Discerning Creation’s Truth: Globalization and the Church – by Cynthia Holder Rich

Read Kathryn Poethig’s essay, “Religion and Globalization”
Read Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth’s essay, “Globalization: What’s at Stake?”

Globalization: Our Era’s “Grande Idée”?

When I visited Madagascar[1] in 2010, the sight of many high school students carrying cellphones and visiting cybercafés indicated a significant change since our family lived on the island in the 1990’s and early 2000s. Through the internet and cellphones, ideas and approaches to life common in the US, Europe and Africa are being transmitted to the young people of the country, a context once much more isolated and insulated from ideas and understandings originating beyond the island’s shores.  The urban youth of Madagascar have received the influence of global forces, and now dress very much the same as youth in Chicago, Paris, or Tokyo, and listen to music familiar to their peers in  many places around the world.

Another sign of change on that trip arrived in the box lunch on the plane from Johannesburg.  Rio Tinto, a British-based mining company with holdings and operations in a number of towns and offshore in Madagascar, offered a factsheet in the boxtop for potential investors, describing the rich mineral resources already found and the company’s expectation of more to come on the island.  Rio Tinto’s environmental and labor practices have raised concerns in Madagascar and in many contexts.  Additionally, their workforce, including many guest workers from other countries in southern Africa, is given partial credit for increasing rates of HIV infection on the island.  Madagascar used to be noted by public health officials mainly for three types of disease, all exacerbated by malnutrition: malaria, tuberculosis and other respiratory disease, and diarrheal diseases (particularly in infants and young children).   The island’s isolation offered protection, however, from HIV and AIDS.  In recent years, concerns among health professionals have risen because of the great increase in the number of guest workers from high-prevalence HIV infection contexts, including a number of countries in southern Africa.  The arrival of great and growing numbers of guest workers has much increased the sex trade, particularly in coastal communities. This both increases employment opportunities (making Rio Tinto a job-creator in current US political parlance, and thus deserving of government protection) in areas where there are few options, particularly for the uneducated young.  Of course, it also increases risk for the spread of a variety of STDs, including HIV.[2]

These two stories are significantly related through the impacts of globalization on island life.  Cellphones and other electronics are manufactured, cheaply, using resources Rio Tinto and a group of other companies are mining (or seeking to mine) on the coast and offshore in Madagascar; the value of these resources make them worth seeking and have increased the demand for the high-tech products that require them.  So globalization creates, opens, and closes the circle of manufactured demand for manufactured goods and the resources that go into them.  Additionally, globalization continues a trend begun in pre-colonial times – the extraction of valuable resources from poor nations by governments or companies from richer countries, with little concern for the gross environmental impacts nor the burden this places on those who live in the country.

Globalization is often noted as a, or the, “grande idée” of our time.  The high-speed movement of ideas, goods, trade, and people marks many aspects of contemporary life.  Globalization brings awareness of how others live and what they see as desirable and good to previously-isolated regions.  It also moves people to work in places of which they know little, and thus to bring their understandings and assumptions – and their diseases, if they have them – to new regions, affecting a cross-fertilization that creates an ongoing process of evolution and change.

The ability to move people and things faster has been attended by assumptions that anything desired or needed can come to any place quickly.  Much of contemporary life in North America, Western Europe, Asia and other regions is built on the foundational assumption that all that is desired can be obtained when the need arises.

Nothing new in the give and the take

Of course, while the speed at which things and people move is a recent development, the movement of people, ideas and goods around the globe is not new.  People have moved goods on trade routes since ancient times, and people from different regions have shuttled between their homes and other continents, regions and states, bringing their cultural perspectives with them, over the millenia. The globalizing exchanges are not new.  Neither is an inevitable unevenness in the exchange.  The give and take that occurred during the North Atlantic slave trade is replicated in many ways in modern-day sex trafficking.  The ideas and energy that inspired and fostered colonial movements across countries, continents and oceans continues today, visible in the search for resources that can be accessed cheaply in poor countries, and sold at high prices in other parts of the world.

