This emphasis on practice leads to a different style of exposition than Weber’s. Much more than Weber’s (or Durkheim’s or Parsons’), Bellah’s expository style is dominated by narrative. Religion in Human Evolution is a grand story, what Bellah calls a “deep history,” that extends all the way from the Big Bang to the axial age (with suggestive implications as to how the story will unfold in modern times). This leads to a much more fluid account of the origin and development of religions than Weber’s. In Bellah’s telling, religious practices emerge gradually over centuries, in constant interaction with social and political transformations. A good example is his account of the slow and tension-filled development of monotheism in ancient Israel. Weber tends to construct large ideal-typical constellations of ideas and then connect them with class structures and political processes. The effect is to freeze big chunks of historical time and to show how ideas and social structures are interrelated within those chunks, rather than to amalgamate meanings and social processes in the flow of history. Bellah’s privileging of process over structure through narrative makes his work more congenial to the academic currents of this new century.

Another important difference between Bellah and Weber is that Bellah is more inclined to emphasize similarities rather than differences between the great religious traditions. On the one hand, Bellah repeatedly emphasizes that the major religious traditions are different, they ask different questions about life, they arise out of different historical experiences, they are shaped by all the particularities of their origins. Nonetheless, Bellah goes to great lengths to argue that the great traditions of the axial age (precisely those which Weber spent most of his career exploring) share in common certain aspirations to transcendence. The historical, archeological, and textual evidence about the life world of those times contained great ambiguities in Weber’s time and many of these have not been cleared up in the past century. But Weber tends to spin the ambiguous evidence in favor of contrast between the traditions, while Bellah spins it in favor of an emphasis on commonalities. An example is their treatment of ancient China. Weber saw Confucianism and Taoism as religions/philosophies of adaptation to the world that lacked the sense of transcendence that could eventually produce the inner-worldly asceticism of Western Protestantism. Bellah on the other hand, assuredly does see an important aspiration to transcendence in Confucius and in other major philosophers of China’s Warring States Period. But he clearly admits that there are some respected Sinologists who do not see that transcendence. There are ambiguities in the evidence and respected experts on both sides. Bellah stands with the side of transcendence, but Weber could have made a case for the other side.

Part of this difference is connected with their style of exposition. Weber’s ideal types are built around distinctions. Bellah’s narrative style pulls phenomena together. But the difference is also linked to the differences in the grand meta-narratives than underpin each project. Weber’s story is about the rise of capitalism out of the religious traditions of the West, and his work on comparative religions is structured to show that capitalism could not have arisen initially in societies with different religious traditions. Bellah’s narrative rejects the “Rise of the West” story. Rather, he is concerned with parallel developments of human cultural creativity across the whole breadth of the human species.

Bellah’s more ecumenical story better resonates with the ethos of the twenty-first century. Intellectuals in both the west and the rest have discredited any reason for triumphalism about the rise of Euro-America. Meanwhile we are all faced with the urgent political necessity of finding commonalities in the human condition that might help us avoid planetary catastrophe.

Bellah’s account also evokes the pathos of our current condition. In the history of sociology, one can trace a long arc from optimism to pessimism: Comte thought that positive science would create a better world for all; Marx envisioned a brutal revolutionary struggle leading eventually to the promised land of communism; Weber put us in an iron cage; Bellah ends his deep history by evoking the possible extinction of the human species.

This pessimistic pathos is also congruent with the mood of the times. In an era when global capitalism is tearing itself apart while socialism presents no viable alternative, and when the world seems powerless to avert global warming and other ecological catastrophes, the extinction of our species seems for the first time possible, even if we hope not probable. The mood is dark, and will remain so for a long time. Just as earlier generations were drawn not only to Weber’s luminescent brilliance but also to the dark shadows in his portrayal of a spirit-stifling rationalization, so may future generations be both inspired by Bellah’s conceptual brilliance and strangely attracted to his darker thoughts about the fatal flaws in our modernity.

Christianity has been spread around the world for many centuries now. In the sixteenth century, the conquistadores brought Catholic Christianity to South America and the Philippines. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries brought it to India, Japan, and China. In the nineteenth century, Catholic and Protestant missionaries planted the faith in the colonies established throughout the world during the age of European imperialism. But this dissemination of the Christian faith was not called globalization. It was called “propaganda fidei” or “Christian mission.”

