+ All Categories
Home > Documents > Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Date post: 11-Feb-2022
Category:
Upload: others
View: 7 times
Download: 0 times
Share this document with a friend
20
Globalization is a relatively recent term. It appeared in English-language usage only in the 1960s, albeit without the heavy connotations that it began to carry in the 1990s. Other simi- lar expressions, however, already popularized the core meaning of all people on earth living in a single social space, notably Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1964). Entering social scientific discourse in the early 1980s, globalization itself subse- quently became such a widespread term that it has become something close to a general name for the current era in which we all live, for better or worse. And in fact, the evaluation of global- ization oscillates uneasily between utopian promise and dystopian menace. Parallel to this ambivalent attitude has been a very consistent tendency to understand globalization in terms of analytic binaries, especially the spatial dis- tinction between the global and the local, or that between universal and particular (see esp. Robertson 1992). The global in globalization refers both to a geographic limit, the earth as a physical place, and to an encompassing range of influence, namely that all contemporary social reality is supposedly conditioned or even determined by it. This inescapable and inclusive quality con- trasts with the notion of modernization, arguably the prime term that globalization has replaced both in popular and scientific dis- course. While modernization excluded various ‘others’ that were deemed either pre-modern/ traditional or only on the way to moderniza- tion, globalization includes us all, even our ‘others’. Modernization temporalized its uni- versalism: eventually all would/could become modern. Globalization spatializes it: the local has to come to terms with the global. It (re)constitutes itself in the way that it does this. The reverse side of this mutual relation is that the global cannot be global except as plural versions of the local. Hence globaliza- tion is always also glocalization (Robertson 1995), the global expressed in the local and the local as the particularization of the global. This difference between modernization and global- ization allows us to understand the different attitudes toward religion that prevail under the aegis of each term. The discussion of this basic thesis in this chapter proceeds as follows: In a first section, I elaborate the idea of the pluralization of reli- gion by isolating and then illustrating four important axes of variation along which this pluralization appears to proceed. On this basis, two further sections then focus on the socio- logical observation of religion. The first traces the reasons why sociological understanding has shifted away from a modernization emphasis 5 Globalization and Glocalization PETER BEYER
Transcript
Page 1: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Globalization is a relatively recent term. Itappeared in English-language usage only in the1960s, albeit without the heavy connotationsthat it began to carry in the 1990s. Other simi-lar expressions, however, already popularizedthe core meaning of all people on earth livingin a single social space, notably MarshallMcLuhan’s notion of a ‘global village’ (McLuhan1964). Entering social scientific discourse inthe early 1980s, globalization itself subse-quently became such a widespread term that ithas become something close to a general namefor the current era in which we all live, for betteror worse. And in fact, the evaluation of global-ization oscillates uneasily between utopianpromise and dystopian menace. Parallel to thisambivalent attitude has been a very consistenttendency to understand globalization in termsof analytic binaries, especially the spatial dis-tinction between the global and the local, orthat between universal and particular (see esp.Robertson 1992).

The global in globalization refers both to ageographic limit, the earth as a physical place,and to an encompassing range of influence,namely that all contemporary social reality issupposedly conditioned or even determined byit. This inescapable and inclusive quality con-trasts with the notion of modernization,arguably the prime term that globalization has

replaced both in popular and scientific dis-course. While modernization excluded various‘others’ that were deemed either pre-modern/traditional or only on the way to moderniza-tion, globalization includes us all, even our‘others’. Modernization temporalized its uni-versalism: eventually all would/could becomemodern. Globalization spatializes it: the localhas to come to terms with the global. It(re)constitutes itself in the way that it doesthis. The reverse side of this mutual relation isthat the global cannot be global except asplural versions of the local. Hence globaliza-tion is always also glocalization (Robertson1995), the global expressed in the local and thelocal as the particularization of the global. Thisdifference between modernization and global-ization allows us to understand the differentattitudes toward religion that prevail under theaegis of each term.

The discussion of this basic thesis in thischapter proceeds as follows: In a first section, Ielaborate the idea of the pluralization of reli-gion by isolating and then illustrating fourimportant axes of variation along which thispluralization appears to proceed. On this basis,two further sections then focus on the socio-logical observation of religion. The first tracesthe reasons why sociological understanding hasshifted away from a modernization emphasis

5Globalization and Glocalization

P E T E R B E Y E R

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 98

mkoraly
Text Box
BEYER, PETER. "Globalization and Glocalization." The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. 2007. SAGE Publications. 19 Mar. 2011.
Page 2: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

which usually favoured the regional ornational society as the default unit of analysis.The second looks at how the subdiscipline hassince the 1980s been explicitly or implicitlyexpanding the basic unit of analysis to includethe entire globe, while simultaneously movingaway from the assumption of secularization asthe dominant trend and toward variations onpluralization instead. These more literature-review oriented sections are then followed by abrief presentation of my own suggestion forhow to theorize religion in global/glocal soci-ety. Finally, a concluding section considerspossible future directions for the sociology ofreligion in light of the overall analysis.

GLOBALIZATION AND PLURALIZATION OF RELIGION

The dominant sociological thesis about therelation of religion and modernization hasbeen one of incompatibility: a modernizingsociety was ipso facto a secularizing society.Religion, as a comparatively ‘irrational’ orien-tation in a modernity defined by rationaliza-tion, would lose its broader social influence orbecome a privatized domain. While not allobservers of modernization agreed with thisproposition, as globalization has become theregnant universalizing concept, the dissentershave quickly become the majority. In as muchas the modern excluded its other side, namelythe traditional, modernization could assignreligion to that ‘other side’, allowing only certain restricted religious expression thestatus of modern religion (cf. Durkheim 1965;Bellah 1970). With globalization, the globalincludes its defining polar opposite, the local,such that when religion appears as the local, itis thereby also global, or better, glocal. Hence,what stands out with respect to religion in theglobalizing as opposed to modernizing worldis not secularization but pluralization, theinclusion of different glocalizations of religion.Theories of religion in the global circumstancecorrespondingly can be expected to emphasizenotions of socially constructed religious plural-ity from both a global and a local perspective.1

Notions of secularization, differentiation, priva-tization, and the categorization of religionalong ‘modern/traditional’ lines do not ceaseto make sense in this context. Instead, theseideas become subordinated to the now seem-ing self-evidence of religious diversity. Ratherthan an anachronistic presence better suited tobygone eras, religion now appears much moreeasily as a prime way of being different or par-ticular and therefore as an integral aspect ofglobalization/glocalization. As such, religionbecomes the site of difference, contestationand, not infrequently, conflict. Its previouslydefining qualities as a provider of societalcohesion, integration and solidarity virtuallydisappear from the screen. Applied to religion,they now make about as much sense as the ideathat a globalizing society is also a secularizingsociety.

AXES OF VARIATION IN GLOCAL RELIGION

On the basis of this observation, the most per-sistent questions about religion and globaliza-tion will concern its plural manifestations, thedifferent ways in which religion glocalizes.Numerous strategies suggest themselves forunderstanding this variety, but the followingfour axes of variation seem to stand out:

1. Religion that is institutionalized as religionvs. religiosity that is non-institutionalized.Within this continuum would fall new reli-gions and new religious trends or move-ments, which can enter the continuum andmove to the institutionalized pole as they develop; as well as Luckmann’s brico-lage or Bellah et al.’s ‘Sheilaism’ on the non-institutionalized end.

2. Religion that is publicly influential vs. reli-gion that is privatized. Unlike under theassumptions of many forms of seculariza-tion theory, religion can now be either orboth of these in different contexts.

3. Religion that is traditional/conservative vs.religion that is modern/liberal. It is difficultto assign precise meanings to the two polesof this axis of variation, but under this

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 99

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 99

Page 3: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

heading fall discussions about so-called‘fundamentalisms’, positive or negative ori-entations to religious plurality itself, andthe degree to which religion claims to bedeterminative for other, non-religiousdomains.

4. Religion that is specifically enacted as religionvs. non-religious forms that may nonethelesscarry ‘religious’ functions. Religion is clearlyone of the most evident ways of assertingindividual or collective difference in theglobal context; but there are also other cate-gories which can play central roles in struc-turing glocality, ones that are neitherunderstood nor performed as religious.Prominent examples are culture, gender, race,and ethnic/nation.

These axes of variation are not necessarilyexhaustive; nor will the religious manifesta-tions of today’s global society fall neatly ontoone side of a continuum or another. Rather,they serve as heuristic distinctions for markingout the field of religious pluralization underthe rubric of globalization. Of particular noteis that each pole of each axis of variation isitself subject to pluralization. Institutionalizedreligion, for instance, will manifest as pluralreligions; while non-institutionalized religios-ity is inherently variable. Instances of local‘monopoly’ or uniformity, by contrast, will callfor special explanation, much like ‘strong’ reli-gion under the secularization thesis had to beseen as an ‘exception’. In addition, althoughthese continua pose the implicit question ofwhat actually counts as religion, defining reli-gion would be misplaced because what isneeded is not conceptual uniformity or the iso-lation of some sort of essence of religion.Instead, what matters is what people in thisglobal society actually call and treat as religion.Such orientations can and will be contested andoften ambiguous; they will themselves pose thequestion of pluralization and glocalization.

