TOPIC 3

• Religion, much more than culture, has the most difficult relationship with globalism. First, the two are entirely contrasting belief systems.
• Religion is concerned with the sacred, while globalism places value on material wealth.
• Religion follows divine commandments, while globalism abides by man-made laws.
• Religion assumes that there is “the possibility of communication between humans and the transcendent.” This link between the human and the divine confers some social power on the latter.
• Religious people are less concerned with wealth and all that comes along with it.
• They are ascetics precisely because they shun anything material for complete simplicity – from their domain to the clothes they wear, to the food they eat, and even the manner in which they talk. 


  religious person
• A religious person’s main duty is to live a virtuous, sin-less life such that when he/she dies, he/she is assured of a place in the other world. O
• n the other hand, globalists are less worried about whether they will end up in heaven or hell.
• Their skills are more pedestrian as they aim to seal trade deals, raise the profits of private enterprises, improve government revenue collections, and protect the elites from being excessively taxed by the state.


  globalists
• If he/she has a strong social conscience, the globalist see his/her work as contributing to the general progress of the community, the nation and the global economic system.
• The religious detests politics and the quest for power for they are evidence of humanity’s weakness; the globalist values them as both means and ends to open up further the economies of the world.
• Finally, religion and globalism clash over the fact that religious evangelization is in itself a form of globalization.
• The globalist ideal, on the other hand, is largely focused on the realm of markets.
• The religious is concerned with spreading holy ideas globally, while the globalist wishes to spread goods and services.
• The “missions” being sent by American Born-Again Christian churches, Sufi and Shiite Muslim orders, as well as institutions like Buddhist monasteries and Catholic, Protestant and Mormon churches are efforts at “spreading the word of God” and gaining adherents abroad.
• Religions regard identities associated with globalism as inferior and narrow because they are earthly categories. In contrast, membership to a religious group, organization or cult represents a superior affiliation that connects humans directly to the divine and supernatural.
• These philosophical differences explain why certain groups “flee” their communities and create impenetrable sanctuaries where they can practice their religions without meddling and control of state authorities. 


  The followers of Dalai Lama established Tibet for this purpose, and certain Buddhist monasteries are located away from civilization so that hermits can devote themselves to prayer and contemplation. These groups believe that living among “non-believers” will distract them from their mission or tempt them to abandon their faith and become sinners like everyone else.
• These philosophical differences explain why certain groups “flee” their communities and create impenetrable sanctuaries where they can practice their religions without meddling and control of state authorities.
• The followers of Dalai Lama established Tibet for this purpose, and certain Buddhist monasteries are located away from civilization so that hermits can devote themselves to prayer and contemplation. 


  These groups believe that living among “non-believers” will distract them from their mission or tempt them to abandon their faith and become sinners like everyone else.
• Communities justify their opposition to government authority on religious grounds.
• Priestesses and monks led the first revolts against colonialism in Asia and Africa, warning that these outsiders were out to destroy their people’s gods and ways of life.
• Similar arguments are being invoked by contemporary versions of these millenarian movements that wish to break away from the hold of the state or vow to overthrow the latter in the name of god.
• To their “prophets,” the state seeks to either destroy their people’s sacred beliefs or distort religion to serve non-religious goals
• In actuality, the relationship between religion and globalism is much more complicated.
• Peter Berger argues that far from being secularized, the “contemporary world is…furiously religious. In most of the world, there are veritable explosions of religious fervor, occurring in one form of another in all the major religious traditions and in many places in imaginative syntheses of one or more world religions with indigenous faiths.”
• Religions are the foundations of modern republics.
• The Malaysian government places religion at the center of the political system. Its constitution explicitly states that “Islam is the religion of the Federation,” and the rulers of each state was also the “Head of the religion of Islam.”
• The late Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, bragged about the superiority of Islamic ruler over its secular counterparts and pointed out that “there is no fundamental distinction among constitutional, despotic, dictatorial, democratic, and communistic regimes.”
• Moreover, religious movements do not hesitate to appropriate secular themes and practices. The moderate Muslim association Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia has Islamic schools where students are taught not only about Islam but also about modern science, the social sciences, modern banking, civic education, rights of women, pluralism and democracy.
• In other cases, religion was the result of a shift in state policy
• There is hardly a religious movement today that does not use religion to oppose “profane” globalization. yet, two of the so-called “old world religions” – Christianity and Islam – see globalization less as an obstacle and more as an opportunity to expand their reach all over the world.
• Globalization has “freed” communities from the “constraints of the nation-state,” but in the process, also threatened to destroy the cultural system that bind them together.
• Religion seeks to take the place of these broken “traditional ties” to either help communities cope with their new situation or organize them to oppose this major transformation of their lives.
• Religion is thus not the “regressive force” that stops or slows down globalization; it is a “pro-active force” that gives communities a new and powerful basis of identity.
• It can provide the groups “moral codes” that answer problems ranging from people’s health to social conflict to even “personal happiness.” 


  religion
• Religious fundamentalism may dislike globalization’s materialism, but it continues to use “the full range of modern means of communication and organization” that is associated with this economic transformation.
• It has tapped “fast long-distance transport and communications, the availably of English as a global vernacular of unparalleled power, the know-how of modern management and marketing” which enabled the spread of “almost promiscuous propagation of religious forms across the globe in all sorts of directions.” 


  religious fundamentalism
• While religions may benefit from the processes of globalization, this does not mean that its tensions with globalist ideology will subside.
• Some Muslim view “globalization” as a Trojan horse hiding supporters of Western values like secularism, liberalism, or even communism ready to spread these ideas in their areas to eventually displace Islam.
• The World Council of Churches has criticized economic globalization’s negative effects. It vowed that “we as churches make ourselves accountable to the victims of the project of economic globalization,” by becoming the latter’s advocates inside and outside “the centers of power.”