Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
INAES (Institute for North American and European Studies), University of Tehran
15-16 November 2005
Abstract
Religion as Culture, Culture as Religion: Making Meanings of American Violence”
David J.Slocum
New York University – Graduate School of Arts and Science
david.slocum@nyu.eduJ. David Slocum is Associate Dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, where he teaches Cinema Studies and Art& Public Policy in the Tisch School of the Arts. His primary interests are in the history, sociology, and transnational study of film. He has published three books, including, most recently, TERRORISM, MEDIA, LIBERATION (Rutgers, 2005).
The proposed paper will begin by reflecting on two fundamental concepts being discussed in the workshop -- religion and culture. My objective will not be to develop working definitions. Rather, the aim will be to suggest that the characteristic features of each of these enormously complex and often ambiguous terms overlap and interrelate with the other in ways significant to our understanding of globalization. Theoretically, the paper will consider whether religion and culture, while not identical or equivalent, might be seen as bearing to each other what Wittgenstein called “family resemblances.”
To adduce some preliminary examples, both religion and culture can be understood to 1) posit belief in god(s) or other beings who partake in a transcendent realm separate from the world or the everyday; 2) distinguish ideas, feelings, objects, behaviors, and events as sacred or profane; 3) provide a worldview that indicates the place and purpose of the individual; 4) offer the narrative and imaginary bases of communities and belonging; 5) shape and constitute identities; 6) present a moral code and illustrations of the resolution of personal and social conflicts; and 7) involve ritual acts or practices that invoke feelings or communications with god(s) or the sacred. Crucial differences obviously also exist, and such a comparable list will also be presented; however, one assertion of the paper will be that processes of globalization have blurred the traditional peculiarities of religion and culture as sources of the aforelisted features of both.
Violence is a phenomenon that will be used to illuminate this point. As common elements of religious and cultural practices, images and narratives of violence circulate widely, serving to illustrate moral codes and to demonstrate both the sacred and the profane. Yet it can be argued that the distinctive moral or especially sacral character of violent images and narratives has grown less and less certain. Of concern to some is the diminution of acts of religious violence so that they are little different from the ubiquitous images of violence in many cultural productions; without the mooring provided by sacred origins or a worldview including the transcendent, these acts lose a privileged status. Changes in cultural violence, too, like that emergent from longstanding myths, have likewise been lamented. The larger proposal regarding violence here, though, will be that globalization has increasingly homogenized renderings of violence in the contemporary world and that, despite considerable (and revealing) backlash, this shift has considerable implications for both religion and culture.
The complex status of institutional religion in the United States is central here. The “separation of church and state” was legally established at the country’s late eighteenth-century founding. Yet persistent religious discourses derived from Christianity have shaped both the so-called “civil religion” and suggestions of the America’s privileged role in world history and in international relations; manifest destiny and American exceptionalism are two of the recurrent ideas that have substantiated and advanced the sense of privilege. These ideas have also served to justify and even to celebrate violence employed in the name of national (for some, imperial) expansion and of actions taken to defend the values or civilization that America claims to epitomize. To reiterate, even as state authority remains formally separate from religious institutional authority, political claims of the state often take the form of moral narratives with Christian roots that portray violence as evil or good, as sacrificial, regenerative, just, or expiatory.
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially 9-11, religion has been accorded greater importance in political rhetoric and as the basis for comprehending “evil” threats to the “free world” (the West with the U.S. at its center). With certain ideological conflicts resolved, the putatively religious valence of much contemporary geopolitical conflict has grown and the resulting discursive construction of violence has changed. At the same time, claims on identity and belonging and on values and meanings made by culture have increased. The proposal to be developed in this paper is that these concurrent changes should not be viewed as dichotomous or opposed or even as parts of a zero-sum equation but as related manifestations of, and responses to, some of the same processes of globalization, hybridization, and the realignment of power structures. Moreover, in the case of the U.S., the historical conditions that formally separated religious and political authority have nevertheless enabled various characteristics and dynamics ordinarily associated with religion to evolve in both realms. The emergence of cultural forms like cinema that rely on modern industrial and economic practices has been especially consequential in this regard, as the proliferation of cultural forms and industries have arguably assumed some of these characteristics.
The proposed paper will address these questions concretely by reference to three film productions — The Passion of the Christ, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and (probably) The Matrix trilogy — which variously employ images of violent conflict and have been enormously popular in the US and globally.