Some illustrations of how pluralization andglocalization express themselves through theseaxes of variation will serve to concretize theargument at this point.

Beginning with the institutionalized religions,in practically every country and region, we find

a variable set of entities which people there call,treat, and enact as religions (or parallel wordsin other languages). These generally includeChristianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism;and, less consistently, Judaism and Sikhism.Beyond these clearly globalized religions is avaried list of others recognized regionally, forexample, Zoroastrianism, Daoism, Jainism,Rastafarianism, Baha’i, Candomblé, or Cao Dai.Two related global continuities are evidenthere: the specific globally present religions, andthe seemingly accepted fact that there are reli-gions which can be named and to which onecan belong or not. In either case, the globalizedcategory is already inherently plural. There isno such thing as a single global religion. Theseoverall statements, however, tell us little aboutconcrete situations in various regions.Different religions dominate in differentplaces: Christianity in Europe, Latin Americaand several African countries; Islam fromNorthern Africa to Indonesia; Buddhism ineastern Asia; Hinduism in South Asia. Each ofthese has a significant, if usually minority,presence in most of the other world regions aswell. Many of the smaller religions haveregional concentrations, like the Punjab forSikhs, Jamaica for Rastafarians, or Japan forOmotokyo. But like the larger ‘world’ religions,most of these also have presences in other partsof the world. Large or small, the religions areusually globally spread and locally concen-trated. Moreover, the individual religions man-ifest themselves only as particular variationssuch as Protestant, Catholic, OrthodoxChristianity; Sunni, Twelver Shi’a, or IsmailiIslam; Vaisnava, Saiva, or Advaita VedantaHinduism; Mahayana or Theravada Buddhism;and so forth. And within each of these cate-gories there are most often more subvariantssuch as Anglican or Jehovah’s Witnesses(Protestant), Bohra or Nizari (Ismaili), Zen orShingon (Mahayana), and so forth. Most ofthese are likewise globally spread with localconcentrations. The result is a different localmix of pluralized religions in different regions.In addition, each of the variants receives localcolouring: Anglican Protestant Christianity is not the same in Uganda as it is in Canada or even different places in these countries;

100 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 100

Page 4: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Sunni Islam is not quite the same in Indonesiaas it is in Turkey, France, or Saudi Arabia; andsimilarly for all the others. Nonetheless, all thisvariation, far from vitiating the global single-ness of the religions and their main divisions,actually constitutes them (see Beyer 2003). Bothpractitioners and external observers understandthese religions as unities through variation, inother words, as glocalizations. The universalsare real abstractions; concrete, socially effectivereligions appear only as localized particular-izations of those global universals. Finally, theconstruction of both global unity and localmanifestations occurs with reference to oneanother: the religions constitute and reproducethemselves in a context of recognized pluralityof religions and subdivisions of religions.None of this, of course, excludes disagreementand conflict over and across the variousboundaries; rather it explicitly includes suchcontestation.

As differentiated social entities, the institu-tionalized religions bear variable relations todomains of social life that are not religion.Thus, through their authorities and represen-tatives, particular religions can seek to exertdirect influence on these other domains,whether politics and law, economy, science, massmedia, education, or a variety of others. Theycan also focus on their own reproductionthrough ritual and practice. Of course, mostreligious groups do both, the latter even beinga condition for the former. The alternative ofseeking to exert public influence or restrictingoneself to privatized religious concerns israrely that stark. Globally speaking, religion isboth a privatized and public concern. The seri-ous variation in this dimension is at the localor particular level, especially as concerns howheavily and effectively institutionalized reli-gion is brought into play in non-religiousdomains. This variance only overlaps partiallywith the differences of the religions them-selves. Thus, for instance, Islam is generallymore publicly active than many other religions,consistently claiming direct relevance in theoperation of all other spheres of life. It is oftenquite effective in this capacity. Yet even here wesee substantial variation, whether over time as movements rise and fade, or geographically,

for example, between relatively ‘theocratic’Iran or Saudi Arabia and relatively ‘secular’Tunisia or Turkey. In places where Islam is notdominant, usually for very practical reasonsthis religion tends to be a more privatized con-cern, but that does not exclude public visibilityand Muslim attempts to influence what goeson in other domains. By contrast, although per-haps in the majority of areas where Christianityis dominant this religion leans more toward aconcentration on its own strictly religiousaffairs, there are so many exceptions to thispattern that it is little more than a statisticalgeneralization. In countries as varied as theUnited States, Poland, the Philippines, Zambia,Brazil and Russia, there have over the past fewdecades been various sometimes quite effectiveand long-lasting Christian forays into thepublic arena. Similar statements could bemade for virtually every other religion; forBuddhism in Japan or Thailand, for Judaism inthe United States or Israel, for Hinduism inIndia or Great Britain, and so on. All thesecases taken together show that, on a globalscale alone, religions are both publicly influen-tial and privatized. It is only at the local or par-ticular level that their subvariants may leanmore heavily toward one alternative than theother. Although almost all the movements seek-ing to assert public religious influence engageglobalized structures such as the system of states,the world economy, cultural flows of variouskinds, and indeed other (global) religions, theparticular characteristics of such movements,how long they last, and how effective they are,these are a matter of local circumstances and nota global trend in either the direction of increasedprivatization or general ‘resurgence’. An aspect ofthe glocalized pluralization is unpredictability.

Over the past three decades, the religiousdevelopments that have without doubtreceived the most attention as a global phe-nomenon are so-called ‘fundamentalisms’.Chief among these have been the AmericanChristian Right, Religious Zionism in Israel,Islamist movements in a number of countries,as well as Sikh and Hindu nationalist move-ments in India (see Marty and Appleby1991–95; Kepel 1994). Perhaps the most evi-dent common feature of these movements is

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 101

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 101

Page 5: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

that they are religio-political movements, onesthat seek public influence for religion. From aslightly different perspective, however, they arealso for the most part conservative or neo-traditionalist movements, meaning that theirexplicit rationale includes a reassertion ofvalues and ways of living warranted by thepast, by tradition, and thereby in opposition toorientations conceived as modern, liberal andsecular. Among the symbolic issues that mostconsistently express this opposition are a callfor comparatively strict control of (especiallyfemale) bodies in contrast to supposed permis-siveness or decadence, and a separatist (oftennationalist) claim to the exclusive validity oftheir truth over against a posited global rela-tivism or anomie (Kapur 1986; Lustick 1988;Juergensmeyer 1993; Riesebrodt 1993). It is infact the traditionalist, ‘anti-modern’ discoursethat most clearly distinguishes those move-ments labelled as ‘fundamentalist’, since quite often not particularly militant move-ments like the Jewish Neturei Karta, theChristian Communion and Liberation, or theIslamic Tablighi Jamaat (see Ahmed 1991;Kepel 1994) are called ‘fundamentalist’, whilepublicly and politically engaged, but non-traditionalist, religious movements such as theliberation theology movement in LatinAmerica do not. As movements and as a cate-gory, ‘fundamentalism’ therefore points to thecontemporary and global relevance of a kindof religion that, under the aegis of moderniza-tion, was deemed to be obsolete and destinedto disappear. It represents a clearly possiblevariant of religious presence in contrast tomore liberal and non-exclusive religion, both ofwhich appear to belong in a globalized society.

The recognized religions do not have amonopoly on the religious in contemporaryglobal society. Three other types of phenom-ena exist alongside and even compete withthem. These are new religious movements,especially those that seek to become new, rec-ognized religions; non-institutional, highlyindividualized, religiosity or ‘spirituality’; andbroadly speaking religio-cultural expressionthat is not differentiated as religion. Each ofthese illustrates the dynamics of glocalizationand pluralization in a somewhat different way.

New religions demonstrate the opened-endedpossibility for additional institutional reli-gions. From Scientology, The Family, and theRaelians to Won Buddhism, Falun Dafa, and I-Kuan Tao, a bewildering variety of groupsoften fall under this heading, with their originsin virtually every corner of the world (seeMelton and Baumann 2002). Aside from thesheer plurality, what is of relevance here is thatthe category of a new religion, along with itspejorative version, ‘cult’ (with strictly parallelterms in other languages), is itself globalized,as is the suspicion with which new religions aretreated by others, including recognized reli-gions, mass media, schools and governments.There is in that context significant continuityin the anti-new religions discourse around theworld (see Richardson 2004). Moreover, a verylarge number of these new religions try toestablish an international and even worldwidepresence, such demonstration of broaderappeal clearly forming part of their claim tolegitimacy. Thus, even though most new reli-gions are quite small and show even moreregional concentration than the larger andolder ‘world’ religions, they participate in theglobalized category of an institutionalized anddifferentiated religion quite as much as do thelatter. They thereby further express the plural-ization of religion both as a social reality and asa category of observation. Nonetheless, as withthe world religions, new religions appear onlyin particular and local form: pluralizationmanifests itself as glocalization of these reli-gious movements and that multiple localiza-tion is both a condition and a symptom oftheir globalization.