Now, it is European and North American historians and anthropologists who are leading the discussion of global Christianity, and its “global critique” is the work of Western philosophers and theologians. What is new about this global Christianity and why are Western intellectuals now concerned about it?

What is new, I think, is the changing position of Western intellectuals—both Christian and secular—in the world order, and the consequent expansion of their horizons. Such expansion takes place under two conditions: first, new forms of communication enable people in one culture to encounter the ways of life and thought of another; and, second, one or both sides are cognitively and morally vulnerable to the effects of the new encounter. One can have the first condition without the second. For example, if one society invades and subdues another through overwhelming power, it is not necessarily morally vulnerable to the new experiences to which it is exposed. The hegemonic society’s elites can just dismiss the other’s strange customs as primitive and inconsequential. To overcome its weakness, the elites in the invaded society may feel pressured to acquiesce in this condescension and to imitate the beliefs and values of the politically superior country in order to acquire its power. The powerful society, in effect, has pulled the weaker society into its own horizons. But if the power relationship is relatively symmetrical, if one society encounters another on a relatively equal footing, the cognitive frameworks of both may be vulnerable to destabilizing re-interpretation. The horizons—the scope of possibility for thought and feeling and belief—of both may expand.

During the ages of Western conquest and colonization, the Christianity implanted around the world was defined and controlled by imperialist powers. Westerners could be proud of having brought their faith to their new dominions and could take satisfaction in transforming those dominions, at least partially, into their own religious likeness—but only partially, because it was usually thought that the “natives” could never fully understand the subtleties of theology and could never be fully trusted to govern themselves. Until after the Second World War, the bishops and leading clergy in most Catholic colonies were European, as were the leaders of Protestant denominations. With movements toward de-colonization, that began to change, but the hegemony of the Western powers ensured that the normative standards for Western theology and ecclesial polity were set in the West itself. Even the theologians of liberation got the foundations of their theological education in universities and seminaries in Europe and North America.

Now, however, Europe and North America have lost their relative standing in the world and stand on something closer to equal footing with new centers of wealth and power around the globe. This leads to a destabilizing expansion of horizons, which in turn leads to anthropological and theological discourse about the globalization of Christianity.

Intellectuals who carry on their reflections within this new horizon notice certain things that they previously hadn’t taken seriously. One of these is the vigor of kinds of indigenous popular Christianity that were marginal to the old missionary enterprise—the kinds with a stripped down theology and a heartfelt faith and hope in the direct experience of the Holy Spirit. Although the origins of these forms of Christianity are in religious movements that began in the West, they were often regarded with suspicion, or as inconsequential, by Western leaders of Christian denominations in Asia and Africa. From the Western leaders’ point of view, one problem was that these forms could easily be propagated by local Christians, without the benefit of sophisticated Western training. In the past generation, it has indeed been these forms of Christianity that have grown most rapidly, even while the forms of Christianity that once dominated the West have gone into decline. At the same time, many of the rapidly growing forms of Christianity in the two-thirds world take on the flavor of their local cultures and seem alien to many Western Christians. This is what is often of concern in the current Western discourse on global Christianity.

Perhaps our situation today is not unique but happens whenever a religious homeland loses its hegemony. Perhaps our situation—for Western Christians and “post-Christians” alike—is akin to that of the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement in the first century CE. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the diaspora of the Jews, they saw the form of their faith that had been adapted by Paul to be more acceptable to Gentiles now suddenly beginning to grow in dynamic fashion, eventually taking on forms that its Jewish forbearers—and even Paul—might have found barely recognizable. The stone that the builders rejected now became the capstone. It is appropriate that several of the articles in this special issue focus on the role played by the apostle Paul, because he began the first of many globalizations of Christianity.

Taylor’s framework, however, is only a first draft.  While presenting a secular face to the West, many Asian states have what could only be described as religious pretentions. This is true of the Chinese state under Mao, and to a lesser degree even under Mao’s successors. Indonesia under Suharto was the guardian of a sacred canopy that was supposed to encompass Indonesia’s major religions. Taiwan’s state has taken a secular turn with democratization, but it still relies on religion to provide public stability and generate international recognition.

Although many people in these and most other Asian societies continue to practice religion, it is a different kind of religion than in most Western societies—more a matter of ritual and myth than belief, and deeply embedded in the social, economic, and political life of local communities. Religion has not undergone the transition from public practice to private belief that Taylor discerns in the West.

