The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (16 page)

At various times before the nineteenth century, Byzantines, Arabs, Chinese, Ottomans, Moguls, and Russians were highly confident of their strength and achievements compared to those of the West. At these times they also were contemptuous of the cultural inferiority, institutional backwardness, corruption, and decadence of the West. As the success of the West fades relatively, such attitudes reappear. People feel “they don’t have to take it anymore.” Iran is an extreme case, but, as one observer noted, “Western values are rejected in different ways, but no less firmly, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, and Japan.”
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We are witnessing “the end of the progressive era” dominated by Western ideologies and are moving into an era in which multiple and diverse civilizations will interact, compete, coexist, and accommodate each other.
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This global process of indigenization is manifest broadly in the revivals of religion occurring in so many parts of the world and most notably in the cultural resurgence in Asian and Islamic countries generated in large part by their economic and demographic dynamism.

In the first half of the twentieth century intellectual elites generally assumed that economic and social modernization was leading to the withering away of religion as a significant element in human existence. This assumption was shared by both those who welcomed and those who deplored this trend. Modernizing secularists hailed the extent to which science, rationalism, and pragmatism were eliminating the superstitions, myths, irrationalities, and rituals that formed the core of existing religions. The emerging society would be tolerant, rational, pragmatic, progressive, humanistic, and secular. Worried conservatives, on the other hand, warned of the dire consequences of the disappearance of religious beliefs, religious institutions, and the moral guidance religion provided for individual and collective human behavior. The end result would be anarchy, depravity, the undermining of civilized life. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God),” T. S. Eliot said, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
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The second half of the twentieth century proved these hopes and fears unfounded. Economic and social modernization became global in scope, and at the same time a global revival of religion occurred. This revival,
la revanche de Dieu,
Gilles Kepel termed it, has pervaded every continent, every civiliza
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tion, and virtually every country. In the mid-1970s, as Kepel observes, the trend to secularization and toward the accommodation of religion with secularism “went into reverse. A new religious approach took shape, aimed no longer at adapting to secular values but at recovering a sacred foundation for the organization of society—by changing society if necessary. Expressed in a multitude of ways, this approach advocated moving on from a modernism that had failed, attributing its setbacks and dead ends to separation from God. The theme was no longer
aggiornamento
but a ‘second evangelization of Europe,’ the aim was no longer to modernize Islam but to ‘Islamize modernity.’ ”
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This religious revival has in part involved expansion by some religions, which gained new recruits in societies where they had previously not had them. To a much larger extent, however, the religious resurgence involved people returning to, reinvigorating, and giving new meaning to the traditional religions of their communities. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Orthodoxy, all experienced new surges in commitment, relevance, and practice by erstwhile casual believers. In all of them fundamentalist movements arose committed to the militant purification of religious doctrines and institutions and the reshaping of personal, social, and public behavior in accordance with religious tenets. The fundamentalist movements are dramatic and can have significant political impact. They are, however, only the surface waves of the much broader and more fundamental religious tide that is giving a different cast to human life at the end of the twentieth century. The renewal of religion throughout the world far transcends the activities of fundamentalist extremists. In society after society it manifests itself in the daily lives and work of people and the concerns and projects of governments. The cultural resurgence in the secular Confucian culture takes the form of the affirmation of Asian values but in the rest of the world manifests itself in the affirmation of religious values. The “unsecularization of the world,” as George Weigel remarked “is one of the dominant social facts in the late twentieth century.”
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The ubiquity and relevance of religion has been dramatically evident in former communist states. Filling the vacuum left by the collapse of ideology, religious revivals have swept through these countries from Albania to Vietnam. In Russia, Orthodoxy has gone through a major resurgence. In 1994, 30 percent of Russians below the age of twenty-five said they had switched from atheism to a belief in God. The number of active churches in the Moscow area grew from 50 in 1988 to 250 in 1993. Political leaders became uniformly respectful of religion and the government supportive of it. In Russian cities, as one acute observer reported in 1993, “The sound of church bells once again fills the air. Newly gilded cupolas gleam in the sun. Churches only recently in ruins reverberate again with magnificent song. Churches are the busiest place in town.”
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Simultaneously with the revival of Orthodoxy in the Slavic republics, an Islamic revival swept through Central Asia. In 1989, 160 functioning mosques and one
medressah
(Islamic seminary) existed in Central Asia; by early 1993 there were about 10,000 mosques and ten
medressahs.
While this revival
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involved some fundamentalist political movements and was encouraged from the outside by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, it was basically an extremely broad-based, mainstream, cultural movement.
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How can this global religious resurgence be explained? Particular causes obviously operated in individual countries and civilizations. Yet it is too much to expect that a large number of different causes would have produced simultaneous and similar developments in most parts of the world. A global phenomenon demands a global explanation. However much events in particular countries may have been influenced by unique factors, some general causes must have been at work. What were they?

The most obvious, most salient, and most powerful cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted. People move from the countryside into the city, become separated from their roots, and take new jobs or no job. They interact with large numbers of strangers and are exposed to new sets of relationships. They need new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Religion, both mainstream and fundamentalist, meets these needs. As Lee Kuan Yew explained for East Asia:

