Diaspora 12:2 2003

Modernity in Question? Culture and

Religion in an Age of Global Modernity^

Arif Dirlik
University of Oregon, Eugene

I would like to present an analytical framework that seeks to

make sense of two seemingly contradictory developments over the
last two decades: economic and political globalization that is taken
generally to point to unprecedented global integration, and the
resurgence of religions or, more broadly, traditionalisms, that create
new political and cultural fractures, or reopen old ones. Most dis-
cussions of global developments privilege one or the other of these
phenomena. We are all familiar with the by now prolific literature
on globalization offering visions (or threats) of impending global
integration and homogenization, in which the divisiveness intro-
duced by religious revivals appears merely as a legacy of the past,
one that is likely to be bridged by an irresistible globalization that
reshapes the world. On the other side are analyses in which reli-
gious revivals are everything, not as remnants of the past but as
products of modernity that point to multiple modernities or "clashes
of civilizations" as the human fate for the foreseeable future.
Emphasis on one or the other precludes recognition that integration
and fragmentationor homogenization and heterogenizationmay
be contradictory aspects of the same processes that are restructur-
ing the globe.
I have descrihed this emerging global condition as "global mod-
ernity." As I shall explain below at greater length, I understand by
this term not just global political and cultural relationships but also
social relationships that cut across national and civilizational
divides. The question of religion or religious fundamentalism is not
a 'Third World" or Islamic question. It is, more importantly, a ques-
tion of capitalist modernity. The resurgence of religion in recent
decades is not just a phenomenon in developing societies whose cul-
tural legacies are bound to the past, if mostly in appearance, hut a
product of capitalist modernity that is also very much alive in the
society that claims to be the most advanced in the worldor, at any
rate, the most powerfulwhere it is entangled in the most unabashed
neoliberal faith in the primacy of the market and individual enter-
prise. The coUectivist forms it takes in other social contextsnot
just in Islamic but also in so-called Confucian societiesalso points

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to the entanglement of religion in clashes over modernity, not only

in a civilizational but also in a social sense. In this latter manifesta-
tion, religionincluding Christianity and Islamin some cases has
replaced socialism (in the overthrow of which it played an instru-
mental part) as an inspiration for alternatives to liberalism, both
in political criticism and in questions of social policy and welfare.
I am not interested here in the merits of religion per se, nor in
the relative merits of different religions. My own position is a
modernist one, that religion is, and should be, a private matter.
Nevertheless, simple intellectual and public responsibility requires
that we confront the ways in which religion has moved to the center
of public political discourses globally, and do so with critical
openness, recognizing the potential for good as well as for harm of
any religion or religious orientation.
Two issues need to be considered closely in the elaboration of the
idea of global modernity and the condition it seeks to comprehend.
First is the issue of the resurgence of religion. There is little
disagreement, it seems, that religion has acquired renewed signi-
ficance and visibility in contemporary life and politics globally in
ways that few would have predicted only three decades ago, when
the Nietzschean "death of God" was widely trumpeted in not just
the left but the liberal press. It is not clear, however, whether this
resurgence is a product of social, political, and cultural changes that
have endowed religion with a new significance, or whether it is a
contemporary "failure of nerve" of reason and modernity that forces
upon our consciousness a reality that has been there all along, but
went unnoticed so long as modern political and cultural secularism
seemed to be triumphant beyond dispute. If the former is the case,
moreover, there is still the question of whether the forces that have
brought religion to the forefront of culture and politics have stajdng
power beyond the present, or whether they are simply transient
peculiarities of another period of radical transformation. In either
case, serious inquiry is required into both the social and cultural
production of religion and the consequences of the return of religion
to public visibility for contemporary life and its immediate, if not
also long-term, future. Special attention is necessary to the rela-
tionship between the resurgence of religious politics and the waning
of hope in socialist or socialist-inspired revolutions, as well as to
possible shifts from an earlier uneven but balanced relationship
between capitalist, modernist rationality and religionwhich kept
religion as a real but subordinate force, more determined than
determiningto a more prominent part for religion in shaping the
logic of modernity.
The second issue is derivative of this first one. This is the issue
of the relationship between religion and culture. Religious practices
have concrete origins and cultural locations, but they are not there-
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fore reducible to culture, or bound by it, especially at times such as

the present, when procedures and consciousness of globalization
facilitate global flows and entanglements of the most arcane cul-
tural characteristics. On the other hand, while religion has been
central to cultural formations globally, it would not do to reduce
culture to religion either, especially as the proliferation of sources
going into the making of culture has been a fundamental feature of
modernity, so that any consideration of the significance of religion,
and its historical outcomes, needs to be placed within a broader
cultural context which, once again, is increasingly global in its
sources and outcomes. The dialectics of culture and religion may be
crucial to assessing both the nature of contemporary religiosities
and their futures.

Global Modernity
Any serious consideration of these issues brings us face to face
with the problematic of modernity. It has been a conceit of modern-
ity that religion must disappear in direct proportion to the progress
of a modern culture identified with the Enlightenment goals of
science and rationality, and expressed in social, cultural, and
political life in secularism. The conceit is a conceit also of social
class. It has made for a fundamental blindness to the persistence
of religion in everyday life but, even more importantly, to the ways
in which modernity itself might contribute to the persistence of reli-
gious ways of thinking in its ceaseless production of cultural inco-
herence and its evacuation of the realm of the spiritual. Rendering
science and reason into secular faiths provides at best a partial
remedy to the moral and spiritual impoverishment of society by
capitalist modernity, limited in appeal to restricted (and privileged)
social groups. The awareness of religion at present is in many ways
a product of the questioning, if not the decline, of this faith in
reason and modernity. But it is also social in origins, a response to
the emergence to visibility of nations and social groups that have
been marginalized in modern politics and culture, partly because of
their efforts to hold on to religion in everyday life. This is especially
the case with societies outside of Euro/America, although it is by no
means restricted to those societies. On the other hand, the very
empowerment of these nations and groups points not to the failures
but to the successand universalizationof modernity, creating the
conditions of global modernity.
The resurgence of religion, in other words, is itself conditioned
and contained by modernity. Its consequences are not so much the
negation as the redefinition of modernity, for which the term "post-
modern" is a convenient if vague (and perhaps inadequate) label.
Indeed, it is arguable that those key words of cultural studies over
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the last two decades, "postmodern" and "postcolonial," are responses

