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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i

Globalizing the Sacred

ii GLOBALIZING THE SACRED
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

GLOBALIZING
THE SACRED
Religion across the Americas

MANUEL A.
VÁSQUEZ
MARIE FRIEDMANN
MARQUARDT

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
iv GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Vásquez, Manuel A.
Globalizing the sacred : religion across the Americas / Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie
F. Marquardt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8135–3284–1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–8135–3285–X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. America—Religion. 2. Religion and sociology—America. 3. Globalization—reli-
gious aspects. I. Marquardt, Marie F. 1972– II. Title.

BL2500 .V37 2003

306.6’097—dc21
2002152411

British Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2003 by Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100
Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibi-
tion is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Manufactured in the United States of America

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

INTRODUCTION 1

1 THE LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 12

2 THEORIZING GLOBALIZATION AND RELIGION 34

3 MIRACLES AT THE BORDER:

A Genealogy of Religious Globalization 65

4 CROSSING THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER:

Religious Congregations and the Internet 92

5 SAVING SOULS TRANSNATIONALLY:

Pentecostalism and Youth Gangs in El Salvador and the United States
(with Ileana Gómez) 119

6 A CONTINUUM OF HYBRIDITY:
Latino Churches in the New South 145

7 PREMODERN, MODERN, OR POSTMODERN?:

John Paul II’s Civilization of Love 171

8 “BLITZING” CENTRAL AMERICA:

The Politics of Transnational Religious Broadcasting 197

CONCLUSION 223

NOTES 231
WORKS CITED 239
INDEX 253

v
vi vi G LCOOBNATLEI ZNI TNSG T H E S A C R E D
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

Acknowledgments

Completing this book would not have been possible without help from
family, friends, and colleagues. Foremost among them is Anna Peterson,
whose careful readings of multiple drafts proved invaluable. Manuel A.
Vásquez also expresses his deepest gratitude to Anna and Gabriel for their
patience and understanding throughout the lengthy process. Thanks
are also due to the members of the Rockefeller reading group on reli-
gion and globalization at the University of Florida, especially to Patricia
Fortuny, David Hackett, Lois Lorentzen, Milagros Peña, and Philip Wil-
liams. Participants in the UF graduate seminar “Globalizing the Sacred”
also allowed Manuel to try out some preliminary hypotheses.
Marie would like to thank Chris and Mary Elizabeth for providing
love, encouragement, and much-needed diversion. Her profound grati-
tude goes to Elizabeth Friedmann for the many sacrifices she offered
to make this project possible. Thanks also to those who have carefully
read and responded to chapter drafts and presentations, including
Nancy Eiesland, Elizabeth Bounds, Steven Tipton, Sarah Mahler, and
Carlos Garma Navarro, and to faculty and colleagues at Emory, espe-
cially Jon Gunnemann, Carla Freeman, Karey Harwood, Barbara
McClure, Melissa Snarr, and Bradley Schmelling. Marie would also like
to thank the Social Science Research Council, the Lilly Endowment, the
Louisville Institute, and the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory
University for funding portions of this project. Finally, we both thank

vii
viii GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

the communities and individuals who so generously shared their ex-

periences with us, our anonymous reader for the insightful comments,
and David Myers at Rutgers University Press for his unwavering sup-
port throughout the production of the book.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Globalizing the Sacred

x GLOBALIZING THE SACRED
 INTRODUCTION 1

INTRODUCTION

T
he origins of this volume date to an apparition of the Virgin Mary in
1996. Just a few days before Christmas, she appeared in iridescent shades
on the windows of a bank building nestled between strip malls and gas
stations amid the suburban sprawl of Clearwater, Florida. Taking ad-
vantage of the image’s appearance in our “backyard,” we traveled to
the site to study the phenomenon (Vásquez and Marquardt 2000). Once
there, we joined not only residents of the Tampa–St. Petersburg area
and the occasional curious out-of-towner but also members of the
national and international media, including the major U.S. television
networks, and volunteers working with the Shepherd of Christ, a lay
Catholic organization based in Cincinnati, who were dedicated to in-
terpreting and spreading Mary’s messages through their Internet site.
Also there were transnational Mexican immigrants, many of whom saw
the Virgin reflected in the bank windows as Our Lady of Guadalupe.
They were joined by French, German, and Australian pilgrims and tour-
ists who had just come from other pilgrimage sites like Medjugorge and
Conyers, Georgia, or who were on their way to Disney World in Or-
lando. In the midst of this bustling and polyglot crowd, we understood
that we could not conduct a traditional ethnographic study of the site,
providing only a thick description of local beliefs and practices. We were
witnessing the production of new local, transnational, and global sa-
cred spaces in interaction with multiple “secular” spaces. Grappling with

1
2 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

the apparition at Clearwater, we began to wonder if the complex dy-

namics at play in this site were not also evident elsewhere. We decided
to embark on a more sustained study of the changing face of religion
in the Americas, our area of expertise, in the context of globalization.
The result is this book.
We approach the study of religion and globalization with some
trepidation. This is ironic, given that, as Rudolph (1997: 1) notes, “re-
ligious communities are among the oldest of transnationals: Sufi orders,
Catholic missionaries, and Buddhist monks carried word and praxis
across vast spaces before those places became nation-states or even
states.” Notwithstanding this long history of religious globalization, it
would be theoretically naive and strategically dangerous not to acknowl-
edge the ideological baggage that has become associated with global-
ization in recent years. Globalization is often understood in purely
economic terms, as an ineluctable and monolithic process that, for bet-
ter or for worse, determines every aspect of social life. Economic elites
have promoted a view of globalization as the triumph of open markets
against state-controlled, protectionist economic regimes. This triumph,
we are told, goes hand in hand with the advancement of liberal de-
mocracy and individual rights and the fulfillment of material and spiri-
tual needs worldwide (Fukuyama 1992).
Critics on the Left, in contrast, tend to see globalization as an in-
sidious form of U.S. imperialism—as the homogenization and exploi-
tation of local cultures and communities. In their view, the crisis of the
welfare state and the weakening of the working class as a collective agent
make resistance to the steamroller of globalization ever more precari-
ous. In this context, globalization functions as a “conservative soci-
odicy” disseminated by the economic elites to justify their privilege
and bolster the inevitability of neoliberalism. As Bourdieu (1998: 38)
sees it, globalization is above all “a justificatory myth” that, while of-
fering utopia, leads only to “the extension of the hold of a small num-
ber of dominant nations over the whole set of national financial
markets.”
We share Bourdieu’s concerns, and we add to them a further con-
cern: in their attempt to reject economic reductionism, some scholars
have presented a “radical” view of globalization as the erasure of all
borders and power relations—globalization as utter fragmentation, flu-
idity, and ephemerality. When social scientists speak of the world as
becoming a “global oecumene” (Hannerz 1992) or “single place”
(Robertson 1992), or as defined primarily by decentered networks
(Castells 1996) or global flows (Appadurai 1996), there is a danger of
 INTRODUCTION 3

glossing over the contested, uneven, and situated impact of globaliza-

tion. Abstract readings of globalization risk obscuring the conflict-laden
relations among global, regional, national, local, and individual actors
and processes. This is why we prefer to talk about “anchored” or
“grounded” globalization (Fox and Starn 1997; Burawoy et al. 2000).
Using case studies, we explore how specific religious communities and
institutions experience globalization in its multiple manifestations.
The best antidote to hegemonic readings is to see globalization as
a complex, historically contingent cluster of processes involving mul-
tiple actors, scales, and realms of human activity. These processes have
contradictory effects for local life and for religious organizations, dis-
courses, and practices. Globalization is not just about domination and
homogenization. It also involves resistance, heterogeneity, and the ac-
tive negotiation of space, time, and identity at the grassroots, even if
these negotiations occur under the powerful constraints of neoliberal
markets and all-pervading culture industries. This is what Appadurai
(2000), Mittelman (2000), and Keck and Sikkink (1998) refer to as “glo-
balization from below” or “grassroots globalization.”
The proliferation of theories of globalization reflects the
polyvocality of the phenomena at hand. In this light, globalization can
neither provide a new theoretical grand narrative nor be seen as the
only path to economic development. We see theories of globalization
above all as a framework to deal with social complexity (Mittelman
2000). Within the globalization framework we find a host of analytical
tools, such as the dialectic between territorialization and deterritorial-
ization, and the concepts of transnationalism, hybridity, and border-
lands, which provide a more nuanced picture of the changing face of
religious and cultural life in the Americas. Given the time and space
compression induced by the recent episode of globalization, traditional
and emerging approaches to religion and society, such as secularization
theory and the so-called New Paradigm, show significant limitations
in making sense of the contemporary status of religion in the Ameri-
cas. These limitations stem from a reliance on a modernist epistemol-
ogy that, while emphasizing difference and change on the surface,
remains primarily interested in retrieving unchanging facts, essences,
and laws governing society. Globalization, as the loosening of spatio-
temporal arrangements and the relativization of collective and indi-
vidual identities, poses a serious challenge to this essentialism. This book
represents our attempt to develop and test conceptual tools to study
religion and social change in the Americas through a mixture of theory
and case studies. Our primary aim is to bring the discipline of religious
4 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

studies into dialogue with emerging theories of globalization and

transnational migration, and into debates about identity, postcolonalism,
media, and the fate of modernity.

RELIGION, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND CULTURAL

AND AREA STUDIES IN CONVERSATION
This dialogue will no doubt generate sparks, given the prejudices in-
volved. Operating under Enlightenment-based notions of history and
agency, many social scientists have tended to dismiss religion’s capac-
ity to shape social life. The Enlightenment construed religion as its
Other, as misguided, even ignorant and irrational, beliefs and practices
bound to disappear as rationality penetrates every sphere of human ac-
tivity. This understanding explains why religion’s enduring vitality has
always posed a thorny problem for the modern social sciences. With-
out denying the heterogeneity of sociological thinking, the dominant
impulse within sociology has been to see the persistence of religion as,
at best, the result of desperate defensive, often private, responses to in-
evitable structural processes of modernization and secularization. At
worst, religion is nothing more than an ideology, a false consciousness,
that reflects and obscures more foundational social realities. Globaliza-
tion theorists have also reproduced this understanding of religion. To
the extent that religion appears in their writings, it is either as anti-
modernist “fundamentalist” movements that seek to assert local iden-
tity and tradition against the cosmopolitanism and “tyranny of the
market” brought about by globalization, or as thoroughly rationalized
and privatized spiritualities that individuals purchase as commodities
in a “religious market.” A case in point is Jean Comaroff’s and John
Comaroff’s introductory chapter in Millennial Capitalism and the Cul-
ture of Neoliberalism (2001). The essay offers a valuable critique of the
millennial and messianic pretensions of neoliberal capitalism. However,
it fails to see that contemporary religious phenomena are not limited
to or even typified by “economies of the occult” (e.g., spirit possession,
fortune-telling, witchcraft, etc.) and “prosperity gospels,” which are the
“spectral,” fetishized expressions of speculative capitalism. While they
recognize that religion offers resources for creative resistance to capi-
talism at the grassroots, the Comaroffs see the rapid growth of religious
movements such as Pentecostalism, which link the material and spiri-
tual world tightly, as purely a response to social pathologies generated
by global neoliberalism. These religious movements are, for the
Comaroffs, today’s cargo cults, built on the despair produced by the
 INTRODUCTION 5

exclusion of vast sectors of the world’s population and on the desire

for immediate gratification created by mass-media consumerism. There
is no question that religion and global capitalism are connected. None-
theless, the connection is far more complex than that imagined by the
Comaroffs.
Despite their limitations, sociology’s founders understood the role
religion can play in the articulation of social epistemologies. Durkheim
(1995), for example, saw religion as the source of “collective represen-
tations,” foundational categories that order our perceptions, structure
our actions upon the world, and cement social relations. Similarly, We-
ber (1958) referred to the role of various religious worldviews in shap-
ing practical, social ethos. And while Marx (1978) saw religion as the
expression of a world in which labor is alienated, he also acknowledged
that “religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic com-
pendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal
ground for consolation and justification.”
We argue that when accorded its proper epistemological status, re-
ligion can provide important insights into the new cartographies pro-
duced by globalization. Religion has always provided complex strategies
for conceptualizing self, time, and space. This means that it must be
taken seriously as an independent variable in the present episode of
globalization, which poses serious challenges to our traditional maps
of reality. This attention is particularly important in the Americas, where
religion continues to constitute a major interpretive horizon for vast
sectors of the population. Moreover, the study of religion cannot be
limited to institutional dynamics or overt behaviors of elites, data that
can be readily quantifiable and reducible to formulas. Religion is also,
in Appadurai’s words, the “work of the imagination”; it is also about
shifting identities and hybrid cultures, about theodicies and utopian
aspirations that might make for messy theories.
Prejudices cut both ways. Reacting to the reductionism of social sci-
entists, many religionists have sought refuge in theories and method-
ologies that view religion as a “sui generis, unique, and sociohistorically
autonomous” reality grounded in an irreducible human essence
(McCutcheon 1997). Paradoxically, by asserting that religion is about
a universal subjective feeling of dependence (Friedrich Schleiermacher),
awe (Rudolph Otto), or existential dread (Paul Tillich), theologians and
historians of religion reaffirm the implications of social scientific re-
ductionism. They define religion, above all, as an interior private mat-
ter. Thus, as Talal Asad (1993: 28) puts it, in Western modernity
6 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