If the title of new religions refers to thosemovements that seek recognition as religions,the term ‘spirituality’ has in recent decadescome to designate another important andinherently plural religious phenomenon. Notcoincidentally a word that is still in many waysbut a synonym for the religious, spiritualitynow often refers to religion in a highly individ-ualized mode, and in this sense outside or atthe margins of the authoritative bounds ofinstitutionalized religions. A variety of trendsand manifestations can fall under this heading.From the somewhat amorphous New Age and

102 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 102

Page 6: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Japanese new New Religions to the tendencyfor a great many people around the world tofashion their own combination of religiousbeliefs and practices with little reference tospecific centres of religious tradition orauthority (cf. Roof 1999; Heelas et al. 2005), aparallel style of religiosity appears to be gain-ing attention. Although the global aspect ofthis development can be subsumed under dif-ferent headings, for instance Inglehart’s notionof post-materialist (Inglehart 1997) religion,the concrete variety of such spirituality canalmost by definition only be local. Yet, follow-ing Inglehart’s analysis, this sort of religiosityseems usually to be pursued by the relativelymore privileged segments of the global popu-lation, those with a higher probability ofhaving broader global connections and thusbeing themselves less rootedly local than thoselarge numbers without such power. This sortof highly particular and highly plural religios-ity is therefore also in that sense more globaland hence glocal.

In some quarters, however, the term spiritu-ality carries a different meaning, shading overinto the idea of religio-cultural expression thatis not distinguished as religion. Spiritualityrefers also to the religious ways of aboriginalpeoples and thus to a form of religiosity that isglocal in a rather distinct way. The category of‘aboriginal’ or ‘indigenous’ is, from one angle,local by definition: it is what was ‘here from theorigins’ as opposed to that which came here‘from somewhere else’ relatively recently.Aboriginal and indigenous people are thosewho were in a place before its incorporationinto globalizing structures. Their ‘traditional’cultural expressions can and do thereby claimto be ones that belong to that locality morepurely than others. A mark of that belonging isin many cases that the carriers of this indigene-ity reject differentiation among various func-tional modalities, including especially religion,when applied to their cultural traditions, suchdifferentiated structures being seen as that whichengenders the homogenization of the local intoglobal patterns. The insistence on aboriginalspiritualities as a non-differentiable dimensionof aboriginal culture is thereby a way of con-structing the integrity and inviolability of

those cultures or identities vis-à-vis globalforces. Ironically, however, the category of abo-riginal has itself become globalized, a primesymptom of which is that aboriginal peoplesaround the world are often in contact andrelate to one another as aboriginal peoples.Aboriginal spirituality is not so much a way ofmaintaining the local against the global as it isyet another instance of glocalization, doing theglobal in local mode. A further indicator of thisrole is that, in some cases, such as AfricanTraditional Religion in countries like SouthAfrica or Benin (cf. Mndende 1998), or variousindigenous religious cultures in Indonesia (seee.g. Schiller 1997), ‘aboriginal’ people mobilizein the opposite direction: they seek to con-struct and have their religious ways recognizedas distinct religions, with the same goal of cul-tural recognition and assertion. The situationpoints to the generally ambiguous but close rela-tion between religion and culture as pluralizedand glocalized categories.

Aboriginal people striving for culturalrecognition and autonomy are not alone ininsisting on an intertwining of religion andculture, thereby melding two categories forasserting glocal difference. The frequency ofreligious nationalism is another and morepowerful manifestation. From State Shinto inpre-World War II Japan and Irish Catholicnationalism to Sinhalese Buddhist nationalismin Sri Lanka and Hindu nationalism in twentieth-century India, this strategy has been a constant of our world throughout themodern era. These and many other religio-nationalist movements have insisted on an inti-mate link among a particular religio-culturalway of life, a particular territory, and a particu-lar group of people generally attributed with acommon ancestry and history in that territory.In each case, a critical warrant for this identifi-cation is a rootedness in the past, often themythic past. As with the aboriginal movements,however, religious nationalisms are not isolatedoccurrences that just happen to have certainfeatures in common. They are local variationson a globalized theme, even model. The religio-cultural identities structure themselvesin deliberate comparison with the rest of theworld, almost invariably imagining this

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 103

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 103

Page 7: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

outside as homologous ‘others’, other religio-cultural identities.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION: FROM MODERN TO GLOBAL CONTEXT

In suggesting pluralization as the prime leit-motif for observing religion under conditionsof globalization, I do not claim that religiousplurality is anything new. Notions of multi-plicity in matters religious are as old as theconcept itself. What I am proposing is ratherthat the most significant dimension for under-standing religion in the specifically global soci-ety of today is its pluralization along severalaxes of variation. The shift to a global perspec-tive is key. Without that change in perspective,the argument loses much of its rationale. It istherefore important to understand how glob-alization has come to be such a ubiquitousconcept and what effect that is having on thesociological observation of religion. Given theinfluence that the classical thinkers of the nine-teenth century still have on this discipline, Ibegin with Marx, Durkheim and Weber.

Since its nineteenth-century origins, sociol-ogy has been informed by the guiding differ-ence between modern and non-modern ortraditional societies. Karl Marx focused almostexclusively on the development and fate ofcapitalism in contrast especially to feudalism;Émile Durkheim built up his theory on thedistinction between modern organic and tra-ditional mechanical solidarity societies; MaxWeber concentrated on various dimensions ofthe shift from pre-modern to modern, includ-ing themes like rationalization, bureaucracy,political domination and modern capitalism.In one sense, religion occupied a central posi-tion for all three of them: as an ideological toolof the dominant classes for Marx, as a founda-tional aspect of society for Durkheim, and as akey factor in the rise of modern capitalism forWeber. Yet in each case, the prevailing fate of atleast institutional religion was decline and evendisappearance: to be discarded by proletariansand fade away under communism for Marx, to

be superseded by the ‘cult of man’ for Durkheim,and to succumb to modern rationality in a disenchanted world for Weber. In one form oranother, the reigning historical direction wasmodernization and the outcome for religionwas secularization.

The passage from traditional to modern inclassical sociology was in one sense a temporaltransition from past to present and future, butit also had spatial reference. First, what we nowcall the West was modern or at least moderniz-ing, while other regions of the world were atbest non-modern. Even though Marx, Weber,Durkheim and other classical sociologists tookaccount of the wider world that they inhabited,their attention to the non-Western regions waslimited because from their perspective that isnot where their main concern, modernization,was happening. Where they did pay attention,such as in Durkheim’s analysis of the religionof Australian Aborigines or Weber’s compara-tive studies of China and India, it was as exam-ples of the pre-modern or traditional. Second,the modernizing West for these thinkers (Marxis a partial exception) came to be seen asdivided geographically into ‘national societies’,which could be compared as to the way mod-ernization occurred in each case. The geo-political unit of the nation-state, especiallyduring the period from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century, becamemore or less synonymous with the idea of asociety. From that time, sociological observa-tion became primarily the Western, nation-state based observation of modernization inthe West (Albrow 1990; Robertson 1992: 8ff.).Somewhat ironically, however, that sameperiod was one of the most intense in terms ofthe projection of Western power all over theworld. In contemporary conceptual terms,classical sociology took place in a globalizinghistorical situation, but its understanding was national, perhaps international, but not global. At the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury, the self-evidence of this identitybetween the (nation) state and society hasbegun seriously to loosen, but it still informsthe discipline to a great extent. This has had corresponding consequences for theunderstanding of religion.

104 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 104

Page 8: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

The secularization assumptions of the clas-sics prevailed in sociology and, to a lesserdegree, in the sociology of religion until thelatter quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed,they reached a kind of apogee in the 1960swith the influential work of thinkers such asPeter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, BryanWilson, Richard Fenn, Talcott Parsons andothers. Although there were salient differencesin their various perspectives, they shared athreefold assumption: religion was eitherdeclining or being pushed to the margins ofsocietal importance; religion’s role in societywas integrative; and the modern societies ofinterest were national and Western (nowincluding Japan). Their positions did, however,include a wider ‘international’ awareness. Thenational societies could be and were comparedin terms of the way religion operated withinthem. The question of pluralization, usually interms of pluralism, was also posed at thisnational level; and the prevailing question inthis regard was how it affected the seculariza-tion of a society (see esp. Berger 1967; Martin1978). Pluralization across the nations washardly even an issue.