from different but resonant cultural locations to the condition of
global modernity. "Postmodern" expresses a First World perspective
on modernity that, at least among the more enlightened and glo-
bally oriented, has been resigned for some time now to a recognition
of modernity as a global condition that encompasses what used to
be the pre-modern and non-modern as well. In its very complexity
and multidimensionality, this perspective calls into question the
claims to universality (and to teleological priority) of an earlier,
Eurocentrically conceived, modernityas well as its orderings of
time and space. In turn, "postcolonialism" gives voice to those
among the formerly colonized who have overcome the disadvantages
imposed by colonialism in the past and now render modernity into
an unfinished (if not abortive) process of political and cultural
hybridization between Europe and its Others, asserting not just a
colonial presence in modernity but participation in its making. In
questioning the spatial and temporal boundaries of modernity, the
two perspectives both point in the direction of globalization, which,
indeed, shows every sign of having overtaken them in the course of
the 1990s in the language of social and cultural analysis.
In dealing with the present, I prefer the term "global modernity"
for two reasons. Both arise from my dissatisfaction with the concept
of globalization, on the one hand, and with claims to alternative
modernities, on the other. I have argued on a number of occasions
that the present is both a period of global integration through a
variety of social, economic, political, and cultural networks and
organizations, and also a period of unprecedented social, political,
and cultural fragmentation, as well as demographic marginalization
of huge populations. Spatial fi-agmentation also implies temporal
uncertainty, which is quite evident in the widespread loss of faith
in the future. The idea of globalization seems to me to be quite
inappropriate in that the teleology built into the term itself, which
suggests spatial homogenization and temporal unification, simply
does not accord with the evidence before us and marks the term as
highly ideologicalor, at best, discursivesimilarly to its social
science predecessor, "modernization."
There are, of course, other problems associated with the term.
Whether globalization is simply a cover for US imperialism needs
to be taken quite seriously, especially at a time when the United
States shows every sign of reverting to an earlier period of imperial-
ism and colonialism as it pursues control both of other states and
of natural resources globally. Of course, we must be careful not to
confuse the issue by equating the current form of US imperialism
with outright plunder. The intention to plunder is no doubt there,
as is evident in the activities of well-connected corporations such as
Enron and Halliburton. Still, it needs to be articulated in practice

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through a structured imperialism characteristic of the global domi-

nation of transnational corporations that are the driving force
behind globalization. If globalization has a reality, it is due not just
to the acquiescence but to the active participation in it of states
globally. To what we may attribute this participation is subject to
debate: the benefits garnered by political elitesfi"omcooperation
with transnational capitalism are clearly one element accounting
for this active acquiescence. Nor can we overlook the fact that glo-
balization has brought real benefits to limited sectors of populations
who were excluded from the top-down developmental policies of an
earlier day. These forces contribute significantly to consolidation of
the hegemony of transnational corporations even when there is
strong evidence that majority populations in globalizing states may
be falling victim to the new global economy. The advantages that
participation in a global economy brings to the obliging nation-
states trumps the immiseration of much of the population. Never-
theless, globalization generates new contradictions for populations
(including elites) who are beneficiaries of global transactions but
are also dislocated by them culturally and physically.
Globalization is also problematic because it is not clear whether
it is entirely novel as a process. In the trivial sense of diffusions of
human populations and commodities, it is as old as the history of
humankind. In the more restricted sense of global transformations
by economic, political, and cultural forces of some coherence and
permanence, it is as old as the history of capitalism. Indeed, while
there may be questions concerning the relationship of globalization
to its colonial past, there are also those who would now reinterpret
the colonial past as a step toward globalizationwhich in some
ways it no doubt was: globalization as colonialism finds a coun-
terpart in colonialism as globalization. I would like to note in pass-
ing here that regardless of which we choose to underline, religion
has been a crucial component of the global spread of capitalist
modernity.
Against the globalization idea, and entangled with it, are argu-
ments for alternative modernities, which gained prominence simul-
taneously with the discourse of globalization in the 1990s but go
back to the 1980s, if not earlier. If I may simplify a bit, the
alternative modernities idea is a rephrasing of the more radical
"third way" ideologies of revolutionary national liberation move-
ments, now confined within the limits of a global capitalism to
which there is no outside. There is a radical difference between the
"Chinese Way" of development pursued under Mao Zedong and
Jiang Zemin, though the same term, "Zhongguo daolu," may be
deployed to describe these policies (see, e.g.,Li). The difference is
important, because the rephrasing of alternative ways of develop-
ment has shifted attentionfi-omsocial/political to cultural issues.
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foregrounding culture as a central element in conflicts over mod-