“strategies of confinement” are entwined with “strategies of defense”

of religion.
A good example of this entwinement is Mircea Eliade, who played
a central role in the development of religion as a sui generis discipline.
Eliade reaches back to the “primitive man” to capture the essence of
homo religiosus. For the primitive man, says Eliade, the sacred stood apart
because it was absolute reality, not only transcending this world but
also grounding it ontologically. The sacred is not the reflection of so-
cial dynamics, as Durkheim and Marx claimed, but reality itself. By con-
trast, “modern man” has desacralized existence, a process which “has
sometimes arrived at hybrid forms of black magic and sheer travesty of
religion”; Eliade clarifies: “We do not refer to the countless ‘little reli-
gions’ that proliferate in all modern cities, to the pseudo-occult, neo-
spiritualistic, or so called hermetic churches, sects, or schools; for all
these phenomena still belong to the sphere of religion, even if they al-
most always present the aberrant aspects of pseudomorphs” (1959: 26).
Globalization, with its relentless dislocation and relocation of cultural
forms, poses a sharp challenge to Eliade’s elitist and dehistoricized un-
derstanding of religion. We argue that it is precisely the “little reli-
gions,” those hybrid forms that Eliade sees as “pseudoreligions” or
“degenerated myths,” that are the vital and public face of religion in
the present context.
A second strategy religionists have used to deal with social scien-
tific reductionism has been to retreat to a narrow focus on sacred texts.
As Orsi (1994: 142) observes: “To study religion in the United States
today is to study texts. The briefest review of papers given at meetings
of the American Academy of Religion over the last two decades shows
how few studies are empirically based. The written and spoken word,
rather than engaged behavior studied in its place, are what occupies
the practitioners.” We do not mean that sacred texts are not worth care-
ful study or that textual approaches to religion are always ahistorical.
After all, it is now standard in the discipline of religion to contextualize
texts and discuss the dynamics of canon formation and maintenance.
The rise of feminist and postcolonial theories has also contributed to a
recovery of the “little texts” at the margins of the great traditions.
Rather, we challenge the tendency to read all social reality—religion
included—as nothing more than a text. This tendency, which gained
legitimacy with the “linguistic turn,” has become greatly exacerbated
by deconstruction and some strands of postmodernism. We have found
Derridean deconstruction to be extremely helpful in disclosing the
power effects of dominant theories, especially those built on binary
 INTRODUCTION 7

thinking. In fact, our critiques of secularization and the so-called New

Paradigm in sociology of religion draw from Derrida’s attacks on repre-
sentationalism. We see religious identities not as fixed unitary essences
but as complex and shifting dynamics, always mediated by multiple
forces. Nevertheless, we do not subscribe to the strong version of the
Derridean dictum that “there is nothing outside the text.”
An example of the pitfalls of the linguistic turn is Mark C. Taylor’s
About Religion (1999). About Religion insightfully shows how religion
operates in the most unexpected, “secular” places—in popular culture,
mass media, and at the heart of global capitalism. Taylor might well
approve of the Comaroffs’ focus on the enchanted reality that accom-
panies global capitalism. However, what the Comaroffs critique as the
mirage of the new economic (dis)order, Taylor celebrates as reality it-
self. In About Religion, Taylor engages in a hyperaesthetization of all so-
cial reality: “As the real becomes image and the image becomes real,
the world becomes a work of art and our condition becomes transpar-
ently virtual” (5). In Taylor’s view, Las Vegas, the mirage par excellence,
has become the master metaphor for “our current sociocultural situa-
tion.” Las Vegas embodies the “realized eschatology of the virtual king-
dom,” a “terminal place” where “high becomes low, low becomes high,
foundations seem to crumble and everything becomes unbearably light.
In light of this darkness, there appears to be nothing beyond this city—
absolutely nothing and nothing absolute” (201). Here, Taylor moves
dangerously from acknowledging that all reality is symbolic in the
broadest sense to claiming that reality can be reduced to the play of
signifiers. Certainly globalization and recent technological changes have
the potential for redefining our epistemologies. However, it is prema-
ture to claim that, for all people in the world, image and reality have
collapsed into each other due to the virtualization of culture and
society.
Taylor reads his case studies as texts that illustrate his overarching
philosophical claims. Extrapolating from these cases, he gives us a
“god’s-eye view” of our present age as realized eschatology. The over-
all effect is to freeze time and space, to enervate resistance against an
ineluctably virtualized world. Despite efforts to erase space, time, and
the body, computer-mediated communications still operate within so-
cial contexts, contexts of access, reception, and production, which are
not the mere effects of virtuality. Instead of looking at social phenom-
ena as texts illustrating a movement from Hegel to virtual reality, we
might explore the ways in which particular people and institutions ne-
gotiate global capitalism, the culture industry, and the Internet. A far
8 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

more heterogeneous and contested picture of the present age would

emerge out of this exploration.
Our critique of semiotic reductionism goes hand in hand with our
attempt to rematerialize the study of religion in a nonreductive fash-
ion. As such, it bears a strong affinity to “the spatial turn,” recent ef-
forts to shift the point of reference in cultural studies, critical theory,
and in the study of religion “from text to territory” (Soja 1999; Tweed
2002; Hervieu-Leger 2002). We believe that scholarship can and should
go beyond the unproductive modernist dichotomy that posits religion
as either a totally autonomous essence or the epiphenomenal manifes-
tation of material reality. It is possible to preserve Eliade’s anti-reduc-
tionist impetus without denying that religion is inextricably entwined
with social and historical processes, particularly those connected with
the production of space and embodied subjectivities. As Orsi (1997: 6–
7) writes, religion “cannot be neatly separated from other practices of
everyday life, from the ways that human beings work on the landscape,
for example, or dispose of corpses, or arrange for the security of their
offspring. Nor can ‘religion’ be separated from the material circum-
stances in which specific instances of religious imagination and behavior
arise and to which they respond.”
In contrast to Geertz (1973), we are not interested in setting a
transcultural definition of religion. Instead we study how religion is
imagined and experienced by individuals, groups, and institutions em-
bedded in multiple realms of activity. To study the complex ways in
which religion is lived today, we draw from multiple methodologies
across disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, history, philoso-
phy, geography, and political science. Our focus on lived religion does
not lead us to forsake the study of religious discourses and texts. Rather,
we argue that cultural studies and ethnographic approaches must be
in constant conversation with textual methods in a way that challenges
all claims to offer the definitive view of the world. For, if textual ap-
proaches carry the danger of semiotic reductionism, ethnography is
prone to what Malkki (1997: 61) calls “a sedentary metaphysics,” a ten-
dency to view cultures as pre-given, self-contained, and territorially
rooted wholes whose organizing logics can be retrieved through “thick
description.” It is precisely the volatile interplay of discursive and
nondiscursive practices that interests us, for globalization has blurred
boundaries among realms of human activity, allowing traditional reli-
gious expressions long considered to be waning to take center stage
alongside commodified consumer culture.
Finally, we wish to cross the border between American studies and
 INTRODUCTION 9

Latin American studies, which has been sustained by the primacy of

the nation-state in our conceptions of space, identity, and culture. The
United States is unique, we are told, in its pluralism and sectarianism,
in having immigration as its core experience and making progress its
main motto. Latin America, on the other hand, is seen as a patriarchal,
corporatist, and deeply traditional region that has never fully succeeded
in making it to modernity. This narrative ignores the entwinement of
U.S. and Latin American histories, a link that globalization has tight-
ened through increasing economic integration, post–1965 migration,
and the rapid growth of the U.S. Latino population.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

Within the larger topic of religion and globalization, we focus on the
Americas. This focus allows us to draw strategically from our experi-
ence as scholars of Latin American and U.S. Latino religion to produce
an ethnographically and historically grounded view of globalization.
Our focus enables us to maintain specificity, capturing the richness of
local phenomena while placing them in their proper regional and glo-
bal context. We do not purport to provide an exhaustive view of the
Latin American and U.S. religious fields. For example, we do not offer
case studies from South America or the Caribbean. We also focus heavily
on varieties of Christianity, skimming only the surface of the range of
religions that permeate the Americas today. We have selected our case
studies because, besides being compelling in themselves, they offer poi-
gnant illustrations of the complex interplay of religion and globaliza-
tion in its economic, political, and cultural dimensions. Our case studies,
moreover, raise crucial epistemological questions, pointing to the limi-
tations of dominant theories of religion and social change and high-
lighting some of the challenges sociology of religion must tackle as it
seeks to theorize complexity.
The first two chapters of the book lay out the theoretical context
for the project. Chapter 1 examines dominant and emerging theories
of religion and social change, while Chapter 2 focuses on globalization
theories. Rather than provide a comprehensive review of the literature,
both chapters concentrate on the theoretical and methodological issues
at stake in the sociological study of religion. We will see these issues at
work in the case studies that make up the rest of the book. Chapters 3
and 4 address the themes of border making and border crossing. Chapter
3 takes a historical approach, challenging both the notion that global-
ization is an altogether new phenomenon and the assumption that
10 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

religion plays only a peripheral role in it. Chapter 4 focuses on the “fu-
ture” of religion as it enters the “electronic frontier.” Both chapters,
however, highlight the tension between, on the one hand, physical mi-
gration and pilgrimage across political borders and, on the other, the
nomadic practices facilitated by mass media and the Internet. We shall
see that the Internet does not lead to total disembodiment and the era-
sure of locality but instead sustains contradictory relations with histori-
cal patterns of migration and community building.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on grassroots religion and transnational
migration. Drawing from fieldwork among Salvadoran gangs in El Sal-
vador and Washington, D.C., and from a study of two congregations
in Atlanta, we explore how Latino migrants negotiate globalization. The
role of religion in the articulation of oppositional identities and alter-
native public spheres at the margins of society is central in these chap-
ters. These identities and public spheres often make it possible for Latino
migrants to assert agency and locality in the face of powerful deterri-
torializing forces. However, as with any social reality, oppositional iden-
tities and alternative public spheres are contradictory, sometimes even
reproducing exclusionary logics.
Chapters 7 and 8 explore globalization “from above,” looking at
how religious institutions handle the pressures of globalization and are
themselves vehicles for global processes. According to Stout and
Cormode (1998: 64), many theologians and religious historians “asso-
ciate institutionalization with spirit-sapping mechanization and lifeless
ossification. In this framework, religious institutions are human cre-
ations standing in the way of pure spiritual ‘movement’ and extra-
institutional ‘dynamism.’” By underscoring the paradoxes and
contradictions generated by institutions as they seek to reorient them-
selves amid rapid flows of peoples, ideas, capital, and commodities, we
offer a more nuanced understanding of institutional dynamics. Like
popular religion, religious institutions are dynamic, polysemic, and open
to conflict. In fact, in both of these chapters, popular religion and reli-
gious institutions are engaged in a complex, if asymmetrical, interplay
that leads to innovation, ambiguity, and heterogeneity. Even when in-
stitutional elites seem utterly at odds with “unruly” locals, trying to dis-
cipline and co-opt them, there are always unintended consequences,
which globalization only accentuates. Just as we cannot assume that
grassroots religion is always emancipatory, we cannot presuppose that
the institutions are static and monolithic and that the outcome of in-
stitutional behavior will always be conservative and repressive.
We conclude the book with a brief discussion of the methodologi-
 INTRODUCTION 11

cal implications of a globalization approach to religion in the Ameri-

cas. As a final note, we should explain the collaborative nature of this
project. Marie Friedmann Marquardt was the principal author of Chap-
ters 1, 3, 6, and 8, while Manuel Vásquez was responsible for Chapters
2, 4, 5 (with Salvadoran sociologist Ileana Gómez), and 7. However, we
have read multiple drafts of each other’s work, offering extensive com-
ments. The introduction and the conclusion are coauthored.
12 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

THE LIMITS OF DOMINANT

AND EMERGING MODELS

F rench and German tourists alongside Mexican migrant workers vener-

ate the image of the Virgin Mary in a strip mall in Florida; Latino gang
members, deported from the United States to “home” countries they
barely know, find Jesus in transnational churches; U.S. Evangelicals use
electronic media to preach a “neoliberal” gospel of wealth and health
to remote indigenous villages in Guatemala. These are some of the strik-
ing faces of religion in the Americas today. While seemingly disparate,
all these expressions reflect the complex ways religion intersects with
the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization. In this
book, we seek not only to describe religious change in the Americas
but also to theorize it. This poses an especially difficult challenge, as
the dominant paradigms in the sociological study of religion fail to
make clear sense of the cases we have gathered. The religious forms we
explore here are not stripped of their supernatural referents or hope-
lessly privatized and inconsequential, as many secularization theorists
would predict. Nor are they mere products of instrumental calculations
in which culture, norms, tastes, and power take a back seat to the work-
ings of a religious marketplace, as rational-choice theorists would sup-
pose. In other words, our cases challenge both the “old” and “new”
paradigms (Warner 1993) on which scholars have relied to study reli-
gion in the Americas. More fundamentally, they question many of the
epistemological bases of modernist sociologies of religion.
The material we gather in our case studies shows that moderniza-

12
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 13

tion and the entry to postmodernity do not automatically translate into

secularization. In fact, we document how the appearance of miraculous
and supernatural religious events and practices is often mediated by
characteristically late- or postmodern mass media, technology such as
the Internet, and the global penetration of flexible forms of capitalism.
Our cases show, moreover, that as people, ideas, media, and capital
transgress national boundaries, or become deterritorialized through
multiple processes of globalization, the religious field in the Americas
becomes increasingly complex and fluid, defying attempts at one-
dimensional descriptions. People in the Americas today are presented with
a dizzying array of religious forms, many of which are detached from
their original context of production. Globalization has precipitated an
overabundance of religious meaning that both challenges the rational-
choice view of the religious marketplace as characterized by a scarcity
of religious goods and points to the emergence of multiple, overlap-
ping, and heterogeneous religious fields that individuals and institu-
tions must negotiate as they go about practicing religion.
Our task in this chapter is to analyze prevalent theoretical ap-
proaches to the study of religion in the Americas to highlight their limi-
tations and set the stage for the alternative, more flexible, conceptual
tools we introduce in Chapter 2. We do not purport to offer new or
exhaustive critiques of the dominant paradigms. Rather, drawing from
some key ongoing debates about secularization and religious pluralism,
we aim to give a general overview of the sociology of religion and to
situate our own approach within it.

CONFRONTING THE “OLD” PARADIGM

In its simplest form, the secularization paradigm claims that modern-
ization results in the progressive decline of religion’s social significance.
This decline gathered significant momentum with the Enlightenment’s
critique of ideology in the quest to affirm human autonomy. Enlight-
enment views of society set themselves against tradition and religious
dogma, particularly against the search for the foundations of human
practice on suprarational, divine sources. Explaining the social by the
social meant a break from the misconceptions of the past, a progres-
sive movement toward full rationality. In fact, Kant (1991) referred to
the Enlightenment as the “coming of age” of human analytical facul-
ties. As reason displaced faith and human history replaced sacred time
as the grounds of legitimation, various spheres of human action became
autonomous. Of these spheres, science, understood as the pinnacle of
14 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

human rationality, achieved special influence. This proved particularly

corrosive to the enchanted world constructed by religion, a world redo-
lent with magical forces and baffling supernatural events. Threatened
by the rigor of scientific rationality, religion withdraws from the pub-
lic sphere, becoming nothing more than personal piety, a “residue”
handed down as legacy (Gauchet 1997: 4).
Most versions of the secularization theory rest on two pillars. The
first is Durkheim’s claim that religion is the “womb of civilization.”
Working with the “elementary forms of religious life,” Durkheim came
to see religion as a foundational set of beliefs and practices that unite
individuals into moral community. He perceived the church as a model
for all social institutions and religious ritual as a model for all social
interaction (Durkheim 1995). According to Durkheim, the earliest com-
munities are characterized by “mechanical solidarity,” that is, by a lack
of individual differentiation or division of labor and by the ever-
presence of religion as the powerful collective effervescence that holds
the group together. With urbanization and technological development,
mechanical solidarity gives way to industrial societies with deeper, more
“organic,” forms of solidarity, characterized by a greater division of la-
bor and the development of individual consciousness (Durkheim 1984).
Since these emerging modern societies are inhabited by interdependent
autonomous individuals, religious institutional forms, values, and rituals
can no longer exert the same overt cohesive power as under mechani-
cal solidarity. Rather, religion must become increasingly abstract and
generalized, becoming either collective moral sentiments or philosophies
of human development. Thus, in Durkheim’s evolutionary scheme, en-
try to modernity increasingly removed religion from the domain of the
supernatural, turning it into an invisible but overarching value system
that integrates and pervades secular institutions.
Building on Durkheim’s legacy, Parsons (1968) and Bellah (1970,
1980) argue that as individuals become increasingly autonomous, so-
ciety becomes more deeply integrated through normative or “axio-
logical” principles that may have a religious origin but have become
secularized. Perhaps the most well known formulation of this approach
is Bellah’s short article on “civil religion.” He argues that although
Americans certainly do not share a unified religion, they are held to-
gether by shared symbols and rituals that take on the characteristics
(and the characteristic power) of religious symbol and ritual. In so do-
ing, they unite into moral community (Bellah 1970). This “civil reli-
gion” provides the morals and standards according to which we judge
our collective actions. Bellah argues that even in times of profound cri-
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 15

