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Preface
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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Preface Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan The age of globalization, as we seem destined to regard it, confronts us with more ironies than sources of clarity. The apparent triumph of Enlightenment secularization, manifest in the global spread of political and economic structures that pretended to relegate the sacred to a strictly circumscribed private sphere, seems to have foundered on an unexpected realization of its own parochialism and a belated acknowledgment of the continuing presence and force of ‘‘public religions’’ (the term is José Casanova’s). As Nobel laureate for economics Joseph Stiglitz notes, ‘‘A particular view of the role of government and markets has come to prevail—a view which is not universally accepted within the developed countries, but which is being forced upon the developing countries and the economies in transition.’’1 Even in the Western world, the prevailing model for the organization of political and economic life, representative or parliamentary democracy, and the capitalist enterprise have come under increasing pressure from a variety of social and cultural movements whose religious origins and overtones are more and more difficult to ignore. Both the model of limited governance in political liberalism, with its corollary conception of civil society (implying religious freedom and tolerance), and the unstoppable engine of globalization find their match in spreading expressions of discontentment and resistance, which are often articulated in theologico-political terms. But does this make them necessarily ‘‘religious’’? Or were the pillars of sovereign power not from the outset theologico-political, if not mythico-religious, at core, just as the engines that continue to drive the forces and interests of economic exchange, their real and virtual monetary flows, have, as Max Weber was the first to realize, affinities with mental dispositions fostered by certain conceptions of faith and belief? Should we (still or again) study current tendencies in society and politics with reference to the i x H E N T D E V R I E S A N D L AW R E N C E E . S UL L I VA N tradition called ‘‘the religious’’? Or is that tradition merely an epiphenomenon of larger empirical processes, which need no reference to transcendent-transcendental motifs and motivations in order responsibly to be explained and engaged? The rigid boundaries, once imagined to be universal, with which the Enlightenment sought to separate the public sphere of political processes from private commitments to the values inculcated by religious and spiritual traditions have come to be a focus of mounting opposition. In the most poignant cases, expressions of ‘‘religion’’ inform or orient resistance by the supposed beneficiaries of globalization to pressures from without to modernize, rationalize, democratize, liberalize, individualize, and (hence?) secularize, integrate culturally and politically, and ultimately assimilate. A renewed and ever more desperate appeal to the separation of church and state and the neutrality of the public domain, with its institutionalized agnosticism, seems unlikely to be a successful counter to such resistance. After all, the resistance is often benign enough, de facto enrichment of our understanding and experience of the common good, despite the widely, indeed excessively , mediatized cases in which it becomes dangerous and a threat to the security of all. Against this, to raise the chant of secular humanism, resolute atheism, the religion of secularism, or the sacredness of laı̈cité seems no more than whistling in the dark, vainly hoping that the specter of ‘‘religion,’’ roaming like a zombie, dead-alive, through the political landscapes of the modern world, will go away (again). A different form of political , legal, cultural, and even psychological accommodation may need to be envisioned. The modern critique of religious conviction—focused on theological truth- and normative claims by churches, councils, or charismatic leaders, which sought to speak about the ordering of society with unanswerable authority and in universal terms—now appears utterly misplaced. It seems to have missed the point or, perhaps, just to have done too little too late. Religious authority and power seem, in what has, rightly or wrongly, been called the ‘‘information age’’ or ‘‘network society’’ (Manuel Castells) to be manifest (revealed ?) and effective in increasingly diffuse and globally mediatized and marketed, some would say commodified, ways, for good and for ill. The legal barriers of separation, once the salutary and defining characteristic of modern democracies, seem to be contested both de jure and de facto in hitherto unimaginable and, indeed, undesirable ways. Even policymakers in the West have come, if only recently, to understand...