introduction

TESTING PLURALISM:
GLOBALIZING BELIEFS, LOCALIZING GODS

William H. Swatos, Jr. and Giuseppe Giordan

It cannot be doubted that the last fifty years have seen an enormous change
in the nature of religious belief and practice on a global scale, largely facil-
itated by the relative ease of movement of persons throughout the world.
Only a small number of countries still stringently restrict travel, which has
itself become more and more affordable. Not only do people travel as either
tourists or pilgrims, but large population segments see economic advan-
tages to be obtained by leaving their countries of origin and going perhaps
thousands of miles to achieve what they perceive as a “better life.” To a con-
siderable extent these peoples also take with them various aspects of the
culture of their countries of origin. Not least among these cultural assets
are their religious traditions that give them a common bond among them-
selves, perhaps even of greater solidity than was the case in their country of
origin.
In the earliest years of this half-century, social scientists in the West
tended to use Max Weber’s concept of secularization as an explanation for
what was happening. Westerners seemed to be turning away from the idea of
the world as an “enchanted garden” and toward what might be termed more
direct, this-worldly cause-and-effect explanations. This approach dove-
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tailed nicely in some respects with the advance of science—medical break-

throughs, atomic energy, and space exploration. Things that were the stuff
of great fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became
even greater facts as they became part of what was more and more the life-
world of Western civilization. As the century ended, however, the products
of these advances also became more widely available throughout the world,
such that peoples of the so called “second” and “third” worlds could also
participate in some measure in the new world order. A greater exchange
of many different kinds of ideas, not solely those of religion, was a part of
this process. For example, quite apart from the specifically religious aspects
of healing, a variety of alternative medical or healing practices from out-
side the West have been introduced in western societies. Some of these are
 2 william h. swatos, jr. and giuseppe giordan

explicitly medical, such as acupuncture, while others involve more mind/

body associations, as for example yoga. Keeping the roughly half-century
frame in mind, now, we can see a kind of dialectic between the global and the
local, sometimes termed “glocal,” that has impacted religions and religious
people around the world. The chapters in this volume illustrate in specific
cases the ways in which the changed environment of the postmodern both
effects and is effected by the historic religions and the people who make
them come alive.
If we begin by looking at the chapters by Robert Dixon and Emanuela
Contiero, we see two quite different kinds of processes of change in Roman
Catholicism. A simplistic secularist might say that Catholicism is withering
away in Australia, but a more careful analysis would suggest that while the
practice of Catholic religious obligations among Anglo-Australians is declin-
ing, the practice of the Catholic faith by immigrants from India (includ-
ing Sri Lanka) and the Philippines is relatively healthy. What’s more, these
Catholics are younger Catholics than those participating who are of Aus-
tralian birth, and this would suggest, then, that the Indian and Philippine
Catholics who are participating at a higher rate will eventually occupy a
more and more central place in the life of the parishes where they are
located as the Australians age on the one hand and the younger immigrant
Catholics add even further youth to their parishes by following Catholic
norms regarding contraception. In this sense, one can perhaps more accu-
rately talk about a “change process” in Australian Catholicism that is being
effected as much by immigrant faith as it is by secularizing tendencies
among that part of the Australian population whose immigration issued
from Western Europe.
Emanuela Contiero’s chapter casts further doubt on the secularizing
tendencies that might be associated with Catholicism in Italy if all parishes
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as a whole are analyzed. She focuses instead on a movement within Italian

Catholicism, Renewal in the Spirit. If we look simply at this movement, we
see anything but secularization. Instead, we see worship that is infused by
both the charismatic movement and a drive to involve laity in a life-style
experience that seeks to restore the dynamism of the early Christians. On
the one hand, it is possible to point out that the number of participants in
Renewal in the Spirit is very small compared to the total number of people
in Italy who would claim to be Catholic. On the other hand, however, the
historical argument from the earliest years of Christianity would suggest
that the church may well have been at its greatest spiritual strength when it
was comparably smaller than larger; that is, the bureaucratizing tendencies
of large organizations run counter to the enthusiasm of the elect. While
 testing pluralism: globalizing beliefs, localizing gods 3