sis, such as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, civil religion provides
a lingua franca to critique perceived injustices and reweave the social
fabric.
The second pillar of secularization theory is Weber’s thesis of dis-
enchantment and rationalization. Weber understood history to be
marked by the increasing dominance of instrumental rationality and
the demise of traditional, charisma-based authority. More specifically,
rationalization meant the ascendance of science over religion as the key
source of legitimation. With the loss of religion’s prominent place in
society, spheres under its tutelage, such as politics, the arts, ethics, and
law, became increasingly autonomous and began generating their own
rational foundations and rules (Weber 1946). As religious values and
norms became incommensurate with those of competing spheres, reli-
gion lost significance in the modern world. More specifically, religion
lost its normative power and became rationalized. Thus, studying the
development of Western calculative rationality, Weber observed how
religion evolved from a naïve otherworldly mysticism toward a stern
this-worldly asceticism that eventually contributed unintentionally to
the rise of the spirit of capitalism. Weber linked this-worldly asceticism
to the Protestant Reformation, which “took rational Christian asceti-
cism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them
in the service of active life in the world” (1958:235). Moreover, by un-
dermining the Catholic Church’s claim to universality, stressing indi-
vidual conscience, and widening the gulf between God and humanity,
the Protestant Reformation contributed to the “disenchantment of the
world.” As Berger explains, it removed “mystery, miracle, and magic”
from this world and made the “umbilical cord” connecting the sacred
to the profane a very tenuous promise of divine grace (1967: 111).1
Building on Weber’s rationalization and disenchantment thesis and
cross-fertilizing it with the Durkheimian notion of differentiation, Berger
(1967) and Luckmann (1967) argued that modernization means not that
the sacred is bound to disappear but that religion will be dislodged from
the public sphere and forced to change in response. As the decline in
church attendance and affiliation, especially among mainline churches,
shows, religion has become both “privatized”—its proper scope reduced
to a personal and, at most, local relation with the sacred—and more
rationalistic, stripped of its supernatural referents and bound to the logic
of the market. As secular options proliferate and as the sacred canopy
fragments in the face of differentiation, a religious market emerges in
which traditions become nothing more than products to be purchased
as emblems of individual lifestyles.
16 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

For all of their coherence, the Weberian and Durkheimian versions

of the secularization theory do not find much empirical support. As
Berger himself has acknowledged, full secularization—the evolution of
a world “no longer ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces”—
has not occurred: “I think what I and most other sociologists of reli-
gion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our
underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand
in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn’t
a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it’s basi-
cally wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It’s very
religious” (1997: 974). In the United States, arguably the most advanced
industrial nation, “beliefs in God and beliefs in afterlife are remarkably
stable. Levels of religious participation and rates of membership in re-
ligious organizations remain high compared to other nations and other
voluntary activities” (Sherkat and Ellison 1999: 365–366).2 In fact, reli-
gion is lived so publicly—in the Internet, on TV, on the covers of
Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times Magazine, and at the Mall in
Washington, D.C. (as in the case of the Million Man March and the
Promise Keepers)—it seems counterintuitive to talk about privatization.
The recent proposal by the Bush administration to fund faith-based
and community initiatives provides one of the clearest examples of the
high profile of religion in the U.S. public arena. What is most remark-
able about this proposal is not the creation of an executive-level office
to oversee the transfer of funds. After all, the Clinton administration
had paved the way by encouraging private nonprofit organizations to
fill the void left by welfare reform. The real surprise is in the relatively
muted public reaction to a potential breach of the First Amendment.3
This may indicate that people recognize the failure of secular initiatives
to deal with intractable social problems. As secular politics come to be
perceived as hopelessly corrupt, unable to offer and sustain individual
and communal good, leaders and citizens alike turn to “old-time reli-
gion,” to the power of the sacred to renew self and transform society.
With this return to religious sources of legitimation, it seems as if reli-
gion has turned the tables on modernity, showing the latter’s failure
to fulfill its own utopian illusions.
But the “pulsating ubiquity” of religion is not apparent only in
United States. The vitality of religion is also evident in Latin America,
Asia, and Africa. As Berger (2001) recently argued, secularization seems
to apply only to central and western Europe and among a small but
influential international cadre of intellectuals trained in Western-style
higher education. Turning the old wisdom of U.S. exceptionalism on
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 17

its head, Berger writes that the United States “conforms to the world-
wide pattern” of religious vigor, while “Europe is, or seems to be, the
big exception.” The task then is no longer to gather evidence to sup-
port the theoretical contention that secularization is “the direct and in-
evitable result of modernity, . . . the paradigmatic situation of religion
in the contemporary world,” but to study historically contingent cases
such as those of “European exceptionalism.”
If the privatization component of the Weberian thesis is not ten-
able, could one argue that rationalization and disenchantment still carry
explanatory power? Can the contemporary flourishing of vocal and af-
fective religion and the revival of old traditions be a case of spiritual
backlash, in the face of a world that has become, as Weber (1958) feared,
an “iron cage”? This is in fact the hypothesis that Juergensmeyer (2000:
225) proposes in his study of the rise of global religious terrorism. In
Juergensmeyer’s view, “the notion that secular society and the mod-
ern nation-state can provide the moral fiber that unites national com-
munities or the ideological strength to sustain states buffeted by ethical,
economic, and military failures” has been challenged by “a global mar-
ket that has weakened national sovereignty and is conspicuously de-
void of political ideals. The global economy became characterized by
transnational businesses accountable to no single governmental author-
ity with no clear ideological or moral standard of behavior.” In this con-
text, religious terrorism represents a violent attempt to reinject
traditional authority and meaning structures into the vacuum left by
secular modernity.
As the attack on one of the most visible symbols of U.S.-based glo-
bal capitalism on September 11, 2001, demonstrates, Juergensmeyer’s
reading carries considerable weight. However, as we will argue in the
next chapter, religion’s relation to globalization is far more complex.
Global religions are very often not in conflict with late modernity. In-
deed, our case studies show that modern mass media, the global tour-
ism industry, capitalist enterprise, and the Internet have become the
very means through which many “anti-rational,” supernatural religious
phenomena flourish in the Americas.4 Chapter 8 discusses the case of
an “angel” that saved a suicidal Guatemalan man’s life by appearing
not in a vision but on a radio commercial funded by the Christian
Broadcasting Network. The Pentecostal gang member profiled in Chap-
ter 5 encountered the Holy Spirit through transnational congregations
set up partly as a result of U.S. cold-war policies. In all these cases,
“magic, miracle, and mystery” penetrate everyday life by means of
distinctively modern media and through processes associated with
18 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

globalization. Rationalized capitalism, urban migration, and technol-

ogy can be the carriers of sacralization rather than secularization, and
the gods certainly remain in business.
In recent years, some theorists have attempted to reformulate secu-
larization theory by lowering its epistemological ambitions. Casanova
(1994) argues that, while the claims that public religion is declining and
that it has become privatized are unwarranted, secularization’s stress
on increasing social differentiation remains legitimate. According to
Casanova, differentiation “remains the valid core of the theory of secu-
larization. The differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres
from religious institutions and norms remains a general modern struc-
tural trend. Indeed, this differentiation serves precisely as one of the
primary distinguishing characteristics of modern structure” (212; cf.
Lechner 1991; Tschannen 1991; Chaves 1994). Religion continues to
have a public role despite social differentiation because of the dises-
tablishment made possible by secularization. For Casanova (1994: 213),
“established churches are incompatible with modern differentiated
states and . . . the fusion of religious and political community is incom-
patible with the modern principle of citizenship.” This does not mean
that voluntary congregational religion is irrelevant. On the contrary, it
plays a key role in strengthening a pluralistic civil society. In other
words, secularization qua differentiation opens the door for multiple
“deprivatized” religious movements that, among other things, defend
the “traditional life-world against various forms of state and market pen-
etration” and articulate the principle of “common good against indi-
vidualist modern liberal theories that would reduce the common good
to the aggregated sum of individual choices” (228–229). More modest
still is Dobbelaere’s (1999) reading of secularization. Focusing on the
European experience, he argues that “secularization is situated on the
societal level and should be seen as resulting from the process of func-
tional differentiation and the autonomization of societal subsystems”
(231). In other words, the impact of secularization is restricted to the
macro-level, affecting primarily institutions and religious forms of au-
thority. Dobbelaere makes no claims about the micro-level, that is, about
how secularization has affected individual consciousness (the
privatization thesis). “The religious situation at the individual level can-
not be explained exclusively by the secularization of the social system:
other factors—individualization of decisions, de-traditionalization, mo-
bility, and utilitarian and expressive individualism—[are] at work. Con-
sequently, the religiousness of individuals is not a valid indicator in
evaluating the process of secularization” (239). Stark and Finke (2000:
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 19

57–79) question the usefulness of Dobbelaere’s narrow reading. If secu-

larization is just “de-institutionalization,” and “if we limited discussion
to Europe, there would be nothing to argue about. Everyone must agree
that, in contemporary Europe, Catholic bishops have less political power
than they once possessed, and the same is true for Lutheran and An-
glican bishops (although bishops probably never were nearly so pow-
erful as they now are thought to have been). Nor are primary aspects
of public life any longer suffused with religious symbols, rhetoric, or
ritual.” Nevertheless, according to Stark and Finke, if secularization
theory makes only minimal and obvious claims about the separation
of church and state and the emergence of autonomous spheres of hu-
man activity, it loses all its predictive and analytical power as the
overarching paradigm in the sociology of religion. In “Secularization
RIP,” Stark and Finke go so far as to declare the death of secularization
theory.
We disagree with Stark and Finke. It is one thing to argue that secu-
larization is not a teleological grand narrative and quite another to re-
ject it altogether. Secularization as structural differentiation is still a
valuable analytical tool. For one thing, it tells us a great deal about the
aspirations of the social sciences, their need to set themselves apart as
autonomous and objective disciplines vis-à-vis religion construed as
primitive knowledge, ideology, or false consciousness. This need ex-
plains why religion occupies such a central place in the early writings
of sociology’s founders. In this sense, secularization is not just a tool
to describe changes ushered in by modernity but also a normative nar-
rative through which the social sciences have constructed their gene-
alogy and established authority. This narrative worked in tandem with
the ascendance of scientific rationality, the formation of bureaucratic
states, and the expansion of international capitalism to redefine the
nature and place of religion. The impact of this narrative, however, is
far more uneven and contradictory than traditional secularization theo-
ries are willing to admit. Modernity is characterized not just by differ-
entiation but also by dedifferentiation (Heelas 1998; Luke 1996). For
example, the rise of the modern nation entails not only processes of
individuation and specialization but also standardizing discourses and
disciplinary practices that sought to manage populations and turn them
into a unified people (Volk) with a culture and territory (Anderson 1983;
Foucault 1978; Gellner 1983).
Since secularization theory is also a modern product, it carries the
“dialectic of differentiation and de-differentiation.” Indeed, while the
secularization paradigm is about differentiation, difference is grounded
20 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

and “disciplined” within the framework of foundational dichotomies

such as tradition versus modernity, faith versus reason, religion versus
science, Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, traditional versus instrumen-
tal authority, ideology (superstructure) versus economy (base), and me-
chanical versus organic solidarity. Within this lattice of asymmetrical
hierarchies, understanding differentiation becomes an exercise in track-
ing the movement from the inferior/primitive to the superior/advanced
terms in the dichotomies.
The dialectic of differentiation and dedifferentiation undermines
Casanova’s claim that differentiation is a “general modern structural
trend,” that is, that modernity entails a necessary movement toward
higher levels of differentiation, whereby religion, although not priva-
tized, is forced to conform to demands of rationality if it is to survive.
Religion and modernity are not necessarily involved in a zero-sum game
in which if one wins the other must lose. Rather they have been en-
gaged in multiple relations, including outright conflict, accommoda-
tion, cross-fertilization, and mutual reenforcing. In the next chapter,
we will see that as globalization challenges established spatio-temporal
arrangements, such as the nation-state, and undermines the separation
among economic, political, and cultural spheres of action, the relation
between the religious and the secular becomes even more complicated,
pointing us beyond difference toward hybridity. Attempts to rework the
secularization paradigm to highlight differentiation and disestablishment
bring us to the so-called New Paradigm in the sociology of religion,
which has risen as one of the most cogent critiques of secularization
theories.

EXPLORING THE NEW PARADIGM: RATIONAL-CHOICE THEORIES

The New Paradigm (NP) distinguishes itself from secularization theory
by depicting a much brighter future for U.S. religion as it encounters
late modernity. Taking religious disestablishment and pluralism as their
point of departure, NP theorists argue that religion’s public vitality does
not shrink in the face of structural differentiation. Instead, religion
thrives because a pluralistic setting requires religious creativity and spe-
cialization.
As we discussed earlier, for most secularization theorists the only
recourse for religious institutions that hope to stay in business is either
resistance or accommodation, either privatization or extreme generali-
zation. Berger (1967: 134) explains: “Religion manifests itself as public
rhetoric and private virtue. In other words, insofar as religion is com-
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 21

mon, it lacks ‘reality’, and insofar as it is ‘real’ it lacks commonality.