ernity. This also gives some commonality to contemporary argu-
ments for "alternative development" and modernization discourse
of an earlier day, as culture has been important in both cases in
explaining developmentthe difference being that cultures that
were deemed to be obstacles to development in an earlier period
have now been reinterpreted to be forces of development. But the
logic is the same. What have been lost in the process are the social
and pohtical explanations of development and non-development that
informed radical critiques of the 1960s and 1970s, which have been
swept aside in the preoccupation with culture. The alternative mod-
ernity discourse may point to a socialist past, as in the People's
Republic of China, but increasingly it is culture that is deployed in
defense of its possibilities.
Globalization and alternative modernity discourses are very
much contemporaries, the one stressing the integrative forces of the
contemporary world, the other underlining difference and different
historical trajectories. In this particular sense, there is also much
in common between the discourses of alternative development and
postcolonialism, as there is also between either of these discourses
and the "clash of civilizations" thesis made popular by the influen-
tial political scientist Samuel Huntington in an article of that title
published just over ten years ago. Huntington, we should remem-
ber, was the author not just of this particular thesis but of the "new
authoritarianism" approach to development, popular in the PRO in
the late 1980s, that was inspired by the examples of Taiwan and
Singaporein other words, he has always had a top-down approach
to issues of politics and development, which is not to be ignored but
also needs to be recognized for its blindness to the fractures in
societies beneath levels of states and abstract civilizations; which,
in actuality, is where religion has experienced the greatest appeal
in its recent resurgence, presenting problems that a crude notion of
civilizational conflict ignores totally. So, too, it must be said, do
most notions of postcoloniality, which, despite their genuflection
towards notions of heterogeneity and hybridity, in the end are
focused not on relations within societies but on relations between
national and civilizational units of culture.
What this means, as S.N. Eisenstadt has remarked in a recent
personal communication, is that we no longer have a conflict be-
tween modernity and tradition, which was the point of departure
for modernization discourse, but conflict over competing claims to
modernity. We are all modern now, whether we like it or not, and
are in search of some identity or other in modernityeven if that
search takes us into the deep past. We also live in the same
modernity, I would like to add, even if we make different claims
upon it. It did not occur to anyone to be modern before modernity
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and development, spreading out of Europe, turned into "global

faiths." This, I think, is what makes modernity singular, as Fredric
Jameson suggests in the title of his recent book, A Singular
Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Any alternatives
created are contingent on that singularity to begin with, which is
what justifies speaking of modernity. It is only after there is a
modernity that the possibility emerges of different claims of
modernity, as any historian of modernity ought to be able to
demonstrate.
And yet, somehow, the issue is pursued as if it were merely a
matter of culture and ideology. The effort to overcome the Eurocen-
trism of modernization discourse has been very important, but it
has tended on the whole to bring in Eurocentrism by the back
doorwhich is not surprising, since most recent criticism informed
by postmodernism and postcolonialism has tended to stress signs
over everyday life, and has preferred to ignore the most obvious
evidence of how people began to think of themselves as modern and
non-modern (or colonial and anti- or non-colonial) to begin with.
Some Chinese around the turn of the twentieth century believed
Chinese would regress back to primitive forms of life unless China
changed in the direction indicated by Euro/American modernity.
Third World identities and the national liberation struggles they
informed derived their plausibility from perceptions of visible
divides between colonizers and colonized. While hybridized notions
of modernity were not missing, they were long overshadowed by a
modernity centered on Euro/America. It is rather remarkable that
scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who are anxious to "provin-
cialize Europe," should ignore the fact that the hybridization so
central to the refutation of colonial dominance is always between a
European and an Indian, an African, a Chinese, or whomever, and
not between a Chinese and an Indianor other non-European eth-
nic, national, or social pairings.
The demotion of Eurocentrism as a historical force, and with it
of colonialism, substitutes a contemporary consciousness for an
earlier one and facilitates the rendering of colonialism into one
more stage in the long march of globalization. This is evident, for
example, in a recent collection edited by A.G. Hopkins, Globaliza-
tion in World History, where colonialism appears as just another
stage in globalization, and which even does away with significant
peculiarities in a European colonialism that was dynamized by
capitalism against, say, the imperial conquests of world-empires
such as the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Qing. In such a perspec-
tive, all empires appear as instantiations of a worldwide march to
globality. While there is much to be gained from the comparative
study of empires and colonialisms, and the relationship between
modernity and empire building, it is important not to overlook the
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very particular relationship between capitalism and Euro/American

colonialism or neocolonialism. This perspective also erases, for much
the same reason, the ways in which colonialism may be very much
alive in the forces of globalization. While globalization is a negation
of colonialism in opening global economic and political power to the
formerly colonized, it also represents the fulfillment of a colonial
modernity in its realization of the ideological hegemony of capitalist
modernity. It is important at the present conjuncture to recognize
the global in the colonial, the imperial, and even the national. It is
equally necessary for a critical perspective to remain cognizant of
the colonial and imperial in the global.
Global modernity as concept seeks to overcome the teleology of
globalization, while also countering the denial of history in
rewritings of modernity that render modernity into a diffuse global
accomplishment without a center. Such rewriting not only erases
the human costs exacted by capitalist development hut also dis-
guises the manner in which political and economic configurations
created by modern colonialism live on under the regime of globality.
As I understand and deploy it here, global modernity reasserts, on
the one hand, the singularity of modernity. Modernity was no doubt
not just a European thing but the product of multifaceted historical
interactions that involved many societies. But it is equally undeni-
able that these interactions assumed a certain form and direction
in Europe, that then spread globally through the agencies of
imperialism and colonialism (capitalism-in-the-making). It produced
not just the Enlightenment, empowered in its claims to universal-
ism by capitalism and imperialism, but also, as Sankar Muthu
argues, opposition to capitalism and colonialism that was equally
integral to Enlightenment thinking, only to fall by the wayside in
the course of the nineteenth century. It was in this double guise
that the rest of the world would encounter modernity, which was
widely associated, if not equated, with Europe. Be that as it may,
for two centuries, modernity was indeed centered in and emanated
out of Europe (and subsequently the United States). This was the
modernity that societies worldwide encountered as a challenge and
sought to emulate to avoid extinction, as they saw it. This was a
phase of modernity that historically was indeed a period of Euro-
centric modernity; when even opposition to colonialism and impe-
rialism was informed by faith in the universalisms of modernity
that included not just Marxism, anarchism, and socialism in gen-
eral but also the nation-state as a benign instrument of reason and
progress.
Ironically, it was the global spread of this modernity that was to
render untenable its very Eurocentric presuppositions. Moderniza-
tion has led not to the disappearance but to the resurgence of cul-
tural traditions. The recognition of this could be avoided for a while
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in a teleological modernization discourse that placed societies in a

