God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society

God in the Tumult of the Global Square

God in the Tumult of the Global Square

RELIGION IN GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, and John Soboslai

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Juergensmeyer, Mark, author.

    God in the tumult of the global square : religion in global civil society / Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, and John Soboslai.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-28346-6 (cloth, alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-28347-3 (pbk., alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95932-3 (electronic)

    1. Religion and civil society.    2. Religion and sociology.    3. Religion and politics.    4. Globalization—Religious aspects.    I. Griego, Dinah, author.    II. Soboslai, John, author.    III. Title.

BL65.C62J84    2015

201’.7—dc23 2015001143

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To the memory of Robert Bellah

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Thinking about Religion in the Global Age

1. The Social Turmoil of the Twenty-First Century: Crises of Identity, Accountability, and Security

2. Religion Tumbles and Turns: How Religion Has Been Affected by Global Forces

3. Religion Resists and Soothes: Religious Responses to Globalization

4. Cosmopolitan Religion at Work: How Religious Values Support Global Citizenship

5. The Annoying Certainty of Global Views: The Dangers of Cultural Imperialism

Conclusion: God in the Global Square

Notes

Bibliography

List of Workshop Participants

Index

For introductory videos to each chapter, go to ucpress.edu/go/globalsquare.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The roots of the project on which this book is based, Religion in Global Civil Society, go back to 2008, when the Henry Luce Foundation provided seed money for an exploratory workshop on the topic. A group of scholars and representatives of international humanitarian organizations in different parts of the world came together in Santa Barbara for a one-day meeting to assess how religion is changing in the global era and how these changes affect the work of civil society groups and movements. Inevitably, the discussion broadened to include the whole range of social changes in the global era and the role of religion in public life. It was a thoughtful occasion, one full of fertile ideas.

The success of that workshop soon led to a proposal for an extended project to last from 2010 to 2014, for which the Luce Foundation provided the major funding, as part of their initiative on religion in international affairs. Our thanks to everyone in the foundation who has persevered and supported our efforts over the years, including Michael Gilligan, Toby Volkman, and Terry Lautz—who first encouraged us to develop this idea into a sustained project.

The project was hosted by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, and our thanks to staff and faculty related to the Center. Since the director of the center at the time, Mark Juergensmeyer, was the principal investigator of the project and one of the authors of this book, there is no need (and maybe no reason) to thank him. But we do appreciate the constant support of the program director, Victor Faessel—the director’s right hand man—who attended all of the workshops and was an active member of the project team. The coordinator of the Luce project, who made the arrangements and held the whole thing together, was Dinah Griego, who is a coauthor of this book. Regina Rivera was our webmaster and publications czar, who artfully designed the project’s website and printed reports from each of the workshops. Oversight of the budget, payments, and other financial matters were provided by the center’s office manager, Cori Montgomery, and by her worthy replacement, Kim Coonen.

The discussions in each of the workshops were transcribed and summaries created for the workshop reports and to serve as background for this book. For this reason we relied on a small army of graduate student writers, including a master wordsmith, John Soboslai, who is a coauthor of this book. Among the other writers were John Ucciferri, Sara Kamali, Linda Khoury, Mayumi Kodani, Vikas Malhotra, Aleksandra Malinowska, Erica Mesker, Barbara Morra, Nicolas Pascal, Sergey Saluschev, Aaron Sokoll, Michael Starks, and Aisa Villanueva. The chief videographer for the project was Paul Lynch, who filmed most of the footage that can be seen on the project’s website and that is embedded within the e-book version of this book. Lynch also created the short video introductions for each chapter and the half-hour video program that summarizes the book as a whole. The full archive of videos related to the project can be found at www.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/luce.

Many of our colleagues at Santa Barbara were involved in the planning for the project or participated in the workshops. Several research fellows of the center, notably Richard Falk, Hilal Elver, Mona Sheikh, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Bidyut Mohanty, were actively involved in multiple sessions. Faculty in the UCSB global studies program who participated included Giles Gunn, Eve Darian-Smith, Phil McCarty, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Nadege Clitandre, Aashish Mehta, and Paul Amar. Religious studies colleagues included Wade Clark Roof, Kathleen Moore, Gurinder Singh Mann, Juan Campo, and Magda Campo. Other UCSB faculty contributing were Nancy Gallagher, Kathleen Bruhn, John Foran, Kum Kum Bhavnani, Gurinder Singh Mann, Sarah Cline, and Claudine Michel.

