Lesson 6

The Globalization of
Religion
 Religion,much more than culture,has the most
difficult relitionship with globalism.
1)First, the two are entirely contrasting beliefs
systems. Religion is concerned with the sacred,
while globalism places value on material wealth.
2)Second, This link between the human and the
divine confers some social power on the latter.
Furthermore, "God," "Allah," or "Yahweh" defines
and judges human action in moral terms (good vs.
bad).
• Globalism's yardstick- is how much of human
action can lead to the highest material satisfaction
and subsequent wisdom that this new status
produces.
• Religious people are less concerned with wealth
and all that comes along with it (higher social
status,a standard of living similar with that of the
reest of the community, “exposure”, top-of-the-
line education for the children).
• Globalish are less worried about whether they will
end up in heaven or hell. As they aim to seal trade
deals, raise the profits of private enterprises.
• Religion and globalism clash over the fact that
religious evangelization is in itself a form of
globalization.
• Globalist ideal - is largely focused on the realm of
markets.
• Religious is concerned with spreading holy ideas
globally, while the globalist wishes to spread goods
and services.
• The "missions" being sent by American Born-Again
Christian churches, Sufi and Shiite Muslim orders,
as well as institutions like Buddhist monasteries
and Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon churches
are efforts at "spreading the word of God" and
gaining adherents abroad.
• Religions regard identities associated with
globalism (citizenship, language, and race) as
inferior and narrow because they are earthly
categories.
• These philosophical differences explain why
certain groups "flee”their communities and create
impenetrable sanctuaries where they can practice
their religions without the meddling and control of
state authorities.
• These isolationist justifications are also used by
the Rizalistas of Mount Banahaw, the Essenes
during Roman-controlled Judea (now Israel), and
for a certain period, the Mormons of Utah.
• These groups believe that living among "non-
believers" will distract them from their mission or
tempt them to abandon their faith and become
sinners like everyone else.
• Priestesses and monks led the first revolts against
colonialism in Asia and Africa, warning that these
outsiders were out to destroy their people's gods
and ways of life.
REALITIES
• In actuality, the relationship between religion and
globalism is much more complicated. Peter Berger
argues that far from being secularized, the
"contemporary world furiously religious.

• In most of the world, there are veritable explosions

of religious fervor, occurring in one form of
another in all the major religious traditions-
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
and even Confucianism (if one wants to call it a
religion)-and in many places in imaginative
syntheses of one or more world religions with
indigenous faiths."
• Religions are the foundations of modern republics.
The Malaysian government places religion at the
center of the political system.
• The late Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah
Ruholla Khomeini, bragged about the superiority
of Islamic rule over its secular counterparts and
pointed out that "there is no fundamental
distinction among constitutional, despotic,
dictatorial, democratic, and communistic regimes.
• The moderate Muslim association Nahdlatul
Ulama in Indonesia has Islamic schools
(pesantren) where students are taught not only
about Islam but also about modern science, the
social sciences, modern banking, civic education,
rights of women, pluralism, and democracy.