hierarchical order culturally and divided the world spatially (poli-
tically) into Three Worlds, also assigning different temporalities to
the different spaces. With the disappearance of socialism (and,
hence, of the Three Worlds), there is only one world of modernity
capitalist modernitywhere everyone is in the same temporality,
struggling over the future of modernity. Religion has emerged as a
crucial mobilizing force in these struggles.
Why this might be the case (and why the notion of alternative
modernity is unconvincing) may be found in the relationship of
global modernity to its Eurocentric past. Global modernity is a
product of that past but is also its negation. Global modernity is, in
a fundamental sense, the victory of a modernity that initially found
its fullest formulation in Europe. To the extent that it represents
the internalization on a global scale of the premises of that mod-
ernity, global modernity is the fulfillment by other means of the
Euro/American colonization of the world. Its driving force is like-
wise the force that dynamized modernity from its origins, capital-
ism, that is in the process of transnationalization but nevertheless
reproduces the structures of modernity globally. The transnationali-
zation of capital has no doubt changed relations of power globally
by bringing to the centers of power some who were initially ex-
cluded from them, but the transformation should not be exagge-
rated. The older powers are still very much at the center of things,
even if it is arguable that hegemony, rather than coercion, has come
to define their relationship to the world.
Under the circumstances, a serious pursuit of alternative mod-
ernity would mean getting out of this worldby establishing spaces
outside of global capitalbut that is obviously not something that
contemporary advocates of alternatives have in mind. Socialism
itself had an ambivalent relationship to capitalist modernity, reject-
ing its mode of development without necessarily rejecting its devel-
opmentalist premises. This ambivalence persists in the PRO, which
still claims socialism in continued reference to a "Chinese way"
{Zhongguo daolu), although that term is vague, and even less con-
vincing than before, when the spaces of socialism are invaded daily
by the forces of transnational capital, with the active complicity of
the so-called socialist leadership.
Nevertheless, global modernity is also the negation of an earlier
Eurocentric modernity, if only because the very transnationalization
of capital creates conditions for the reassertion of claims to particu-
lar identities that increasingly challenge the centering of the world
around the original homelands of capitalist modernity, and the ren-
dering of that center into a teleological end of history. At the very
least, global modernity refers to a condition of struggles over the
present, the future, and the past of modernityin that orderthat
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distinguishes it from an earlier resignation to a Euro/American-

centered world. Most importantly for the issues at hand in this dis-
cussion, as secular life is invaded ever more thoroughly by the
material and cultural practices of capitalist modernity, the struggle
is shifted to the realms of spirit, values, and corresponding epistemo-
logies, which are endowed with the transcendental power to with-
stand the ravages of history in guaranteeing ethnic, national, or
civilizational identity in the midst of the forces of homogenization.

Perspectives on Religion in Global Modernity

It is easy to assert that herein lies the straightforward answer
to the resurgence of religion. But this, I suggest, is the point of
departure for the analysis, not its end. It tells us little about the
articulation of a resurgent religion to its context in material and
cultural structures, or about its relationship to social, national, and
civilizational struggles for identity against the forces of globaliza-
tion. Religion is not merely a function of global modernity, but one
of its constituents. It is entangled not just in civilizational clashes
but also in struggles against colonialism, the search for national
identity and cultural coherence, and demands for social justice and
equality that cut across national and civilizational boundaries.
These entanglements also raise questions about what we might
have in mind in the first place when we speak of the resurgence of
religion: how religion expresses concerns that are not religious to
begin with, how the expression of these concerns in the language of
religion nevertheless reshapes them, and how religion itself is
transformed by its broader political and cultural context.
If I may now return to the questions I posed in the introduction
to this discussion, the resurgence of religionand of traditional-
ismsis very much a problem in perception, if not just in percep-
tion. Eurocentric modernity had arranged individual societies and
the world in cultural hierarchies, predicating success in modernity
on the eradication of cultures deemed backward both globally and
in individual societies and described cogently as "traditions" or
"traditionalisms." The retreat fi-om this binarism of the modern and
the traditional has made possible the recognition of the temporal co-
presence of all those who inhabit the world, of modernity in tradi-
tions and traditions in modernity, and of the "backward" as very
much a part or function of the modern. Traditions that once seemed
doomed to extinction, restricted in their appeal to die-hard conser-
vatives, have acquired new lives in the definition of cultural iden-
tities of various sorts, perhaps most fervently in those societies that
had rejected them the most forcefullysocialist societies. They
demand recognition as equals in modernity, and they make claims
on the present and the future for the values they represent and the
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epistemologies that inform them. The reaffirmation of religion is

part of a general trend in the transvaluation of traditions as
modernity goes global. The scholar of Islam Akbar Ahmed sees in
the turn from emulation of "the West" to the revalidation of Islam
as a guide to modernity the transition in Islamic societies from the
modern to the postmodern (32). This also suggests that the religion,
tradition, or epistemology that is on the resurgence, even in cases
of so-called fundamentalism, is one that has been wrought already
in the crucible of modernity.
Much of this resurgence is not a resurgence at all but simply the
emergence to visibility of beliefs and practices that have been there
all along, but remained invisible so long as they were doomed by
theory and ideology to extinction. The prominence religion has
acquired in politics over the last decade or so is not quite novel. If
I may illustrate by an anecdote, in 1963, while I was still a student
in Robert College (now Bosphorus University) in Istanbul, I had the
privilege of organizing a year-long series of lectures on Kemal
Atatiirk, to bring critical perspectives on a leader allegiance to
whose principles had been part of our daily ideological indoctrina-
tion from elementary school onwards. To guarantee critical perspec-
tives, we invited for the lectures distinguished individuals repre-
senting a variety of social and ideological perspectives. The lectures
proved to be quite controversial, as one might have expected, and
were attacked on a number of occasions by people who objected to
them for one reason or another. Recently, I was thumbing through
the volume that issued from the series and, reading the Preface,
was only mildly surprised at something I had written at the time
(in 1964):

