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CHAPTER 6 Modernism and Multiculturalism

At the turn of the 20th century, Pope Pius X (1907) declared modernism to be the synthesis of all heresies. It “lays the axe to the root, not the branch,” he said as he excommunicated a number of scholars and set up vigilance committees to report heretics to Rome. The Vatican severely suppressed biblical scholarship in the Catholic tradition until the Second Vatican Council half a century later.

Of course, in one sense the pope was right. Modernism is a synthesis of all heresies that goes to the root of faith traditions, challenging the very notion of dogma. As reprehensible as we might find his suppression of scholarship, he was correct about the profound shaking of the roots that modernism brought to Catholicism and to religion in general as it entered the human stage as part of the cultural and intellectual package accompanying the birth of modern Europe. From the pope’s position at the top of the church hierarchy, his efforts to smash modernism, beginning with those priests under his control, was a rational decision, even if we might see it differently. The church would never be the same.

The deep and radical changes associated with the globalization of social life are occurring with even more rapidity as we begin a new millennium. When social organization changes, so does religious organization; new ideas, rituals, and societies emerge through mutual, dialectical interaction. Societies have always changed, especially when they encountered others, but never have the scale and scope of cross-culture encounter been so widespread or intense. When culture groups interact, the encounter changes each of them, even if they are of unequal power. The impact of the agricultural revolution on human life unfolded over many centuries, but the industrial revolution immediately transformed humanity in profound ways. Although considerable continuity exists between the cultures created by the modern world’s industrial, scientific, and democratic revolutions on the one hand and those of the early 21st century on the other, many now argue that we are living in a postmodern era that is undergoing another transformation as profound as any in human history.

In this chapter, I examine the two great cultural upheavals of the past two centuries: (1) the twin crises for religion of modernism and multiculturalism and (2) the diverse responses they have provoked among the world’s cultures and religions. They constitute nothing less than what I like to call “cultural tectonics”—like the shifting of tectonic plates deep under the earth’s surface that cause earthquakes, the deep cultural shifts of our time are shaking the very cultural ground on which we stand.

From Local to Cosmopolitan

Each of the world’s major religions had its roots in a local primal religion, usually connected with a particular tribe or clan and a specific geographical location. Each tradition became more cosmopolitan as it diffused, encountering and incorporating other cultural forms along the way. Even today, most of the world’s population never move more than 50 miles away from their birthplace; the cultural changes at the founding of the world’s religions usually involved courageous men and women stepping outside the boundaries of their comfortable lives and moving into new territory, geographically and spiritually.

These roots did not disappear as the tradition changed over time but established the form that influenced each religion’s later shape. In a similar transformation process, each of the world religions has increased in its internal diversity and its structural differentiation. Finally, each religion has had to struggle with the two-horned dilemma of modernism: (1) the challenges of cultural pluralism and (2) scientific criticism. All these aspects of the local–cosmopolitan shift have had profound cultural and organizational consequences for each tradition. I will now look more closely at some of the specific transformations in religion that the phenomenon called “modernism” has brought about.

Internal Diversity and Structural Differentiation

The further a tradition travels from its roots, the more diverse it becomes. Each major religious tradition incorporates a wide range of beliefs under a broad, abstract sacred canopy and thus becomes diverse in terms of beliefs, rituals, and institutions. The reason for this development is no mystery. The primal faith of each religion’s origins was constructed along relatively homogeneous lines by a group of fairly like-minded people who lived close to nature in specific ecological conditions. As culture groups migrate, carrying their religious traditions with them, or as invading tribes conquer them or they defeat their neighbors, people reevaluate and reconstruct their worldview and corresponding ethos to incorporate different perspectives and adapt to new data. These groups borrow features of other traditions and then reformulate and strengthen their tradition in direct opposition to new challenges. Sometimes the culture changes dramatically as the result of a new technology or environmental condition. Among the Siksika in North America, for example, the introduction of the horse disrupted collective, egalitarian buffalo-hunting practices by allowing individuals to obtain their own buffalo independent of the group. A hierarchy developed favoring those who had horses, and buffalo-centered egalitarian religious rituals deteriorated.

The major religious traditions often adapted to new settings through syncretism or co-optation: Chinese folk Gods became Buddhas, and local African deities became Christian saints. Even Judaism, which remained an ethnic religion with strictly guarded boundaries, adapted to local conditions so that a Palestinian and a Babylonian Talmud were produced early in the Common Era, and contemporary Ashkenazi Jews differ from their Hasidic brothers and sisters. After centuries of adaptation, each religious tradition has become remarkably diverse; patterns of rituals and beliefs vary widely around the globe and sometimes even between congregations in the same neighborhood.

The process of structural differentiation is a relatively recent phenomenon that involves the creation of specific institutions to fulfill different functions; it can occur both within the religion and between religious and other spheres of life. As societies become larger and more complex, the division of labor increases (see Durkheim, 1893/1933) so that specialized institutions carry out specific functions. Functions once performed by religious organizations are now carried out elsewhere (e.g., in public school systems), and religious institutions have taken on a specialized role, concentrating more on private than on public life.

The structural differentiation of the social order itself is a striking characteristic of modern societies and has been the subject of much scholarly and political debate. Early sociologists made much of the difference between premodern and modern society, the “Great Transformation” from preindustrial to industrial society in Western Europe during the 19th century, when countless peasants were uprooted from their family and village