We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less. It is all crammed and crushed into a very tight time frame, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries—Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore—there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion. . . . The old customs and religions—ancestor worship, shamanism—no longer completely satisfy. There is a quest for some higher explanations about man’s purpose, about why we are here. This is associated with periods of great stress in society.
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People do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self. Interest politics presupposes identity. In times of rapid social change established identities dissolve, the self must be redefined, and new identities created. For people facing the need to determine Who am I? Where do I belong? religion provides compelling answers, and religious groups provide small social communities to replace those lost through urbanization. All religions, as Hassan al-Turabi said, furnish “people with a sense of identity and a direction in life.” In this process, people rediscover or create new historical identities. Whatever universalist goals they may have, religions give people identity by positing a basic distinction between believers and nonbelievers, between a superior in-group and a different and inferior out-group.
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In the Muslim world, Bernard Lewis argues, there has been “a recurring tendency, in times of emergency, for Muslims to find their basic identity and loyalty in the religious community—that is to say, in an entity defined by Islam rather than by ethnic or territorial criteria.” Gilles Kepel similarly highlights the centrality of the search for identity: “Re-Islamization ‘from below’ is first and foremost a way of rebuilding an identity in a world that has lost its meaning and become amorphous and alienating.”
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In India, “a new Hindu identity is under construction” as a response to tensions and alienation generated by modernization.
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In Russia the religious revival is the result “of a passionate desire for identity which only the Orthodox church, the sole unbroken link with the Russians’ 1000-year past, can provide,” while in the Islamic republics the revival similarly stems “from the Central Asians’ most powerful aspiration: to assert the identities that Moscow suppressed for decades.”
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Fundamentalist movements, in particular, are “a way of coping with the experience of chaos, the loss of identity, meaning and secure social structures created by the rapid introduction of modern social and political patterns, secularism, scientific culture and economic development.” The fundamentalist “movements that matter,” agrees William H. McNeill, “. . . are those that recruit from society at large and spread because they answer, or seem to answer, newly felt human needs. . . . It is no accident that these movements are all based in countries where population pressure on the land is making continuation of old village ways impossible for a majority of the population, and where urban-based mass communications, by penetrating the villages, have begun to erode an age-old framework of peasant life.”
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More broadly, the religious resurgence throughout the world is a reaction against secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence, and a reaffirmation of the values of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity. Religious groups meet social needs left untended by state bureaucracies. These include the provision of medical and hospital services, kindergartens and schools, care for the elderly, prompt relief after natural and other catastrophes, and welfare and social support during periods of economic deprivation. The breakdown of order and of civil society creates vacuums which are filled by religious, often fundamentalist, groups.
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If traditionally dominant religions do not meet the emotional and social needs of the uprooted, other religious groups move in to do so and in the process greatly expand their memberships and the saliency of religion in social and political life. South Korea historically was an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, with Christians numbering in 1950 perhaps 1 percent to 3 percent of the population. As South Korea took off into rapid economic development, with massive urbanization and occupational differentiation, Buddhism was found wanting. “For the millions who poured into the cities and for many who stayed behind in the altered countryside, the quiescent Buddhism of Korea’s agrarian age lost its appeal. Christianity with its message of personal salvation
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and individual destiny offered a surer comfort in a time of confusion and change.”
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By the 1980s Christians, largely Presbyterians and Catholics, were at least 30 percent of South Korea’s population.

A similar and parallel shift occurred in Latin America. The number of Protestants in Latin America increased from roughly 7 million in 1960 to about 50 million in 1990. The reasons for this success, the Latin American Catholic bishops recognized in 1989, included the Catholic Church’s “slowness in coming to terms with the technicalities of urban life” and “its structure that occasionally makes it incapable of responding to the psychological needs of present-day people.” Unlike the Catholic Church, one Brazilian priest observed, the Protestant churches meet “the basic needs of the person—human warmth, healing, a deep spiritual experience.” The spread of Protestantism among the poor in Latin America is not primarily the replacement of one religion by another but rather a major net increase in religious commitment and participation as nominal and passive Catholics become active and devout Evangelicals. In Brazil in the early 1990s, for instance, 20 percent of the population identified themselves as Protestant and 73 percent as Catholic, yet on Sundays 20 million people were in Protestant churches and about 12 million were in Catholic ones.
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Like the other world religions, Christianity is going through a resurgence connected to modernization, and in Latin America it has taken a Protestant rather than a Catholic form.

These changes in South Korea and Latin America reflect the inability of Buddhism and established Catholicism to meet the psychological, emotional, and social needs of people caught in the traumas of modernization. Whether additional significant shifts in religious adherence occur elsewhere depends on the extent to which the prevailing religion is able to meet these needs. Given its emotional aridity, Confucianism appears particularly vulnerable. In Confucian countries, Protestantism and Catholicism could have an appeal similar to those of evangelical Protestantism to Latin Americans, Christianity to South Koreans, and fundamentalism to Muslims and Hindus. In China in the late 1980s, as economic growth was in full swing, Christianity also spread “particularly among young people.” Perhaps 50 million Chinese are Christian. The government has attempted to prevent their increase by jailing ministers, missionaries, and evangelists, prohibiting and suppressing religious ceremonies and activities, and in 1994 passing a law that prohibits foreigners from proselytizing or setting up religious schools or other religious organizations and prohibits religious groups from engaging in independent or overseas-financed activities. In Singapore, as in China, about 5 percent of the population is Christian. In the late 1980s and early 1990s government ministers warned evangelists against upsetting the country’s “delicate religious balance,” detained religious workers including officials of Catholic organizations, and harassed in various ways Christian groups and individuals.
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With the end of the Cold War and the political openings that followed, Western churches also moved into the Ortho
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dox former Soviet republics, competing with the revived Orthodox churches. Here too, as in China, an effort was made to curb their proselytizing. In 1993, at the urging of the Orthodox Church, the Russian parliament passed legislation requiring foreign religious groups to be accredited by the state or to be affiliated with a Russian religious organization if they were going to engage in missionary or educational work. President Yeltsin, however, refused to sign this bill into law.
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Overall, the record suggests that where they conflict,
la revanche de Dieu
trumps indigenization: if the religious needs of modernization cannot be met by their traditional faiths people turn to emotionally satisfying religious imports.