Finally, Asian religions are practiced under new cultural conditions of belief, even in an age of social mobility and global communication. The result is somewhat different than Taylor describes in the North Atlantic world.

Although religion in most Asian societies has been more a matter of communal practice than of individual belief, the meanings of such communal practice have been changing.  This is the result of social mobility, social differentiation, and the expansion of cognitive horizons.  Social mobility happens mainly when people move from countryside to city, from agricultural to industrial labor or to commerce.  Social differentiation refers to the separation of work (which is increasingly dependent on a globalized economy) and education from family and kinship.  The expansion of cognitive horizons is the result of the exposure to diverse people and ideas through exposure to modern media and to life in the metropolis. Most Asian societies have experienced all three of these processes, but the processes have unfolded in different ways along different paths.  The result is that these processes now intersect to form different contexts, which shape the specific transformations of religion in different societies.

When members of rural communities travel to the city, either within their own country or abroad (as with Indonesian or Filipino guest workers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea), often as low paid migrant workers, they do not leave behind the rituals that sustained their community life back home.  Often migrants travel through chains of relationships—extended family ties, regional associations connected with their local communities—and, once in the city, set up little shrines to the deities of their home.  Often, though, the pressures of industrial work make it difficult for them to reconstitute the full range of community liturgical life in the city. But they remit money back to the countryside partly to support their home community shrines and make pilgrimages home for important festivals.  While at work in a city or town they encounter many people with different gods, different rituals—including of course highly educated cosmopolitans.  Moreover, they have to conform to rhythms of work that do not fit their community’s customary patterns, and they try to educate themselves and especially their children in “scientific” education that contradicts folk practices but provides some hope for upward mobility.

Becoming all things to all people, they are skeptical with the skeptics, politely tolerant with those who worship strange gods, all the while never rejecting the ritual practices of their home communities.  As they do so the result must be a kind of hybrid consciousness. In Chinese culture, at least, there has been a long tradition in favor of such consciousness.  In different aspects of their lives, people could adhere to Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings without worrying much about their logical inconsistencies.  Such are the flexibilities of a non-monotheistic culture, rather than a culture that assumes that there is a single jealous God who demands that all things conform consistently to His will.

However, another result of the possibility to choose one’s own faith from among various options can be increasing demands for purified religion. If one is going to choose one’s own faith rather than simply adapt to the various practices that have been handed down through one’s corporate group, one may want a system of practices and beliefs that seem consistent.  This may be one reason for the attraction of Christianity (especially evangelical Protestant Christianity) among rising middle classes in South Korea and to some degree in urban China.  It may also be the reason for the embrace of reformed versions of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan, and of movements toward stricter forms of Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Western China.  The attempt to “modernize” religious practices by rationalizing and universalizing them may help to create new forms of religious fervor—and in turn inspire missionary tendencies.  Maintaining one’s religious conviction cannot depend on hiding within an enclosed community.  It requires getting other people to follow it as well. The stage is set for development of large scale religious movements that can then clash with one another in new ways.

Will this new cultural churning lead to syncretistic, hybrid practices that peacefully knit together various strands of traditional practice?  Or will it lead to sectarian struggles among those devoted to purified faiths?  Answers to such questions are highly context-dependent.  The restructuring of cultural boundaries between the religious and the secular will be influenced by a confluence of factors, such as the rate and pace of social mobility, the extent of and the pace of social differentiation, and the suddenness of expansion of cultural horizons—as well as the cultural resources provided by various traditions for reconciling diversity.

In an age of social mobility and global communication, Asian religions are practiced under new cultural conditions of belief, and the result is somewhat different than Taylor describes in the North Atlantic world.  There, modern people are presented with a stark choice between understanding existence through an “immanent frame” or a “transcendent frame.”  As I have noted, in many Asian societies, including China, the immanent and transcendent are much more mixed up in various hybrid combinations.  In accord with widespread traditions of syncretism, many people believe and practice many things at once.  But modern conditions of belief also impel some believers to purified forms of religious practice.  This is something like what happened in Europe during the Reformation, as Taylor describes it.  When it happens in the unsteady world of Asia today, this is not necessarily a good thing—at least for those who love peace, predictability, and order.