What transformed that situation since the1970s is to some degree a matter of specula-tion. But one can begin by noting a coinci-dence not often mentioned. The mid-1980ssaw the publication of both RolandRobertson’s seminal ideas on globalization andRodney Stark and William Bainbridge’sexplicit theoretical rejection of the seculariza-tion thesis (Robertson and Chirico 1985; Starkand Bainbridge 1985). Both were the result ofwork begun in the later 1970s, both suggesteda significant reorientation for sociologicalobservation, and both have been highly influ-ential since. They also represent two radicallydifferent approaches. What they nonethelesshave in common is their shared historical con-text and here religious developments play acritical role. At the risk of oversimplifying, theyear 1979 stands out. Its portentous eventsinclude the Iranian revolution, the founding ofJerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the UnitedStates, the Nicaraguan revolution, the accessionof John Paul II to the papacy, the Soviet inva-sion of Afghanistan, and the first stirring of

the Solidarity movement in Poland. All ofthese showed that religion could (still) be apublic and mainstream force; all of them are toa significant degree incomprehensible withouttaking into view the wider global context inwhich they occurred (cf. Beyer 1994). Variousongoing and subsequent religio-political eventsin places like Israel-Palestine or Sri Lanka onlyreinforced that impression. What they encour-aged is a shift in sociological observation,exemplified in the work of Robertson, Starkand Bainbridge, and a great many others, inwhich the sociology of religion moves gradu-ally more into the mainstream of the largerdiscipline at the same time as most sociologistsof religion hastily claim to abandon the secu-larization thesis and pay attention to religiousdiversity in new ways. Now, in this differentcontext, the variety of ways in which religionand religiousness manifests itself as well as newdevelopments in the religious sphere becomethat much more obvious and worthy of atten-tion, whether we are speaking, for instance,of the abiding strength of religion in theUnited States, the continuing efflorescence ofnew religious movements in every corner ofthe globe, the growth of already longstandingPentecostalism or Islamism worldwide, thereligious assumptions of seemingly secularEuropeans, or the vitality and ever changingface of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa.

There can be little doubt that the seeminglysudden and precipitous fall of the Sovietempire at the end of the 1980s marked a pro-found change in world order and, inevitably, asignificant shift in how people around theworld, including sociologists, understood thatworld. In a few short years, the self-evidentCold War organizing distinction between East and West disappeared. The world was notjust different, it had to be thought anew, andnow without the socialist/capitalist divide.These had, in effect, been alternative paths ofmodernization from which a ‘national society’could choose. The signs of transformed obser-vation in the 1990s became quickly apparent.Two tendencies are particularly notable. Onehas tried to continue with a modified versionof the old lines, effacing the socialist alternativeand thereby leaving the ‘capitalist road’ as the

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 105

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 105

Page 9: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

only possibility. Francis Fukuyama’s early 1990sdeclaration of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama1993) and the worldwide anti-globalizationmovements that emerged toward the end of thedecade represent opposing versions of thisdirection. It touched off the rapid rise in popu-larity of the term, globalization, understoodessentially as global capitalism without thesocialist alternative. This understanding ofglobalization is modernization in a monopolis-tic guise. It therefore has had little cause to takereligion seriously – except as defensive ‘funda-mentalism’ (Barber 1996; cf. Beckford 2003:103ff.) – and has typically imagined a decline inthe power of the national state (see Rudolphand Piscatori 1997; Beck 2000). Both featureswitness to the difficulty of continuing toobserve today’s social reality in the normativeterms of the ‘secular/modern national society’.

The other significant tendency has alsoadopted a global perspective, accepting that weevidently all now live in the same social world.The result, however, is the observed multiplica-tion of difference rather than (just) progressivehomogeneity. This is the direction that Iemphasize here. It understands the global in terms of its glocal particularizations. It resonates strongly with the post-modern discourse that has paralleled the recognition ofglobalization (see Lyotard 1984, French origi-nal published in 1979). In announcing the endof grand narratives, post-modernism openedthe door for the multiplicity of narratives, butalso for their contestation. Important in thepresent context is that these visions no longerhave to assume the national, territorially delim-ited, and solidary society as normative. It isalso among them that one finds a much strongerplace for religion. It is therefore this kind ofapproach that has more clearly informed verylate twentieth and early twenty-first centurysociology of religion.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OFRELIGION IN THE GLOBALIZATION ERA

A closer look at post-Cold War sociologicalobservation of religion can begin by repeating

that neither the national society nor the notionof secularization need be or has been aban-doned. As noted, these maintain their impor-tance, only now as aspects of pluralizedvariation rather than as guiding assumptions.That said, we should not expect the change totake place all at once. Current sociologicalthinking is in fact in a kind of transitionalphase, combining ‘modernization’ and ‘global-ization’ assumptions. Two of the clearer exam-ples of this are analyses of European‘exceptionalism’ and religious market theories,trends well represented in the work of GraceDavie (Davie 2003) and Rodney Stark and hiscollaborators (Stark and Bainbridge 1987;Finke and Stark 1992; Stark and Iannaccone1994) respectively. In spite of sharp differencesin theoretical perspectives, the two approachesshare a continued orientation toward the idea ofsecularization, the use of the national/regional(Europe and the United States) society as thebasic unit of analysis, and yet also an explicitcontextual awareness of and reference to therest of the world without, however, giving thenotion of globalization an operative placewithin their theories. Thus Davie’s examina-tion of religion in contemporary Europefocuses on this region’s exceptionalism interms of how secularized it is, that by compar-ison most of the rest of the world is not secu-larized, and that religion is not thereby simplyunimportant in Europe. The exceptionalismonly makes sense in global context. And, inspite of their explicit rejection of the secular-ization thesis, Stark et al. analyse religious markets in mostly national/regional terms andwith respect to how ‘vital’, namely unsecular-ized, each of those markets is. They also putgreat stress on religion’s rationality (Stark andFinke 2000), a preoccupation that resonatesmuch more with a modernization/seculariza-tion orientation. Yet, in seeking to construct ageneral theory of religion, they expressly claimvalidity for all religious markets around theworld, not just in the West.

This transitional situation also reveals itselfin the use of the distinction between religionand spirituality. From Ernst Troeltsch’s latenineteenth-century discussion of ‘mysticism’(Troeltsch 1931) to Thomas Luckmann’s

106 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 106

Page 10: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

‘invisible religion’ of the 1960s (Luckmann1967), a key element of the secularizationthesis has hitherto been privatization, the ideathat religion has become more and more theaffair of individuals or voluntary associationsand less and less a matter of overarching insti-tutional authority. That discussion continues,but there has been a partial shift in emphasiscorresponding to a change from privatizationas dominant principle to religion/spiritualityas axis of variation. On the one hand, a signif-icant literature still operates in the context ofthe privatization thesis, arguing either posi-tively that privatized spirituality is the (new)dominant trend (e.g. Roof 1999; Heelas et al.2005) or negatively that such non-institutionalspirituality is merely ‘potential’ religion (e.g. Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Bibby 2002).These perspectives generally adopt the nationalsociety as their unit of analysis, although some-times including cross-national comparison.On the other hand, the phenomenon is receiv-ing increasing attention as a globalized trendand alternative. Under this heading would fall Ronald Inglehart’s suggestion of a ‘post-materialist’ religiosity, the growing presence ofwhich he detects on the basis of ‘world’ valuesstudies (Inglehart 1997). It would also includea varied literature on the New Age movementas a specifically global and not just Westerndevelopment (Rothstein 2001; Carozzi 2004;Ackerman 2005; Howell 2005). Moving acrossthe continuum, there is the attention thatsomewhat more institutionalized but still oftenquite fluid religious developments are receiv-ing. Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity is acase in point. Although it already began toattract sociological attention in the 1960s and1970s, many of the more recent contributionsfocus specifically on its ability to translate itselfor glocalize relatively easily around the world,as well as on its global growth (see e.g. Poewe1994; Cox 1995; Dempster et al. 1999;Coleman 2000; Martin 2002; Wilkinson 2006).Somewhat related is the topic of new religiousmovements. In spite of their small size andoften limited geographic range, their globalpresence, global aspirations, as well as the sim-ilarity in the kind of suspicion and oppositionthat they attract in countries right across the

globe have been topics of growing attention inthe sociological literature of the post-Cold Wardecades (see e.g. Hexham and Poewe 1997;Dawson 1998; Kent 1999; Barchunova 2002;Richardson 2004). This orientation is a notableaddition to that which informed the sociologi-cal literature on new religious movements that dates from the 1960s to the 1980s, whichgenerally operated mostly in the orbit of secu-larization assumptions, notably through thedominance of the question of conversion (see,from a great many, Lofland 1966; Judah 1974;Glock and Bellah 1976). That literature wasalso overwhelmingly oriented to the nationalor regional society, mostly in the West, but alsoin Japan (see e.g. McFarland 1967; Brannen1968; cf. Shimazono 2004).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century,sociological analyses of religion that adopt an overtly global orientation are still not thatcommon. To be sure, ever since the early 1990s,there has been a smattering of such works (e.g.Robertson and Garrett 1991; Ahmed 1994;Beyer 1994; Van der Veer 1996; Rudolph andPiscatori 1997; Haynes 1998; Meyer andGeschiere 1999; Esposito and Watson 2000;Stackhouse and Paris 2000; Beyer 2001;Hopkins et al. 2001; Juergensmeyer 2003;Agadjanian and Roudometof 2005; Learman2005), but their number contrasts markedlywith the social scientific literature on global-ization itself, which has become unmanageablein volume. There is, however, a very significantliterature on religion that is highly relevant tothe themes of globalization and glocalization.The bulk of these contributions have centredon two subjects: religio-political mobilizationand religion in the context of transnationalmigration. The literature on the former grewand adopted a global dimension as of 1979when, in light of the rise of the American NewChristian Right, the term began to be trans-ferred from its original context, first to Islamand the Iranian revolution specifically, andthen to diverse religio-political movements inIslam, Judaism, Hinduism and Sikhism espe-cially (for early examples, see Haines 1979; vonder Mehden 1980). In spite of the dissimilari-ties among the different so-called ‘fundamen-talisms’ and protests that it was a Western