This situation represents a severe rupture of the traditional task of reli-
gion, which was precisely the establishment of an integrated set of defi-
nitions of reality that could serve as a common universe of meaning
for the members of a society.” New Paradigm theorists dispute read-
ings both of secularization and of the transformation of the sacred
canopy. The canopy neither collapses nor goes underground, but in-
stead reconstitutes itself as “small, portable, accessible . . . sacred um-
brellas” (C. Smith 1998: 106).
The locus classicus of the New Paradigm is R. Stephen Warner’s 1993
essay “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological
Study of Religion in the United States.” Warner argues that the old para-
digm of secularization was developed to analyze Europe, where it can
be argued that religious monopolies once existed. Secularization, how-
ever, cannot account for U.S. religious history, which is “constitutively
pluralistic.” Warner (1993: 1047) explains: “Religion in the United States
has typically expressed not the culture of the society as a whole but
the subcultures of its many constituents; therefore . . . it should not be
thought of as either the Parsonian conscience of the whole or the
Bergerian refuge of the periphery, but as a vital expression of groups.”
Warner and other New Paradigm theorists agree with the Durkheimian
view that religion creates social solidarity, but they stress religion’s con-
tributions in the articulation of the myriad of particular collective iden-
tities that characterize U.S. civil society. This, in turn, accounts for the
vitality and visibility of religion in the United States. Like race, ethnicity,
and language, “religion itself is recognized in American society, if not
always by social scientists, as a fundamental category of identity and
association, and it is thereby capable of grounding both solidarities and
identities” (1060). Religious organizations have become spaces in which
culturally particular groups can be free to create associations, and this
contributes to the fact that “eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the
most segregated hour of American life” (1069). Indeed, according to
Warner, the “master function” of U.S. religion is to provide a “social
space for cultural pluralism” (1058). This “space” emerged in the United
States as a result of the disestablishment assured by constitutional sepa-
ration of church and state. As Anthony Gill (1999) argues, such space
is currently emerging in Latin America, as the established Catholic
Church loses hegemony and state-sanctioned legal protections.
Following Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge (1985), some NP
theorists have adopted rational-choice models to understand the dy-
namics of religious pluralism.5 According to the rational-choice versions
22 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

of the NP, highly regulated religious monopolies create lethargy and

indifference among consumers and suffer shrinking influence in the
market. In contrast, an unregulated religious marketplace, filled with
entrepreneurs who compete for consumer loyalty, grows and expands.
NP theorists thus challenge the old-paradigm claim that open markets
encourage a “standardization” of religious products or automatically
result in mass marketing, thus weakening religious institutions (Witten
1993: 135). Instead, an open market can lead to increasingly flexible,
particularized, and vital religious expressions. This is because the un-
regulated marketplace encourages suppliers to compete for market share
and ensures that monopolistic religions will falter and entrepreneurs
will thrive. Warner explains that “what is important about religious
markets from this perspective is not so much the diversity of alternatives
available to consumers as the incentive for suppliers to meet consum-
ers’ needs.” This incentive is maximized “when the religious economy
is wide-open to energetic entrants, none of whom has a guaranteed in-
come” (Warner 1993: 1057).
Typically, rational-choice theorists explain the practices of religious
actors, be they consumers or producers, according to cost-benefit analy-
ses that can be applied across cases. In other words, the religious actor
is a variety of homo economicus understood as a self-sufficient unit that
behaves rationally, “making the most of what s/he has” (Elster 2000:
20), that is, seeking to maximize gains and minimize losses.6 The reli-
gious goods at play may range from purely material commodities, such
as economic mobility (for consumers) or increased market share (i.e.,
church participation, for the producers), to “supernatural compensa-
tors,” such as rewards in the beyond or coherent theodicies. Supernatu-
ral compensators are particularly risky investments, since they cannot
be guaranteed. Therefore, religious consumers must diversify their “port-
folios” of religious investments to spread the risk. This leads to greater
religious pluralism. Supernatural compensators also make it possible for
certain religious practices and institutions to thrive in pluralistic envi-
ronments. By presenting supernatural compensators as scarce, open to
only a select group whose members are willing to invest all their re-
sources in risky goods, religious institutions solve the problem of “free
riders,” individuals who want to enjoy all the benefits of group mem-
bership while contributing very little. Thus religious institutions that
impose costly demands on their members—in the form of sacrifice and
stigmatization of secular practices such as drinking and dancing—at-
tract only individuals with a high degree of commitment, which, in
turn, strengthens group morale and solidarity, producing more collec-
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 23

tive benefits for each member. As Stark (1996) argues for the rise of
Christianity, the people most attracted to these high-risk religions are
those who have nothing to lose and much to gain by forsaking the sta-
tus quo.7
The New Paradigm is better equipped than the secularization model
to explain the evolving religious dynamics in the Americas. The increas-
ing differentiation of the religious field has not led to a decline of pub-
lic religions.8 The rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the
urban poor, the rearticulation of Catholicism among movements such
as the charismatic renewal and the neocatechumenate, and the resur-
gence of African-based and native religions around the recovery of sup-
pressed racial and ethnic identities show how disestablishment and open
markets have raised religion’s visibility in the hemisphere. The New
Paradigm, however, provides only a partial explanation. First, the NP
is provincial, assuming that the United States, as a self-contained nation-
state, should be the unit of analysis and model for sociology of reli-
gion. We contend that a global and transnational perspective would
provide a richer view of sources of increasing religious pluralism in the
United States and the rest of the Americas. Rather than a single pre-
dictable market characterized by scarcity, there are multiple overlapping
religious “markets” defined by the abundance and cross-fertilization of
options. Because markets are deterritorialized by globalization, choices
can become more volatile and complex, as individuals enter multiple
markets at once and consume seemingly contradictory products. Pen-
tecostal churches, such as those we discuss in Chapter 5, illustrate how
religious practices and institutions do not remain static, but often enter
transnational circuits in ways that rejuvenate both “host” and “home”
societies. However, such processes do not lead to a global homogeni-
zation of religious forms, as some theorists of globalization have argued
(Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose 1996; Poewe 1994). Rather, we see a flour-
ishing of hybrid religious forms.
A second limitation of the NP, particularly of its rational-choice
versions, is its “methodological individualism,” which holds that “struc-
tures and systems possess no independent causal weight and are con-
ceived best as behavioral constraints” (A. Gill 1998: 199). This
impoverished notion of choice and practice fails to account for how
decisions are patterned among particular groups of people. Stark and
Finke argue that preferences and tastes are subject to variation some-
times “so idiosyncratic that people have no idea how they came to like
certain things. As the old adage says, ‘There’s no accounting for tastes’”
(2000: 38). However, Stark and Finke acknowledge that “culture in
24 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

general, and socialization in particular, will have a substantial impact

on preferences and tastes.” But for all their stress on analytical rigor
and empirical corroboration, they fail to specify what they mean by
“culture,” “socialization,” and “substantial impact.”9 Pierre Bourdieu
(1977) offers a richer way of looking at how religious activities are
shaped by the consumer’s enduring yet flexible dispositions molded by
his or her trajectory and position in various meso- and macrocontexts,
including class divisions and racial and gender formations. This is what
Bourdieu calls habitus: embodied perceptual and motivating schemes
that produce and reproduce the social structures in which individuals
are located and that explain not only creative activity but regularities
in social practices.
Finally, most rational-choice theorists reduce complex religious
fields to the behavior of elites, or “religious entrepreneurs.” And in a
further reductionist move, these theorists assume that these elites act
as one unitary agent, in accordance with a universal rationality of cost-
benefit calculation. The result of these simplifications is a one-dimen-
sional view of religious practices and institutions that is at odds with
the increasing complexity and fluidity engendered by the recent epi-
sode of globalization (Vásquez 2000).

SUBCULTURAL IDENTITY THEORY

Most studies of religious markets have focused on institutions and elites,
or “supply-side” analyses of the producers of religious goods. However,
in his 1998 study of U.S. Evangelicals, Christian Smith builds on the
New Paradigm to develop a nuanced approach to the choices and ac-
tions of ordinary believers who consume the products and services pro-
vided by entrepreneurial religious elites. This focus corrects many of
rational-choice theorists’ shortcomings by examining the sociocultural
context in which consumers operate.
Smith labels his theoretical approach to religious consumption a
“subcultural identity theory of religious persistence and strength.” He
argues that the most persistent religions—those organizations whose
products are consistently consumed over time—embed themselves in
subcultures that construct a collective identity and give members un-
equivocal moral meaning and a powerful sense of group belonging. The
strongest religious groups are “genuinely countercultural,” that is, they
are structured in such a way that they distinguish themselves clearly
from other subcultural groups and demand a high level of commitment
from their members (1998: 118–119). However, these groups are not
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 25

sectarians who cordon themselves off from the rest of society. Rather,
they are directly involved in contesting the broader society. Thus Smith
concludes that Evangelicalism in the United States thrives “not because
it has built a protective subcultural shield against secular modernity,
but because it engages passionately in a direct struggle with pluralistic
modernity” (88).
Smith distinguishes his approach from that of secularization theo-
rists in at least two ways. First, he argues that the most persistent and
successful religious groups are not those that retrench to enclaves of
privatized piety or that accommodate by subscribing to an abstract, ra-
tionalized religion, but those that engage modernity while also clearly
distinguishing themselves from modern secular culture. Second, he con-
tends that cultural pluralism encourages the strength and persistence
of religion as a means by which religious consumers can create satisfy-
ing social-psychological frames that make sense of the world. Plural-
ism does not generate “cognitive dissonance,” radically undercutting
“the social support necessary for maintaining subjective adherence to
a body of beliefs” (Hunter 1983). Rather, pluralism offers individual re-
ligious consumers multiple fragments of the shattered “sacred canopy,”
which they can use innovatively to construct their own “sacred um-
brellas.” These umbrellas are “small, portable, accessible relational
worlds—religious reference groups—under which [individuals’] beliefs
can make complete sense” (C. Smith 1998: 106). Here, Smith challenges
the secularization theorists’ view of religion as a force for either macro-
social integration or purely privatized affect. Religion continues to have
a public role, but it is closely connected with diverse local expressions
that characterize civil society. Echoing Warner, Smith sees religion in
the United States as part and parcel of the “new voluntarism.” Increas-
ingly, individualized religious identification is understood to be a
personal choice rather than an effect of participation in a particular col-
lectivity (e.g., a church or synagogue). Philip Hammond (1992)
describes this as a move from collective-expressive to individual-
expressive religious behavior, which shifts religious identity from be-
ing an immutable core of personality to being transient and changeable,
or from being involuntary to being voluntary.
Smith’s stress on the individual-expressive consumption pattern
also fits well with the conception of an open religious market place in
which consumers shop for fragments of their personal “sacred umbrel-
las.” However, Smith eschews the most reductive tendencies in rational-
choice theories. In addition to focusing on ordinary believers, Smith
introduces history and culture to rational choice’s formulaic account
26 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

of religious practices and choices. He explores “how ordinary people

utilize their religious traditions’ cultural tools more or less efficiently
to construct distinctive, meaningful, satisfying social identities” (1998:
119). Smith argues that when we turn our gaze from the “normative
views of historical religious elites” to the actual practices of contempo-
rary religious believers, the notion of a zero-sum game between reli-
gion and modernity becomes less tenable. Instead, “religious traditions
have always strategically renegotiated their collective identities by con-
tinually reformulating the ways their constructed orthodoxies engage
the changing sociocultural environments they confront” (99–100).
With subcultural-identity theory, the Enlightenment rationality of
sameness behind secularization theory that made modernity/science and
tradition/religion mutually exclusive gives way to a perspective that rec-
ognizes difference and religion’s multiple roles in constituting it. Never-
theless, subcultural-identity theory still exhibits some of the weaknesses
associated with other embodiments of the NP. More specifically, it
shares with rational-choice models the notion that religious actors are
fully self-legislating rational consumers and producers, acting strategi-
cally to select and produce religious goods that contribute to the ar-
ticulation of desired identities. In other words, despite the richer focus
on the differentials in cultural resources available to religious produc-
ers and consumers, subcultural-identity theory still depicts religious ac-
tors as essentially atomic and fully intentional agents who weigh the
outcomes of their decisions unencumbered by structural and systemic
constraints.
In Smith’s account, the process of piecing together coherent local-
ized worldviews, or “sacred umbrellas,” entails a conscious individual
decision to embed oneself in a particular “relational network of iden-
tity” (1998: 218). Yet Smith does not clarify how individuals choose
among the dizzying array of networks that exist in the contemporary
pluralist Americas. While individuals do choose and create their sacred
umbrellas by sorting through the religious fragments available to them,
we contend that they do so already embedded in sociopolitical and cul-
tural power dynamics operating at multiple levels, including the local,
the regional, the national, and the global. As the religious actors con-
struct new umbrellas, their choices are both limited and expanded by
their position in interacting spheres of human activity.10
Subcultural-identity theory’s most significant limitation, though,
is that it understands culture (and religion within it) statically. Subcul-
tural-identity theory operates under what we may call a “horticultural
model” of culture and religion. In this model, “the activity of culture,
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 27

as suggested by the etymological links to ‘gardening’, has been conven-

tionally associated with the cultivation of a territory. Every culture is
supposed to come from somewhere, to have its place in the world”
(Papastergiadis 2000: 103). In this conventional understanding, cultures
are construed as “being formed in particular territorial relationships with
carefully established borders, separating one from another. They are cre-
ated systems of beliefs amongst their members that [secure] a homoge-
neous, coherent and continuous sense of affiliation.” In the context of
globalization, this conventional understanding of culture exhibits seri-
ous limitations. “What is obscured by this perspective are the porous
boundaries between groups, the diffuse notions of identity, the deter-
ritorialized links between members of groups, the globalizing patterns
of communication and the hybrid process of cultural transformation”
(105).
Our case studies show people easily negotiating multiple, sometimes
even contradictory, forms of religious identification and affiliations. In
Chapter 3, for example, we will encounter a Catholic priest who mod-
els his preaching style after a Pentecostal televangelist, notwithstand-
ing the engagement of evangelical Protestants and Catholics in a fierce
competition for the Latino “religious market.” Similarly, in Chapter 8,
we discuss Guatemalan Catholic-school teachers who use evangelical
tracts disseminated by the U.S.-based transnational Christian Broadcast-
ing Network (CBN) to teach their students about the Bible, while CBN
adopts elements of the local Catholic culture to produce context-
sensitive soap operas. These are but two examples of the many ways
that people combine religious forms to create frameworks for meaning—
making that need not be embattled to thrive, as Smith argues. Our cases
challenge Smith’s functionalist assertion that religion provides, above
all, solidarity in the form of tight-knit groups threatened by the out-
side world. Rather, we see people crossing fluid borders of religious
meaning adeptly and without overt cost-benefit calculations.