A purification of practice usually involves an attempt to recover the axial age roots of local traditions. (The term “axial age” was coined by Karl Jaspers to refer to the period in the first millennium B.C.E. when visions of a universally transcendent reality were created in Israel, Greece, India, and China.)  Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, and Christians seek purified versions of their practice. This means rejecting the accretions of tradition and of all those practices that embed religion in local communities with particularistic loyalties.  Rituals are deemed to be efficacious not ex opere operato, but on the strength of the interior conviction that they express. Religious practice gets transformed into religious faith—a personal belief in world transcending ideals that demand universal loyalties.

These purified faiths grow up parallel with older, community embedded practices, but they often claim continuity with them.  Often they gain inspiration and energy through connection with global religious movements. At least when they are appropriated by ordinary people, these forms are never purely universalistic.  Under conditions of belief where one can never take one’s religious practices for granted, religious believers yearn for signs that their beliefs are on the right track.  One important sign is that their kind of faith is expanding.  There is thus a strong missionary impulse in all of these new universalizing movements.

Fearing that such faiths could inspire independent social movements, most Asian governments used some combination of suppression or co-optation to prevent such universalizing faiths from flourishing and to keep them firmly within bounds.  The collapse of such political structures after the Cold War has given a new impetus to such globalizing faiths.  They were attractive at least partly because they were once forbidden fruit. With the crumbling of political barriers that once confined universalizing, missionizing religions in place, there is now a global scramble for souls.

Depending on the particular contexts in which they develop, new expansionist religious movements can lead to serious social and political conflict or can provide resources for reconciliation and healing.  In China, the scramble for souls leads to relatively more conflict.  In general, the movements direct their adherents to otherworldly concerns rather than to this-worldly political activity.  But some of their beliefs give the government cause for concern—especially eschatological beliefs.  The Falungong believes that a great millennial transformation is coming in which the good will be saved and the evil punished.  Many Chinese Pentecostal Christians believe in Premillennialism, which holds that the Last Times are coming soon and that those who have accepted Jesus will be raptured up to heaven, while the world undergoes great tribulations which will end with the triumphant Second Coming of Christ.  The government also worries about the public health implications of practices like faith healing.  Thus it steps ups efforts of surveillance and sometimes suppression. But eschatological religious movements organized through ramifying networks cannot easily be suppressed.  If the government punishes particular leaders, the act only inspires members who revere martyrdom.  If the government cuts off a part of the network, other shoots can quickly grow up elsewhere.  The networks cannot easily be co-opted.  Members who expect otherworldly salvation do not need anything that the government has to give them. Despite government attempts to stop such beliefs and practices, the networks that foster them are expanding very rapidly.

In Taiwan, though, socially engaged Buddhist movements seem to have made a positive contribution toward healing the tensions of a democratizing society.  Their ideologies stress generous acceptance of all people and they motivate their members to build a better world through sustained, gradual effort.  By dampening the tensions that have come from Taiwan’s many conflict-producing forms of identity politics, the Buddhist movements have helped shore up the shaky foundations of Taiwan’s democracy.  In this context, the universalization of religious visions has led to confluences of care rather than conflict.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, the record is mixed.  In places like Aceh, newly energized Islamist movements have clashed with newly energized Christian missionizing movements. (Such clashes of course often are intertwined with clashes over the distribution of natural resources—in Aceh’s case, of petroleum.)  Fortunately, these clashes have subsided in recent years with the help of astute efforts at political compromise and reconciliation.  In the long run, though, sustainable reconciliation may involve a religious dimension.  This is the promise—and the challenge—of groups like Dian Interfidei which seek through ecumenical dialogue and creative common ritual to create “cross-religious persons.”

Internationally, the new scramble for souls can lead to intensified conflict, especially since the universalistic, world transcending impulses often get submerged quickly into worldly nationalisms, enlarged, ambitious communities created by expanded imaginations.   The newly universalizing impulses do not have to lead to conflict, however.  As we have seen, much depends on the content of the traditions out of which they arise and the specific context in which they evolve.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]

The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor’s second secularity, a decline of religious belief and practice among ordinary people. The degree of religious practice varies from country to country, but almost everywhere temples, mosques, churches, and shrines are ubiquitous and full of people, especially during festival seasons. Even in China, where the government actively propagates an atheist ideology and has severely restricted open religious activities, it has been estimated that as much as ninety-five percent of the population engages from time to time in some form of religious practice.  Moreover, throughout Asia there have been impressive revivals and reformations of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious beliefs and practices—Asia is religiously dynamic.