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 107

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 107

Page 11: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

misconception when applied outside theProtestant Christian fold, the term has per-sisted in social scientific discourse since the early 1980s, arguably because of its abilityto name an important global continuityamong otherwise highly disparate religiousmovements. Fundamentalism is in that sense aquintessentially glocal concept.

A somewhat similar analysis applies to therelation between religion and transnationalmigration. A critical part of the web of com-munications and flows that has helped to maketoday’s globalized reality so apparent is themovement of people under various guisesranging from tourists to migrants. The impor-tance of the latter category is that it representsthe more or less permanent moving of peoplefrom one part of the world to another, but insuch a way that links between the ‘old’ countryand the ‘new’ are in most cases maintained,thereby contributing to the density and per-manence of global social connections. Religionconsistently plays an important role in suchmigration as resources for immigrant adapta-tion to new local environments and as one ofthe social forms that flows from one part of theworld to another along the communicativelinks thus established. Migration is in turn aprime conduit for the globalization of the reli-gions themselves. In light of the intensificationof both migration and transnational linkages,it is not surprising that the social scientific lit-erature which focuses on them becomes, ineffect, globalization literature with respect toreligion. A brief look at some examples willserve to concretize this point.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, American soci-ologists began to pay concerted attention tothe religious expression of that country’s post-1960s migrants. Here the work directed byStephen Warner and Judith Wittner wasground breaking and was notably carried outonly in the mid-1990s. Already the title of themajor publication emerging from thisresearch, Gatherings in Diaspora, pointedexplicitly to the linkages of migrant religiousforms in the United States with the widerworld (Warner and Wittner 1998). What is alsocharacteristic of this volume and of the grow-ing literature that has emerged in its wake is

the emphasis on the plurality of these forms inthe United States, on their roots in variousparts of the world, as well as on the common-alities that they display in response to the par-ticularly American context. In that light, thenarrative it tells is no longer overwhelmingly aChristian story with a Jewish minor thread.Other non-Christian religions are the focusalong with a new intra-Christian variety. Mostimportantly in the present context, the transna-tional dimension is receiving sustained atten-tion, attesting to the explicitly global aspect ofthis new religious plurality (see e.g. Levitt1998; Prebish and Tanaka 1998; Lawson 1999;Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002; Haddad and Smith2002; Guest 2003; Vásquez and Marquardt2003; Carnes and Yang 2004; Levitt 2004).

Similar but also different developments haveoccurred among scholars in other regions. Theseinclude countries such as Canada and Australia(Coward et al. 2000), but notably and in greatervolume, Europe. As with the American litera-ture, recent global migrants to this latter regionhave raised the double question of how thesewill challenge the ways that religions take formand importance in European countries, and howtheir implantation in this region will generatenew forms of the recently arrived religions. Onboth sides, what is at issue is the plural glocaliza-tion of religion (see e.g. Burghart 1987; Dessai1993; Baumann 2000). Somewhat in contrast tothe United States, however, the majority of theattention falls on one particular religion, namelyIslam. To some extent this is because a majorityof migrants in many countries are Muslims, tosome degree because Muslims seem to challengethe highly privatized and unobtrusive way thatreligion has functioned in this region duringmuch of the twentieth century. In consequence,the burgeoning literature on Islam and Muslimsin Europe tends very much to operate on theassumption of implicit comparison: Can Islamadapt? Can Europeans maintain their seeminglyestablished ways and demand that Islam con-form? (see, from among many, Khosrokhavar1997; Vertovec and Rogers 1998; Nielsen 1999;Roy 1999; Rath 2001; Jonker 2002). The axes ofvariation of publicly influential to privatized andof traditional/conservative to modern/liberal areboth at play and overlap with the issue of the

108 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 108

Page 12: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

plurality of religions themselves and of theirglobal presence.

Two other global regions from which highlyrelevant literature has been emerging are LatinAmerica and the Caribbean and sub-SaharanAfrica. Two prime religious vehicles in thesecases are Christianity and New World Africanreligions. With respect to the former, althoughthe transnational Roman Catholic Church iscertainly still of importance (cf. Lanternari 1998;Casanova 2001), it is Pentecostal and EvangelicalChristianity that is receiving the bulk of theattention, arguably because of its transnationalpresence and recent growth, the ease with whichits proponents move around the world from var-ious home bases, and its diverse glocalization inso many regions (e.g. Meyer and Geschiere 1999;Adogame 2000; van Dijk 2001; Alvarsson andSegato 2003). New World African religions likeVoudon, Candomblé, or Santería are quite dif-ferent in their characteristic features, yet theyshare with Christianity, and with Pentecostalismin particular, a long transnational history inwhich Africans and their inherited religiousexpressions play a significant role. The trans-Atlantic connection has been a prime pathacross which both originally African andEuropean religious impulses travelled eventuallyto engender new, pluralized, and glocalized religions that are today still in the process of for-mation (Clarke 1998; Motta 1998). The transna-tionalism has provided the conditions forreconstructing ‘old’ world religions in pluralfashion; and also, according to some observers,for constructing a new world religion altogether(Frigerio 2004). Therefore, just as the transplan-tation of other religions along the paths of globalmigration is resulting in their pluralized and glo-calized reconstruction in regions where they had little presence before, so is an older migra-tion spawning new religions that are in turn pro-ducing glocalized versions on several continents.

THEORIZING PLURALIZED RELIGION IN A GLOBAL SOCIETY

In light of the increasing sociological attentionpaid to religion in the context of globalization,

the lack of explicit theorizing on the relationbetween the two terms is perhaps a bit puz-zling. As noted, the amount of literature rele-vant to the question is on the rise, but for themost part globalization in these works remainsthe name for an aspect of the social environ-ment to which religion responds in variousways, not as something that, like capitalism orthe sovereign state, is a constitutive dimensionof globalization. Partial exceptions are theefforts that emphasize the transnational face ofreligion and the literature on religio-politicalmovements. But even here, the global contextis provided by something other than religionto which religion responds. At best religionthickens global flows. The contributions ofRoland Robertson move into the gap to anextent in that he stresses the thematization ofglobality as an integral facet of the global con-dition; and that this task is an inherently ‘reli-gious’ one (Robertson and Chirico 1985;Robertson 2001). Such thematization alsoallows multiple possibilities, thereby implicitlyadmitting at least some of the axes of pluraliza-tion presented here. In this way, he shows howglobalization as a historical development is asreligious as it is from other angles economic,political, or broadly speaking socio-cultural.Robertson’s efforts are therefore important;but they are at best a beginning. In the follow-ing paragraphs, I sketch a theoretical approachthat seeks to explain how religion and the plu-ralization of religion have been a key dimen-sion of the historical process of globalizationitself.

It is no accident that the bulk of globaliza-tion analyses describe the process primarily in economic, political, and sometimes in tech-nological terms. The justification for thisemphasis lies in the fact that the historical con-struction of today’s global society centred onthe development and expansion of an initiallyEuropean-based capitalist economy and of ini-tially European imperial power, both of whichhave since been appropriated with differentialsuccess by virtually every other part of theworld. The theoretical key to understandinghow religion might fit into this picture andalso be constitutive of it is to focus on how thesorts of transformations in the economic and

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 109

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 109

Page 13: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

political realms that brought about this expan-sion and appropriation also happened in thearea of religion. This, in turn, requires a con-ceptualization under which economic, politi-cal, religious, and other social modalities canbe subsumed and compared. On one level, thesociological notion of institution might servethis purpose. For greater clarity and moredetailed comparability, however, I suggest theconcept of societal system as developed in thework of Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann 1995).

