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Globalization refers to the historical process by which all the world's people increasingly come to live in a single social unit. It implicates religion and religions in several ways. From religious or theological perspectives, globalization calls forth religious response and interpretation. Yet religion and religions have also played important roles in bringing about and characterizing globalization. Among the consequences of this implication for religion have been that globalization encourages religious pluralism. Religions identify themselves in relation to one another, and they become less rooted in particular places because of diasporas and transnational ties. Globalization further provides fertile ground for a variety of noninstitutionalized religious manifestations and for the development of religion as a political and cultural resource.

A great many religious commentators understand globalization as at once a largely economic, imperialistic, and homogenizing process. They share the economic/mass cultural/political perspective, evaluating globalization as anywhere from a threatening challenge to the manifestation of evil in our world. In many respects globalization in this segment of the literature is a successor term for what used to be censured as the capitalist system or cognate terms. Accordingly, globalization results in violence and the unjust oppression of the majority of people around the world. It threatens local and indigenous cultures, imposing a particularly heavy burden on women. It is the chief cause of global and local environmental degradation, again to the principal detriment of the mass of marginalized humanity. Such theologically inspired positions are not restricted to the representatives of a particular religious tradition. Thus, for example, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and those speaking from indigenous traditions all arrive at similar critical assessments of globalization. And far from being a characteristically religious perspective, such arguments are quite common in the overall literature, whether recognizably religious or not. What they imply, among other consequences, is that religion and religious sensibilities are at root outside of and contrary to globalization, that globalization and religion are fundamentally incommensurate. Another segment of both the religiously inspired and the secular literature, while often sharing many of the negative judgments, nonetheless sees a much closer relation between the two. As noted, these observers almost invariably share the broader meanings of globalization, especially the dialogical and from below perspectives.

Religious insider perspectives do not necessarily limit themselves to opposition, however. Some theologically oriented observers argue that religion has an essential role in shaping globalization; that the negative outcomes of globalization point to the need for a positive global ethic, which religions can provide. The efforts led by Hans Küng in this direction are perhaps the most well known. For Küng, not only does the globalized world require a guiding global ethic, but key to the development of that ethic is harmonious relations and dialogue among the world's religions. The combination signals a dialogical understanding of globalization that Küng shares with many other observers. Here it applies to religion: the globalized whole depends for its viability on the contribution of religion, yet this contribution presupposes a plurality of particular religions that come to understand themselves in positive relation to one another. Unity and diversity are both constitutive of the global. This core assumption of Küng's Global Ethic Project points to general features of how those contributions to the globalization debate that do not ignore religion have sought to understand its role in the process: as an important dimension of globalization that exhibits the characteristic dynamic tension between global and local, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, between the universal and the particular.

Globalization perspectives seeking to include religion have taken several directions of which the following are likely the most significant. Certain approaches analyze religion as a global or transnational institution, whose diverse manifestations operate to a large extent independently of economic and political structures and that bind diverse regions of the world together in ways comparable to global trade, international relations, mass media, sport, communications media, or tourism. A second but related focus of observation is the role that religious systems play as powerful cultural resources for asserting identity and seeking inclusion in global society, especially among less powerful and marginalized populations. It is in this context that religio-political movements, including so-called fundamentalisms, receive the most focused attention. A third strategy goes even further, attempting to show how the formation, reformation, and spread of religions have been an integral dimension of globalization as such. From this angle, what we today conceive as the most typical forms of religion and even the typical understandings that we have of religion are themselves outcomes and reflections of the historical process of globalization. Although these three directions are by no means mutually exclusive, for the sake of presentation they can be treated separately. Each implies a somewhat different theoretical emphasis, and each also tends to focus on different empirical manifestations of religion in our world.

A further theoretical approach to the role of religion and religions in globalization goes beyond the idea that religious worldviews and institutions have participated in the process. It focuses on the degree to which both modern institutional forms and modern understandings of religion are themselves manifestations of globalization. With the centuries-long development of what is today a globally extended society, religion came to inform what is today a globally extended religious system consisting primarily of a series of mutually identified and broadly recognized religions. These religions, in virtually every region of the globe, include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but a variable list of other religions receives almost as broad legitimacy. Among these are Judaism, Sikhism, Daoism, and Jainism, followed again by another set of less consistently or more regionally accepted ones such as Bahāʾī, Shintō, Candomblé, African Traditional Religions (ATR), Scientology, and so forth. The idea that religion manifests itself through a series of distinct religions may seem self-evident to many people, including a great many of their adherents. Yet that notion is historically of quite recent provenance. In Europe, where this understanding first gained purchase, it dates back at the earliest to the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, such as in most regions of Asia, one must wait until at least the nineteenth century. Its development and spread is entirely coterminous with the period most theories identify as the prime centuries of globalization.

For this approach to religion and globalization, the construction of the religious system is not only recent. It is also quite selective; not every possible religion, not everything possibly religious counts. Symptomatic of both aspects are ongoing and recent debates among scholars of religion concerning the meaning of the concept and its supposed Eurocentrism. One perspective in these controversies has it that religion is at best an abstract term, useful for certain kinds of analysis but not something real that is actually out there in the world. A prime argument in support of this position is how the ideas of religion as a separate domain of life and of the distinct religions are so demonstrably products of relatively recent history and so clearly attendant upon and implicated in the concomitant spread of Christian and European influence around the world. Another is that religions is empirically too narrow, as what is meant by them does not cover nearly everything in our world that is manifestly religious using slightly different notions of religion. Cogent as such arguments are, however, they point exactly to what the theory under review states: a peculiar way of understanding religion and institutionally embodying religion has developed in conjunction with and as an expression of the process of globalization. It is accepted and contested right around the world. Similar to global capitalism and the global system of sovereign states, the idea and its putting into practice exclude as well as include. It also involves power and imposition, as do all human institutions. And just as antiglobalization movements are themselves important manifestations of that which they seemingly oppose, so too is contestation—whether academic, theological, or broadly political—with reference to religion and the religions symptomatic of the social and cultural reality that it contests.

A strict corollary of this theory, a consequence of the selective nature of this religious system, is that new religions will constantly try to form and that much religiosity will escape the system. The existence of this global religious system, simultaneously at the global and local levels, therefore spawns its constant development and the constant challenging of the way it operates. That idea leads logically to consideration of the religiousness of the global system itself.

Is globalization of religion possible?

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