Until recently, the only people who have been active in politics
are the reactionaries who, throwing their bags on their backs,
have traveled from village to village, spreading their messages
of deception. So-called progressives have been satisfied with
words. This situation is about to change. (Dirlik viii; my
translation)

It does not matter in hindsight that I was wrong, that, after a

brief respite for the left, the reactionaries did indeed win, and
managed against all odds (including a jealously secular Kemalist
militarist regime) to capture Turkish politics for Islam. The point
here is that following the popularly elected rule of the so-called
Democratic Party in the 1950s, religion was on its way to making
a comeback in politics after the decline it suffered following
Kemalist reforms after the founding of the Republic in 1923. The
1960 military coup d'etat halted the resurgence of religion but did
not stop it. This, in a way, is symptomatic of political developments
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worldwide, not just in the Third World but globally, although the
timing might differ according to local circumstances. A recent study
of religion in US electoral politics has shown convincingly that it
was during this same period that religion became visible in US
politics. Islam, of course, has been an issue in South and Southwest
Asian politics throughout this period. Islam, Hinduism, and Bud-
dbism have been visible in political movements in South and South-
east Asia, preceding the end of colonialism. If we expand our under-
standing of religion to include seemingly secular faiths such as
Confucianism, we could state also that it was during these same
years, in opposition to the Communist victory on the Chinese main-
lEuid, that Confucianism as a Chinese faith found a home in Taiwan
and Hong Kong. Nor is it just among the population at large that
religion has exerted the greatest influence. A volume published in
1950 by the Partisan Review in the United States, Religion and the
Intellectuals, documented the proclivity of many distinguished
intellectuals to mourn the loss of religious values that might have
helped in overcoming the alienation generated by modernity. It
opens with these lines:

One of the most significant tendencies of our time, especially

in this decade, has been the new turn toward religion among
intellectuals, and the growing disfavor with which secular
attitudes and perspectives are now regarded in not a few
circles that lay claim to the leadership of culture. (5)

I offer these scattered, and possibly incongruous, bits of evidence

only to suggest that religion has been a matter of public concern
throughout modernity, and visible at all times since World War II.
Garry Wills, pointing to the importance of religion in politics
throughout US history, ascribes its invisibility in history-writing to
secularist historians' tendency to "misplac[e] such a large number
of people" (15). In a discussion of fundamentalism in the 1990s,
WiUiam McNeill suggests that fundamentalist movements may be
"contemporary exemplars of a tradition of religious protest ... that
descends unbroken from [the] founding figures" (559). McNeill
emphasizes above all the continued breakdown of peasant society
and the need it creates for religious certainty. The breakdown of
rural society, the migration of peasants into urban areas not just
nationally but transnationally, and the role the media play in
overcoming the urban-rural gap are elementsmostly continuous
with modernitythat go a long way in explaining the religious
surge of the last two decades. We might add that peasants and
rural areas (nationally and globally), viewed under the regime of
modernity as locations of cultural backwardness that would dis-
appear with modernization, are being transformed into sub-urban
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populations that challenge the teleology of modernity, making their

own claims on the present and the future.
But why now? It is possible to recognize the strong presence of
religion in modernity, and still argue that there is something new
in the status religion has regained as a terrain for political dis-
cussion and the respectability it has achieved since the 1980s, in
tandem with the decline of socialism. Secularism has been a modern
faith and a goal of modern politics. But that is far from saying that
it has been a reality of modernity. As a number of influential
sociological studies have demonstrated, our judgments on the place
of religion in modern public life have been distorted by a confusion
of the decline in the power of the Christian church in Europe with
a decline in the search for transcendence in everyday life, a con-
fusion of secularism as functional differentiation with secularism as
a decline of faith, and, especially outside Europe, a hegemonic
privileging of so-called modernizing regimes at the cost of ignoring
the populations over which they ruled. In other words, a moderniza-
tionist bias has served to render living religious traditions into
marginal remnants from the past. Yet these traditions were indeed
quite broad-based. We may all be complicit with this kind of pre-
judice, neglect, or oversight, because the evidence has been before
us all along. This evidence has consisted not just of reactionary
manifestations of the persistence of religion (which is what gets
noticed usually) hut of the part religion has played in popular pro-
test movements for social justiceevident in movements from the
origins of industrialization in England, documented by E.P. Thomp-
son, Eric Hohsbawm, Christopher Hill, and others in England, to
studies of popular movements in the modem history of China.
It would be a mistake, however, to ignore the novel forces that
have played a crucial part in the emergence to visibility of previous-
ly disdained traditions. I don't think we could overemphasize the
important part the fall of socialism has played in the resurgence of
religion in politics, which has two dimensionsbefore and after. By
"before," I am referring to religious mobilization to overthrow Com-
munism, which was to play a crucial part not just in the Third
World, so-called, hut in the First as well, especially in the United
States, where opposition to Communism was crucial to religious
mobilization and to the overthrow of Communism as conceived by
the Ronald Reagan presidency. It is this same religious mobilization
that has come forward following the fall of Communism, both in for-
merly Communist regimes, where it is quite welcome, and among
former victims of socialist imperialism, whose anti-socialist
grievances, encouraged earlier, have now become a major problem
for their former patrons-^ hlowback," in CIA jargon.
These developments need to he viewed within the structural
context of global modernity, when the constituencies of modernity
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have proliferated and assumed greater complexity in composition.