Here cannot be the place for a thoroughpresentation of the details of this approach(see Beyer 2006, Ch. 1), but the argumentabout globalization on its basis can be summa-rized like this: from about the late medievalperiod in Western Europe, there began todevelop roughly simultaneously distinct andyet interdependent social systems, each spe-cializing in different functional areas, includ-ing a capitalist economic system, a politicalsystem of sovereign states, an empirically basedscientific system, and a religious system mani-festing itself as a plurality of religions. Each ofthese systems gradually built up its differenti-ated structures on the basis of its own ration-ality; each enhanced its peculiar mode ofpower. And it was on the combined basis ofthese institutional systems that the Europeanssucceeded in spreading their influence aroundthe world by the beginning of the twentiethcentury. As an integral part of this process,non-Western regions of the world have appro-priated these systemic power modalities,invariably particularizing them to local cir-cumstances and thereby glocalizing them.These systems have thus become the dominantsocial structures of contemporary global soci-ety. Yet they are by no means all that consti-tutes that society. The societal systemsspecialize and are therefore selective in whatthey include. They do not subsume everythingthat might otherwise appear as economic production/consumption, political regulation,knowledge, or religion. This combination ofcharacteristics opens the way for understandingthe pluralization of religion under conditions of globalization, but in such a way as to sub-sume the older notions of secularization, priva-tization, and differentiation that dominated

sociological discussion under the rubric ofmodernization.

A brief historical narrative can outline thedevelopment of a religious system in themodern phases of globalization. In WesternEuropean society of the high and late MiddleAges, religion already had a well-developedand differentiated presence in the form of theRoman Christian Church. This specialized butalso multi-functional institution providedsome of the conditions that allowed the rise ofother systems, notably the economic, politicaland scientific. The gradual differentiation ofthese other systems provided a context for theclearer differentiation of the religious one, adevelopment that manifested itself institution-ally through the Protestant and CatholicReformations and conceptually in the emer-gence of a new and pluralized understandingof religion itself. Beginning in the sixteenth toseventeenth centuries, Europeans began toconceive religion no longer primarily as a gen-eral and singular sort of activity that couldexpress itself through various practices of pietyand devotion, but as a differentiated domain ofdivine/human relations that manifested itselfmainly through a set of distinct and systematicreligions to which a given person could‘belong’ or not. In spite of a continued searchfor unity in the religious domain, Europeanscame to see these religions increasingly as irre-ducibly distinct. They included initially, undernewly minted words, Christianity, Judaism,Mahometanism (i.e. Islam), and Paganism.Given that these semantic and institutionaldevelopments happened in the context ofEuropean global expansion, however, by thenineteenth century Europeans included anincreasing set of additional religions that,armed with their new understanding, they ‘dis-covered’ in other parts of the world, includingBuddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Theresponse of people in these other regionsvaried. In the case of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism,and Hinduism, for instance, there was wide-spread collaboration in the re-imagining andreconstruction of these religio-cultural tradi-tions as one of the religions and thus in theglocalization of this initially Western model of what a religion was. In the case of the

110 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 110

Page 14: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Chinese and Confucianism, there was more orless unanimous refusal. All cases, however,included widespread contestation around thecentral questions of what belongs to these reli-gions, which religions belong, which variationsof these religions are authentic, and in generalwhat are the boundaries of the religiousdomain itself. Moreover, the development ofthis religious system is an aspect of the modernprocess of globalization itself. The religions donot just respond to a globalizing context; theyemerge as a part of that process just like theglobal capitalist economy or the global systemof sovereign states. In light of this complex andselective historical development, the pluralizedfate of religion along the axes of variationbecomes clear.

First, the thesis of a differentiated and glob-alized religious system along these lines offersan explanation as to why, in spite of significantcontestation and ambiguity, there seems to besuch widespread global agreement on the exis-tence and legitimacy of a delimited if region-ally varied set of religions, and on the fact thatthese religions are unities in spite of wide-ranging ‘internal’ variation. Correspondingly,contemporary sociology understands religious‘pluralism’ primarily in terms of these religionsand their different subdivisions and not, forinstance, in terms of individual variation inbelief and practice.2 Religion is not just vari-able; the religions are plural, both internallyand in relation to each other.

Second, in light of the selective and some-what arbitrary modern (re)construction ofreligions, the possibility of variation across theboundaries between institutionalized andnon-institutionalized religiosity becomes evi-dent. Not everything conceivably religious fallswithin the authoritative boundaries of the reli-gions; and the elements of these religionscould be recombined in a wide variety of ways.Thus, what falls under labels like spirituality orthose forms that could be new religions hoversat the boundaries of the recognized religionsor outside them altogether. Without the exis-tence of the institutionalized religions, such con-trasting variation could gain no observationalpurchase. We could not recognize them as reli-gions, as spirituality, or as another contrasting

category such as, for instance, culture. In thatlight, we should expect constant debate andobservation concerning how institutionalizedreligions are faring in a particular region,whether non-institutional religiosity is moreprevalent, whether and how new religions areforming and becoming accepted, and so forth.The possibility exists that, in a given region,institutional religions will weaken to the pointof irrelevance or, by contrast, will strengthenso as to push non-institutional forms under-ground. Yet there is nothing in the theory ofthe religious system that would predict onetrend or another, only continued variationalong this axis. Since the historical construc-tion of this religious system only makes sensein the context of other analogous systemsdeveloping at the same time, the question ofthe relations between the religious system andthese other systems will be an important con-sideration. This condition points to thesalience of the three other axes of variationoutlined above.

Third, therefore, the co-existence of thesesystems introduces the question of whether thesocial purposes that the religious system servescannot be fulfilled by one or more of the othersystems. For instance, can a sense of the ulti-mate meaning of life not be provided throughthe scientific system with its ever-expandingform of knowledge? Can an ultimate sense ofbelonging and moral rightness not be hadthrough the state as the vehicle of the nation?Can loving acceptance not be found in theintense relationships of the family? Can under-standing and socialization not be deliveredeffectively through academic education? Cancosmic vision not be provided by science orart? Can participation in mass media perform-ances or through sport not supply people witha sense of ritual regularity and incorporation?The idea is not that these alternatives willinevitably replace religion in these functions,but rather that these possibilities are a con-stant, acting as another source of religiousvariation over time and in different places.

More critically in this regard, the relation ofreligion to other systems points to the questionof the relative power of these systems.Although the relation of the systems is not

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 111

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 111

Page 15: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

hierarchical in any structural sense, they dovary in terms of their prominence. With fewexceptions, the global capitalist economy, thesystem of territorial states and the scientificsystem are most often far more invasive andunavoidable in the lives of the world’s popula-tions than is the authoritative influence of theinstitutionalized religions. Yet, to the degreethat religion constructs itself as one of thedominant systems in global society, that powerrelation need not be constant and certainlyreligion should not be expected to disappear.Rather, simply out of that structural relation,one should expect a fluctuation between rela-tive powerlessness of the religious system,manifested for instance in the widespread privatization of religion, and the relative resur-gence of religion so as to exert meaningfulpublic influence at least in various regions (cf. Beyer 1994).

Finally, the differentiation of a religioussystem poses the question of the relation ofthat system to the society as a whole, includingits other dominant societal subsystems and therespective other religions. The axis from ‘con-servative’ to ‘liberal’ religion enters at thispoint. The central issue in this regard is theextent to which the religions, through theiradherents, will accept the relativizationimplied in the concentration of religious con-cern in a particular societal subsystem amongothers, and one that is moreover internally dif-ferentiated into formally equal religions. Giventhe universal and encompassing visions thatwhat we recognize as religions typically offer,this is an important issue because it concernsthe core logic of that system, its claim to renderaccess to the transcendent conditions thatmake the immanent possible. If religion assertssuch a foundational role for all aspects of socialand personal life, then how will it respond tolimitation and even contradiction of thatclaim? As noted above, the answers will varyalong a continuum from rejection to unprob-lematic accommodation. On the conservativeend one finds responses that claim uniquevalidity for their religion or variant thereof.They reject key features of the modern worlddeemed representative of the limiting situa-tion, and they valorize of traditions evocative

of past societies which ostensibly allowed truereligion its proper role. By contrast, on the lib-eral side, positive orientations to the differenti-ated situation tolerate and even celebratereligious and other forms of plurality, laud the‘freedom’ and ‘inclusion’ that it promises (andcriticize the failure to live up to these ideals),and accept the relatively autonomous func-tioning of other institutional societal systems.Such a stance is not, however, identical withthe acceptance of religious privatization or theradical secularization of society: a sectarianconservative orientation can also abandon thewider public world to its secularity, and liberalreligious positions are often also publiclyassertive (cf. Casanova 1994).

