DAVID LYON
On January 20 1994, religious revival broke out under the flight path of aircraft taking off and landing at Lester B. Pearson International Airport, Toronto. This was no local, indigenous, self-contained event, but a 'blessing' that flowed into, and then out of, Toronto, involving countries worldwide. John Arnott, pastor of the (California-based) Vineyard Fellowship at the airport, acknowledges the contribution of at least two intermediaries of the blessing. In November 1993, during a visit to Argentina, Arnott was prayed for by Assemblies of God minister Claudio Friedzon. The other channel of influence was Rodney Howard Browne, who had experienced 'laughing revival' in South Africa. Browne imparted the blessing to Randy Clark in Rhema Bible Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clark, in turn, was the invited preacher at the Airport Vineyard on that decisive night in January 1994, when the blessing touched down at Toronto.
Within a few months, the blessing had not only spread far and wide from Toronto, but, because of its apparently unique features, it had hit the headlines, first in the UK. Unusual behaviours, such as uncontrolled laughter and falling to the floor, are easily sensationalised. They make good media copy. Although South Africa and Argentina did not figure prominently in the visitor roster, Canadians, Americans and Britons came in large number, plus many from non-English-speaking Asian countries such as Japan. The American connection was weakened to some extent when the Vineyard movement parted company with the airport people (who are now 'The Airport Christian Fellowship'). The blessing crosses religious boundaries, involving Pentecostals, Anglicans, plus about one third from independent and non-denominational churches (Poloma 1996a). But it also arouses controversy and has been accused of divisiveness.
The Toronto Blessing offers opportunities for considering some of the relations between globalization and religion. It has manifestly global connections, and evidences diversity. Whether the latter will be embraced in new alliances, or alternatively, will splinter the movement, remains to be seen. It raises questions about class, ethnicity and gender in glocalized contexts. But it also raises questions of 'media effects'. Do such events as the Toronto Blessing attract a disproportionate amount of media attention, not only because of the supposedly strange phenomena, but also because, despite glossolalia, the predominant language of interaction is English, and because a major North American city is its hub? Could this northern variant of Pentecostalism distract attention from other, perhaps more truly global manifestations of the same religious tendency?
Of course, other religious events and processes could also be used as a focus for this debate. The mass suicide in March 1997 in the Heaven's Gate cult, for instance, became instant world news through newspapers, television, and the Internet. Indeed, the local event in the San Diego area was much more successful in drawing attention to the cult than the evangelistic efforts undertaken by Heaven's Gate in 1995, when hostility and ridicule was the main response (Kapica 1997: A-7). Are events like this and the Toronto Blessing primarily 'local'-Heaven's Gate devotees resided in a California mansion-or 'global'- in the sense that the events have a world-wide 'life of their own' as a flow of information? A related question may be asked of the Rushdie affair. Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie became a cause celebre following a fatwa pronounced against him in Iran the 1980s, because of his alleged disrespect for Islam in The Satanic Verses. Religious authority clearly has ongoing power in the modern world. This case also raises questions about whether fundamentalism is merely a Western, Christian-based, phenomenon, or something more global in scope.
When the strong secularization thesis held sway it was fairly easy to ignore religious activities as supposedly declining features of the social world. Today, that has changed, and the question now is, how are these pervasive and palpably religious activities best considered, sociologically speaking? In particular, is there a trend towards globalized religion, where increasing homogeneity and sameness is the order of the day? Or is religion dividing into localised fragments and sectarian splinters? Is difference multiplying? The viewpoint argued here is that neither position is particularly helpful on its own. Neither, by it self, explains the Toronto Blessing, Heaven's Gate suicide, or the Rushdie affair. Rather, both local distinctiveness and global generality are simultaneously apparent, in interconnected ways (Urry 1995: 152-62).
This seeming paradox may be explored using Roland Robertson's concept of 'glocalization' to try to capture some of the complexities of the 'local-global' theme (Robertson 1995). The concept began life as a Japanese business technique-dochachuka-for adapting a global outlook to local conditions. Such micromarketing does not simply conform itself to local conditions, of course; it helps to construct consumers for commodities. One could even say that glocalization encourages consumers to create themselves, to develop their own styles and tastes. Robertson extends the use of this concept into the cultural sphere, although he acknowledges that economics is more deeply bound up with the cultural than many have been prepared to admit.
Glocalization is in turn tightly tied to another process; the cultural shifts often described as 'postmodern'. Postmodernity has to do, in part, with a global overproduction of images, differences, truths and objects, which leads to a questioning of more conventional, taken-for- granted cultural realities. Postmodernity also refers to an intensification of cultural contacts that help to erode older boundaries or raise doubts about traditional ways of doing things. The chief danger of using the term 'postmodern', however, is that the 'modern' might thus appear to be superseded. The view is taken here that the modern persists, only in altered conditions, which may be viewed variously as post-, high-, meta-, or hyper-modern (Lyon 1994). The point is that these cultural shifts are bound up with glocalization, in which signs, individuals and commodities travel more freely, to produce a blurring of boundaries.
