contained in that way. And also the speed with which pluralization occurs today is unique.
Now, I would also argue that in terms of the effect on religion, pluralism is about the most important global fact to look at -- not secularization. Until quite recently, most scholars who dealt with religion in the modern world adhered to the so-called secularization theory. So did I, by the way, when I started work as a sociologist of religion. And I was not alone: Most people had the same idea. The idea was very simple: the more modernity, the less religion.
This was not a crazy idea, there were some reasons for saying that. [But] I think it was wrong. And I, along with most people in the field, changed my mind about 25 or so years ago, not for some philosophical or theological reason, but simply because the empirical evidence made it impossible to adhere to this theory. There are few people who heroically maintain the theory. The most prominent one died recently: very nice, very intelligent man, Bryan Wilson, All Souls College in Oxford. But most scholars of religion today, I think, would agree that secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity; we live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity.
Now, there are two exceptions to this statement about the religious character of our age: one is sociological, the other one is geographical. The sociological exception is that there is a relatively thin, but very influential stratum of people internationally that indeed is secular. In many countries including the United States, this intelligentsia or cultural elite is very much in conflict with the religious populace. It is a very important fact in many countries.
The other is the geographical exception, which to my mind is the most interesting question today in the sociology of religion. Western and Central Europe is the only important part of the world that is highly secularized. There're some others: Australia apparently [is] highly secularized. Very interesting place not very far from here is Quebec, which rapidly secularized itself in recent decades. But I think in both cases we're really dealing with extensions of Europe.
And, again, why Europe is so secularized is a fascinating issue -- I'm doing a book with a British colleague on this topic, and between us, we came up with seven reasons why Europe is the way it is. It's fascinating. People who deal with the sociology of religion have to deal with Iranian mullahs -- people like that. Well, the Iranian mullahs have been around for a long time, we know how they work basically and why. The interesting things, from a sociologist's point of view, are not Iranian mullahs, but taxi drivers in Stockholm and sociology professors in Paris. Okay, back to pluralism.
One reason why secularization theory collapses under its own weight is the United States, a strongly religious country. If modernity is the key variable, are you going to seriously argue that the United States is less modern than Stockholm? Some people would say, oh, it's an exception. Well, it's too big an exception to keep the theory going. Something's wrong with the theory.
While secularity is not a necessary consequence of modernization, I would argue that pluralism is. And the reason has to do with some very basic processes of modernity: mass migration, mass travel, and probably most important, mass communication -- films, television, the internet, you name it. What does globalizing communication means? Everybody talks to everybody else, and as everyone talks to everybody else, a highly pluralistic situation is enhanced by technology and people begin to influence each other.
Now, let me give a rather personal illustration of what I'm talking about. I'm not just talking about interfaith committees sitting around tables like this. My older son married a woman from India who's a non-practicing Hindu -- and he's a sort of non-practicing Protestant, but it is still a very interfaith marriage.
When my granddaughter was about six, the people across the street were missionaries for Jews for Jesus, and the two little girls had theological conversations with each other that were absolutely fascinating. I wasn't present at any of them, but I got the reports. I would say inter-religious communication by 5-year-old, 6-year-old little girls is sociologically more significant than interfaith committees set up by the Vatican because there are many more little girls than there are theology professors or whatever. It's a massive phenomenon, and I would say inevitable with modernity.
Now, what does that mean for religion? It means that both institutionally and individually, any particular religious tradition can no longer be taken for granted. And this has immense implications for religious institutions and for individual human beings. I have argued before in different contexts that modernity in its essence means an enormous change in the human condition, from fate to choice. For much of human history all kinds of practices, beliefs and institutions were simply an individual's destiny. You were born into a particular situation and that accidental birth determined almost everything you did, including your beliefs.
Modernity means choices, beginning with many choices in terms of technology. Your tribe used one hammer for a particular task for hundreds of years. Now instead of one hammer, you have three technological systems. And there are choices in terms of consumption, production, marriage, occupation and, most dramatically, even identity.
This movement from fate to choice affects not only individuals but also institutions. I would say in the pluralistic situation whether religious institutions like this or not, they become de facto voluntary associations. The prototypical modern, institutional form of religion is the voluntary association. Obviously this voluntariness is enhanced when you have a political and legal system that guarantees religious freedom. [But] even if you look at regimes that try to limit religious freedom -- I would say Russia is a good example, China is a good example -- of course they suppress the voluntariness, but they can't suppress it completely. And you have all kinds of things springing up which the authorities do not like and cannot control.