BEYOND THE NATION: PLURALISM AND HYBRIDITY

IN THE LATIN AMERICAN “MODEL”
For subcultural-identity theory, religion is essentially about boundary
creation. Subcultural-identity theory “normalizes” difference by attrib-
uting to it the univocal role of creating and sustaining Otherness. That
is to say, difference operates under the exclusionary, dichotomous logic
of modern sociology of religion. Just as Warner showed how secular-
ization theory emerged from the European experience to become a
28 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

dominant paradigm, it could be argued that the NP offers a U.S.-centric

approach in its stress on pluralism and open markets. In our view, Latin
America provides yet another model, where the historic institutional
dominance of the Catholic Church as a state-sanctioned church (the
Royal Patronage) did not translate into total orthodoxy. As Griffiths
(1999:1) puts it: “The interaction of Christianity with native American
religions in the colonial era (and indeed subsequently) was character-
ized by reciprocal, albeit asymmetrical, exchange rather than the uni-
lateral imposition of an uncompromising, all-conquering and all
transforming monotheism.” The popularity of the cult of the saints
(with its home and town altars), lay brotherhoods, and other local lay
religious specialists like benzedeiras (blessers-healers) and rezadoras
(prayer specialists) demonstrates that people at the grassroots practiced
multiple ways of being Catholic, which were often in a tense relation-
ship with the official Church. At the same time, popular practices were
defined by high levels of syncretism that blended elements of Iberian
Catholicism, native and African-based religions, and European Spirit-
ism. Even now, after the rapid expansion of evangelical Protestantism,
which has increased competition for the souls of poor and working-
class Latin Americans, religion in the region continues to enter new,
flexible recombinations. As we argue in Chapter 3, the “pentecostaliza-
tion” of Catholicism is increasingly transcending organizational bound-
aries and becoming a style of being Catholic shared not just by
charismatics but even by progressives still involved in base communi-
ties and liberation theology. Similarly, Pentecostalism, with its strongly
dualistic view of world, has in many parts of Latin America become
highly indigenized, incorporating the practices and beliefs of native re-
ligions in ways that shock U.S. missionaries.
Why should Latin American cases be of interest to U.S.-based New
Paradigm theorists? As we will discuss more fully in the next chapter,
the rapid circular flow of ideas, people, goods, and capital between Latin
America and the United States compels us to go beyond nation-based
models of culture and religion and to take into account regional (i.e.,
hemispheric) and global dynamics. The explosive growth of the Latino
population in the United States, sustained transnational migration from
Latin America, and increasing economic integration of the Americas
challenge us to transcend the limitations of modernist social science,
which has privileged the nation-state and area studies (as a by-product
of the cold war) as the central organizing spatio-temporal scales. A hemi-
spheric approach would allow us to see that religion in the Americas
today is not just promoting “the formation of strong and potentially
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 29

‘deviant’ identities, including religious subcultures and identities”

(Smith 1998: 107). Certain religious beliefs and practices thrive at the
grassroots because they are a source of hybridity. In other words, many
ordinary believers and institutions find in religion resources to bridge
the multiple identities and functions that they must perform in an in-
creasingly complex world. More importantly, religion helps to link re-
alities that modernity dichotomized and that globalization has now
destabilized: the global and the local, tradition and modernity, the sacred
and the profane, culture and society, and the private and the public.
We are certainly not claiming that the Latin American “model,”
with its interplay of institutional dominance, pluralism, and hybrid-
ity, should be taken as the new universal norm.11 Nevertheless, Latin
American experiences relativize the thesis of “U.S. sectarianism and plu-
ralism,” which we would argue is a version of U.S. exceptionalism.
Postcolonial studies have shown that the birth of the modern nation
out of the remnants of colonial rule entailed the development and ap-
plication of disciplinary and homogenizing techniques that attempted
to fix the boundaries of collective identity (Bhabha 1990: 1–7, 291–321).
The aim was to constitute the nation as an organic “imagined commu-
nity” with a shared culture and a given territory defended by the state
apparatus, thereby obscuring internal and external differences and ex-
cluding as “Other” impurities and primitivisms, which does not fit mod-
ern classificatory schemes. As Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann
observe, the social sciences informed this process of nation building by
setting up a dichotomy between religion and nationalism. Religion was
one of the anachronistic impurities that the nation had to overcome
as it marched into modernity, since “nationalism is assumed to be ‘secu-
lar,’ since it is thought to develop in a process of secularization and
modernization. Religion, in this view, assumes political significance only
in underdeveloped parts of the world—much as it did in the past of
the West” (Veer and Lehmann 1999: 3). Challenging this reading of
history, Veer and Lehmann show how religious themes like the divine
election (the chosen people), rebirth, martyrdom, and the coming of a
messiah have played an important role in building the modern nation.
Veer and Lehmann’s work demonstrates that the relation between
religion and modernity is more complex than teleological readings of
secularization theory would allow. At a deeper level, their work shows
that the repression and exclusion associated with the birth of nations
do not succeed in eliminating the Other, which is always contesting
the drive toward homogeneity. In Bhabha’s (1994: 111) words:
“Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of
30 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of

subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bas-
tards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is
not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a
hybrid.”
The point of this excursus into religion and nationalism is to show
that binary oppositions such as self-other, identity-difference, and
modernity-tradition, as well as anxiety about hybridity, are at the core
of claims of national exceptionalism. By preserving national
exceptionalism in relation to the United States, the New Paradigm and
subcultural-identity theory reproduce the homogenizing techniques of
modern social sciences, failing to see “impure” hybrid forms that oper-
ate under the principle of nonexclusionary difference.12
Recent comparative work shows that in the United States, identi-
ties have been construed as fixed, “autonomous unities” (García
Canclini 1999). Arguably, this exclusionary view of identity is connected
to a racial formation built around the notion of hypodescent, that is, a
binary racial system buttressed by legal and physical segregation.13 The
notion of segregated identities grounds contemporary views of U.S. cul-
ture and social policy in the form of multiculturalism (culture as a mo-
saic of ethnic essences) and affirmative action. It also shapes U.S.
sociology of religion, which tends to privilege religion’s sectarian role,
its contribution in “promoting exclusivist self-affirmations” (García
Canclini 2001: 11). In contrast to hegemonic conceptions of identity
in the United States, the dominant logic of difference in Latin America,
while still hierarchical and Eurocentric, is open to “the possibility of
various different affiliations, circulating among identities and mixing
them” (García Canclini 1999: 117). This openness is rooted in Latin
American understandings of race as a continuum constituted by vari-
ous degrees of mixing rather than by rigid dualities. Of course, race and
identity are also inflected by power in Latin America, where whiteness
and all things European continue to be normative. However, in Latin
America, identities are not primarily self-contained essences legitimized
by legal discourses and institutional practices. Rather, identities tend
to be negotiated in everyday life and crisscrossed by domination and
resistance.14
Bringing the Latin American “model” to the fore thus destabilizes
the discourse about differentiation and pluralism at the heart of the New
Paradigm. The Latin American model helps refocus our attention be-
yond the hegemonic discourses of exclusionary identity, toward a dis-
covery of the pervasiveness of hybridity in the U.S. religious field. This
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 31

discovery is already underway among some U.S. sociologists of religion.

Studying religion among baby boomers, Roof (1999: 4) argues that
“boundaries separating one faith tradition from another that once
seemed fixed are now often blurred; religious identities are malleable
and multifaceted, often overlapping several traditions.” While Roof uses
the concept of subcultures to characterize the moral and spiritual en-
claves in which baby boomers operate, he stresses that on the ground,
“religion is also process, movement, aspiration, quest. These liminal
qualities point to its effusive and creative potential; its recurrent capacity
to combine elements into new forms, its bumptiousness, or ability to
reinvent itself on location” (296). Although theorists may wish to fix
religious practices in shorthand formulas, “in the contemporary United
States, fluidity within religious groups and institutions is extraordinar-
ily high. Boundaries are porous, allowing people, ideas, beliefs, prac-
tices, symbols, and spiritual currents to cross” (44).
Robert Wuthnow (1998a: 1–18) observes a post–1950s shift in U.S.
religion from a “spirituality of dwelling [which] requires sharp symbolic
boundaries to protect sacred space from its surroundings” to a “spiritu-
ality of seeking” marked by “images of those who have left home: the
migrant worker, the exile, the refugee, the drifter, the person who feels
alienated or displaced.” This new spirituality of journeying has posed
serious challenges to churches that offer unchanging goods to tight-
knit geographically bound communities. Believers, for their part, must
negotiate among multiple “complex and confusing meanings of spiri-
tuality,” as they seek to deal with an increasingly chaotic and global-
ized world.
New Age and other “postmodern” U.S. religions are not the only
ones to exhibit high degrees of flexibility and hybridity.15 African Ameri-
can religions, including Vodou and the Zion churches, have always in-
volved cross-fertilization as much as “Othering.” The same can be said
of Pentecostalism, which is a mixture of African American musicality
and orality and Wesleyan/Holiness piety. And, as Simon Coleman (2000:
24) observes, new Pentecostal waves, such as the Faith Movement, only
intensify this mixing further, competing with and borrowing from “a
post-modern world of healing movements, the New Age, materialism
and pluralism.” Because of the modernist bias toward purity, all these
traditions have been seen as corrupt pathological responses to disloca-
tion, alienation, and poverty. They have never been considered as po-
tentially representing the prevalence of hybridity in U.S. religion.
Latin American and U.S. Latino experience foregrounds the perva-
siveness of hybridity in the Americas without ignoring the presence of
32 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

institutional and structural boundaries. It is not that difference, com-

petition, and conflict do not matter. In fact, some of our case studies
show how religion in a globalized setting can serve to reaffirm a strong
sense of locality against macroprocesses, to reinforce the exclusion of
the socially marginalized sectors by religious and political elites, or to
form solidarity at the grassroots level on the basis of ethnic identity.
Rather, because globalization challenges the modernist narrative of in-
creasing social differentiation, we need to rethink and supplement New
Paradigm approaches. Subcultural-identity theory tells us only part of
the story: religion is not just about difference and marking boundaries
(territorializing), but also about mixing and blurring boundaries
(deterritorializing).
Some New Paradigm theorists have begun to nuance the stress on
exclusionary difference, boundaries, and competitive religious markets.
In a recent lecture, Warner (1997: 233–235) pointed toward a “new
theory” that moves beyond the traditional U.S. alternatives of assimi-
lation versus multiculturalism. He described the United States as a so-
ciety with “a multitude of particular communities but also with multiple
bridges between them.” Recognizing that U.S. culture is “gloriously
impure, even at its Protestant core,” Warner appealed to the Hispanic
notion of mestizaje. Warner’s move, however, is still tentative: he pre-
supposes ethnic differences and language boundaries, which he must
then reconcile through affective and bodily aspects of religion such as
ritual, music, and food (in a Durkheimian fashion). While we applaud
this step, we also agree with Nancy Ammerman that the NP needs more
radical work, directed toward its epistemological roots. Ammerman
(1997: 213) argues that
the context for that new paradigm is nothing less than the decentering
of modernism as our primary interpretive frame. Modern frames as-
sumed functional differentiation, individualism, and rationalism as “the
way things are.” Modern frames looked for bureaucratically organized
institutions with clear lists of members and tasks. Modern frames
looked for a clear line between rational, this worldly, action and action
guided by any other form of wisdom. Modern frames looked for the
individualized “meaning system” that would be carved out of differentia-
tion and pluralism. I hesitate to invoke the word postmodern, given all
its baggage, but it seems to me a useful concept here. The root of our
problem with the either/or concepts with which we work is that we
now live in a both/and world.

Affirming our both/and condition, Orsi (1997: 11) suggests that we

adopt a “hermeneutics of hybridity.” According to Orsi, “the analyti-
cal language of religious studies, organized as it still is around a series
 LIMITS OF DOMINANT AND EMERGING MODELS 33

of fixed, mutually exclusive, and stable polar opposites, must be

reconfigured in order to make sense of religion as lived experience. A
new vocabulary is demanded to discuss such phenomena, a language
as hybrid and tensile as the realities it seeks to describe.”
In the next chapter, we survey the globalization literature in search
of this new vocabulary. The analytical resources that we find there op-
erate within the framework of a “critical postmodernism.”16 We reject
the extreme relativism of naive postmodernist approaches that construe
the social world as utterly decentered and devoid of any relatively stable
power relations. We recognize the increasing fluidity and fragmenta-
tion of society and culture, while acknowledging the persistence, and
even intensification, of forms of domination and resistance character-
istic of modernity. As will become clear in the next chapter, we see
postmodernism as the radicalization of modernity’s stress on difference
and critique. Thus, we aim to construct a self-reflexive postmodernist
account of religion and society, one that is aware of its multiple points
of continuity and rupture with modern theories.
34 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

THEORIZING GLOBALIZATION
AND RELIGION

G lobalization, as Bauman (1998: 1) rightly complains, “is on everybody’s

lips; a fad word turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-
key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries.” In-
deed, a recent issue of National Geographic declares that “today we are
in the throes of a worldwide reformation of culture, a tectonic shift of
habits and dreams called, in the curious argot of social scientists, ‘glo-
balization’” (Zwingle 1999: 12). As we theorize globalization, we seek
to avoid mystifications of this kind. We do not claim that a globaliza-
tion framework can resolve all the conundrums of religion in the Ameri-
cas and thus that we must reject wholesale the methods and insights
of what we have called modernist approaches. Nevertheless, a global-
ization framework provides powerful tools to analyze changes in the
religious field in the Americas that challenge some of the core assump-
tions of secularization theory and the New Paradigm.
This chapter explores the theoretical implications of a globaliza-
tion framework for the study of religion in the Americas. Our aim is
not to offer a new theory of globalization. Nor do we seek to provide
an exhaustive review of the ever-expanding literature on globalization.1
Rather, we concentrate on those global processes that are most entang-
led with changes in the religious field in the Americas. We believe that
a focus on the interplay between religion and globalization not only
provides novel ways of studying religious phenomena but also enriches
our understanding of globalization in distinctive ways, foregrounding

34
 T H E O R I Z I N G G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D R E L I G I O N 35

important dynamics hitherto ignored. We argue that globalization

scholars must take religion seriously, since religion in the Americas is
deeply implicated in the dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorial-
ization that accompanies globalization. According to García Canclini
(1995: 229), this dialectic entails “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation of
culture to geographical and social territories and, at the same time, cer-
tain relative, partial territorial relocalizations of old and new symbolic
productions.” Religion, we believe, is one of the main protagonists in
this unbinding of culture from its traditional referents and boundaries
and in its reattachment in new space-time configurations. Through this
interplay of delocalization and relocalization, religion gives rise to hy-
brid individual and collective identities that fly in the face of the meth-
odological purity and simplicity sought by modernist sociologies of
religion.

GLOBALIZATION IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT

According to Giddens (1990: 64), globalization is the “intensification
of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way
that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away
and vice versa.” Defined thus, globalization is not a new phenomenon,
for there have been many examples of wide-ranging translocal dynam-
ics throughout history. Pointing to the role of Buddhism under Ashoka’s
empire in India (272–232 BCE) and Confucianism in China during the
Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Roland Robertson (1992: 6) goes so far
as to claim that “the overall processes of globalization (and sometimes
deglobalization) are at least as old as the rise of the so-called world re-
ligions two thousand and more years ago.” What, then, is new about
the current episode of globalization? Why the sudden surge of interest
in the phenomenon? To identify the distinctive features of globaliza-
tion as it is experienced today, we need to contextualize it historically.
Following theorist Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), we may divide previ-
ous translocal experiences into two categories: world empires and world
systems. Imperial systems emerged around 1000 BCE, as advances in ag-
riculture and transportation technology made possible the rise of cen-
tralized state apparatuses with large standing armies and relatively
complex administrative bureaucracies capable of controlling extensive
territories and extracting surplus through a system of taxes and levies.
Despite extensive trading networks, translocal integration was weak,
with limited impact over the lives of the vast majority of inhabitants
in the heterogeneous cultures and societies subsumed by early world
36 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

empires. Cultural and religious syncretism was limited to cosmopoli-

tan urban centers and port towns. Integration among the various sub-
cultural units in an empire depended heavily on military force, as states
did not have the means to manage their populations in the ways that
panoptical modern states exerted power at the microlevel (Foucault
1978). Using criteria defined by Held et al. (1999: 22), we can speak
here of a “thin globalization in so far as the high extensity of global
networks is not matched by a similar intensity, velocity or impact, for
these all remain low.” World empires include ancient Rome and China,
Mogul India, and Ottoman Turkey.
Throughout the contraction and expansion of competing empires,
Wallerstein argues (1974: 38–129), the horizon of translocal interdepen-
dence remained constant until the emergence of the modern world-
system out of the fragmentation produced by the crisis of feudalism in
the “long sixteenth century” (1450–1620). Technological advances, par-
ticularly in maritime transportation, facilitated the expansion of long-
distance trade with Asia as well as the colonization of the Americas and
the Atlantic slave trade. While physical coercion continued to play a
significant role in translocal integration, the nascent world-system came
to be increasingly dominated by the capitalist mode of production. As
the various imperial powers competed against each other for profits,
capitalism underwent rapid episodes of globalization, eventually lead-
ing in the late nineteenth century to the formation of an interstate sys-
tem divided into core countries, with capital-intensive, high-wage, and
high-technology economies; peripheral countries, with labor-intensive,
low-wage, and low-technology economies; and semi-peripheral coun-
tries, mixing elements of both core and periphery. The result was a
“thick globalization” in which “the extensive reach of global networks
[was] matched by their high intensity, high velocity, and high impact
propensity across all the domains and facets of social life from the eco-
nomic to the cultural” (Held et al., 1999: 21). This episode of global-
ization, which Marx and Engels described so vividly in the Communist
Manifesto, reached its peak in the early 1900s, before World War I.
This is a telescopic view of the emergence of the capitalist world-
system.2 Nevertheless, it offers sufficient background to identify conti-
nuities and ruptures entailed by the current episode of globalization.
Thick globalization has intensified dramatically in the last three decades,
producing deep and widespread processes of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. These processes have undermined the viability of
the nation-state as the key analytical unit of modern social science and
 T H E O R I Z I N G G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D R E L I G I O N 37

