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A generation or two ago, there were perhaps four strands of religion in global perspective. In the developing world, global faiths (e.g., Christianity) and local religions (e.g., animism) were integral to daily life. In Western Europe, secularity was ascendant in mind and discourse, but spirituality was tangible in heart and culture. The decline of formal religion, individually or culturally, had entailed neither the collapse of morality nor the demise of interest in ritual, spirituality, and the supernatural, as pre-twentieth-century commentators had often assumed it would.
In the U.S., mainline and Catholic Christianity were very strong; evangelical Christianity was becoming more self-aware and was being increasingly harnessed to political platforms, sometimes emerging in fundamentalist political programs. By contrast, in the communist world, official hostility to most religious expression had significantly, but not entirely, eradicated religious sensibility.
The most notable thing, in retrospect, is the degree to which these four strands ran parallel to and independently of one another, rather than intermingling and merging.
Today, several striking themes emerge out of the energy and anxiety that arise from the increasing overlapping of these four strands. The energy stems from a number of sources, including the rise of the charismatic and prosperity gospel movements in the developing world, as a result of the cultural crossover between the U.S. and societies with huge wealth disparity; the enormous potential of China and Russia for rediscovering religious dimensions of life and culture, and the unknown of whether the traditions that become dominant will be indigenous or imported; and the slowly emerging tendency of evangelical Americans to engage with global poverty and the environmental crisis.
The anxiety includes lament at the decline in Arab and/or Muslim cultural integrity and resentment at American and/or Western ascendancy, focused on the Israeli-Palestinian political impasse, which erupts into violence locally and globally. There is also anger in developing societies, especially in Africa, toward Western assumptions that global Christianity should incorporate perceived secular values (particularly in relation to sexuality) into its ethic. And there is fear in Western Europe of the loss of the postwar secular consensus (the belief that religion is confined to the private and personal sphere and has no significant purchase on the public domain), in the face of the cultural resistance of immigrant groups—a fear that finds expression in militant secular tracts, hapless efforts at legislation, and clumsy assertions of free speech.
In a generation's time, one can only assume that this cross-fertilization of cultures will continue to increase, with corresponding dimensions of energy and anxiety. It is often said that if you want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans—so prediction is a fool's game. But the following are among the key unknowns, the resolution of which is likely to shape significantly the character of religion in 2034:
• Whether nations with large Muslim populations, such as Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia, can harmonize democracy and cultural adaptation to Western ascendancy with abiding Muslim faith, or find resources in their own traditions to sustain them amid diversity and conflict. If not, the consequences may be explosive;
• Whether mainline Christianity, so entangled in Europe with secularity and in America with cultural dominance, will lose its doctrinal and ethical identity in the West and dissolve into a mass of symbols with no content, therapies with no center, and rhetoric with no handle on truth;
• Whether the Israeli-Palestinian question will remain a focus of international and inter-religious tension or become a symbol of religious and global hope and cooperation;
• Whether rapid and grassroots-led communication, based on the visual and tangible rather than the verbal and cerebral, will make popular religion inherently eclectic and spirituality a syncretistic pick-and-mix.
Reports of the death of religion have turned out to be greatly exaggerated. The secular consensus established in Western Europe and largely assumed by American intellectuals and public officials, but not by the American public as a whole, is proving hard to export to the rest of the world. Will this secular consensus become global, will it disintegrate (perhaps violently), or will it be transformed and enriched in international, intercultural, and inter-religious encounter? Those are the key questions for global religion in the next twenty-five years.
Speaking the Truth
