After Modernity?: Secularity, Globalization, and the Reenchantment of the World

1. Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World

h 3 Religion in a Globalized World: Paradigms and Problems Despite the confident prognostications of social scientists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding the “withering” of religion and the inevitable secularization of the world, at the turn of the millennium talk of globalization and the march of modernity is inextricably linked with the phenomenon of religion.1 In our début de siecle climate—in an “age of terror” and in the wake of September 11, 2001—much popular and journalistic attention has been given to the relationship and tension between globalization and religion. Much of this has focused on links between religion and violence, and especially the role of Islamic extremism or fundamentalism as its own kind of globalizing force, operating under the banner of antiglobalization.2 But the “globalization and religion” conversation does not concern only certain forms of Islamic extremism. As the work of Philip Jenkins and others has pointed out, Christianity itself has been globalized in new ways. No longer a “Western” religion, the center of gravity of global Christianity has shifted to the southern hemisphere.3 This book, however, is not primarily interested in the globalization of religion, whether it be the explosive growth of Christianity in the global South or the creeping expansion of Islamic extremism in the majority world as well as the thriving metropolises of the West.4 Rather, this collection takes up a third cluster of questions and Chapter 1 Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World James K. A. Smith 4 James K. A. Smith issues found at the nexus of globalization and religion. In particular, we are interested in the links between globalization, capitalism, and secularization—and the valuations and permutations of “religion” (by no means monolithic) that attend this constellation. In addition, and conversely, this volume explores different religious—particularly Christian—evaluations of and responses to globalization. It is important to note at the outset the slipperiness and polyvalence of a buzzword like “globalization.” Its lexical plasticity is notorious. In its most benign sense, globalization simply refers to an integration of global networks across national borders—economic networks, primarily, but also networks of labor, information, and so on.5 In more suspicious and critical formulations, globalization is simply the term of art for the oppression and exploitation that attend global capitalism.6 To avoid any kind of simplification, we might extrapolate from a maxim of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: just as Husserl points out that consciousness is always “consciousness of . . . ,” so too globalization is always globalization of . . . .7 The building of transnational networks of commerce, interaction and exchange is not an inherently negative phenomenon. Indeed, one could argue that the church’s vision of catholicity is precisely a vision of a globalized community. The church was transnational before markets were. At issue, then, is not the phenomena of globalization as such, but rather what is being globalized and the forms that this globalization takes. Here religious voices and questions take on a new significance when brought into conversation with globalization. In particular, two sets of questions are generated at the nexus of religion and globalization. The first set concerns how religion is positioned by the discourses and project of globalization. If globalization is tantamount to the globalization of capitalist and free-market organizations of commerce and exchange, and if this is the outworking of a logic of modernity, and modernity is driven by the logic of Enlightenment , then the creeping expansion of globalization should be tantamount to a globalization of the Enlightenment—and thus of the Enlightenment’s account of religion’s withering and shriveling. The distinctly modern pedigree of capitalism, and thus its affiliation with the Enlightenment, entails an expectation regarding the place and value of religion in a globalized world. In this way, the discourse of globalization is often attended by expectations regarding global secularization, yielding what has come to be known as the Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World 5 “secularization thesis.”8 According to this sociological predictive thesis, the gradual but steady growth of modern Enlightenment will roll back the superstition and mythology associated with religion. Agents who participate in the market that yields iPods and jet aircraft couldn’t possibly cling to the magical world of religious belief. Progress in modernity would be the progress of rationalization, Weber suggested, which would mean a radical “dis-enchantment of the world” and thus a secularization of...