These constituencies are no longer restricted to the "West" and the
"Westernized elites" of the Third World, or to a few urban centers,
especially in the Third World. The urban-rural distinction, cor-
responding to modern-traditional or advanced-backward distinc-
tions, has become largely meaningless within individual societies,
even as developing urban centers are engaged in networking as
global cities. The hierarchies of global modernity are of a different
kind. There is little question about the transnationalization of the
economy and, with it, of politics and culture. There is a transnation-
al elite in formation that is responsible for the functioning of trans-
nationality. But labor, too, is increasingly transnationalized, not
just in movements of laborers but also in the transnationalization
of commodities, including labor power. Modernity, in the forms of
both production and consumption (including the consumption of cul-
ture), finds its way into every niche in every corner of the world.
Large numbers of people are marginalized globally. At the same
time, entrepreneurs and lahorers from previously marginalized
areas become players in the glohal economy.
These groups bring with them religious beliefs and practices that
had never disappeared, or that acquire new significance under new
circumstances. There are ohviously practitioners of religion who
now practice their religion more openly than was possihle before.
Such is the case, for instance, in Turkey, where religion has come
out into public and political life against the strong secularist faith
of the Kemalist military. But religion has also come to play an
important part in the definition of ethnic and national cultural
identity, as in the case, for instance, of the Hindu revival in India,
including in the lives of diasporic Indians. The entanglement of
religion in questions of identity shows eloquently that religion is not
just about religion hut expresses a broad range of quite contradic-
tory concerns.
The number and range of groups among which religion finds
favorfrom middle-class Americans in Southern California to
Indian businessmen to educated Turks and Arabs to Communist
Party followers of Falun Dafaindicate that these revivals are also
expressions of the eruption of populations formerly viewed as
backward rurals into visihility in the economy and politics by forces
of globalization. I have argued, for the case of the so-called
Confucian revival starting in the 1980s, that it was dynamized hy,
and in turn sought to give form to, the economic success of East
Asian societies in search of a particular identity in the midst of the
successful globalization of their economiessomething that would
also become audible in the 1990s in the PRC. The question may be
just not a matter of national success, but also the appearance of
successful classes within the nation with different attitudes toward
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religion or tradition than before. The Islamic movements and par-

ties that have come to dominate Turkish politics do not represent
a mere continuation of the past, or simply a replay of an earlier
Islamic politics. The surge in Islam has heen empowered hy social
movements generated hy the economic and political developments
of the 1980s, which have restructured Turkish society, especially in
bringing to the fore its "Anatolian" dimension. The religious elite
that gives ideological voice to these movements is not merely heir
to the ulema of an earlier day hut a highly modern elite that
articulates Islam to contemporary concerns and ideologies. A recent
study notes that,

as a result of 1980s economic policies, two distinct bour-

geoisies, often in conflict, have emerged in Turkey. Not only do
they compete over market share but, more important, they
compete over ideological and cultural orientation of the
country. The new Anatolian bourgeoisie is less dependent on
the state and more embedded in Turko-Islamic culture and
demands a smaller government, larger political space, and
freedom for civil society. Therefore, the conflict in Turkey is
not only between the haves and have-nots, but also between
these two bourgeoisies. (Yavuz 88)

The economic policies that produced these changes represented

a shift from import-substitution to export-oriented development,
which has been crucial in the realization of globalization. That may
be the reason the Anatolian bourgeoisie was named the "Anatolian
tigers," probably after the East Asian tigers that spearheaded
globalization. Like the latter, the Anatolian tigers were divided by
power and status, depending on their place in the emerging global
economy. Intellectual promotion of Islam, likewise, has ranged from
affirmations of traditional fundamentals to postmodern notions of
Islamic pluralism. The dynamizing of religion by the cultural habits
of newly emergent classes is visible in the case of the United States
as well. A recent study by Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The
Origins of the New American Right, makes the intriguing argument
that it was the emergence of the so-called sun belt, in this case in
Southern California, that empowered a newly formed middle class
of recent rural origins to bring religion into politics. It needs to be
stressed that economic and social transformations did not create
religious practices but brought a new vitality to them, enhanced
their appeal, and energized new kinds of social and political activity
that would have transformative consequences for the religion itself.
In all these cases, moreover, it is the success rather than the failure
of economic modernity that has resulted in the reaffirmation of
traditional and religious ways of life.
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Religion does not merely serve the conservative purposes of a

global petite bourgeoisie. It also provides a language of protest and
social activity against colonialism old and new, as well as for
movements of those marginalized or discarded by the same globali-
zation. This suggests that while class is very much an issue in
understanding the resurgence of religion(as are gender and ethni-
city), its relationship to religious revivals within and across
national boundaries is not amenable to simple, one-dimensional
explanations. If religion is utilized to establish the identity of newly
emergent classes, as in the cases above, it also serves to give voice
to the poor, and to inspire welfare activities on their hehalf, as has
been the case across the spectrum of religions. Ironically, in light
of its deployment against Communism, religion has also come to
serve as a substitute for former socialist movements in giving voice
to the marginalized and downtrodden, especially in Third World
contexts. We are all familiar with the "Social Gospel" and the place
Liberation Theology has played in popular movements in Latin
America. Religious groups have also played an important part in
Islamic societies in the critique of capitalism and colonialism, as
well as in the provision of welfare services to the needy. In East
and Southeast Asia, Confucianism has been held forth as a force in
the creation of a less individualistic capitalism that is consistent
with the coUectivist orientation of so-called Confucian societies.
Indigenous religions, as well as the religions of disadvantaged
groups such as African-AmericEins in the United States, have been
crucial in creating the political cohesion necessary in movements
against injustice and oppression.
It is also important, I think, that Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and
Buddhist fundamentalists each hold forth their own economic doc-
trines, which, they believe, surpass in their effectiveness and
promise of social justice both the now defunct socialism and an
unbridled capitalism, as is documented in the volume Fundamental-
isms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance
(Marty and Applehy 289-426). The global spread of neoliheralism
over this same period would indicate that these alternatives in
economic development may be more effective in their identity claims
than in the shaping of policy. The exception may be the economic
impact of US evangelism, which is not surprising, given the power
relations involved. In her Between Jesus and the Market: The
Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America, Linda Kintz offers a
reading of the economic ideas of evangelical Christians, who have
acquired enormous power over the last two decades (including
President George W. Bush, of course) and who not only identify the
Christian faith with the neoliberal market economy but see the
image of God in the corporation. American media, including reli-
gious media, spread these faiths around the world, adding the
power of ideology to the forces of material reality to roll back claims
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to alternatives, which are then restricted in their appeals to the