It is not insignificant, either, that the local-global theme is also important within the sphere of religious discourses of various kinds. For instance, Japanese interest in the universal and particular, expressed today in dochachuka, is deep-seated and long-lived. And in the famous (sixth century BCE) vision of Ezekiel, where the 'wheels within wheels' are attached to a kind of chariot-throne, the idea is that God, though universally mobile, nevertheless appears and acts locally. Again, the paradox is present that finds God in specific places and also everywhere. Might this turn out to be another of those fascinating socio-theological parallels that throw light on the phenomena in question? (See e.g., Martin 1997) In this case, it is noteworthy that a means of movement is described, albeit in visionary terms; the chariot-throne. In what follows, particular attention is paid to the role of modern means of movement; now, not only transport but also communication and information technologies (CITs).
In order to explore these themes, several strategies are adopted. Firstly, the conceptual groundwork is laid, in a discussion of glocalization, flows, and sacriscapes. Secondly, the Toronto Blessing phenomena are used as a case study, in which these three concepts can be tried out and illustrated. This does, of course, skew the discussion towards Christian-based examples of glocalization. Thirdly, some implications for further study of religion and globalization are considered. This refers back to emerging trends and to the challenges-both analytical and practical-of glocalization for religion.
glocalization, flows and sacriscapes
Three concepts are proposed as offering some very useful ways of considering the theme of religion and the global-local debate. The first, 'glocalization', points up the interconnection between the local and the global. It punctures the inflated views of globalization as some mere macro-level socio-economic process involving 'world-systems' that either do not touch the everyday lives of ordinary people in local places, or, if they do, merely impose alien pressures upon them. Rather, the local and the global are mutually dependent. This sets in place the broad analytical context.
The second, 'flows', is used effectively by Manuel Castells (1989, 1996), where he tries to transcend traditional thinking about relatively fixed and stable systems-of economic life, especially-and stresses the sense of fluidity and flux in social analysis. Entrepreneurial networks, in which relationships flow between nodes, makes place less economically, but not socially, significant. Thus one-time decision-centres lose autonomy in the network, creating a 'dysjuncture' between the global economy and local communities. The term 'flows' is also used by Arjun Appadurai who also talks of global cultural 'scapes' (Appadurai 1990)-the building blocks of 'imagined worlds' created by social groups of diverse kinds, from transnational corporations to ethnic neighbour hoods. The concept of 'flows' helps us move beyond the idea of 'society' (as nation-state) that was the taken-for-granted analytical sociological (and often historical) focus of modern times.
The third concept, 'sacriscapes' is Malcolm Waters's way of trying to make good an apparent gap in Appadurai's set of 'scapes' (namely, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes). Although he does not elaborate the theme at length, Waters observes that the great world religions, with their monotheism and universal claims, have had globalizing tendencies, seen in the Ottoman Empire or in Christendom (Waters 1995). But in modern times, processes such as the growth of individualism, the Western splitting apart of church-and-state, and the reduction of religion to Sunday-and-church, have fostered new modes of religious activity-in Waters's view, ecumenist and fundamentalist. The term 'sacriscapes', then, refers to the flows of religious beliefs and practices.
The concept of glocalization helps to deflect attention from mere globalism as an approach. It is easy to see how the McLuhanesque 'global village' might be seen as a product of burgeoning communication and information technologies (CITs), for, today, CITs are the single most significant means of breaking down barriers to communication, and thus of making the world a single place. Moreover, American CIT companies are world leaders, and through them, only a few of the world's remotest places remain ignorant of Disney, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola. Forms of economic and cultural imperialism are undoubtedly visible here, and negative responses to them are fully understandable.
Globalism often resonates with an economic triumphalism, that rejoices each time a new franchise or outlet is opened in some previously untouched country. It is thus newsworthy when McDonald's moves into Moscow as communism moves out, or when curried or Kosher burgers appear in Delhi or Jerusalem. But the same kind of language is heard of 'global' evangelism and church-planting (it this thinly veiled economic expansionism, or have corporations adopted a secular 'unreached peoples' approach?). At a World Evangelization Fellowship (WEF) meeting in Abbotsford, British Colombia in May 1997, Jun Vencer announced that 'We've come to celebrate the globalization of the church' (Christian Week, May 27 [1997]). But what exactly was being celebrated? It is clear from reports of the WEF meeting that politically and culturally sensitive local initiatives, not some off-world vapour trails from jetsetting evangelists, were the focus of much discussion.
Globalism (and globalization) is misleading, for a number of reasons. The main one is that, as in Fukuyama's 'end of history' theorem, a certain complacent assumption about having reached a single culminating point prevails. This is curious in the light of the perceived sense of speeding-up of the rate of change. Even if global conditions are seen as being in tension, as in Benjamin Barber's graphic depiction of 'Jihad vs McWorld,' American influence is still seen as predominant (in the McWorld symbol). Yet other powerful impulses exist. The localism of Japanese marketing, even though it carries with it far fewer cultural images, directs an increasing number of transnational business strategies, well beyond Japan. And, as Mike Featherstone observes, 'Brazilianization' could be seen as another important trend, towards social zoning, and the dual cities of very rich and very poor (Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995: 9). Globalism seems to involve not only Westernization and Americanization but Japanization and Brazilianization as well.