there certainly does need to be a critical mass of persons to enable the

enthusiasm of an event to grow, it is not necessarily the case that bigger
is always better. Smaller religious communities of a few hundred may be
far more effective in their spirituality than large parishes of thousands,
where in some cases it is hard to tell the church from city hall except for
architecture.
Two other chapters also look at religious developments in Italy. We know
that historically a division in the Christian Church took place between East
and West, and Rome became the center of the Western Church. Across time,
there have been greater or lesser efforts by the two churches to repair that
breach, however these largely had a formalistic character. In other words,
the Eastern and Western churches at their best agreed to let each other have
a church building in major cities of each other’s nations somewhat like reli-
gious embassies. The various diplomatic corps and their entourages would
form the core of these churches’ congregations, to which then visitors from
the different nations could also come for worship and pastoral care. This
all began to change in the last fifty years, when many Orthodox Christians,
especially from Romania, but not only so, began emigrating to Italy to find
work. Giuseppe Giordan documents that there are over 1,400,000 Ortho-
dox presently in Italy. No longer is Orthodoxy in Italy a faith of diplomats
and sailors. Whether the Orthodox population in Italy is in fact having an
“Orthodox effect” on Italy may well be debated, but the presence and prac-
tice of Orthodoxy is clearly widespread. Orthodoxy also stands in a unique
relationship to the Roman Catholic heritage of Italy, in the sense that the
mutual bans of excommunication between the two churches have been
lifted. This is quite different from the role played in Italy by various Protes-
tant groups.
The Eastern Orthodox, however, are not the only persons from the East
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who have come to Italy in recent years. Barbara Bertolani writes about Sikhs
who have been coming to Italy from their native locales on the Indian
subcontinent since the early 1970s and may now number as many as 100,000
people. Sikhism is, relatively speaking, a minority religion everywhere at
the national level, though being concentrated primarily within the Punjab
region of India. The faith in some respects combines elements from both
the dominant Hindu culture of India and its own holy book, the Guru
Granth Sahib. Sikh worship consists primarily of readings from the holy book
and then sharing in a common meal which, unlike the Christian eucharist
as generally practiced, is actually a meal. If one wishes to think in terms
of religious syncretism, then the faith combines elements that could be
seen to come primarily from Hinduism and Islam. In other words, there is
 4 william h. swatos, jr. and giuseppe giordan

no particularly religious connection between Sikhism and Italy; rather, the

Sikh presence is to be accounted for by employment opportunities. In some
places both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe where they have tried to settle,
Sikhs have encountered particular problems over the requirement that their
men must carry a dagger. Since undertaking this obligation coincides with
the attainment of puberty, the question of someone attending a public high
school while carrying a dagger becomes controversial. In total numbers, the
Sikh population is greatly dwarfed in Italy by Muslims, for example, but by
their customs and ways of dress, including both the dagger and wearing a
turban, the Sikhs are much more likely to stand out as “different” among the
population. It is, hence, far easier to be a “secular Muslim” than it is to be a
“secular Sikh.” These physical accoutrements notwithstanding, Sikhs do at
present seem to fit well into Italian society. Bertolani raises the question,
however, of how comfortable this fit will be as the rising generation of Sikh
youth move into adulthood.
The chapter by Anthony Blasi, Barbara Kilbourne and Oscar Miller ad-
dresses the question of how Barak Obama became President of the United
States in the 2008 election and thereby also became the first non-white pres-
ident of the United States. It is well-known that Roman Catholics generally
vote Democratic, the party of the President. Hence it could be assumed
that Roman Catholics in general would vote for Obama. The principal ques-
tion then was how would Protestants vote (and, at least implicitly, why)?
They find three significant factors: First, the greater the number of different
Protestant denominations within a Census Bureau standard metropolitan
area, the greater the likelihood that people would vote for Senator Obama.
Second, the greater the number of non-Protestant religious expressions, the
greater the likelihood that people would vote for Senator Obama. Third,
the total number of different denominations of any sort of any religion, the
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greater the likelihood that people would vote for Senator Obama. Of these
three, the final one is the most powerful. There are many possible ways to
interpret these data of course, but with respect to the final, strongest predic-
tor, one could make a rather straightforward statement: Diversity promotes
tolerance. The greater the religious diversity present in a geographical area,
the more likelihood that religion will not dominate decision making in what
are primarily secular matters. Religious diversity, it follows, is most likely to
occur in situations of religious pluralism.
Barbara Loach’s contribution on Hispanic Evangelicals introduces an
important pluralist variant that has affected political as well as religious
perceptions of the rising Hispanic population in the United States. For gen-
erations a simple equation existed in regard to this ethnic group: Hispanic =
 testing pluralism: globalizing beliefs, localizing gods 5