However, this dynamism is of a different kind than that found in the United States, and it cannot be explained in terms of the narrative Taylor uses in the North Atlantic world. Asian religious developments are often misread by both Western observers and Asian scholars trained in the Western social sciences. When Western scholars have looked for religion in Asian societies, they have often looked for it in the form of private faith.  But in most Asian societies, much of religion is neither private nor faith.

It is often not faith, in the sense of a personal belief in doctrines.  In China, for example, there have been literally millions of temples built or rebuilt in the countryside over the past three decades.  Most people doing this rebuilding would be hard pressed to give a consistent and coherent account of the Daoist or Buddhist philosophies that one might think were behind this revival.  Even the rural Chinese Catholics I studied could only give a vague account of the creed to which they were supposed to assent.  Most of the people building temples and churches seem driven by the desire to create a place where they can carry out rituals that would give some order to their lives and their community life.  It can be meaningful to carry out such rituals even if one does not believe in the theology that supposedly underlies them.  For example, in the Chinese Catholic villages I studied—which typically consisted entirely of Catholics who had carried on their identity through many generations—there are many “lukewarm” Catholics who don’t regularly pray, are skeptical about doctrines, and don’t follow many of the moral teachings of the Church.  Yet they still consider themselves Catholics and would still want to be buried with Catholic funeral rituals because that is the way to connect, in life and death, with their natal communities.

Collective ritual, in this and many Asian contexts, comes before personal faith, as do collective myths—stories about gods or spirits or blessed events such as apparitions, healings, or miraculous occurrences. Rituals and myths are public rather than private.  Even when they have to be carried out surreptitiously, out of sight of suspicious government regulators or condescending urban-based mass media, they are, in the local context, public.  Under such circumstances they create alternative public spheres that sometimes complement, but at other times contradict, the public projects of their governing states.

This is a form of religious practice akin to what Charles Taylor calls “embedded religion.” The world of embedded religion is “enchanted,” filled with good and bad spirits.  Religious practices are used to call upon the good and control the bad, as much for the sake of the material health and prosperity as for any otherworldly salvation.  One’s community is under the protection of local spirits—patron saints in the European Middle Ages and ancestors and various local protector spirits in many parts of Asia—and although these local spirits may be imagined to be under the control of a supreme being, much of actual popular religious practice is aimed at getting one’s own local spirits to take care of one’s family and friends in the here and now.

These forms of localized, socially embedded religious practices have by no means entirely disappeared in the North Atlantic world.  But as Taylor shows, they have largely been eclipsed.  A key event in this process was the Reformation, which condemned much of Catholic sacramental ritual as “magic,” to be replaced by personal devotion driven by interior faith.  In the United States the prevalent forms of religion are individualistic expressions of a desire for personal authenticity carried out through voluntary association with other like-minded individuals.

Until relatively recently, scholars in the North Atlantic world have usually assumed that modernization entails the eclipse of localized, socially embedded religion. Just as the American government during the Cold War convinced itself and its publics that governments allied with the USA, even dictatorships, were part of the “Free World,” so did American scholars imagine that societies open to influence from the West were becoming “free societies,” composed of instrumentally rational individuals who had sloughed off communal traditions, especially religious traditions. (If there was any future for religion in such societies, it was assumed that it would be in the form of Christianity, brought by Western missionaries, who were welcomed by most governments in the Free World.) The real processes of social development in Asia, however, usually took a different path.

Through colonialism or through anti-colonial and revolutionary movements that sought national autonomy, wealth, and power by building strong, bureaucratically organized governments modeled on those from the West, national political leaders imposed centralized states upon societies that had not undergone the North Atlantic world’s path to modernity.  In particular, these societies had not radically loosened the ties that bound local corporate communities together—especially the local rituals and myths that generated the enchanted identity of such communities.

Thus, the governments that emerged or consolidated in Asia during the Cold War were imposed on top of societies that were still largely assemblages of corporate groups rather than the voluntary associations of a (Western style) civil society. Popular religion was mostly an expression of the identities of corporate groups—extended families and local village communities mostly, but also in some cases larger-scale ethnic identities, as with the Muslims in the western regions of China.  Religious ritual and myth expressed and reinforced particularistic loyalties within ascriptive communities.  The construction of local temples, churches, and mosques was connected to a wide range of economic, social, and political activity. Places of worship were also venues for commerce and public entertainment, institutions for ensuring trust, mediating disputes, and providing welfare to those in need.  They were also nexuses in regional networks of communities with similar religious practices.  Such communities and their networks constituted a kind of public sphere—a framework of connections within which discussions about local affairs could take place, a system of statuses that marked out paths of social mobility and recognition, a site for common celebrations and shared experiences.  These diverse bubbles of public-ness introduced potential weaknesses into the sturdy foundations upon which authoritarian governments wanted to build their version of public order.

