The Mission of the Church in the Face of Globalization - Part One
The idol which we have to recognize, unmask, and reject is an ideology of freedom, a false and idolatrous conception of freedom which equates it with the freedom of each individual to do as he or she wishes. We have to set against it the Trinitarian faith which sees all reality in terms of relatedness (Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell, 75).
Through God’s love we are gathered together and guided by the Spirit in the worship, reverence, and movement forward in the way of Jesus Christ the Son. This is but one formulation of Trinitarian resistance to the idolatrous freedom that is hidden beneath the presumed “catholicity” of globalization. This essay hopes to provide (in two parts) an exploration of the negative effects of globalization on the contemporary church in western culture. It appears here in condensed (believe it or not!) form.
Parsing Globalization
The phenomenon of globalization is a problem for the Body of Christ. However and unfortunately, this phenomenon is difficult to define. Peter Sedgwick has witnessed to this fact in that, when attempting to define globalization, he is able at best to narrow it to three interrelated processes or changes:
First, there is a return to the pre-1914 situation of global trade, capital mobility, and immigration. It is not exactly the same, but the trends point to a rough similarity. In particular the mobility of capital is now very great, as it was before 1914, but on a much vaster scale. Second, there is a series of processes, including flows of information, capital, etc., which exacerbate many local political, social, cultural, and economic tendencies to breaking point…What has happened is that political forces in many societies have devalued the legitimacy of the modern state…Third, there is an awareness that cultural patterns and flows now reach across the globe, even if…it is a mistake to speak of global culture (Peter Sedgwick, “Globalization,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 487-488).
When he speaks of this mistaken assertion of a global culture, Sedgwick means that the aforementioned flows of information, currency, etc. do not amount some “demonic external force” but rather to the subversion of the distinctiveness and legitimacy of the nation-state as a viable cultural model and spirit. Globalization, in Sedgwick’s reasoning, represents above all a decentralization of power and authority and the growth of the ability of people in different cultures to access one another (people and money) quickly and with little thought of immersion into the culture of the other.
William Cavanaugh has put the matter a different way when he writes, “globalization does not signal the demise of the nation-state but is in fact a hyperextension of the nation-state’s project of subsuming the local under the universal. The rise of the modern state is marked by the triumph of the universal over the local in the sovereign state’s usurpation of power from the Church, the nobility, guilds, clans and towns (Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 99).” The state’s presence, since it is no longer felt as a true power, is more subversive in contemporary culture. Indeed, the nation-state is no longer present in the form of one particular nation but rather as a conglomerate of various “developed” nations holding the majority of power over commerce and resources in “underdeveloped nations.” Thus, we might define globalization as the process by which “developed” nations overcome and absorb the particularities of culture and thereby make different cultures easily accessible without the “inconvenience” of learning a new language or set of norms and mores…
…If religion ever has been the soul of society, it is certainly not in our era. Indeed, the enlightenment has tended to view religion in this manner. Economic, legal, and political systems run affairs in the “real” world and religion is relegated to the private sector of our consciousness. Any attempt to critique the media or the government from a Christian standpoint is likely to be lumped together with the likes of the “moral majority” and other ilk. Globalization has, in many cases, silenced the church (and thus the individual Christian) from speaking any criticism toward culture and the only voices we hear are the most extreme and entertaining ones. As C. Wright Mills writes, “the media tell the man in the mass who he is – they give him identity; they tell him who he wants to be – they give him aspirations; they tell him how to get that way – they give him technique and they tell him how to feel that he is that way even when he is not – they give him escape (Mills, 35).” The mass media are often more formative in the lives of Christian people than the community of God is. If Cavanaugh’s definition is correct and the church really is a “discipline…a way of inscribing bodies into certain practices” then the mass media, it seems, is the greatest and fastest growing church in world history. As Mills has observed, it provides us identity, aspirations (hope, maybe), technique, and escape. It is no stretch to name these gifts of the mass media as practices of the global church of Western culture. Thus, since the mass media is an offshoot of globalization in our contemporary world, it is not difficult to imagine that globalization is a problem for the church. In a reversal of Cavanaugh’s terms, the local body of Christ has been subsumed into the global image of personhood provided by multinational corporations. What a church!
So we see that, while difficult to define, globalization is clearly a presence in our lives. It calls us – much as the church should – into a global “community” of people who are influenced and shaped by what we see on television and other media. This is a problem for the church whose mission is to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19).”
A further complication of this tendency toward subsuming the local into the universal is the globalization of poverty and oppression. The situation described by Sedgwick earlier in this essay is here made clearer by K.P. Aleaz. Because the legitimacy of local authority structures has been taken away,
Globalization along with economic growth achieves globalization of poverty. This is because in the new economic policy of globalization and liberalization, the function of the state is only just to make the climate safer for the market and withdraw almost completely from the realm of economic goals such as the liquidation of poverty and unemployment, distribution of welfare, narrowing the gulf between the rich and the poor, people’s participation in the economic process, accountability of economic centers to the people, and economic self-sufficiency. Here it should be clearly identified that the market is not concerned with these economic goals, and therefore globalization of poverty is the result (K.P. Aleaz, “The Globalization of Poverty and the Exploitation of the Gospel,” in A Scandalous Prophet: The Way of Mission after Newbigin, 166).