realm of identity politicsor are opened to reinterpretation in
accordance with existing realities, as in the case, for example, of the
reinterpretation of Confucianism to discover in it Weberian pro-
mises of capitalist development. Other traditions and religions have
undergone similar reinterpretation, which contributes further to
internal divisions. What seems unquestionable almost everywhere
around the globe is that religion has acquired much greater visibil-
ity (than it had earlier) as the terrain on which political conflicts
play out, also providing some of the language for the latter.
It is important to note, however, that the resurgence of religion
is not just about the resurgence of religion. Religion comes in
packages, one might suggest, that contain other social, political, and
cultural anxieties and aspirations. It is important in every case to
examine the constellation of issues with which it is articulated to
evaluate the meaning of religious resurgence, its significance in any
one context, and the political and cultural orientations it may
assume. It is equally important to view such resurgence within the
specific cultural context, to assess not only its cultural significance
but also the meanings assigned to it. This is the case with even a
single faith, say, Confucianism or Falun Dafa, which may have dif-
ferent resonances and associations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singa-
pore, the PRC, and the United States. Aziz Al-Azmeh has offered a
cogent critique in his Islams and Modernities of the reductionist
equation of religion with civilizations and entire peoples (e.g., the
Arabs) that glosses over the divisions and contradictions that mark
all these religions along national, ethnic, class, and gender bounda-
ries. There may be structural forces encouraging the revival of reli-
gion in politics globally, but how these forces are mediated locally,
and how they endow religion with different meaning in different
contexts, is important to our understanding of both the significance
of the revival and the contradictions it generates.
At the same time, it is not quite clear whether these structural
transformations in global modernity are transitory in nature or are
lasting features in its formation. Even in the latter case, the
circumstances of global modernity are marked by an instability that
perhaps renders unstable the cultural and religious traditions that
express both oppositions and adjustments to these changes. I think
that the kind of fundamentalism represented by, say, the Taliban
is rather rare, made possible and perpetuated by isolation from the
outside world. In other circumstances, religion is subject to the
multifaceted forces of its broader cultural environment. Contrary to
the totalizing dreams of the Taliban, whether Afghan or American,
it doesn't seem likely that religious fundamentalism is ready to
return any existing society to a condition where religion is the
culture of society. Functional differentiation, which Jose Casanova
describes in his Public Religion in the Modern World as the most '
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essential aspect of modern secularism, still restricts the sphere of

religion in society and politics. The individualization of religion
with modernity, Thomas Luckmann has argued, made religion a
matter of choice rather than necessity, creating in effect a market
of religions, which is especially evident in the proliferation of
religious sects and grouping, plajdng no little part in producing the
instabilities to which I referred above:

with the pervasiveness of the consumer orientation and the

sense of autonomy, the individual is more likely to confront
the culture and the cosmos as a "buyer." Once religion is
defined as a "private" affair the individual may choose from
the assortment of "ultimate meanings" as he sees fitguided
only by the preferences that are determined by his social
biography. (98-9)

Religion, like tradition, is open to commodificationnot only by

televangelists and Asian gurus peddling salvation but in well-
intentioned, if misguided, efforts to render cultural practices,
including religion, into cultural properties. Whether in reinterpre-
tations of theological issues in postmodern theology or in the
articulation of social grievances in social movements around the
world, religion itself is subject to ongoing interpretation in accord-
ance with the demands of its social and cultural environments.
There is something quite obscurantist in the appraisal of religions
as civilizational characteristics immune to all the class, ethnic, and
gender struggles that complicate, even when they do not render
entirely irrelevant, any equation of beliefs and civilizations.
Religion, of course, is also open to simple manipulation. Let me
illustrate with anecdotal evidence from contemporary politics in the
United States. Religion has been a big issue in US electoral politics
since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan used it to good effect to
become president (and to defeat "the evil empire," we might add).
The votes of the believers since then have been viewed by many as
crucial to political victory, as the ascendancy of the Republican
Party would seem to indicatenot to speak of the attendance at
Reagan's funeral of no less a figure than Mikhail Gorbachev, which
adds global legitimacy to the actions of a particularly reactionary
and vindictive president (Gorbachev has not received the attention
he deserves as a player in the downfall of socialism and the pro-
motion of globalization). The Democratic candidate, John Kerry,
aware of this, has begun to play up his religiosity but, according to
recent reports, has so far failed to convince the deeply religious
(mostly Protestant fundamentalists) among the electorate that his
Catholicism is to be taken seriously. On the other hand. President
Bush has deep roots in Texan evangelical Christianity of a particu-
larly zealous orientation and is expected to draw the Christian vote,
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Culture and Religion in an Age of Global Modernity

which reputation seems to have made him somewhat cautious. In

mid-August, when he was in Oregon for a private rally for Repuhh-
cans, he was apparently asked hy an Oregon enthusiast to "pray for
Oregon" hut refused to do so by dodging the request. In our
preoccupation with religion in politics, we should not lose sight of
the politics of religion that undermines its own premises hy ren-
dering religion into political currency. This applies as much to the
deployment of religion at the national as at the international level,
which further fragments religion in accordance with class, gender,
national, ethnic, or regional interests, fomenting dangerous conflict
in the divisions it generates hut also creating the conditions of its
own negation. On the other hand, the politicization of religionthe
inevitable concomitant of bringing religion into politicsalso
corrupts religion. This was an eventuality that, according to Wills,
was very much on the minds of the framers of the US Constitution
when they insisted on separating religion from the state.