challenged the core–semi-periphery–periphery division of labor. More

importantly, they have restructured everyday life for vast sectors of the
world’s population, redefining time, space, identity, and agency at the
local level. The specificity of the present episode of globalization thus lies
in the tight intertwining of global, transnational, and local (commu-
nity and self) dynamics. Since the late 1960s, the world has experienced
what Harvey (1989: 284) describes as “an intense phase of time-space
compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon
political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon
cultural and social life.” Adding specificity to Harvey’s description, we
can characterize the last thirty years as a period of “growing extensity,
intensity and velocity of global interactions . . . associated with a deep-
ening enmeshment of the local and global such that the impact of dis-
tant events is magnified while even the most local developments may
come to have enormous global consequences. In this sense, the bound-
aries between domestic matters and global affairs may be blurred” (Held
et al. 1999: 15).
Defining globalization as time-space compression is shorthand for
a complex host of socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes.
Appadurai (1996: 33–37) has characterized these processes by focusing
on the overlaps and disjunctures among five global flows, which he
qualifies with the suffix “-scapes” to describe the “irregular landscapes”
they produce. The flows are: (1) ethnoscapes, “the landscape of persons
who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants,
refugees, exiles, guest workers”; (2) financescapes, the movement of capi-
tal and commodities at “blinding speeds”; (3) technoscapes, global tech-
nological changes and transfers; (4) mediascapes, “the distribution of
the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information
(newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production stu-
dios)” and “the images of the world created by these media”; and (5)
ideoscapes, discourses connected to articulation of collective (national)
and individual identity.
Appadurai does not address religion directly.3 Nevertheless, his
emphasis on multiple flows and the centrality of culture is a good cor-
rective to overly abstract and economistic readings of globalization. The
notion of scapes, however, carries its own dangers: it may lead to an
understanding of globalization as the product of impersonal, utterly dis-
located flows.4 Globalization is not just about flows of ideas, goods,
people, and capital but also about the practices and organizational
structures of territorialized actors like migrants, the state, and churches.
38 GLOBALIZING THE SACRED

Globalization entails power differentials that “are embodied in specific

social relations established between specific people, situated in un-
equivocal localities, at historically determined times” (Guarnizo and
Smith 1998: 11). Taking this insight seriously, we have chosen to specify
the key dimensions of globalization not as flows but as historical pro-
cesses, reproduced and contested by the activities of individual and col-
lective actors. This approach allows us to preserve the dynamism and
complexity captured by Appadurai through his notion of scapes, while
producing “anchored” analyses of globalization.

THE CURRENT EPISODE OF GLOBALIZATION

The Transition from Fordism to Flexible Production
To understand the current phase of globalization from an economic
perspective and how it manifests specifically in the Americas, we need
to begin in the early twentieth century. Following World War I, the
economic dynamics of thick globalization converged around a Fordist-
Keynesian regime of production and consumption. The backbone of this
regime was industrial, highly centralized (assembly-line) mass produc-
tion for expanding, albeit fairly homogeneous, national markets. To pro-
tect the economy against sudden crises, such as those of the late 1920s
and early 1930s, the model called for heavy state intervention. Among
other things, the state was charged with regulating demand by redis-
tributing some wealth through entitlement programs. Corporate indus-
try, for its part, sought high wages and high levels of employment,
enabling an increasingly urbanized labor force not just to reproduce it-
self but to consume the big-ticket items produced in the economies of
scale. Workers organized in influential unions entered into a concor-
dat with the state and industry, pledging support for the model as long
as their collective demands were met.
This stage of capitalism operated at an international level through
a system of nation-states. While vast areas of Africa and Asia were still
under colonial rule, elites in dominant centers of power articulated
strong national identities, which intensified in World War II as vari-
ous nations sought to carve out spheres of influence. After the war, with
much of Europe and Japan in ruins, the United States emerged as the
dominant national power, its industrial capacity unscathed, ready to
supply the growing demand for products both domestically and
internationally. With its politicoeconomic hegemony threatened only
by an ascending Soviet Union, the United States advanced a global fi-
nancial system based on the dollar under the 1944 Bretton Woods agree-
 T H E O R I Z I N G G L O B A L I Z AT I O N A N D R E L I G I O N 39