Catholic. The truth of this was so axiomatic that is was not worth discussing.
In addition, when that equation first came to be tested, the disequilibration
had nothing to do with Evangelicals (or even Protestants) but Marxists, espe-
cially with the successful Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro and later in
Venezuela. Loash traces the process whereby Evangelicalism, particularly
in the form of Charismatic Evangelicalism has become a potent force in
both Hispanic communities and in national politics, inasmuch as in many
communities the Hispanic vote can serve to tip an electoral balance in one
direction or another. That is, although there are relatively few locales outside
of the Southwest and parts of southern Florida in which there is a sufficiently
large Hispanic population to “control” an election by sheer percentage of
the population, there are many communities where “the Hispanic vote” can
decide a vote between two candidates, if a “Hispanic bloc” can be created
whose loyalty is stronger than loyalty to any particular political party. Sim-
ply by proportion, however, it is likely that Evangelicals, Hispanic or not, will
favor a Republican candidate, inasmuch as there are joint socioeconomic
interests between Evangelicals and the Republican Party in its current ves-
ture. This represents a significant change that has been occurring between
American ethnic blocs and the dominant two political parties.
For years, well into the 1960s, the Democratic Party was also the party
of choice for Roman Catholics, but a sea change took place as a result of
the rise of the women’s movement within the ranks of the Democratic Party
in the late 1960s. Those women were overwhelmingly “Pro-choice” women
who advocated actively for abortion rights. While some Roman Catholic
Democrats tried to soft-pedal the issue, it became difficult for them to stand
against the tide of the Pro-choice advocates within their party. Hence, alle-
giances among Anti-Abortion leaders began to shift to Republican candi-
dates. Republicans, on the other hand, gradually saw in the issues—first of
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abortion, then of gay rights—a focus that resonated with many Americans.
Some of these were Roman Catholics, but many more had affiliated with the
“New Evangelical” churches. Increasingly we now see these issues uniting
Hispanic newcomers with young Protestant Evangelicals to advance a broad
social agenda that bridges historic Democratic concerns with new issues
that are raised by the growing Hispanic population in the United States.
The increasing role of Protestantism in Hispanic life, however, is not lim-
ited to the United States. Renée de la Torre and Christina Gutiérrez Zúñiga
report on significant Protestant developments in Mexico across the last half
of the twentieth century and into the present one. The Catholic population
in Mexico declined by over 15 percent between 1950 and 2010, while the
Protestant population increased by just a hair over ten fold. The data also
 6 william h. swatos, jr. and giuseppe giordan

show, however, that the decline increased dramatically after the decade of
the 1970s. Specifically, through the 1970s over 95 percent of the population
professed Roman Catholicism. Between 1980 and 2010, a significant change
took place, with only 83 percent professing Catholic in the latter. One ques-
tion, of course, is why after almost 100 years the Catholic quasi-monopoly
position in Mexico has begun to change. Perhaps more significant, inas-
much as Catholicism still shows a very strong majority within the Mexi-
can population, however, is who the Protestants are religiously. Their data
show that more than half of the Mexican Protestant population worship in
churches that they call “Other Evangelical,” and the second largest group
is “Pentecostal/Neo-Pentecostal.” This is very consistent with the picture of
Hispanic Protestantism in the United States that Loach paints. Hispanic
Protestantism, whether in the United States or Mexico (and other South
American countries, more often than not) particularly embodies within
itself our subtitle of “globalizing beliefs and localizing gods.” The groups
to which these two chapters point as core are more likely than any others
within the Protestant fold to embody glocalization, and in so doing, they
offer a religious entré into postmodernity, not least for peoples who may
have been least integrated into the core of the modern project.
Bill Swatos’s chapter looks almost at the opposite end of religious life in
historic Christianity by giving an overview of recent steps within the Angli-
can fold to bring pressure to bear on a growing tide of what the proponents
of this movement perceive as an abandonment of traditional Christianity by
the leaders of Anglican churches in the West. The “Continuum Movement”
as it tends to be termed, took its “baby steps,” so to speak, with what were
initially the “illegal ordinations” of women in the Episcopal Church in the
1970s, but it did not really come fully into its own until the consecration
of V. Eugene Robinson, an openly gay priest, who was already controver-
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sial, as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003. In each of these