Concluding Thoughts: Religion and Cultural Studies

I bring up the Bush anecdote and the political manipulation of
religion to illustrate the elusiveness of the question of religious
revival and the instability of its place in public political life at
presentespecially on a global scale. The instability pertains both
to the constituencies of religion and to its ideological expressions.
If religious movements derive at least some of their dynamism from
their service in the cause of identities of emergent groupssuch as
the middle classes of Orange County, CA, the "Anatolian bourgeoi-
sie," or Chinese small businesswhat becomes of the religion as
these groups establish themselves in new identities? And what of
the content of the religious practices as they are articulated to other
dimensions of cultural life? If religious values have derived their
appeal from the ethical concerns of everyday life, as they seem to
have done, are they equally suhject to the localizing forces of every-
day life? What is the relationship between religion as a guiding
ideology of a social movement and religion stabilized in institutions,
and what happens in the latter case to the place it has held in
everyday life? Religion in contemporary life has been allied to neo-
liberal economic policies, but it also continues to serve in the
mobilization of movements for justice and popular welfare. What
may be most important is that, as a mode of articulating public
desires and grievances, religion is once again very much a part of
the terrain of public culture and politicsnot merely as a medium
of representation but in informing the manner in which social and
political problems are grasped and expressed.
The exceptions would seem to be Europe and the PRCat least
at the official level. It may be worth underlining that these have
also been the two governmentalities among major players in world
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politics that have refused to abandon completely the legacies of

socialism. Casanova suggests that the misleading illusion of the
secularism of modernity has been created by excessive emphasis on
Europe. This secularism continues at present at the level of the
Europeem Union. It may not be surprising, at a time of reaffirma-
tions of cultural traditions, that the traditions of reason and secu-
larism should be reaffirmed in the founding of the European Union.
Will this secularism survive the changing composition of European
societies, or will Europe, too, take a turn in the direction of greater
public religiosity? Much the same question may be raised with
respect to the PRC, where the regime is under further pressure as
religious freedoms are tied in with issues of democracy, as in the
cases of the Falun Gong or further opening up to Christianity, or an
end to colonial policies, as in Tibet and the northwest. Despite
much talk about Confucianism or Falun Gong, however, there
seems to be little evidence that most East Asian societies are likely
to be invaded by religious politics any time soon. Global modernity
finds expression in East Asian societies in the reaffirmation of
cultural traditions that are strikingly this-worldly and very much
tied in with secular interestsmost prominent among them, the
pursuit of wealth and power!
Given the proliferation of religions in the contemporary world,
and the emotional intensity they evoke in the part they play in the
enunciation of identities, secularism may be more important than
ever in the achievement of some semblance of social harmony and
coexistence. On the other hand, it seems foolhardy to deny the
importance of religion in contemporary life and escape back into the
kind of unqualified secularism associated with a modernist ideology.
The most recent issue of boundary 2 (volume 31, number 2, Summer
2004), a journal with which I am associated, is entitled "critical
secularism," after Edward Said's idea of "secular criticism," which
affirms secularism while trying to overcome some of the biases
imbedded in modernist ideology. The editor of the issue, Aamir
Mufti, defines "critical secularism" as "a constant unsettling and an
ongoing and never-ending effort at critique, rather than a once-and-
for-all declaration of the overcoming of the religious, theological, or
transcendental impulse" (3). It may be objected that this kind of
unsettling, inherent in contemporary life, is what invites religion
back in the first place, but there is much worth contemplating in
the intention underlying the concept that it is necessary to resist
the reification of secularism itself by rendering it into a modem
faith. As religion needs to be critically self-conscious, so does
secularism, lest it betray its own premises.
There are no ready-made answers to the questions thrown up by
religion in contemporary life. Religion has come to play a central
part in the constitution of global modernity and is subject for the
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same reason to its contradictions. Uncertainties over its present and

future status only underline its importance as a subject for popular
cultural studies, which have in the past done better with popular
media than with the cultures of the population. There are exem-
plary works, of course, such as those by Kintz and Ahmed that I
have cited above, or Lawrence Grossberg's We Gotta Get Out of this
Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture and, more
recently, studies by Susan Harding of the evangelist Jerry Falwell
and by Heather Hendershot of the immensely important question
of religion and conservatism in the media. I cite these works not
because they are the only, or the most important, ones available but
because they consciously try to bring together problems in popular
religion with problems in cultural studies. A work such as Hard-
ing's study of Jerry Falwell is also important as an illustration of
the vulnerability of cultural studies to an uncritical relativism
contemporary in vocabulary but quite old-fashioned in its anthropo-
logical insiderism and its philological determinismsthat renders
critique powerless against the totalistic claims of evangelical
worldviews.
What is needed most urgently is more work at both the national
and the transnational levels, work that brings together social and
political analysis with critical engagements of popular media,
culture, and religion within a new understanding of the world. An
intriguing question is the relationship of the religious revival to
other intellectual and cultural expressions of global modernity, most
importantly postmodernism and postcolonialism. Al-Azmeh has
underlined correctly the fact that indiscriminate attacks on the
Enlightenment and rationality encouraged by important strains in
postmodernism and postcolonialism have ignored the historical and
social complexities of modernity and have facilitated the popularity
of the more fundamentalist strains in religions. He is concerned
mostly with Islam, but we could also point to attacks on "secular
humanism," also a product of the Enlightenment, that accompanied
the resurgence of religion in the United States, or condemnations
of materialism and Marxism in the name of religious cults of one
kind or another. The place religion has acquired in everyday life
and politics should make it a central concern in studies of popular
culture, and may even help the latter free cultural studies from
what seems to be an involutionary descent into trivia.

Notes

1. This article is a slightly revised version of a presentation at the inaugural seminar for the new
Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 8 October
2004.1 am grateful to the Department, especially Professor Pang Laikwan, for including me in
this important occasion. The paper has benefited from meticulous editing by my friend Khachig
Tololyan.

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