• King Henry VIII broke away from Roman

Catholicism and established his own Church to
bolster his own power. In the United States,
religion and law were fused together to help build
this "modern secular society.”
• Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote, "not only do
the Americans practice their religion out of self-
interest but they often even place in this world the
interest which they have in practicing it.
• Jose Casanova confirms this statement by noting
that "historically, religion has always been at the
very center of all great political conflicts and
movements of social reform.
• Religious movement today that does not use
religion to oppose "profane" globalization. Yet, two
of the so-called "old world religions"-Christianity
and Islam-see globalization less as an obstacle
and more as an opportunity to expand their reach
all over the world.
• Globalization has "freed" communities from the
"constraints of the nation-state," but in the
process, also threatened to destroy the cultural
system that bind them together.
• Religion is thus not the "regressive force" that stops or
slows down globalization; it is a "pro-active force" that
gives communities a new and powerful basis of identity.
• It is, therefore, not entirely correct to assume that the
proliferation of "Born-Again" groups, or in the case of
Islam, the rise of movements like Daesh signals religion's
defense against the materialism of globalization.
• Some Muslims view "globalization" as a Trojan horse
hiding supporters of Western values like secularism,
liberalism, or even communism ready to spread these
ideas in their areas to eventually displace Islam.
• The Catholic Church and its dynamic leader, Pope
Francis, likewise condemned globalization's "throw-away
culture" that is "fatally destined to suffocate hope and
increase risks and threats.
• The Lutheran World Federation 10th Assembly's 292-
page declaration message included economic and
feminist critiques of globalization, sharing the voices of
members of the Church who were affected by
globalization.
• For a phenomenon that "is about everything." it is
odd that globalization is seen to have very little to
do with religion.
• As Peter Bayer and Lori Beaman observed,
"Religion, it seems. is somehow 'outside' looking at
globalization as problem or potential." One reason
for this perspective is the association of
globalization with modernization, which is a
concept of progress that is based on science,
technology, reason, and the law.
• Samuel Huntington, one of the strongest
defenders of globalization, admits in his book.
• The Clash of Civilizations, that civilizations can be
held together by religious worldviews.
• As far back as the 15th century, Jesuits and
Dominicans used religion as an "ideological
armature" to legitimize the Spanish empire.
• Finally. one of the greatest sociologists of all time,
Max Weber, also observed the correlation between
religion and capitalism as an economic system.
• Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism, believed that
God had already decided who would and would not
be saved.
• This "inner-worldly asceticism"-as Weber referred
to this Protestant ethic-contributed to the rise of
You sent modern capitalism.
 Lesson 7

Media and
Globalization
• A film is made in Hollywood, it is shown not only
in the United States, but also in other cities across
the globe.
• South Korean rapper Psy's song "Gangnam Style"
may have been about a wealthy suburb in Seoul,
but its listeners included millions who have never
been or may never go to Gangnam.
• Some of them may not even lobalizat know what
Gangnam is. Globalization also involves the spread
of ideas.
• People who travel the globe teaching and
preaching their beliefs in universities, churches,
public forums, classrooms, or even as guests of a
family play a major role in the spread of culture
and ideas. But today, television programs, social
media groups, books, movies, magazines, and the
like have made it easier for advocates to reach
larger audiences.
• Globalization relies on media as its main conduit
for the spread of global culture and ideas.
 Media and Its Functions
• Lule describes media as "a means of conveying
something, such as a channel of
communication”.Technically speaking, a person's
voice is a medium.
• Commentators refer to "media" (the plural of
medium), they mean the technologies of mass
communication.
• Print media include books, magazines, and
newspapers
• Broadcast media involve radio, film, and television.
• Digital media cover the internet and mobile mass
communication.
• Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once declared
that "the medium is the message." He did not
mean that ideas ("messages") are useless and do
not affect people.
• Television is not a simple bearer of messages, it
also shapes the social behavior of users and
reorient family behavior.
• McLuhan added that different media
simultaneously extend and amputate human
senses. New media may expand the reach of
communication, but they also dull the users'
communicative capacities.
• New media are neither inherently good nor bad.
The famous writer was merely drawing attention
to the historically and technologically specific
attributes of various media.
The Global Village and Cultural
Imperialism
• McLuhan used his analysis of technology to
examine the impact of electronic media.
• Since he was writing around the 1960s, he mainly
analyzed the social changes brought about by
television. McLuhan declared that television was
turning the world into a "global village."
• By this, he meant that, as more and more people
sat down in front of their television sets and
listened to the same stories, their perception of
the world would contract.
• Commentators, therefore, believed that media
globalization coupled with American hegemony
would create a form of cultural imperialism.
• In 1976, media critic Herbert Schiller argued that
not only was the world being Americanized, but
that this process also led to the spread of
"American" capitalist values like consumerism.
• This media/cultural imperialism theory has,
therefore, been subject to significant critique.
Critiques of Cultural Imperialism
• Proponents of the idea of cultural imperialism ignored the
fact that media messages are not just made by
producers, they are also consumed by audiences.
• The field of audience studies emphasizes that media
consumers are active participants in the meaning-making
process, who view media "texts" (in media studies, a
"text" simply refers to the content of any medium) through
their own cultural lenses.
• 1985, Indonesian cultural critic len Ang studied
the ways in which different viewers in the
Netherlands experienced watching the American
soap opera Dallas.
• Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes decided to push Ang's
analysis further by examining how viewers from
distinct cultural communities interpreted Dallas.
• Apart from the challenge of audience studies, the
cultural imperialism thesis has been belied by the
renewed strength of regional trends in the
globalization process.
Thank You