At the heart of the project were a series of workshops, most of which were held at Santa Barbara. These included the initial planning workshop, a networking workshop at the beginning of the project, a capstone workshop at the end, and three region-focused workshops: Latin America and Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa and the Middle East. Our thanks to the many student assistants who helped make these Santa Barbara workshops a success, including Anila Arif, Cory Baker, Peter Boraas, Nick Cook, Collin Dvorak, Brad Greenbaum, Amanda Maxi, Kendra Sarna, and Eva Van Wingerden.

Five of the workshops were held abroad, and in each case we relied on cosponsors in these locales. In Buenos Aires, the workshop was cosponsored with Universidad del Cema. Our cohosts were Carlos Escude, who was director of the Centro de Estudios Internacionales y de Educacion para la Globalizacion (CEIEG); and Fernando Lopez-Alves, special advisor of CEIEG as well as a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. In Buenos Aires, the event was facilitated by Eric Arias, Rebeca Gonzalez Esteves, and Sebastian Kobaru.

In Delhi, the workshop was cosponsored by the Council for Social Development. We relied on the gracious hosting of Manoranjan Mohanty, who was a professor at the council as well as a fellow of the UC Santa Barbara Orfalea Center. Our thanks to the staff of the council, especially Prashant Trivedi who was instrumental with the workshop logistics, and to the staff of the India International Centre in New Delhi where the workshop was held.

In Cairo, we held two workshops, both facilitated by several UC Santa Barbara faculty members who were in residence in Egypt at the time: Juan Campo, Magda Campo, Nancy Gallagher, and Paul Amar. Juan Campo served as co-convenor of one of the workshops; Amar was co-convenor of the other and helped to arrange many of the speakers. The planning team for the Cairo workshop also involved Saad Ibrahim. We greatly appreciated the services of the staff of the American University at Cairo, and the facilities that AUC provided in their old campus adjacent to Tahrir Square.

The Shanghai workshop was cosponsored by the Center for Global Studies Center at Shanghai University, and its innovative director, Changgang Guo, served as co-convenor. At that time, Guo was also the dean of graduate studies at the University, and he contributed significantly to the planning for the workshop. We greatly appreciate the efforts of the Shanghai University staff, including Zhenghan Zhang, and the assistance of Collin Dvorak, a global studies graduate of UC-Santa Barbara and former assistant at the Orfalea Center who was a graduate student at Shanghai University at the time and cheerfully assisted in making arrangements and showing us around town.

In Moscow, our workshop was cosponsored by the School of Global Studies at Moscow University. The cohost and co-convenor of the workshop was Dean Ilya Ilyin. Central to the success of the workshop was Alexander Rosanov, who served as translator, guide, arranger, and friend. Other members of the Russian staff for the workshop included Ivan Aleshkovsky, who was involved in the early workshop planning, and Nicolai Zolotarev, who provided simultaneous translation.

We are most grateful for the time and effort of over a hundred scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners who participated in these eleven workshops. Their names and affiliation are cited in the participants list at the end of this book. Some traveled days to attend these sessions, and several were at multiple events. Each provided insights and wisdom that are reflected in the pages of this book, in the summary reports of each workshop that have been published by the Orfalea Center and which may be found in digital form on the center’s website, and in the video clips that constitute the video archive of the project and are found on the website, www.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/luce.

Three of the participants served as special consultants outside the workshop format. Zhuo Xinping, the highest ranking scholar of religious studies in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, journeyed from Beijing to Santa Barbara so we could consult with him on issues relevant to the project. We are grateful that Craig Calhoun joined us in a panel discussion in Santa Barbara on a topic related to the project, even though at the time he was in the process of moving to London to become the new director of the London School of Economics. We were moved that Robert Bellah would find the topic of the project of sufficient interest to come from Berkeley to Santa Barbara to present a paper on the possibilities of global civil religion. The ideas in Bellah’s paper are the substance of chapter 4 of this book. Sadly, this paper was one of his last, since he died suddenly in July 2013. We dedicate this book to Bellah’s memory, not only because of the impact that the ideas in his paper had on our project, but also because of the way that his approach to the study of religion and society has informed our outlook on this subject as a whole. Bellah always took the wide view, historically and comparatively, in trying to understand the relationship between culture and society and between religion and social change. Thus, in a very real sense, this project is informed in every aspect by Bellah’s scholarly sensibilities and his conviction that the study of religion in society will illumine the most significant depths of human imagination and aspiration.