To create national unity, maintain social control, and mobilize large and diverse populations, modernizing governments needed (or thought they needed) to get control over religious practices that fostered particularism, regionalism, and ethnic distinction.  There were two main strategies. One was to suppress religious practice—destroy temples, ban public religious rituals, eliminate religious leaders (by forcing them to change their professions, by imprisoning them, and sometimes by executing them)—and to replace this with a quasi-religious cult of the state and its leader.  This was the strategy of the People’s Republic of China and North Korea.  An alternative strategy was to co-opt religious leaders and to segregate religious communities, the strategy followed by Indonesia under Suharto. There, in the name of “Pancasila,” the regime restricted proselytization among the five main religious groups (Muslims, Catholics, Reform Protestants, Hindus, and Buddhists), and co-opted the leaders of each group by making them members of state-sponsored commissions.  Some countries adopted a mix of the suppressive and co-optative strategies, which was the case in Taiwan under the Kuomindang.

During the Cold War these various strategies seemed to work, at least on a superficial level. Throughout East and Southeast Asia local religions seemed to be tamed and rendered irrelevant to the big issues of the day. In some cases, as in China, religious practices disappeared from sight. In societies that relied less on sheer repression and more on co-optation, religion contributed some vibrant local color, while remaining comfortably within the grip of the state and irrelevant to the politically directed processes that supposedly constituted national modernization. As such they were mostly invisible to Western social scientists.  Anthropologists studied them, but mostly in an attempt to document them before (as it was presumed) they inevitably faded away, or to develop comprehensive theories about the roots of pre-modern religious experience.  Even anthropologists did not generally assume that such religious activities were especially relevant to current political or economic developments. Meanwhile, political scientists, economists, and even sociologists almost completely ignored them.

However, none of these strategies used by Asian states to tame local religions actually destroyed them. The suppression strategies drove the practices underground while in many cases maintaining the communal ties with which these religious practices had been intertwined.  The co-optation strategies helped to reproduce and maintain communal religious identities.

The recent emergence of religion as a visible force in Asian social and political life is at least partially connected with the end of the Cold War, after which Asian states in the “Free World” that had counted on strong support from the USA have found support diminished and at least partially contingent on adoption of democratic reforms.  Such states, including South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, have been losing the capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation.  Meanwhile, the communist regimes of China and Vietnam have had to loosen some of their social controls to permit economic reforms and integration into global markets.  Throughout the Asian region, a plethora of religious practices have blossomed forth.

It is unclear whether the loss of capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation has actually led to a quantitative increase in religious practice, but the weakening of state capacities to control religion has at least made local Asian religious practices more visible, more energetic, and potentially more politically consequential.  All of a sudden the increased visibility of religion breaks down the imaginary communities of modernizing societies that Western intellectuals had created for themselves. Asian religious transformations now command the attention of all sorts of social scientists.

Thus, like America, Asia is “awash in a sea of faith.”  But the Asian sea of faith is different from the American one. Asian religious practices are less individualistic and more communal, socially embedded, and locally particularistic.  This makes it more difficult to imagine how Asian religions could be accommodated into the standard liberal model for political incorporation (often based on the American experience), which officially considers religious belief a personal preference of individual citizens, who will then form all sorts of different but overlapping private religious associations in an open religious marketplace and expect that these private associations will share enough in common that they will tolerate one another but have enough differences that they will not coalesce into any unified opposition to the state.  We are becoming more aware of the limitations of this liberal model, even in established Western liberal societies like the United States.  How much more difficult might it be for this liberal model to accommodate the local, particularistic, communal religions that are becoming newly visible in Asia?