Another term to use here is "denomination," a peculiarly American term. Richard Niebuhr, a church historian -- not to be confused with his brother Reinhold -- said that denomination was a new form of religious institution peculiar to the United States. He defined it not as a sect, but a church which recognizes de facto, if not de jure, the right of other denominations that do exist. Take the Roman Catholic Church as a very important example. Certainly it couldn't think of itself as a voluntary association, but it has de facto become one. Probably first in the United States, and then after Vatican II internationally, it has now officially accepted that position with its very impressive doctrine of religious freedom.
Even Judaism: It is not easily understood as a voluntary association with its linkage of religion and ethnicity, [but] in the United States, it has become denominationalized. No matter how you count it, there are at least three Jewish denominations in the United States, and depending on what concept you use, there may be actually five or six.
Now, this leads to very significant changes. It obviously leads to changes in the relationship between religious institutions and the state. It changes the relations of institutions to each other. They become competitors in what in effect is a market, and it changes the relationship of religious institutions and their functions to the laity very significantly.
That's very briefly, the institutional consequences of this globalizing pluralism. There are also very interesting consequences for the individual -- again a movement from fate to choice. And increasingly you find individuals who put together their own particular religious profile. You find this very much in North America and in Western Europe. You find it elsewhere as well. Robert Wuthnow, who I think is one of the best sociologists of religion in the United States, has used the term "patchwork religion": People put together different elements of their own tradition and other traditions and say, "Well, I'm Catholic, but --." The "but" is very important and there are many things [included] there.
For example, the belief in reincarnation. An enormous number of people in Europe and America believe in reincarnation, which is not exactly Christian doctrine. So that's part of "I'm Catholic, but I believe I've been here many times before," or something like that. Danielle Hervieu-Léger, a French sociologist of religion uses the term "bricolage," which means tinkering. It's like a Lego, you create your own little version of whatever it is you want to call yourself.
Another topic that I find very important is the interaction of two phenomena, relativism and fundamentalism. The pluralistic situation inevitably relativizes. If you lose the taken-for-granted status of the tradition, it becomes relativized, and actually our language says this very well. For example, one might say, "I happen to be Catholic" -- an extremely interesting phrase. Or a more sort of Californian: "I'm into Buddhism." Which, of course, suggests that tomorrow I might be out of Buddhism, and in fact chances are that I will; I'll discover something else.
I suppose the climax of this relativism in religion and in other things is the so-called postmodern theory. We all have our narratives. There's no way of saying that one narrative is superior to another, and the real virtue here is tolerance. We should all tolerate each other's narratives. This, by the way, is fine as long as you deal with religion that is empirically not falsifiable. When you're dealing with morality, [relativism] is a recipe for social disintegration. Just take a simple example: You're talking to a victim of rape and you say, well, there's the rapist's narrative and there's your narrative, and you know, you have to respect -- well, you can't. If you do that, society will cease to exist. So relativism is a very dangerous direction.
Fundamentalism can be defined in different ways. I would define it as an attempt to restore or create anew the taken-for-grantedness of a particular worldview, of a particular religious tradition, against a relativization of the modern world. And that's a very difficult project.
Let me simply say there are two models of fundamentalism. One is [what] I call the "reconquista" model. That was the term used in the endless war between Christians and Muslims in Spain when the Spanish Christians were going to re-conquer Spain from Islam. The reconquista model of fundamentalism is to impose the restored taken-for-grantedness on an entire society. The Catholic Church has long given up this project. The role it had during the Spanish civil war would be unthinkable today.
Unfortunately, there are significant elements in the Muslim world that do want to do that. It's a very difficult project because for the project to succeed, you have to control and eliminate the pluralistic dynamic, and that's very hard to do. As I've mentioned before with Russia and China, even if you have a totalitarian state, it is difficult to do.
The more modest, and therefore more possible, model for fundamentalism is a sort of micro-totalitarianism. You don't try to impose your ideas on the society as a whole, but you create a community within which it becomes possible. This is the sectarian or sub-cultural possibility. It's also difficult because the pluralistic dynamic is very strong and you have to have very strong isolation of your community from the surrounding society, which you have decided can go to hell because the truth is now within your community. But at least compared to the reconquista model, it is feasible.
In the dialectic between relativism and fundamentalism, looking at it now from the point of view of the healthy society or a healthy democracy, it seems to me both are equally destructive possibilities: relativism because it makes social order in the end impossible; fundamentalism because it creates either civil strife or, at worst when it succeeds, some kind of tyranny. And I think a very important intellectual and indeed political purpose would be to clearly define and occupy the middle ground, which is neither relativistic, in which all questions of truth become obsolete, nor a fundamentalist, militant adherence to absolute truth.
I would say in most western countries, most people indeed occupy that middle ground. I think if you look at survey data you'll find that most Americans are somewhere in the middle on most of the neuralgic issues of the culture wars. So it's not an impossible project.