ment. This system established significant controls on capital flows and

fixed exchange rates, allowing national governments substantial au-
tonomy in managing their economies. Latin American nations occu-
pied peripheral positions within this system, either exporting raw
materials and labor to the core countries or creating protected national
and regional markets through import-substitution industrialization.
Pressures on the Fordist-Keynesian model began as early as the mid–
1960s. By then, European and Japanese economies were fully recovered
from the war. They were joined by the newly industrialized Asian coun-
tries, as well as emerging Latin American economies like Brazil and
Mexico, in the search of new markets. Internally, the U.S. economy be-
gan to show signs of strain under the burden of the war in Vietnam.
Added pressure came from the oil shocks of 1973 and 1975. The weak-
ening U.S. economy, in turn, undermined the dollar, the anchor of the
Bretton Woods system. This eventually led in 1973 to the adoption of
a flexible exchange-rate system, which made national economies vul-
nerable to global currency speculation. With the collapse of Bretton
Woods, the Fordist-Keynesian regime based on the coordinated inter-
dependence and regulation of national economies could no longer
maximize profits. It was too rigid, cumbersome, and energy intensive
to respond to the changing economic climate. Capitalism needed re-
lease from the spatio-temporal constraints imposed by the old regime.
After a period of considerable disorder and uncertainty, the 1980s
saw the gradual emergence of what experts call flexible production. Flex-
ible production attempts to strengthen competitiveness through the
strategic downsizing, dispersion, and diversification of production.
Rather than centering production in the urban assembly line, flexible
production relies heavily on temporary and pliable arrangements like
subcontracting and outsourcing to produce small batches of goods that
respond to rapidly changing demands. Since subcontracting and
outsourcing often depend on cheap, unregulated labor in developing
countries, they generate transnational networks of production and ac-
cumulation that challenge the state’s ability to control the domestic
economy. The coordination of dispersed transnational production has
been facilitated by innovations in communication and transportation
technology that make it possible to link distant localities almost
instantaneously. In place of the Fordist-Keynesian nationally based ver-
tical integration, we see the emergence of what Castells terms the
“network society,” an extensive, open-ended, transnational, and flex-
ibly integrated system of nodes. We now may talk about global assembly
lines, which link workers in Flint, Michigan, and Matamoros, Mexico,
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 CHAPTER XI.
Hyacinth Vaughan repeated one sentence over and over again to
herself—they were always the same words—"Thank Heaven, Adrian
does not know what I have done."
For, as the days passed on, she learned to care for him with a love
that was wonderful in its intensity. It was not his personal beauty
that impressed her. By many people Claude Lennox would have been
considered the handsomer man of the two. It was the grandeur of
Adrian Darcy's character, the loyalty and nobility of his most loyal
soul; the beauty of his mind, the stretch and clearness of his
intellect, that charmed her.
She had never met any one like him—never met so perfect a mixture
of chivalry and strength. She learned to have the utmost reliance
upon him. His most lightly spoken word was to her as the oath of
another. She saw that every thought, every word, every action of his
was so perfectly correct that his least judgment was invaluable. If he
said a thing was right, the whole world could not have made her
think it wrong; if he disapproved of anything, so entire was her
reliance upon him, that she could not be brought to consider it right.
It seemed so strange that she should have been so ready to run
away, so as to escape this Adrian Darcy; and now the brightest
heaven of which she could dream was his friendship—for his love,
after she understood him, she could hardly hope.
"How can he care for a child like me," she was accustomed to ask
herself, "uninformed, inexperienced, ignorant? He is so great and so
noble, how can he care for me?"
She did not know that her sweet humility, her graceful shyness, her
naïveté, her entire freedom from all taint of worldliness, was more
precious to him, more charming, than all the accomplishments she
could have displayed.
"How can I ever have thought that I loved Claude?" she said to
herself. "How can I have been so blind? My heart never used to beat
more quickly for his coming. If I had had the same liberty, the same
amusements and pleasures which other girls have, I should never
have cared for him. It was only because he broke the monotony of
my life, and gave me something to think of."
Then in her own mind she contrasted the two men—Adrian, so calm,
so dignified, so noble in thought, word, and deed, and so loyal, so
upright; Claude, all impetuosity, fire, recklessness and passion—not
to be trusted, not to be relied upon. There was never a greater
difference of character surely than between these two men.
She learned to look with Adrian's eyes, to think with his mind; and
she became a noble woman.
Life at Bergheim was very pleasant; there was no monotony, no
dreariness now. Her first thought when she woke in the morning,
was that she should see Adrian, hear him speak, perhaps go out
with him. Quite unconsciously to herself, he became the centre of
her thoughts and ideas—the soul of her soul, the life of her life. She
did not know that she loved him; what she called her "love" for
Claude had been something so different—all made up of gratified
vanity and love of change. The beautiful affection rapidly mastering
her was so great and reverent, it filled her soul with light, her heart
with music, her mind with beauty. She did not know that it was love
that kept her awake throughout the night thinking of him, bringing
back to her mind every word he had spoken—that made her always
anxious to look well.
"I always thought," she said to him one day, "that grave and
thoughtful people always despised romance."
"They despise all affectation and caricature of it," he replied.
"Since I have been out in the world and have listened to people
talking, I have heard them say, 'Oh, she is romantic!' as though
romance were wrong or foolish."
"There is romance and romance," he said; "romance that is noble,
beautiful and exalting; and romance that is the overheated
sentiment of foolish girls. What so romantic as Shakespeare? What
love he paints for us—what passion, what sadness! Who more
romantic than Fouque? What wild stories, what graceful, improbable
legends he gives us! Yet, who sneers at Shakespeare and Fouque?"
"Then why do people apply the word 'romantic' almost as a term of
reproach to others?"
"Because they misapply the word, and do not understand it. I plead
guilty myself to a most passionate love of romance—that is, romance
which teaches, elevates, and ennobles—the soul of poetry, the high
and noble faculty that teaches one to appreciate the beautiful and
true. You know, Hyacinth, there are true romance and false
romance, just as there are true poetry and false poetry."
"I can understand what you call true romance, but not what you
mean by false," she said.
"No; you are too much like the flower you are named after to know
much of false romance," he rejoined. "Everything that lowers one's
standard, that tends to lower one's thoughts, that puts mere
sentiment in the place of duty, that makes wrong seem right, that
leads to underhand actions, to deceit, to folly—all that is false
romance. Pardon my alluding to such things. The lover who would
persuade a girl to deceive her friends for his sake, who would
persuade her to give him private meetings, to receive secret letters
—such a lover starts from a base of the very falsest romance; yet
many people think it true."
He did not notice that her beautiful face had suddenly grown pale,
and that an expression of fear had crept into her blue eyes.
"You are always luring me into argument, Hyacinth," he said, with a
smile.
"Because I like to hear you talk," she explained. She did not see how
full of love was the look he bent on her as he plucked a spray of
azalea flowers and passed it to her. Through the tears that filled her
downcast eyes she saw the flower, and almost mechanically took it
from his hand, not daring to look up. But in the silence of her own
room she pressed the flowers passionately to her lips and rained
tears upon them, as she moaned, "Oh, if he knew, what would he
think of me? what would he think?"
 CHAPTER XII.
Hyacinth Vaughan was soon to learn more of Mr. Darcy's sentiments.
He was dining with them one day, when the conversation turned
upon some English guests who had arrived at the hotel the evening
before—Lord and Lady Wallace.
"She looks quite young," said Lady Vaughan. "She would be a nice
companion for Hyacinth."
Mr. Darcy, to whom she was speaking, made no reply. Lady Vaughan
noticed how grave his face had grown.
"Do you not think so, Adrian?" she asked.
"Since you wish me to speak, my answer is, no; I do not think so."
"Do you mind telling me why?" pursued Lady Vaughan "I have been
so long out of the world I am ignorant of its proceedings."
"I would rather you would not ask me, Lady Vaughan," he said.
"And I would rather hear what you have to tell," she persisted, with
a smiling air of command that he was too courteous not to obey.
"I do not think Lady Wallace would be a good companion for
Hyacinth, because she is what people of the period call 'fast.' She
created a great sensation three years ago by eloping with Lord
Wallace. She was only seventeen at the time."
Lady Vaughan looked slightly disgusted; but Hyacinth, who perhaps
felt in some measure that she was on her trial, said: "Perhaps she
loved him."
Adrian turned to her eagerly. "That is what I was trying to explain to
you the other day—false romance—how the truest, the purest, the
brightest romance would have been, not eloping—which is the
commonplace instinct of commonplace minds—but waiting in
patience. Think of the untruths, the deceit, the false words, the
underhand dealings that are necessary for an elopement!"
"But surely," said Lady Vaughan, "there are exceptions?"
"There may be. I do not know. I am only saying what I think. A girl
who deceives all her friends, who leaves home in such a fashion,
must be devoid of refinement and delicacy—not to mention truth
and honesty."
"You are very hard," murmured Hyacinth.
"Nay," he rejoined, turning to her with infinite tenderness of manner;
"there are some things in which one cannot be too hard. Anything
that touches the fair and pure name of a woman should be held
sacred."
"You think highly of women," she said.
"I do—so highly that I cannot bear even a cloud to shadow the
fairness and brightness that belong to them. A woman's fair name is
her inheritance—her dower. I could not bear, had I a sister, to hear
her name lightly spoken by light lips. What the moss is to the rose,
what green leaves are to the lily, spotless repute is to a woman."
As he spoke the grave words, Hyacinth looked at him. How pure,
how noble the woman must be who could win his love!
"Ah me, ah me!" thought the girl, with a bitter sigh, "what would he
say to me if he knew all? Who was ever so near the scandal he
hated as I was? Oh, thank Heaven, that I drew back in time, and
that mine was but the shadow of a sin!"
There were times when she thought, with a beating heart, of what
Lady Vaughan had said to her—that it was her wish Adrian Darcy
should marry her. The lot that had once seemed so hard to her was
now so bright, so dazzling, that she dared not think of it—when she
remembered it, her face flushed crimson.
"I am not worthy," she said over and over again to herself—"I am
not worthy."
She thought of Adrian's love as she thought of the distant stars in
heaven—bright, beautiful, but far away. In her sweet humility, she
did not think there was anything in herself which could attract him.
She little dreamed, how much he admired the loveliness of her face,
the grace of her girlish figure, the purity, the innocence, the
simplicity that, despite the shadow of a sin, still lingered with her.
"She is innately noble," he said one day to Lady Vaughan. "She is
sure always to choose the nobler and better part; her ideas are
naturally noble, pure, and correct. She is the most beautiful
combination of child and woman that I have ever met. Imagination
and common sense, poetry, idealisms and reason, all seem to meet
in her."
Years ago, Adrian Darcy had heard something of Lady Vaughan's
half-expressed wish that he should marry her granddaughter. He
laughed at it at the time; but he remembered it with a sense of
acute pleasure. His had been a busy life; he had studied hard—had
carried off some of the brightest honors of his college—and, after
leaving Oxford, had devoted himself to literary pursuits. He had
written books which had caused him to be pronounced one of the
most learned scholars in England. He cared little for the frivolities of
fashion—they had not interested him in the least—yet his name was
a tower of strength in the great world.
Between Adrian Darcy and the ancient Barony of Chandon there was
but the present Lord Chandon, an old infirm man, and his son, a
sickly boy. People all agreed that sooner or later Adrian must
succeed to the estate; great, therefore, was the welcome he
received in Vanity Fair. Mothers presented their fairest daughters to
him; fair-faced girls smiled their sweetest smiles when he was
present; but all was in vain—the world and the worldly did not
please Adrian Darcy. He cared more for his books than woman's
looks; he had never felt the least inclination to fall in love until he
met Hyacinth Vaughan.
It was not her beauty that charmed him, although he admitted that
it was greater than he had ever seen. It was her youth, her
simplicity, her freedom from all affectation, the entire absence of all
worldliness, the charm of her fresh, sweet romance, that delighted
him. She said what she thought, and she expressed her thoughts in
such beautiful, eloquent words that he delighted to listen to them.
He was quite unused to such frank, sweet, candid simplicity—it had
all the charms of novelty for him. He had owned to himself, at last,
that he loved her—that life without her would be a dreary blank.
"If I had never met her," he said to himself, "I should never have
loved anyone. In all the wide world she is the only one for me." He
wondered whether he could speak to her yet of his love. "She is like
some shy, bright bird," he said to himself, "and I am afraid of
startling her. She is so simple, so child-like, in spite of her romance
and poetry, that I am half afraid."
His manner to her was so chivalrous that it was like the wooing of
some gracious king. She contrasted him over and over again with
Claude—Claude, who had respected her girlish ignorance and
inexperience so little. So the sunny days glided by in a dream of
delight. Adrian spent all his time with them; and one day Lady
Vaughan asked him what he thought of his chance of succeeding to
the Barony of Chandon.
"I think," he replied slowly, "that sooner or later it must be mine."
"Do you care much for it?" she asked. "Old people are always
inquisitive, Adrian—you must forgive me."
"I care for it in one sense," he replied; "but I cannot say honestly
that title or rank give me any great pleasure. I would rather be
Adrian Darcy, than Baron Chandon of Chandon. But, Lady Vaughan,
I will tell you something that I long for, that I covet and desire."
"What is it?" she asked, looking at the handsome face, flushed,
eager, and excited.
"It is the love of Hyacinth Vaughan," he answered. "I love her—I
have never seen anyone so simple, so frank, so spirituelle. I love her
as I never thought to love any woman. If I do not marry her, I will
never marry anyone. I have your permission, I know; but she is so
shy, so coy, I am afraid to speak to her. Do you think I have any
chance, Lady Vaughan?"
She raised her fair old face to his.
"I do," she replied. "Thanks to our care, the girl's heart is like the
white leaf of a lily. No shadow has ever rested on her. She has not
been flirted with and talked about. I tell you honestly, Adrian, that
the lilies in the garden are not more pure, more fair, or fresh than
she."
"I know it," he agreed; "and, heaven helping me, I will so guard and
shield her that no shadow shall ever fall over her."
"She has never had a lover," continued Lady Vaughan. "Her life has
been a most secluded one."
"Then I shall try to win her," he said; and when he had gone away
Lady Vaughan acknowledged to herself that the very desire of her
heart was near being gratified.
 CHAPTER XIII.
It may be that Hyacinth Vaughan read Adrian Darcy's determination
in his face, for she grew so coy and frightened that had he not been
brave he would have despaired. If by accident she raised her eyes
and met his glance her face burned and her heart beat; when he
spoke to her it was with difficulty she answered him. She had once
innocently and eagerly sought his society—she had loved to listen to
him while he was talking to Lady Vaughan—she had enjoyed being
with him as the flowers enjoy the sunlight. But something was
awake in her heart and soul which had been sleeping until now.
When she saw Adrian, her first impulse was to turn aside and fly, no
matter whither, because of the sweet pain his presence caused her.
He met her one morning in the broad corridor of the hotel; she
looked fresh and bright, fair and sweet as the morning itself. Her
face flushed at his coming, she stopped half undecided whether to
go on or turn and fly.
"Hyacinth," he said, holding out his hand in greeting, "it seems an
age since I have had any conversation with you. Where do you hide
yourself? What are you always doing?"
Then he paused and looked at her—admiration, passion, and
tenderness unspeakable in his eyes. She little knew how fair a
picture she presented in her youthful loveliness and timidity—how
graceful and pure she was in her girlish embarrassment.
"Have you not one word of greeting, Hyacinth? It is the morning of a
fresh day. I have not seen you since the noon of yesterday. Speak to
me—after your own old bright way. Why, Hyacinth, what has
changed you? We used to laugh all the sunny summer day through,
and now you give me only a smile. What has changed you?"
She never remembered what answer she made him, nor how she
escaped. She remembered nothing until she found herself in her
own room, her heart beating, her face dyed with burning blushes,
and her whole soul awake and alarmed.
"What has changed me?" she asked. "What has come over me? I
know—I know. I love him!"
She fell on her knees and buried her face in her hands—she wept
passionately.
"I love him," she said—"oh, Heaven, make me worthy to love him!"
She knelt in a kind of waking trance, a wordless ecstasy. She loved
him; her heart was awake, her soul slept no more. That was why
she dreaded yet longed to meet him—why his presence gave her
pain that was sweeter than all joy.
This paradise she had gained was what, in her blindness and folly
she had flown from; and she knew now, as she knelt there, that,
had all the treasures of earth been offered to her, had its fairest gifts
been laid at her feet, she would have selected this from them.
At last the great joy, the great mystery, the crowning pleasure of
woman's life, was hers. She called to mind all that the poets had
written of love. Was it true? Ah, no! It fell a thousand fathoms short.
Such happiness, such joy as made music in her heart could not be
told in words, and her face burned again as she remembered the
feeble sentiment that she had dignified by the name of love. Now
that she understood herself, she knew that it was impossible she
could ever have loved Claude Lennox; he had not enough grandeur
or nobility of character to attract her.
When she went down to the salon, Sir Arthur and Adrian were there
alone; she fled like a startled fawn. He was to dine with them that
day, and she spent more time than usual over her toilet. How could
she make herself fair enough in the eyes of the man who was her
king? Very fair did she look, for among her treasures she found an
old-fashioned brocade, rich, heavy, and beautiful, and it was
trimmed with rich point lace. The ground was white, with small
rosebuds embroidered on it. The fair, rounded arms and white neck
shone out even fairer than the white dress; a few pearls that Lady
Vaughan had given her shone like dew-drops in the fair hair. She
looked both long and anxiously in the mirror, so anxious was she to
look well in his eyes.
"Miss Vaughan grows quite difficult to please," said Pincott to her
mistress, later on; and Lady Vaughan smiled.
"There may be reasons," she returned; "we have all been young
once—we must not quite forget what youth is like. Ah—there is the
dinner-bell."
But, as far as the mere material dinner was concerned, Adrian did
not show to great advantage; it was impossible to eat while that
lovely vision in white brocade sat opposite to him.
"She flies from me—she avoids me," he thought; "but she shall
listen. I have tamed the white doves—I have made the wildest,
brightest song-birds love me and eat from my hands. She shall love
me, too."
He could not succeed in inducing her to look at him; when he spoke
she answered, but the sweet eyes were always downcast.
"Never mind. She shall look at me yet," he thought.
After dinner he asked her to sing. She saw with alarm that if she did
so she would be alone with him—for the piano was at the extreme
end of the room. So she excused herself, and he understood
perfectly the reason why.
"Will you play at chess?" he asked.
Not for the wealth of India could she have managed it.
"I shall win you," his eyes seemed to say. "You may try to escape.
Flutter your bright wings, my pretty bird; it is all in vain."
Then he asked her if she would go into the grounds. She murmured
some few words of apology that he could hardly hear. A sudden
great love and sweetest pity for her youth and her timidity came
over him. "I will be patient," he said to himself; "the shy bird shall
not be startled. In time she will learn not to be so coy and timid."
So he turned away and asked Sir Arthur if he should read the
leading article from the Times to him, and Sir Arthur gratefully
accepted the offer. Lady Vaughan, with serenely composed face,
went to sleep. Hyacinth stole gently to the window; she wanted no
books, no music; a fairyland was unfolded before her, and she had
not half explored it. She only wanted to be quite alone, to think over
and over again how wonderful it was that she loved Adrian Darcy.
"Come out," the dewy, sleepy flowers seemed to say. "Come out,"
sung the birds. "Come out," whispered the wind, bending the tall
magnolia trees and spreading abroad sweet perfume. She looked
round the room; Lady Vaughan was fast asleep, Sir Arthur listening
intently, and Adrian reading to him. "No one will miss me," she
thought.
She took up a thin shawl that was lying near, opened the long
window very gently, and stepped out. But she was mistaken: some
one did miss her, and that some one was Adrian. No gesture, no
movement of hers ever escaped him. She was gone out into the