CONCLUSIONS: FUTURE DIRECTIONS FORTHE SOCIOLOGICAL OBSERVATION OFRELIGION IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

The theoretical perspective outlined in the lastsection is but one attempt to gain some greaterpurchase on the role of religion in the con-struction of contemporary global society. Itsmain advantages are that it demonstrates howone can see globalization and religion as inti-mately linked while at the same time showingthat this linkage necessarily implies variousforms of glocalized religious pluralization.That said, the field of the sociological under-standing of religion in global context is stillrather sparsely occupied, probably because westill find ourselves in a transition between apreviously dominant secularization/modern-ization and an as yet only practically recog-nized pluralization/globalization perspective.So much of the more recent sociological liter-ature on religion operates with an explicit orimplicit awareness of the now unavoidablyglobal and religiously plural context, but theoften implicit theoretical assumptions thatinform this work are frequently still those ofthe secularization thesis. A main symptom inthis regard is that the perceived inadequacy ofthe latter leads only to the hypothesis that the‘real’ situation is just the negation of secular-ization, for instance, the ‘resacralization’ of

112 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 112

Page 16: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

society or that nothing has fundamentallychanged since the fifteenth century CE. Just as the post-modern has thus far defined itselfprimarily as the negation of the core assump-tions of the modern, so have post-secularizationpositions not really gone much beyond observ-ing that the ‘king is dead’ or that the ‘emperorhas no clothes’.

Replacing the leitmotif of secularization/modernization positively with that of pluraliza-tion/globalization then carries certain implica-tions for the directions that the sociologicalobservation of religion will likely continue totake. The first and most obvious of these direc-tions is that the sheer variety of glocal formsthat religion takes will persist as a prime focus ofresearch. Simply documenting that variety isalready a significant and ongoing task. Just asimportant is the issue of the co-existence ofthese religious forms and variations within thesingle social space of global society and indeedwithin a great many localities of that society.The ‘problem of religious pluralism’ is sympto-matic of the basic situation of religion underglobalized conditions. Pluralization of religionis not just descriptive, it is also potentially andactually problematic just like secularization wasunder the assumptions of modernization.Sociological research will therefore have to con-tinue to concern itself with the possible waysthat this pluralization is managed, and the con-sequences of different strategies in this regard.In this regard, although the pluralization thesisconcerning religion undermines the possibilityof any easy prognosis, the issue of transforma-tions in the religious field and the discerning ofreligious trends nonetheless remains. If we canno longer convince ourselves that there exists amaster trend, then we are still left with the ques-tion of the likely outcomes in different regionsof global society.

Finally, it must be stressed again that a re-orientation of the sociological observation of religion in the context of globalization andglocalization does not mean the irrelevance of previously dominant concepts, above all secularization, privatization, and differentiation.Pluralization of religion was an important issueunder the aegis of the secularization/moderniza-tion orientation, but it was subsumed under

those concepts as a symptomatic or contributingfactor. Analogously, the older concepts remainimportant but now subsumed under the domi-nant motif of pluralization as descriptors alongaxes of variation. For in the final analysis, theshift from one leitmotif to another is more amatter of looking with different eyes at long-standing developments than it is a claim thatsomething radically new has happened onlysince the new terms rose to prominence. We havelived in an era of globalization and pluralizationfor quite some time now. The construction andvalorization of these partially neologistic ideasonly signals a reassessment of what we deem tobe most worthy of our attention.

NOTES

1. See e.g. Stark and Bainbridge 1987; Beyer 2006 astwo, in their details, radically different examples.Beckford’s (2003) much more extensive analysis of secu-larization, pluralism, globalization and religious move-ments overlaps in important ways with what I amoutlining here. There are, however, also important differ-ences. They are signalled in the choice of the word plural-ization, a deliberate distancing from and echoing of thegenerally more evaluative pluralism; and in the close link Iam suggesting between pluralization and globalization,subordinating secularization and movements to these twoprimary terms. I take Beckford’s emphasis on social con-structionism as a given.

2. Cf., for example (Bellah et al. 1985), who, in seeking todescribe just this sort of variation ‘across religious bound-aries’, coin the now well-known term, ‘Sheilaism’, therebygiving it a name as if it were another religion, in effect seek-ing to model this phenomenon on the taken-for-grantedreligions.

REFERENCES

Ackerman, Susan E. 2005. ‘Falun Dafa and the New Age Movement in Malaysia: Signs ofHealth, Symbols of Salvation’. Social Compass 52:495–511.

Adogame, Afe 2000. ‘The Quest for Space in theGlobal Spiritual Marketplace: African Religions inEurope’. International Review of Mission 89: 409.

Agadjanian, Alexander and Victor Roudometof(eds) 2005. Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age.Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 113

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 113

Page 17: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Ahmed, Akbar S. 1994. Islam, Globalization andPostmodernity. London: Routledge.

Ahmed, Mumtaz 1991. ‘Islamic Fundamentalism inSouth Asia: The Jamaat-i-Islami and the TablighiJamaat’. pp. 457–530 in FundamentalismsObserved. Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. ScottAppleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Albrow, Martin 1990. ‘Globalization, Knowledge andSociety’. pp. 3–18 in Globalization, Knowledge andSociety: Readings from International Sociology.Edited by M. Albrow and E. King. London: Sage.

Alvarsson, Jan-Åke and Rita Laura Segato (eds)2003. Religions in Transition: Mobility, Mergingand Globalization in the Emergence ofContemporary Religious Adhesions. Uppsala:Uppsala University Library.

Barber, Benjamin R. 1996. Jihad vs. McWorld.New York: Balantine Books.

Barchunova, Tatyana V. 2002. ‘Faith-BasedCommunities of Practice in Novosibirsk’. InConference on Local Forms of ReligiousOrganization as Structural Modernisation: Effectson Community-Building and Globalisation.Marburg, Germany.

Baumann, Martin 2000. Migration – Religion –Integration: Buddhistische Vietnamesen und hin-duistische Tamilen in Deutschland. Marburg:Diagonal Verlag.

Beck, Ulrich 2000. What is Globalization? Translatedby P. Camiller. London: Polity.

Beckford, James A. 2003. Social Theory and Religion.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bellah, Robert N. 1970. ‘Religious Evolution’. InBeyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper & Row.

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M.Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Stephen M. Tipton1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism andCommitment in American Life. San Francisco:Harper & Row.

Berger, Peter 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of aSociological Theory of Religion. New York:Doubleday Anchor.

Beyer, Peter 1994. Religion and Globalization.London: Sage.

Beyer, Peter (ed.) 2001. Religion in the Process ofGlobalization/Religion im Prozeß Globalisierung.Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

Beyer, Peter 2003. ‘De-Centring ReligiousSingularity; The Globalization of Christianity asa Case in Point’. Numen 50: 357–86.

Beyer, Peter 2006. Religions in Global Society.London: Routledge.

Bibby, Reginald W. 2002. Restless Gods: TheRenaissance of Religion in Canada. Toronto:Stoddart.

Brannen, Noah S. 1968. Soka Gakkai: Japan’sMilitant Buddhists. Richmond, VA: John KnoxPress.

Burghart, Richard (ed.) 1987. Hinduism in GreatBritain: The Perpetuation of Religion in an AlienCultural Milieu. London: Tavistock.

Carnes, Tony and Fenggang Yang (eds) 2004. AsianAmerican Religions: The Making and Remaking ofBorders and Boundaries. New York: New YorkUniversity Press.

Carozzi, Maria Julia 2004. ‘Ready to Move Along:The Sacralization of Disembedding in the NewAge Movement and the Alternative Circuit inBuenos Aires’. Civilisations: Revue internationaled’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 51:139–54.

Casanova, José 1994. Public Religions in the ModernWorld. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Casanova, José 2001. ‘Globalizing Catholicism andthe Return to a “Universal Church”. pp. 201–25 inReligion in the Process of Globalization. Edited byP. Beyer. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

Clarke, Peter B. (ed.) 1998. New Trends andDevelopments in African Religions. Westport, CT:Greenwood.

Coleman, Simon 2000. The Globalisation ofCharismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel ofProsperity. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Coward, H., J. R. Hinnells and R. B. Williams (eds)2000. The South Asian Religious Diaspora inBritain, Canada, and the United States. Albany,NY: SUNY Press.

Cox, Harvey 1995. Fire from Heaven: The Rise ofPentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping ofReligion in the Twenty-First Century. Reading,MA: Perseus Books.

Davie, Grace 2003. Europe: The Exceptional Case:Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London:Darton, Longman & Todd.

Dawson, Lorne L. 1998. ‘The Cultural Significanceof New Religious Movements and Globalization:A Theoretical Prolegomena’. Journal for theScientific Study of Religion 37: 580–95.

Dempster, Murray W., Byron D. Klaus and DouglasPetersen (eds) 1999. The Globalization ofPentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel. Oxford:Regnum Books International.

Dessai, E. 1993. Hindus in Deutschland. Moers:Aragon.

114 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 114

Page 18: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Durkheim, Émile 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by J. W. Swain.New York: Free Press.

Ebaugh, Helen Rose and Janet Saltzman Chafetz(eds) 2002. Religion across Borders: TransnationalMigrant Networks. Walnut Creek, CA: AltamiraPress.