As this manuscript came close to publication, we have had yet more people to thank. We would like to thank Maeve Cornell-Taylor, Jennifer Eastman, and Eric Schmidt at the University of California Press.

Finally, a word about how this book was crafted and what each of us did. We began with brainstorming sessions that included the three authors—Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, and John Soboslai—along with center’s program director, Victor Faessel; a key writer, John Ucciferri; and our videographer, Paul Lynch. We reviewed the videos and reports from the workshops and sifted through the many topics to come up with overarching themes. Eventually, it was Juergensmeyer’s task to provide the narrative line for the book and to set out a general outline. Griego worked with the transcripts of the workshops, relating what was said to the ideas in the outline, and providing nuance and variation to the theme. Most of the writing was done by Juergensmeyer and Soboslai, with Soboslai working closely with Griego to make sure that the ideas were directly connected to the workshop discussions. Finally, each of us read everything—not once, but multiple times—arguing cheerfully over each chapter sometimes in person, sometimes digitally, sometimes by Skype, even when Griego was in Brazil, Juergensmeyer in Myanmar, and Soboslai in Connecticut. Juergensmeyer had the last reading and the last word, as it turned out, though each of us is to blame for it all. Though, in truth, it was less of a burden than a pleasure to work together on the completion of a project that had been so close to our lives for several years and that articulates some of the most critical issues of religion and social change in the tumult of our global age.

Tahrir Square, Cairo. Photograph by Dinah Griego.

Introduction

THINKING ABOUT RELIGION IN THE GLOBAL AGE

CAIRO’S TAHRIR SQUARE WAS FULL of life—flags waving, throngs of protestors and soccer fans, posters with political slogans, and loudspeakers screaming ardent speeches that called for freedom from oppression. It was one of many such rallies that followed the tumultuous sequence of public protests that had led to the ouster of the Mubarak regime on January 25, 2011.

But on this occasion, a group of scholars and activists were meeting at the same time and almost at the same place, in a university hall just off Tahrir Square. The meeting’s participants could hear the shouts and speeches through the open windows as they discussed the momentous changes in Egyptian society, changes echoed throughout the Muslim world, and the significance that these changes had for our understanding of the role of religion in public life. It was as if reality was breaking through the walls to remind the discussants of the importance of the dramatic social and cultural changes in Egypt in the global era.

A similar meeting in New Delhi, India, was quieter, and yet outside the India International Center where the discussions took place were myriad changes. The city was being spruced up for the Commonwealth Games, a sort of smaller version of the Olympics, and the improvements were vivid: new roads and freeways, a high-speed subway system, and enormous new stadiums and sports pavilions. Alongside these public works were private ones, not just office buildings and apartments, but new Hindu temples as well, some of them associated with religious movements appealing especially to the mobile Indian middle class.

At Cairo and New Delhi, as at other meetings, including ones at Buenos Aires and Santa Barbara, much of the discussion in this series of workshops on the role of religion in global civil society was about the transformations of old religious institutions in the global age. In many cases, traditional religion had become politicized, in some cases fused with right-wing nationalism, as traditional leaders led the charge against pluralism and secularism and, in an era in which the nation-state is under siege, saw an opportunity for nationalism to be buttressed by religious ideologies and institutions.

At the Shanghai meeting, however, it was a different story. Religious groups countered the sterility of modern life. Outside the meeting’s venue at Shanghai University, a dazzling modern city was being created. The vista one saw across the Huangpo River was the Pudong financial district, a vision of the future—shards of gleaming glass and metal skyscrapers reaching to the heavens in a profusion of imaginary architectural styles. But in the futuristic modernity of Shanghai, religion is making remarkable inroads. After decades of strict atheistic socialism, temples and mosques have been restored and are thriving. Christianity has become curiously popular, especially among educated youth. House churches and new religious movements challenge the government’s attempts to control them. As workshop participant Xu Yihua, a professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, put it, religious belief in China has been hidden but is now increasingly emergent.¹ In China, religious practices are becoming an alternative to the secular past.

Much the same can be said of Russia. In Moscow, the meetings were held on the campus of Lomonosov Moscow State