Probably too difficult. It is not impossible in most parts of Asia to develop moderate, democratic, stable but adaptable polities, but we would have to expect that the paths to such an outcome would be different from the North Atlantic path.  The direction of these paths may depend on the precise ways in which local religious cultures are affected by secularism in the third sense defined by Charles Taylor: of a move to a society in which religious belief and practice are no longer unchallenged but seen as one option among many, and not necessarily the easiest to embrace.  I will discuss this third form of secularism in my next post.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]

Can this analytic framework be applied outside of the North Atlantic world, particularly to Asian societies?  Taylor himself would not claim to have created a framework for a universal theory of comparative religion.  But this framework, grounded in a particular cultural and historical experience, may nonetheless be useful for cross cultural comparisons.  The conditions for its comparative use, however, would be as follows.  First, we acknowledge its limitations from the outset.  Second, we apply it as a first draft approximation to understanding the historical transformations of religion in another culture to see if there is at least a rough fit with these processes. Third, we are careful to see how it doesn’t fit and then use this discrepancy as a stimulus to expand our horizons. This can set into motion not an objectifying, essentializing gaze upon cultural difference, but a fruitful dialogue across cultures.

This is the approach I will try to take in this post, as I explore the fit between Taylor’s framework and contemporary developments in East and Southeast Asian societies, concentrating mainly on the political and religious transformations taking place in these societies in the aftermath of the Cold War.

In form, all modern East and Southeast Asian governments are secular in the first sense of the term defined by Taylor.  They are based on constitutions that do not ground the state’s legitimacy on beliefs in realities that transcend this world and do not privilege any particular kind of religious belief.  They relegate religious belief to the private sphere. Even the constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees freedom of religious belief as long as it is kept private—so private that it is not expressed in any venue that is not approved and regulated by the state.  East and Southeast Asian governments arrived at their present-day secular constitutions through various, often tortuous, paths throughout the course of the 20^th century, but, in formal terms at least, they conform to North Atlantic models of state neutrality with respect to religion.  This is an example the sociologist John Meyer and his collaborators would call global “institutional isomorphism,” a tendency of political, economic, and cultural institutions around the world to assume a uniform style of formal organization (based on Western templates).

But the secular form of Asian political institutions often masks a religious spirit.  Some examples:  Japan has a secular constitution, but many of its government leaders have felt compelled to pray for the spirits of the war dead at the Yasakuni shrine.  The pressure to visit the shrine comes from nationalistic constituencies within Japan, but it is indeed a pressure to worship at a Shinto shrine, presided over by a priest, which purports not just to memorialize the names of the dead but actually to contain their spirits.  (Japan’s Asian neighbors are more upset about this than Americans. Could this be because Asians take more seriously the living presence of spirits of the dead?)  Through its “Vigilant Center” at the Ministry of Culture, the government of Thailand is supposed to protect the nation’s culture and values by, among other things, keeping people from using images of the Buddha for profane purposes. The Indonesian government is based on a national ideology of “Pancansila,” which proclaims a national unity based upon mutual tolerance among believers in an “Almighty Divine.” And even the government in China, which is supposedly led by the atheist Communist Party, takes it upon itself to carry out religious functions.  It has claimed the right to determine who is the true re-incarnation of the Panchen Lama (and will undoubtedly do the same for the next re-incarnation of the Dalai Lama).  It claims to be able to determine the difference between true religion and “evil cults,” and tries to root out even private belief in “evil cults” like Falungong.  Moreover, the Chinese government invests enormous amounts of money in spectacular public rituals, like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, which are redolent with symbols of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Often, the secular political form is what outsiders see, while the spirit is what insiders apprehend. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western scholars took the formal structure of Asian states as evidence of “modernization,” a universal process of (among other things) secularization that was transforming the whole world.  Even communist China was seen as an example of modernization, although one that had perversely gone astray.  Inside all of this putative political modernization, however, other meanings were being constructed. Emerging and consolidating states were being seen as necessary mediators between citizens and cosmic forces that transcended the visible world.  States contained sacred power—power that could be benevolent but could also turn demonically ferocious, as did the cult of Mao Zedong during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Political secularization, in Taylor’s sense, therefore is a reasonably accurate way to describe the formal structure of most East and Southeast Asian states.  But it doesn’t adequately describe the interior spirit of these states, which must be comprehended through a closer examination of how these states have developed within modern history.  Taylor’s account of political secularization does, however, help us pose the questions of how the external forms and interior spirit of modern Asian states have interacted with one another and what have been the practical consequences of this interaction. It would be beyond the scope of this post to give a full account of the development of Asian states.  But as we consider the development of the social and cultural life within some Asian societies, we can get some sense of how these societies and cultures have been influenced by the interplay between secular form and religious substance within their states. In my next two posts, I will explore the extent to which Asian states and societies have followed Taylor’s path to social and cultural secularization.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]