Testing Pluralism Religion and the Social Order An O cial Publication of the Association for the Sociology of Religion General Editor William H. Swatos, Jr. VOLUME 23 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/reso Testing Pluralism Globalizing Belief, Localizing Gods Edited by Giuseppe Giordan and William H. Swatos, Jr. LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Testing pluralism : globalizing belief, localizing gods / edited by Giuseppe Giordan, William H. Swatos, Jr. pages cm. – (Religion and the social order, ISSN 1061-5210 ; VOLUME 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25447-3 ((hardback) : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-25475-6 (e-book) 1. Religious pluralism–History–21st century. 2. Religions–History–21st century. I. Giordan, Giuseppe. II. Swatos, William H. BL85.T35 2013 201'.5–dc23 2013016359 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1061-5210 ISBN 978-90-04-25447-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25475-6 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhof Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Introduction: Testing Pluralism: Globalizing Belief, Localizing Gods . 1 William H. Swatos, Jr. and Giuseppe Giordan 1. Mixed Results for Orthodoxy: The Impact of Contemporary Cultural Change on the Acceptance of Key Catholic Beliefs and Moral Teachings by Australian Mass Attenders. 11 Robert Dixon 2. Pluralism and Rituals in Italian Catholicism: The Spiritual Approach of Renewal in the Spirit. 39 Emanuela Contiero 3. A World in Motion: The Plurality of Orthodox Churches in Italy . 57 Giuseppe Giordan 4. The Sikhs in Italy: A Growing Heterogeneous and Plural Presence 75 Barbara Bertolani 5. Religious Pluralism and the 2008 Obama Vote . 95 Anthony J. Blasi, Barbara Kilbourne and Oscar Miller 6. Evangelical Perspectives on Latino Immigration . 107 Barbara L. Loach 7. New Landscapes of Religious Diversity in Mexico . 125 Rene de la Torre and Christina Gutirrez Ziga 8. From Internal to External Pluralism: The Anglican Metamorphosis. 149 William H. Swatos, Jr. 9. Pluralism and Implicit Religion . 161 Edward Bailey 10. The Field of Religions in Norwegian Pluralist Society . 175 Neils Reeh 11. Ethnic Religious Politics in Israel: The Case of the Shas Party . 193 Anat Feldman vi contents 12. Spiritual Pluralization and Scientists in Italy . 211 Stefano Sbalchiero Contributors . 233 introduction TESTING PLURALISM: GLOBALIZING BELIEFS, LOCALIZING GODS William H. Swatos, Jr. and Giuseppe Giordan It cannot be doubted that the last fty years have seen an enormous change in the nature of religious belief and practice on a global scale, largely facil- itated by the relative ease of movement of persons throughout the world. Only a small number of countries still stringently restrict travel, which has itself become more and more afordable. Not only do people travel as either tourists or pilgrims, but large population segments see economic advan- tages to be obtained by leaving their countries of origin and going perhaps thousands of miles to achieve what they perceive as a “better life.” To a con- siderable extent these peoples also take with them various aspects of the culture of their countries of origin. Not least among these cultural assets are their religious traditions that give them a common bond among them- selves, perhaps even of greater solidity than was the case in their country of origin. In the earliest years of this half-century, social scientists in the West tended to use Max Weber’s concept of secularization as an explanation for what was happening. Westerners seemed to be turning away from the idea of the world as an “enchanted garden” and toward what might be termed more direct, this-worldly cause-and-efect explanations. This approach dove- tailed nicely in some respects with the advance of science—medical break- throughs, atomic energy, and space exploration. Things that were the stuf of great ction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became even greater facts as they became part of what was more and more the life- world of Western civilization. As the century ended, however, the products of these advances also became more widely available throughout the world, such that peoples of the so called “second” and “third” worlds could also participate in some measure in the new world order. A greater exchange of many diferent kinds of ideas, not solely those of religion, was a part of this process. For example, quite apart from the speci cally religious aspects of healing, a variety of alternative medical or healing practices from out- side the West have been introduced in western societies. Some of these are 2 william h. swatos, jr. and giuseppe giordan explicitly medical, such as acupuncture, while others involve more mind/ body associations, as for example yoga. Keeping the roughly half-century frame in mind, now, we can see a kind of dialectic between the global and the local, sometimes termed “glocal,” that has impacted religions and religious people around the world. The chapters in this volume illustrate in speci c cases the ways in which the changed environment of the postmodern both efects and is efected by the historic religions and the people who make them come alive. If we begin by looking at the chapters by Robert Dixon and Emanuela Contiero, we see two quite diferent kinds of processes of change in Roman Catholicism. A simplistic secularist might say that Catholicism is withering away in Australia, but a more careful analysis would suggest that while the practice of Catholic religious obligations among Anglo-Australians is declin- ing, the practice of the Catholic faith by immigrants from India (includ- ing Sri Lanka) and the Philippines is relatively healthy. What’s more, these Catholics are younger Catholics than those participating who are of Aus- tralian birth, and this would suggest, then, that the Indian and Philippine Catholics who are participating at a higher rate will eventually occupy a more and more central place in the life of the parishes where they are located as the Australians age on the one hand and the younger immigrant Catholics add even further youth to their parishes by following Catholic norms regarding contraception. In this sense, one can perhaps more accu- rately talk about a “change process” in Australian Catholicism that is being efected as much by immigrant faith as it is by secularizing tendencies among that part of the Australian population whose immigration issued from Western Europe. Emanuela Contiero’s chapter casts further doubt on the secularizing tendencies that might be associated with Catholicism in Italy if all parishes as a whole are analyzed. She focuses instead on a movement within Italian Catholicism, Renewal in the Spirit. If we look simply at this movement, we see anything but secularization. Instead, we see worship that is infused by both the charismatic movement and a drive to involve laity in a life-style experience that seeks to restore the dynamism of the early Christians. On the one hand, it is possible to point out that the number of participants in Renewal in the Spirit is very small compared to the total number of people in Italy who would claim to be Catholic. On the other hand, however, the historical argument from the earliest years of Christianity would suggest that the church may well have been at its greatest spiritual strength when it was comparably smaller than larger; that is, the bureaucratizing tendencies of large organizations run counter to the enthusiasm of the elect. While testing pluralism: globalizing beliefs, localizing gods 3 there certainly does need to be a critical mass of persons to enable the enthusiasm of an event to grow, it is not necessarily the case that bigger is always better. Smaller religious communities of a few hundred may be far more efective in their spirituality than large parishes of thousands, where in some cases it is hard to tell the church from city hall except for architecture. Two other chapters also look at religious developments in Italy. We know that historically a division in the Christian Church took place between East and West, and Rome became the center of the Western Church. Across time, there have been greater or lesser eforts by the two churches to repair that breach, however these largely had a formalistic character. In other words, the Eastern and Western churches at their best agreed to let each other have a church building in major cities of each other’s nations somewhat like reli- gious embassies. The various diplomatic corps and their entourages would form the core of these churches’ congregations, to which then visitors from the diferent nations could also come for worship and pastoral care. This all began to change in the last fty years, when many Orthodox Christians, especially from Romania, but not only so, began emigrating to Italy to nd work. Giuseppe Giordan documents that there are over 1,400,000 Ortho- dox presently in Italy.