Social Change and Religious Shifts - Shona Chandani

Bouma GD, 2007, “Religious Resurgence, Conflict and the Transformation of Boundaries”, in P Beyer and L Beaman, Eds. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden and Boston.

Gary Bouma’s main focus is managing religious diversity. This article focuses on the recent religious resurgence; on the rhetoric of diversity and the boundaries in religion, their definition and application.

That there us a religious resurgence is no longer a debated issue. This can be seen particularly in Africa and Latin America, also in Asia and even Australia where secular press coverage of religious events has doubled in recent years. Resurgence can be detected among multiple existing faith groups and in the new religious movements of which the meg-church phenomenon is a large part. Several causes can be found for the resurgence; people are becoming dissatisfied with superfluous secularisation while globalization and migration moving people around opening up new spiritual options.

In this article Bouma treats conflict as a subset of competition, what happens when one competitor wants to remove another. Competition and therefore conflict happens not just between religious groups but internally. These internal struggles are a greater focus in this article than inter-religious conflicts. Bouma discusses the “creation of imagined communities of otherness” (page 194), any outside force which unites those under one religious banner, as a solution to both internal and external competition. One example used is the west and Islam, dating back to the crusades. The images created through hero worship of the crusader Knights and demonization of Muslims still influence Christian-Muslim relations today. A larger problem arises when the rhetoric of ‘otherness’ becomes reality.

Bouma also discusses who should and who actually defines boundaries, their significance and how they change. The social significance of religious labels and boundaries can shift with current events. The process of boundary definition and the creation of imagined others is the same, it’s just the groups involved that differ. Boundary definition in post modernity is less legal, less organised and therefore more fluid and volatile than in high modernity because post modernity is characterised by hyper-differentiation. Bouma highlights that one of the functions of conflict is to define boundaries, increase ones knowledge of the centre.

Globalisation has brought a rapid increase in religious diversity in communities. This combined with the religious resurgence means there are going to be more and more communities in the future who are encountering who are not used to it. Most of these interactions will end with greater social cohesion and communication, some will not.

Into the future, Bouma stresses that it’s crucial to maintain a distinction between competition and conflict. It can mean the difference between co-existing and annihilation, the response to a perceived threat will often be very extreme. Boundaries between groups will need to be constantly renegotiated for harmony.