Because enlightenment style nation-states do not typically deal in questions of purpose and actual values, the “free” market is left alone and becomes a force in itself. Indeed, “The idea that if economic life is detached from all moral considerations and left to operate by its own laws all will be well is simply an abdication of human life to the pagan goddess of fortune. If Christ’s sovereignty is not recognized in the world of economics, then demonic powers take control (Truth to Tell, 77).” Few can look at the cost of living in so-called developed nations and assume that this is not the case. And just as the cost of living is rising in “developed nations” – helping multinational corporations to grow in size and wealth – so the likelihood of staying alive in “developing” nations is rapidly decreasing. We must keep in mind that this is happening as countries within the Western-style nation-state conglomerate are becoming wealthier and more entrenched in the “freedom of the market” at the expense of those who we currently characterize as “third world” citizens. This is the situation reflected when, in a book chapter entitled “The Unfreedom of the Free Market,” Cavanaugh writes,
On the one hand, we are told that we live in an era of unparalleled freedom of choice. As the last few state barriers to free markets crumble, we see opening up around us an infinity of opportunities for work and consumption. On the other hand, there is a profound sense of resignation to fate in attitudes toward the market. The process of globalization seems to have advanced beyond anyone’s control. Managers sigh that their decisions are subject to the impersonalized control of “market forces.” The popularity of Dilbert cartoons bespeaks a cynicism about the instrumentalized and bureaucratized nature of corporate employment. Consumers feel besieged by marketing and surveillance, and feel powerless in the face of enormous transnational corporations that are disconnected from the communities in which we live. We hear rumors that our shoes are made by children and other exploited laborers, but we have no idea how we would begin to resis (Cavanaugh, “The Unfreedom of the Free Market,” in Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, 103).
Here we see that the crux of many of the social problems brought about by globalization is the loss of “roots” in contemporary culture. When he describes as the disconnection from the communities in which we live, Cavanaugh is speaking of the fundamental disconnect – in both value and purpose – of the free market from real people in real situations of human need and injustice.
This situation is made all the more tragic because those who stand to gain from this fundamental disconnect between free market economics and real people in real places are victims as well. It would be far too easy to demonize those in power by asserting that these actions that divide and harm others are done with malicious intent. However, these people are also disconnected from communities that have the potential to inscribe them into certain practices that would allow them to imagine that it is unethical, immoral, and evil to exploit children and the poor to make shoes for rich people in “free market” nations. The problem is that the cultural forces of globalization are not able to form individuals (now the basic unit of society) into morally capable human beings through discipleship in the community of those faithful to the way of Jesus Christ. The nation state is not the church and thus its mission cannot be the same as the church. However, it seems that in contemporary culture, people are more likely to be discipled by the state or by some notion of “global culture” found in the media than by a formative community of fellow pilgrims on the way of Jesus Christ. This again is a problem for a church whose mission is no less than to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Globalization is a problem for the Community of God because it furthers the cultural myth that, through Internet, reality television, and “global culture”, we are more connected than we have ever been. The truth of the matter, however, is that globalization - as it is an extension of the enlightenment - has made us much more lonely and isolated than we could have ever imagined.
When the effects of the Western style nation-state conglomerate, often hidden by this new apparent global culture, has subsumed the local into the universal, the resultant individualization (begun with the enlightenment) alienates people from their roots as people connected through family, trade, clan, tribe, and Church. What Cavanaugh has called “Fordism” represents the advent of the assembly line by Henry Ford as a primary means of production in contemporary culture. This assembly line style of production of material goods is one example of contemporary alienation that results from this globalizing tendency of Western culture. To pose a particular example, a person who works on a furniture assembly line in Mexico may spend her days putting legs on tables at which she will never sit. The person who will benefit from her work is not her family, her community, or likely any one that she actually knows. The likely beneficiary will be someone in some far country who makes more money than she does and who will never know who it is that built the table at which (ideally) they share meals with family and friends. Some may call this a great advancement in a new global culture but what is missing is the true conviction that people were created by God to be in community.
We have seen that globalization is a problem because it has taken our roots from us. In subsuming the local into the universal, globalization (the new arm of the nation-state) has stolen our identity as people formed in community. The enlightenment idea that the individual is the basic unit of society has been taken to new extremes in global culture which, via the internet, reality television, and any number of other new distractions and diversions, has not given us a true global community but rather simply a large number of people who lack any true purpose aside from their own whims, needs, and confusions. And it seems today that the confusions far outweigh anything else.
Divorce is one example of this confusion. When families dissolve through divorce, the cause is not necessarily extreme moral failure or even “irreconcilable differences.” I would venture to say that the root cause is a lack of rootedness is a community that cares and is strong enough to help form the critical, theological, and moral capacities necessary to resist current fragmentation. People who are divorced are not inherently bad nor have they committed some terrible crime against God. They have simply been formed on the crooked potters wheel of enlightenment rationalism by the idea that the end of all life is individual happiness. This and other situations bespeak the utter tragedy of the trick played on us by those “demonic forces” named earlier by Newbigin. What Christians must seek to do in today’s culture is answer the question of what – given our current bleak outlook – we can do to develop the imaginative faculties to dream of a different reality.
In the next section we will examine the question of how the church can resist these negative effects of globalization.
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