the resurgence of religious and cultural identities in a globalizing world
1. Religion as a reaction against modernization and capitalist consumerism
- Opposition to secularism, moral relativism, and self-indulgence, and reaffirmation of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity, meeting needs unattended to by state bureaucracies.
- Religion could be both a new cultural form to take on the responsibilities old cultural practices could not resolve, e.g. Korean and Latin American Protestantism (98-99); or reaffirmation of tradition among new urban elites, e.g., Islam.
2. Assertion of traditional cultures as result of economic growth.
- Chinese economic development, decline of Communism, and reassertion of Chinese nationalism as new cultural identity.
- Japanese total defeat in World War II and transformation of itself from a military empire to an economic empire with preservation of certain cultural characteristics, e.g. elite rule in politics and economy.
- Assertion of an East Asian collective identity, emphasizing values alternative to Western individualism, etc.
- Islamic resurgence as non-Western countries' way to modernize without necessarily imbibing Western values and consumerism.
- Is the comparison between Islamic revival and Protestant reformation appropriate?