THE GLOBALIZATION OF RELIGION

• Religion has played a tremendous role in providing a context for the

current revival and the resurgence of religion. Today, most religions
are not relegated to the countries where they began.
• Religions have, in fact, spread and scattered on a global scale.
• Globalization provided religions a fertile milieu to spread and thrive.
• According to Scholte (2005), “Accelerated globalization of recent times
has enabled co-religionists across the planet to have greater direct
contact with one another. Global communications, global
organizations, global finance, and the like have allowed ideas of the
Muslims and the universal Christian church to be given concrete shape
as never before”.
• Information technologies, transportation means, and the media
are deemed important means on which religionists rely on the
dissemination of their religious ideas.
• For instance, countless websites that provide information about
religions have been created. This makes pieces of information and
explanations about different religions ready at the disposal of any
person regardless of his or her geographical location.
• Media also plays an important role in disseminating religious ideas.
• In this respect, a lot of television channels, radio stations, and print
media are founded solely for advocating religion.
• Modern transportation has also contributed considerably to the
emergence, revivalism, and fortification of religion.
 • Turner (2007), cited the case of Islamic revivalism in Asia which “is
related to the improvement in transportation that has allowed many
Muslims to travel to Mecca, and return with reformist ideas”.
• Modern technology, therefore, has helped religions of different forms
such as fundamentalist, orthodox, or modernist to cross geographical
boundaries and be present everywhere.
• Globalization also allowed religion or faith to gain considerable
significance and importance as a non-territorial touchstone of identity.
• Being a source of identity and pride, religion has always been
promoted by its practitioners o that it could reach the level of globality
and be embraced by as many people as possible.
• By paving the way for religions to come in contact with each other and
providing a context for their flourishing and thriving, globalization has
brought such religions to a circle of competition and conflicts.
• “Globalization transforms the generic “religion” into a world-system of
competing and conflicting religions”.

Globalization and Regionalization

• The process of globalization and regionalization re-emerged during the

1980s and heightened after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
• At first, it seems that these two processes are contradicting – the very
nature of globalization is global while regionalization is naturally
regional.
• The regionalization of the world system and economic activity
undermines the potential benefits coming out from a liberalized global
 economy. This is because regional organizations prefer regional
partners over the rest.
• Hurrell (2007), defined regionalization as the “societal integration and
the often-undirected process of social and economic interaction”.

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