cases what could be called “break away” groups formed and created new
Anglican congregations, usually aided in their efforts by either sympathetic
retired bishops in the American church or more recently by bishops from
other parts of the Anglican communion, not least Africa. The last straw in
the movement in the United States occurred with the election of a woman
as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. In light of this step, a small
number of Episcopal Church dioceses voted to remove themselves from
the parent body on the grounds that technically “the Episcopal Church is
a union of dioceses,” with the implicit caveat that any diocese that can affil-
iate with the Episcopal Church by a voting procedure can disaffiliate by
the same procedure. Three dioceses voted to remove themselves entirely,
 testing pluralism: globalizing beliefs, localizing gods 7

while a fourth diocese created a slightly different procedure where there

would be two dioceses in the same geographical space: one affiliated with
the Episcopal Church and one not (subsequently becoming part of a larger
movement of union known as the Anglican Church in North America, which
gathered together a number, but not all, of those Continuum churches that
had formed between the 1970s and 2010). Since that time a fourth diocese
has removed itself, but it has not as of yet affiliated with the ACNA dioce-
ses. A further outcome of this movement has been the Anglican Ordinariate
established by the Roman Catholic Church, whereby a priest and his con-
gregation can petition the Vatican for corporate reunion with Rome, while
continuing to use an only slightly modified Anglican liturgy. The Ordinariate
radically simplified prior Roman Catholic procedures for corporate reunion
and essentially functions in a way parallel to those Eastern Rite churches
affiliated with Rome (e.g., the Maronites).
The final four chapters of the book move us away from named religions
in the usual sense and look in different respects at what might be called reli-
giousness as an experience. The work of Edward Bailey on implicit religion
has spanned over forty years, and in the present chapter he uses implicit
religion as a tool to try to help us understand pluralism itself. That is, what
pluralism is in itself, or what kinds of behaviors (including speech acts) do
people display when they are trying to be inclusive while not at the same
time abandoning their own convictions. In the implicit religious sense this
is largely a matter of speaking and behaving in a way that encompasses
the other without denying the self. After a general theoretical overview
based upon extensive interview probing, Edward then presents, first, a case
study based upon his several years of research on customers at a “pub-
lic house,” but then turns to consider the question of “pluralism” as itself
an implicit religion. In other words, one might ask whether “pluralism”
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has not itself become the “implicit religion” of late- or post-modernity. To

what extent is pluralism itself the “high god” of late modernity? Is it plu-
ralism, rather than secularism, that actually succeeds the world of state
religions? To be a creditable state in the modern world, for example, is it
necessary that in some way or other pluralism is written into both a con-
stitutional type of document and also employed in the actual conduct of
everyday life, including not only private life, but also public, governmental
life?
Almost as a counterpoint to Edward’s chapter on implicit religion comes
Neils Reeh’s chapter on “life stance communities” in Norway, which one
might want to call “secular religions.” In Norway, all religions receive gov-
ernmental support. The Church of Norway is Lutheran, and the majority
 8 william h. swatos, jr. and giuseppe giordan