Globalization in these cases can be what theologian Dwight Hopkins terms a “religion” – something in which people put faith and on which they believe they can depend.  The god of this religion, as Hopkins puts it, is “the concentration of monopoly finance capitalist culture”.  This god inspires the very movements of people, goods and ideas that have increased global integration and interdependence.  Worship at the altar of this god has produced, as well, the uneven, inequitable and unjust exchanges, that over the centuries have enslaved some and enriched others, exchanges that continue to do so even today.

Depending on globalization can be risky, as globalization has often proven unreliable.  In one example of the fallibility of globalizing systems and infrastructure, when a tsunami hit Japan earlier this year, supplies of parts for a host of industries became unavailable for some weeks or months.  Globalizing forces have encouraged business not to stock (nor buy, nor pay to warehouse) any significant quantity of needed parts, preferring to have only the parts needed at a particular moment on hand.  In this way, globalization has taught business and industry in many places to count on the uninterrupted flow of resources, which backfires when the unexpected happens.  In other words, as weather, natural disasters, and political and social disruption and crisis are normal features of life on earth, globalizing forces have encouraged false beliefs that are not supported by our own experience or history.  As extremes of weather increase (and are set to further increase, as shown by research reported in November 2011 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), life on earth shows signs of the inherent instability of the high-speed, high-tech, high-consumption style of the materialist system of modern-day globalization.

Discerning the Primary and the Secondary Truth

In Faith in History and Society, Johann Baptist Metz calls believers to two truths cogent to our discussion.  One is Metz’ understanding of the purpose of theology, which is, he says, to act as “an apology for hope”.  Quoting the author of I Peter, who called upon his readers to “be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (3:15, NRSV), Metz argues that theology in our day must act as an apologia for hope which takes into consideration the realities of global economic interdependence.  What does it mean to have hope in a time of gross and growing inequity and injustice?  What is the rational, righteous accounting for hope?  How can we have hope in a world that operates in this way?

We cannot.  Our hope as followers of Jesus is not in a world thoroughly shaped by the theories underpinning globalization, the world Metz calls a “secondary world”.  Metz argues that the world as it is understood to be, and life as popular imagination accepts and believes it to exist, is only a pale and artificial imitation of the real, primary world created by God.  The world in which we live deals death both to those it enslaves and those it enriches and robs the planet of its rich resources, created fully able to feed, clothe, house, and care for all.

Conversely, and in ways that are real and worthy of worship and foundational for hope, the Gospel is a globalizing force for good.  Through Jesus, God began a globalizing movement that was created good, worked to redeem the whole of creation, and continues to call forth good in the world and for the world.  The Gospel is the foundational document for the real, primary world, one which confronts the artificial, death-dealing powers of the secondary world and overcomes this world with the power of life.  The globalizing Gospel does not turn people into production or consumer units.  The Gospel names and respects all people as they are, precious creatures made in the image of God.  The Gospel gives us hope and offers us an accounting which we who follow can offer those seduced by the secondary world’s lies as a compelling, alternative and true narrative.  In this, we have hope.

As believers enter the Advent season of preparation for the coming of the Messiah, the world — the secondary world – enters a season of particularly virulent and vicious consumer activity here in the US.  Last week’s pairing of record Thanksgiving weekend sales and violence among consumers shows the power of this secondary world in moving people away from life.  Those who believe in Jesus are called to respond.

This is a season of preparation – and, more importantly, of witness.  Globalizing forces will continue.  The positive, hopeful, life-giving power of the globalizing Gospel demands from we who know this good news proclamation, celebration and praise.  May we who believe stand in this power and share it with a globalized world in need.

Read Kathryn Poethig’s essay, “Religion and Globalization”
Read Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth’s essay, “Globalization: What’s at Stake?”

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[1] Madagascar is the island off the coast of southeast Africa, visible in the image accompanying this essay.

[2] A recent book by Jennifer Cole, Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (2010, University of Chicago Press), explores the various intersections brought about by globalization, particularly in the growth of the sex trade on the island.