Analysis of Religion and Globalization by Peter Beyer

This work investigates the implications of theories of global change for the study of religion generally and, through a series of case studies, applications of those theories to specific religious movements. In particular, Beyer is interested in the seeming contradiction of the persistence of conflict between social units within a globalizing world that is more and more becoming a "single place." The first half of his book, the introduction and four chapters, is taken up with theoretical definitions of religion as a social system and the position of that social system with regard to other systems. The second half of the book, five chapters, explores applications of Beyer’s theorizing to a wide range of world religious particularities.

Beyer introduces his readers to the idea of globalization in religious phenomena with the example of the fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Salman Rushdie to death. For Beyer, the speed and range of the event (one to which he returns several times throughout the book) are illustrative of the character of today’s world and religion’s place within it. Both the speed and the range are functions of contemporary communications technology, which makes rapid communication possible over virtually the entire surface of the globe. In Beyer’s estimation, effective barriers to communication between radically different and distant socio-cultural groups no longer exist. For this reason, Beyer argues that the global system must be the primary unit of analysis, even for phenomena as highly specific as religions. But globalization for Beyer is, as for others, most immediately a question of power, of the direction of change and who controls it. Ultimately, what the Rushdie affair and others show i...

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...ut I am still not sure what--and I will need a better dictionary to find out. That is not his fault, but that of my own background. Ultimately, this work is not intended for the scholar of a particular religion, nor even for the generalist in history of religions. It is very clearly a work in the realm of world systems theory, whose language and assumptions are painfully different from those of my own discipline. Nevertheless, I believe scholars of both religious studies and anthropology of religion would do well to begin an investigation of this area of the social sciences.

Beyer, Peter. Religion and Globalization. SAGE Publications Ltd (March 31, 1994)