of Norwegians are Lutheran. Beginning in 1981, the Norwegian government

also extended support within this program to “life stance communities”—
in a sense, secular religions, the largest of which is the Norwegian Humanist
Association, with slightly over 80,000 members. The questions, then, that
he explores is in what sense the Norwegian Humanist Association is or is
not a “religion,” and more broadly, if so, what is a religion (or not?). One of
the peculiarities of this, for example, is that “religion” is taught in Norwegian
schools. As a result of challenges by the NHA, courts held that the Norwegian
schools’ religion curriculum had to be changed. The tension here is obvious:
on the one hand, life stance communities by being so-called (and accepting
of being so-called) are not religions, but by recognizing life stance commu-
nities as deserving of the kinds of support the state supplies to religious
communities, the state places itself in the position of having to integrate life
stance communities within the rubrics of “religious” life, not merely by sup-
plying funding, but also giving a kind of quasi-acceptance to their teachings
as a part of the fabric of Norwegian life, even though 77 % of Norwegians
are members of the Norwegian state (Lutheran) church and NHA mem-
bers constitute only 1.6% of the population. Basically the role of the NHA
is to provide secular ceremonies for life-cycle events: marriage, childbirth,
death. The NHA also has a printed form to assist persons to withdraw from
the state church. Curiously, however, the NHA is also challenged by other
life stance communities. For example, another life stance community, the
Holistic Federation, challenges the NHA. The Holistic Federation defines
itself as a “spiritual” community and argues that in a sense the NHA really
should not be a life stance community because it denies the reality of the
spiritual. Reeh explores many of the potential theoretical trajectories within
contemporary sociological thought to try to come to an understanding of
these different groups, which is certainly helpful. Yet what one might see
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also running through this is much the same kind of bickering that has char-
acterized American Protestant sectarianism, especially through the 1960s,
and to some extent remains prevalent today. Expunging God from religion
apparently doesn’t end religious argumentation.
Nevertheless, in interfaces with the state, religious loyalties can work
both ways. Anat Feldman’s account of the Shas Movement in Israel might
stand in some respects as a counterpoint to Reeh’s. While the Holistic Fed-
eration members may portray their “life stance” as an “advance” over tra-
ditional religion, the Shas Movement is a political party originating from a
lower stratum of Israeli society: those Jewish immigrants from Arab coun-
tries and their children. In short, the Shas Movement’s power lies with the
citizens who are culturally, religiously, politically, and economically inferior
 testing pluralism: globalizing beliefs, localizing gods 9

in Israeli society today. The Shas Movement challenges contemporary Israeli

society inasmuch as it is a declared ethnic party in a society that does not
consider expression of ethnicity to be politically correct. It is also an ultra-
Orthodox party in a society that does not believe the religiosity of these
immigrants to be Orthodox Judaism, but rather that of those ultra-Orthodox
who emigrated from Europe. The irony here is that today’s ultra-Orthodox
of European origin re-invented Orthodoxy in Europe, while the Shas lived
Orthodoxy in the region of the Holy Land for far longer, though with less
economic success in secular life. What then is “genuine” Orthodoxy?
In the final chapter, continuing this look at the interface of the religious
and the secular in the context of pluralism, Stefano Sbalchiero examines the
relationship of spiritual pluralism or “spiritual pluralisation” as he prefers to
call it to look at the spirituality of “atheist” scientists, returning also to the
use of the “implicit religion” concept. Based on questionnaire research with
160 Italian scientists and university researchers, evenly divided between
biologists and physicists, he asks his subjects, the majority of whom profess
no religion, about spirituality. (In that non-profession the atheist:agnostic
ratio is 2:1. The professing religious are all Catholic.) There is clearly a differ-
ence between the atheists and agnostics on the one hand and Catholics on
the other about how they think about spirituality. For example, combining
the atheists and agnostics, about two-thirds agree that “Spirituality is largely
independent from religious traditions,” while just a quarter of the Catholics
do so. Going in the reverse direction, not one agnostic believes that “Spiritu-
ality necessarily implies the existence of a God,” while 75 % of the Catholics
do. Clearly, then, religion does play a role for the religious, but that is not to
say that the non-religious are without spiritual sensibilities, whatever they
may be. Thus it seems that, even among persons who share a common pro-
fessional orientation and who are all comparably well-educated, religion (or
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its absence) makes a considerable difference in how they perceive their own
spiritual and religious natures as well as, then, what they might or might
not accurately perceive about those of others—including others with whom
they may work closely.
In some respects we now end where we began. Pluralism matters, but
it matters in different ways in different places, under different conditions.
The adherents and the beliefs of the different world religions have made the
pluralistic world of postmodernity something of a crazy quilt in design, yet
the truth may be that the design does not matter nearly as much as whether
or not the quilt keeps us warm and raises our spirits.
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