sweet, dewy, fragrant gloaming, and he longed to follow her.
He read on patiently until—oh, pleasant sight!—he saw Sir Arthur's
eyes begin to close. He had purposely chosen the dryest articles,
and had read slowly until the kind god Morpheus came to his aid,
and Sir Arthur slept. Then Adrian rose and followed Hyacinth. The
band was playing at the further end of the gardens, and Mozart's
sweet music came floating through the trees.
It was such a dim pleasant light under the vines, and the music of
the dripping water was so sweet. His instinct had not deceived him:
something white was gleaming by the rock. He walked with quiet
steps. She was sitting watching the falling waters, looking so fair and
lovely in that dim green light. He could contain himself no longer; he
sprung forward and caught her in his arms.
"I have found you at last, Hyacinth," he said—"I have found you at
last."
 CHAPTER XIV.
Hyacinth Vaughan turned round in startled fear and wonder, and
then she saw her lover's face, and knew by her womanly instinct
what was coming. She made no effort to escape; she had been like
a frightened, half-scared bird, but now a great calm came over her, a
solemn and beautiful gladness.
"Hyacinth, forgive me," he said—"I have been looking for you so
long. Oh, my darling, if ever the time should come that I should look
for you and not find you, what should I do?"
In this, one of the happiest moments of his life, there came to him a
presentiment of evil—one of those sharp, sudden, subtle instincts for
which he could never account—a sense of darkness, as though the
time were coming when he should look for that dear face and not
find it, listen for the beloved voice and not hear it—when he should
call in vain for his love and no response meet his ears. All this
passed through his mind in the few moments that he held her in his
arms and looked in her pure, faultless face.
"Have I startled you?" he asked, seeing how strangely pale and calm
it had grown. "Why have you been so cruel to me, Hyacinth? Did you
not know that I have been seeking for you all day, longing for five
minutes with you? For, Hyacinth, I want to ask you something. Now
you are trembling—see how unsteady these sweet hands are. I do
not want to frighten you, darling; sit down here and let us talk
quietly."
They sat down, and for a few moments a deep silence fell over
them, broken only by the ripple of the water and the sound of
distant music.
"Hyacinth," said Adrian, gently, "I little thought, when I came here
four short weeks since, thinking of nothing but reading three
chapters of Goethe before breakfast, that I should find my fate—the
fairest and sweetest fate that ever man found. I believe that I loved
you then—at that first moment—as dearly as I love you now. You
seemed to creep into my heart and nestle there. Until I die there will
be no room in my heart for any other."
She sat very still, listening to his passionate words, letting her hands
lie within his. It seemed to her like a king coming to take possession
of his own.
"I can offer you," he said, "the deepest, best, and purest, love. It
has not been frittered away on half a dozen worthless objects. You
are my only love. I shall know no other. Hyacinth, will you be my
wife?"
It had fallen at last, this gleam of sunlight that had dazzled her so
long by its brightness; it had fallen at her feet, and it blinded her.
"Will you be my wife, Hyacinth? Do not say 'Yes' unless you love me;
nor because it is any one's wish; nor because Lady Vaughan may
have said, 'It would be a suitable arrangement.' But say it if you love
me—if you are happy with me."
He remembered in after-years how what she said puzzled him. She
clasped her little white hands; she bent her head in sweetest
humility.
"I am not worthy," she whispered.
He laughed aloud in the joy of his heart. "Not worthy? I know best
about that, Hyacinth. I know that from the whole world I choose you
for my wife, my queen, my love, because you are the fairest, the
truest, the purest woman in it. I know that, if a king were kneeling
here in my place, your love would crown him. It is I who am not
worthy, sweet. What man is worthy of love so pure as yours? Tell
me, Hyacinth, will you be my wife?"
The grave pallor left her face; a thousand little gleams and lights
seemed to play over it.
"My wife—to love me, to help me while we both live."
"I—I cannot think that you love me," she said, gently. "You are so
gifted, so noble, so clever—so brave and so strong."
"And what are you?" he asked, laughingly.
"I am nothing—nothing, that is, compared to you."
"A very sweet and fair nothing. Now that you have flattered me,
listen while I tell you what you are. To begin, you are, without
exception, the loveliest girl that ever smiled in the sunshine. You
have a royal dowry of purity, truth, innocence and simplicity, than
which no queen ever had greater. All the grace and music of the
world, to my mind, are concentrated in you. I can say no more,
sweet. I find that words do not express my meaning. All the
unworthiness is on my side—not on yours."
"But," she remonstrated, "some day you will be a very rich, great
man, will you not?"
"I am what the world calls rich, now," he replied, gravely. "And—yes,
you are right, Hyacinth—it is most probable that I may be Baron
Chandon of Chandon some day. But what has that to do with it,
sweet?"
"You should have a wife who knows more than I do—some one who
understands the great world."
"Heaven forbid!" he said, earnestly. "I would not marry a worldly
woman, Cynthy, if she brought me Golconda for a fortune. There is
no one else who could make such a fair and gentle Lady Chandon as
you."
"I am afraid that you will be disappointed in me afterward," she
remarked, falteringly.
"I am very willing to run the risk, my darling. Now you have been
quite cruel enough, Cynthy. We will even go so far as to suppose you
have faults; I know that, being human, you cannot be without them.
But that does not make me love you less. Now, tell me, will you be
my wife?"
She looked up at him with sweet, shy grace. "I am afraid you think
too highly of me," she opposed, apologetically; "in many things I am
but a child."
"Child, woman, fairy, spirit—no matter what you are—just as you
are, I love you, and I would not have you changed; nothing can
improve you, because, in my eyes, you are perfect. Will you be my
wife, Hyacinth?"
"Yes," she replied; "and I pray that I may be worthy of my lot."
He bent down and kissed the fair flushed face, the sweet quivering
lips, the white drooping eyelids.
"You are my own now," he said—"my very own. Nothing but death
shall part us."
So they sat in silence more eloquent than words; the faint sound of
the music came over the trees, the wind stirred the vine leaves—
there never came such another hour in life for them. In the first
rapture of her great happiness Hyacinth did not remember Claude,
or perhaps she would have told her lover about him, but she did not
even remember him. Over the smiling heaven of her content no
cloud, however light, sailed—she remembered nothing in that hour
but her love and her happiness.
Then he began to talk to her of the life that lay before them.
"We must live so that others may be the better for our living, Cynthy.
Should it happen that you become Lady Chandon, we will have a
vast responsibility on our hands."
She looked pleased and happy.
"We will build schools," she said, "almshouses for the poor people;
we will make every one glad and happy, Adrian."
"That will be a task beyond us, I fear," he rejoined, with a smile,
"but we will do our best."
"I must try to learn every thing needful for so exalted a position,"
she observed, with a great sigh of content.
"You must be very quick about it, darling," he said. "I am going to
presume upon your kindness. It is not enough to know that I have
won you, but I want to know when you will be mine."
She made no reply, and he went on.
"I do not see why we need wait—do you, Cynthy?"
"I do not see why we need hurry," she replied.
"I can give you a reason for that—I want you; my life will be one
long sigh until I can say in very truth that you are my wife. Will you
let me tell Lady Vaughan this evening, that I have been successful?"
She clung to him, her hand clasping his arm. "Not to-night," she
said, softly. "Adrian, let me have this one night to myself to think it
all over."
"It shall be just as you like, my darling; I will tell her to-morrow.
Now, Cynthy, this is the 19th of July—why should we not be married
in two months from to-day?" Ah, why not? She said nothing. The
wind, that whispered so many secrets to the trees, did not tell them
that.
 CHAPTER XV.
When Hyacinth woke next morning, it was with difficulty that she
disentangled dreams and truth; then the whole of her untold joys
rushed over her, and she knew it was no fancy—no dream. She went
down to breakfast looking, if possible, more beautiful than she had
ever looked; the love-light on her face made it radiant; her eyes
were bright as stars. Lady Vaughan gazed at her, as she had often
done before, in sheer wonder. During breakfast she heard Sir Arthur
complaining of his papers.
"I am told they will not come until night," he said. "I really do not
see how I am to get through the day without my papers."
"What is the cause of the delay?" asked Lady Vaughan.
"Some accident to the mail train. The company ought to be more
careful."
"Adrian will perhaps be able to do something to amuse you," said
Lady Vaughan.
"Adrian has gone out," returned Sir Arthur, in an injured tone of
voice. "Some friends of his came to the hotel late last night, and he
has gone out with them; he will not return till evening."
"Who told you so?" asked Lady Vaughan.
"He wrote this note," said Sir Arthur, "and sent it to me the first
thing this morning." Then Hyacinth smiled to herself, for she knew
the note was written for her.
"We must get through the day as well as we can," said Lady
Vaughan.
Greatly to Sir Arthur's surprise, Hyacinth volunteered to spend the
morning with him.
"I can amuse you," she said—"not perhaps as well as Mr. Darcy, but
I will do my best. We will go out into the grounds if you like; the
band is going to play a selection from 'Il Flauto Magico.'"
And Sir Arthur consented, inwardly wondering how sweet, gentle,
and compliant his granddaughter was.
Just before dinner a messenger came to the salon to say that Mr.
Darcy had returned, and, with Lady Vaughan's permission would
spend the evening with them.
"He will tell Lady Vaughan this evening," thought Hyacinth; "and
then every one will know."
She dressed herself with unusual care; it would be the first time of
seeing him since she had promised to be his wife. Amongst her
treasures was a dress of white lace, simple and elegant, somewhat
elaborately trimmed with green leaves. Pincott came again, by Lady
Vaughan's wish, to superintend the young lady's toilet. She looked
curiously at the white lace dress.
"Begging your pardon, Miss Vaughan," she said, "but I never saw a
young lady so changed. I used to feel quite grieved when you were
so careless about your dress."
"I will try not to grieve you again," said the young girl, laughingly.
"You must not wear either jewels or ribbons with this dress,"
observed Pincott. "There must be nothing but a simple cluster of
green leaves."
"It shall be just as you like," observed Miss Vaughan.
But the maid's taste was correct—nothing more simply elegant or
effective could have been devised than the dress of white lace and
the cluster of green leaves on the fair hair. Hyacinth hardly
remembered how the time passed until he came. She heard his
footsteps—heard his voice; and her heart beat, her face flushed, her
whole soul seemed to go out to meet him.
"Hyacinth," he cried, clasping her hand, "this day seemed to me as
long as a century."
Lady Vaughan was sitting alone in her favorite arm-chair near the
open window. Adrian went up to her, leading Hyacinth by the hand.
"Dearest Lady Vaughan," he said, "can you guess what I have to tell
you?"
The fair old face beamed with smiles.
"Is it what I have expected, Adrian?" she asked. "Does my little
Hyacinth love you?"
The girl hid her blushing face; then she sunk slowly on her knees,
and the kind old hands were raised to bless her. They trembled on
her bowed head; Hyacinth seized them and covered them with
passionate kisses and tears. She had thought them stern hands
once, and had felt disposed to fly from their guidance; but now, as
she kissed them, she blessed and thanked them that their guidance
had brought her to this happy haven of rest.
"Heaven bless you, my child!" said the feeble voice. The lady bowed
her stately head and fair old face over the young girl.
"If you have ever thought me stern, Hyacinth," she said—"if you
have ever fancied the rules I laid down for you hard—remember it
was all for your own good. The world is full of snares—some of them
cruel ones—for the unwary. I saw that you were full of romance and
poetry; and I—I did my best, my dear. If you have thought me hard,
you must forgive me now—it was all for your own good. I know the
value of a pure mind, an innocent heart, and a spotless name; and
that is the dowry you bring your husband. No queen ever had one
more regal. The Vaughans are a proud old race. There has never
been even the faintest slur or shadow resting on any one who bore
the name; and the highest praise that I can give you is that you are
worthy to bear it."
Adrian did not know why the fair young head was bent in such lowly
humility, why such passionate sobs rose to the girl's lips as he raised
her and held her for a moment in his arms.
"Go to your room, Hyacinth, and remove all traces of tears," said
Lady Vaughan. "We must be glad, not sorry, this evening—it is your
betrothal night. And see, here are the papers, Sir Arthur; now you
will be quite happy, and forgive that unfortunate mail train."
 CHAPTER XVI.
Hyacinth was not long absent. She bathed her face in some cool,
fragrant water, smiling to herself the while at finding that Lady
Vaughan could be sentimental, thankful that the needful little scene
was over, and wondering shyly what this new and bewildering life
would be like, with Adrian by her side as her acknowledged lover. So
happy she was—ah, so happy! There was not one drawback—not
one cloud. She rearranged the pretty lace dress and the green
leaves, and then tripped down-stairs, as fair a vision of youth,
beauty, and happiness as ever gladdened the daylight. Just as she
reached the salon door she dropped her handkerchief, and stooping
to pick it up, she heard Lady Vaughan say,
"Do not tell Hyacinth—it will shock her so."
"She must hear of it," Sir Arthur returned; "better tell her yourself,
my dear."
Wondering what they could be discussing she opened the door and
saw a rather unusual tableau. Lady Vaughan was still in her
comfortable arm-chair; she held a newspaper in her hands, and Sir
Arthur and Adrian Darcy were bending over her, evidently deeply
interested. Hyacinth's entrance seemed to put an end to their
discussion. Adrian went up to her. Sir Arthur took the paper from his
lady's hand and began to read it for himself.
"You will not refuse to sing for me to-night, Cynthy?" said Adrian. "It
is, you know, as Lady Vaughan says, our betrothal night. Will you
give me that pleasure?"
Still wondering at what she had heard, Hyacinth complied with his
request. She played well, and she had a magnificent, well-trained
voice. She sung now some simple ballad, telling of love that was
never to die, of faith that was never to change, of happiness that
was to last forever and ever; and as she sung the divine light of love
played on her face and deep warm gratitude rose in her heart. He
thanked her—he kissed the white hands that had touched the keys
so deftly; and, then she heard Sir Arthur say again:
"He cannot be guilty; it is utterly impossible. I cannot say I liked the
young fellow; he seemed to me one of the careless, reckless kind.
But rely upon it he is too much of a gentleman to be capable of such
a brutal, barbarous deed."
"If he is innocent," observed Lady Vaughan, "he will be released. In
our days justice is too sure and too careful to destroy an innocent
man."
"Colonel Lennox will never get over it. Such a blow will kill a proud
man like him."
"I pity his mother most," said Lady Vaughan.
Every word of this conversation had been heard by Hyacinth and
Adrian. She was looking over some music, and he stood by her. A
strange, vague, numb sensation was gradually creeping over her.
She raised her eyes to her lover's face, and they asked, as plainly as
eyes could speak:
"What are they discussing?"
"A strange, sad story," he spoke in answer to the look, for she had
uttered no word. Lady Vaughan heard him.
"You will be grieved, Hyacinth," she said; "but that you will be sure
to hear of it sooner or later, I would not tell you one word. Do you
remember young Claude Lennox, who was visiting his uncle? He
came over to the Chase several times."
"I remember him," she replied, vaguely conscious of her own words
—for a terrible dread was over her. She could have cried aloud in her
anguish, "What is it—oh, what is it?"
"Appearances are against him, certainly," continued Lady Vaughan,
in her calm tone—oh, would she never finish?—"but I cannot think
him guilty."
"Guilty of what?" asked Hyacinth; and the sound of her own voice
frightened her as it left her rigid lips.
"Guilty of murder, my dear. It is a strange case. It appears that the
very day after we left the Chase, a dreadful murder was discovered
at Leybridge—a woman was found cruelly murdered under a hedge
in one of the fields near the station. In the poor woman's clinched
hand was a handkerchief, with the name 'Claude Lennox' upon it. On
searching further the police found his address, 'Claude Lennox, 200
Belgrave Square,' written in pencil on a small folded piece of paper.
The woman's name is supposed to be Anna Barratt. Circumstantial
evidence is very strong against Claude. One of the porters at
Leybridge Station swears that he saw him walk with a woman in the
direction of the fields; a laboring man swears that he saw him
returning alone to Oakton Park in the early dawn of the morning;
and the colonel's servants say he was absent from Oakton the whole
night."
"Still, that may only be circumstantial evidence," said Sir Arthur,
"though it is strongly against him. Why should he kill a woman who
was quite a stranger to him, as he solemnly swears she was?"
"Who, then, was with him at the station? You see, three people
swear to have noticed him leave Leybridge Station with a woman
whom none of them recognized."
They might perhaps have continued the discussion, but a slight
sound disturbed them, and, looking round, they saw that Hyacinth
had fallen to the floor. She had risen from her seat with a ghastly
face and burning eyes; her white lips had opened to say, "It is not
Claude who killed her, but her husband." She tried to utter the
words, but her voice was mute, and then with outstretched arms she
fell face foremost to the ground in a dead swoon. Adrian ran to her;
he raised her—he looked in wondering alarm at the colorless face
with its impress of dread and fear.
"It has frightened her almost to death," he said. "Did she know this
Claude Lennox, Lady Vaughan?"
"Yes, very slightly; we met him once or twice at Oakton Park, and he
called at the Chase. But I did not like him. I kept Hyacinth carefully
out of his way."
"What can we do for her?" he asked, in a trembling voice.
"Nothing," said Lady Vaughan. "Do not call the servants; they make
such a fuss about anything of this kind. Let the fresh air blow over
her."
They raised her up and laid her upon the couch. Sir Arthur threw
open the doors into the conservatory, and opened the windows in
that room also, to admit currents of fresh air. Lady Vaughan
withdrew with noiseless step to another room for a glass of cool
water. Adrian bent over the wholly unconscious form of his darling,
his face almost as white as her own in his anxiety. Suddenly he
remembered that he had acquired a slight knowledge of surgery in
his University life, and drawing a lancet from his pocket, he made a
slight incision in the beautiful snowy arm that lay so limp and lifeless
upon his hand.
One or two drops of blood from the cut stained his fingers.
Passionately he kissed the wound that he had made in his love, but
though a slight moan escaped her lips, Hyacinth did not yet move
nor awaken from her swoon. The old people returned, and Lady
Vaughan moistened the pallid brow and colorless lips. Again that
moan came, the girl moved, and presently the white lips parted with
a sigh, and the eyes opened with a look of terror in them which
Adrian never forgot.
"I am so frightened!" she said.
"My darling!" cried Adrian, "I am sorry you heard anything about it.
Why need you be frightened?"
"I am shocked," she said, and the ghastly fear deepened in her eyes.
"Of course you are—one so young, so fair, so gentle. The very word
'murder' is enough to terrify you."
Then she lay perfectly still—holding her lover's hand in hers, looking
at him with such wordless sorrow, such unutterable woe in her face.
Lady Vaughan brought her a glass of wine; she drank it, hardly
knowing what she did, and then the elder lady, bending over her,
kissed her face.
"You must not be so sensitive, my dear," she said. "How will you get
through life if you feel for everybody's trouble in this fashion? Of
course we are all deeply grieved for the young man, but he is
nothing to us."
Her words fell on dulled ears and an unconscious brain; the girl, still
holding her lover's hand, turned her face to the wall. She had not
been able to collect her thoughts—they were in a state of chaos. Of
all that crowded upon her, that seemed to burn into her brain, that
crushed and crowded like living figures around her, one stood out
clear, distinct, and terrible—Claude was innocent, and no one in the
world knew it but herself. Look where she would, these words
seemed to be before her, in great red letters—"No one but myself!"
She turned her white face suddenly to Adrian Darcy:
"If they find him guilty," she asked, "what will they do to him?"
"If he is guilty, he will pay for the crime with his life. But now,
Cynthy, you must not think so intently of this. Try to forget it for a
little time."
Forget it! Ah, if he knew? When should she forget again?
"He is innocent, and no one in the world knows it but myself, and no
one else can prove it."
Over and over again she said the words; it seemed to her they had
bewitched her. As soon as she had finished them, she began the
terrible phrase over again. Then the darkness seemed to fall over
her. When she raised her eyes again, Adrian was reading to her. She
tried hard to grasp the sense of what he was saying. She tried to
understand the words, but they were like a dull distant sound—not
one was plain or distinct to her.
"I must be going mad," she thought, starting up in wild affright; and
then Adrian's arms were encircling her. He could feel the terrible
beating of her heart; he could see the awful fear in her face.
"My dearest Hyacinth," he said gently, "you must not give way to
this nervous fear—you will do yourself harm."
He laid the fair young head on his breast; he soothed and caressed
her as he would have soothed a frightened child; and then Lady
Vaughan insisted that she was tired and must go to rest. They did
not notice that as she left the room she took with her the paper Sir
Arthur had been reading.
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