Esposito, John L. and Michael Watson (eds) 2000.Religion and Global Order. Cardiff: University ofWales Press.

Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark 1992. The Churchingof America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in OurReligious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press.

Frigerio, Alejandro 2004. ‘Re-Africanization inSecondary Religious Diasporas: Constructing aWorld Religion’. Civilisations: Revue interna-tionale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 51:39–60.

Fukuyama, Francis 1993. The End of History and theLast Man. New York: Avon Books.

Glock, Charles Y. and Robert N. Bellah (eds) 1976.The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.

Guest, Kenneth J. 2003. God in Chinatown: Religionand Survival in New York’s Evolving ImmigrantCommunity. New York: New York UniversityPress.

Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Jane I. Smith (eds)2002. Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible andInvisible. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Haines, Byron L. 1979. ‘Islamic Fundamentalismand Christian Responsibility’. Christian Century96: 365–66.

Haynes, Jeff. 1998. Religion in Global Politics.London and New York: Longman.

Heelas, Paul, Linda Woodhead, Benjamin Seel,Bronislaw Szerszyinski and Karin Tusting 2005.The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is GivingWay to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hexham, Irving and Karla Poewe 1997. NewReligions as Global Cultures: Making the HumanSacred. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Hopkins, Dwight N., Lois Ann Lorentzen, EduardoMendieta and David Batstone (eds) 2001.Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Howell, Julia Day 2005. ‘Muslims, the New Age andMarginal Religions in Indonesia: ChangingMeanings of Religious Pluralism’. Social Compass52: 473–92.

Inglehart, Ronald 1997. Modernization andPostmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and

Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Jonker, Gerdien 2002. Eine Wellenlänge zu Gott: Der‘Verband der Islamischen Kulturzentren’ inEuropa. Bielelfeld, Germany: Transcript.

Judah, J. Stillson 1974. Hare Krishna and theCounterculture. New York: Wiley.

Juergensmeyer, Mark 1993. The New Cold War?Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Juergensmeyer, Mark (ed.) 2003. Global Religions: AnIntroduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kapur, Rajiv 1986. Sikh Separatism: The Politics ofFaith. London: Allen & Unwin.

Kent, Stephen A. 1999. ‘The Globalization ofScientology: Influence, Control, and Oppositionin Transnational Markets’. Religion 29: 147–69.

Kepel, Gilles 1994. The Revenge of God. Oxford:Blackwell.

Khosrokhavar, Farhad 1997. L’islam des jeunes. Paris:Flammarion.

Lanternari, Vittorio 1998. ‘From Africa to Italy: TheExorcistic-Therapeutic Cult of EmmanuelMilingo’. pp. 263–83 in New Trends andDevelopments in African Religions. Edited by Peter B. Clarke. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Lawson, Ronald 1999. ‘When Immigrants TakeOver: The Impact of Immigrant Growth onAmerican Seventh-day Adventism’s Trajectoryfrom Sect to Denomination’. Journal for theScientific Study of Religion 38: 83–102.

Learman, Linda (ed.) 2005. Buddhist Missionaries inthe Era of Globalization. Honolulu: University ofHawai’i Press.

Levitt, Peggy 1998. ‘Local-level Global Religion: TheCase of U.S.-Dominican Migration’. Journal forthe Scientific Study of Religion 37: 74–89.

Levitt, Peggy 2004. ‘Redefining the Boundaries ofBelonging: The Institutional Character ofTransnational Religious Life’. Sociology of Religion65: 1–18.

Lofland, John 1966. Doomsday Cult: A Study ofConversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance ofFaith. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Luckmann, Thomas 1967. The Invisible Religion:The Problem of Religion in Modern Societies. NewYork: Macmillan.

Luhmann, Niklas 1995. Social Systems. Translated byJ. Bednarz, Jr and D. Baecker. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Lustick, Ian S. 1988. For the Land and the Lord:Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York:Council on Foreign Relations.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 115

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 115

Page 19: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

Lyotard, Jean-François 1984. The Condition ofPostmodernity. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.

Martin, David 1978. A General Theory ofSecularization. Oxford: Blackwell:

Martin, David 2002. Pentecostalism: The World TheirParish. Oxford: Blackwell.

Marty, Martin E. and R. Scott Appleby (eds)1991–95. The Fundamentalism Project. 5 vols.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McFarland, H. Neill 1967. The Rush Hour of theGods: A Study of New Religious Movements inJapan. New York: Macmillan.

McLuhan, Marshall 1964. Understanding Media: TheExtensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Melton, J. Gordon and Martin Baumann (eds) 2002.Religions of the World: A ComprehensiveEncyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices. SantaBarbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Meyer, Birgit and Peter Geschiere (eds) 1999.Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow andClosure. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mndende, Nokuzola 1998. ‘From UndergroundPraxis to Recognized Religion: Challenges facingAfrican Religions’. Journal for the Study of Religion11: 115–24.

Motta, Roberto 1998. ‘The Churchifying ofCandomblé: Priests, Anthropologists, and theCanonization of the African Religious Memoryin Brazil’. pp. 45–57 in New Trends andDevelopments in African Religions. Edited by Peter B. Clarke. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Nielsen, J. 1999. Towards a European Islam.Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Poewe, Karla (ed.) 1994. Charismatic Christianity asa Global Culture. Columbia, SC: University ofSouth Carolina Press.

Prebish, Charles S. and Kenneth K. Tanaka (eds)1998. The Faces of Buddhism in America. Berkeley,CA: University of California Press.

Rath, Jan et al. 2001. Western Europe and its Islam.Leiden: Brill.

Richardson, James T. (ed.) 2004. Regulating Religion:Case Studies from Around the Globe. New York:Kluwer Academic/Penum.

Riesebrodt, Martin 1993. Pious Passion: TheEmergence of Modern Fundamentalism in theUnited States and Iran. Translated by DonReneau. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robertson, Roland 1992. Globalization: SocialTheory and Global Culture. London: Sage.

Robertson, Roland 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Spaceand Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’. pp. 25–44 inGlobal Modernities. Edited by Mike Featherstone,Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. London: Sage.

Robertson, Roland 2001. ‘The GlobalizationParadigm: Thinking Globally’. pp. 3–22 inReligion in the Process of Globalization. Edited byP. Beyer. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

Robertson, Roland and JoAnn Chirico 1985.‘Humanity, Globalization, Worldwide ReligiousResurgence: A Theoretical Exploration’.Sociological Analysis 46: 219–42.

Robertson, Roland and William R. Garrett (eds)1991. Religion and Global Order. New York:Paragon House.

Roof, Wade Clark 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: BabyBoomers and the Remaking of American Religion.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rothstein, Mikael (ed.) 2001. New Age Religion andGlobalization. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Roy, Olivier 1999. Vers un islam européen. Paris:Éditions Esprit.

Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber and James Piscatori (eds)1997. Transnational Religion and Fading States.Boulder, CO: Westview.

Schiller, Anne 1997. Small Sacrifices: ReligiousChange and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju ofIndonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shimazono, Susumu 2004. From Salvation toSpirituality: Popular Religious Movements inJapan. Honolulu: Trans Pacific Press.

Stackhouse, Max L. and Peter J. Paris (eds) 2000. Godand Globalization: Religion and the Powers of theCommon Life. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International.

Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge 1985. TheFuture of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and CultFormation. Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress.

Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge 1987.A Theory of Religion. New York: Peter Lang.

Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke 2000. Acts of Faith:Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley,CA: University of California Press.

Stark, Rodney and Laurence Iannaccone 1994.‘A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the“Secularization” of Europe’. Journal for the ScientificStudy of Religion 33: 230–52.

Troeltsch, Ernst 1931. The Social Teachings of theChristian Churches. New York: Macmillan.

Van der Veer, Peter (ed.) 1996. Conversion toModernities: The Globalization of Christianity.London: Routledge.

van Dijk, Rijk 2001. ‘From Camp to Encompassment:Discourses on Transsubjectivity in the GhanianPentecostal Diaspora’. pp. 177–200 in Religion inthe Process of Globalization. Edited by P. Beyer.Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

Vásquez, Manuel A. and Marie FriedmannMarquardt 2003. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion

116 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 116

Page 20: Globalization and Glocalization - Sage

across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press.

Vertovec, Steven and Alisdair Rogers (eds) 1998. Muslim European Youth: ReproducingEthnicity, Religion, Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

von der Mehden, Fred R. 1980. ‘Religion andDevelopment in Southeast Asia: A ComparativeStudy’. World Development 8: 545–53.

Warner, S. and J. G. Wittner (eds) 1998. Gatheringsin Diaspora: Religious Communities and the NewImmigration. Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress.

Wilkinson, Michael 2006. The Spirit Said Go:Pentecostal Immigrants in Canada. New York:Peter Lang.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOCALIZATION 117

05-Beckford_Ch05 8/31/07 2:45 PM Page 117


Recommended