In more recognisably religious terms, certain grand themes may discerned, operating on a global level. Various authors have concluded that current trends actually produce an interest in what might be thought of as at least quasi-religious matters. The state, for instance, in taking responsibility for life-issues, internally, and questions of human rights, national identities, and so on, externally, confronts directly issues of humanness (Robertson 1985). Anthony Giddens takes this further, speculating that universal or global values are becoming important, particularly around questions of the survival of humanity or of the planet (Giddens 1990). And Peter Beyer, in his study of religion and globalization, argues that a 'global civil religion is both possible and likely' (Beyer 1994: 227), and that this could provide the context for local cultures.
But closer analysis of cultural globalization reveals great diversity and difference, raising serious questions for the coherence of any so-called 'global society'. Whether a Durkheimian normative integration or common cultural values could ever become dominant in a global setting is a very moot point. Global society, if such an entity exists, would relate to the rapid expansion of ClTs, and their capacity to bind time and space, along with world-wide economic activity. But in local situations, these do not themselves necessarily promote cultural homogeneity. Indeed, just the opposite seems to be the case. As Featherstone observes, glocal marketing, dual cities and cultural syncretism suggest trends away from singularity and sameness (Featherstone 1995: 9-14). A good case can be made for an oscillation between local and global-or at least panregional-influences in any given location (Ranger 1993).
Whereas once the West could count on having hegemonic control over a fairly large area of the globe, such is no longer the case. The shifting balance of power away from the West has allowed other voices to be heard, as postcolonial theory and analysis has demonstrated (Vattimo 1988). While voices from the margins have become more audible, their identities have also emerged as more mixed than was conventionally imagined. Black people, for instance, are both inside and outside Western, modern culture, whether in Europe or North America. They stand partly as a product, partly a denial of that Western, modern project (Featherstone 1995: 11). Similarly, aboriginal peoples of Canada or Australia, are also in but not of the modern nation-state. These increasingly audible 'other voices' are heard, more frequently than Western social scientists like to acknowledge, speaking with religious tones.
It is by no means clear that Christian churches, as the predominant religious groupings of Western modernity, have come to terms with this situation. Liberation rheology, during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, expressed some Christian anxieties about, and rejection of, colonialism. But the theologies themselves were often rooted in Western, modern soil, and do not today seem to express the aspirations or cultural distinctiveness of peoples once touched by them. Certain forms of missiology, no doubt chastened by anthropological critique, provide sensitive accounts of how boundaries are crossed between faith and its absence (Noll 1996: 1). But what may actually be found, in Latin America, Africa, or the Pacific Rim, are great varieties of local expression, often in syncretist forms. Cultural fragmentation and the 'collapse of symbolic hierarchies' seem rather to be the (dis)order of the day (Featherstone 1995: 13). This points up, again, the links between the global and the postmodern experience.
But it is not clear, either, that sociologies and anthropologies of religion have come to terms with globalizing circumstances. Much writing still seems to assume that what occurs in the western, especially Anglo-Saxon, world is of prime significance, and that classic dilemmas that supposedly bedevil western forms of religiosity return to haunt the global scene. Hence Malcolm Waters (1995), among others, sees a growing dichotomy between ecumenist and fundamentalist religious forms in global contexts, an idea not so very far removed from the Bergerian quandary of modernity, between accommodation and resistance. Christian religious forms in non-Western countries are often taken to be merely the products of western imperialism. Yet where Christianity, especially in its Pentecostal forms, is growing most rapidly (Latin America, Africa, the Pacific Rim), it is indigenous growth, that actually sends many more missionaries to other countries than they receive.
The older, modernist construction of cultural order is melting like a frozen river in springtime. Fresh movements are breaking up the ice-pack, leaving fragments to float free, finding new but temporary attachments within the flows. In place of a fairly clear identification of members of nation states, of insiders and outsiders, and of social and cultural hierarchies, there is now much more ambivalence and ambiguity. There may be connections and networks, but these are much more fluid than fixed. Flows of influence, of common interests, or of cultural tastes, may be discerned more readily than the categories of 'class' or 'society' that once characterised sociological analysis. These flows relate to what Benedict Anderson calls 'imagined communities' (1991), where there exists a sense of belonging and fellowship attached to certain symbols that are significant for forming a collective memory. Appadurai's 'flows' involve ethnoscapes (persons such as migrant workers, students, tourists, refugees), technoscapes (CITs, machines), finanscapes (stock market data, money), mediascapes (TV, radio, satellites, newspapers, the Internet) and ideoscapes (political ideas). The kinds of social grouping that result are described by Michel Maffesoli in The Time of the Tribes (1995). Particularly in large metropolises, Maffesoli finds situations 'swarming with heterogeneous values'.
In the light of this palpable polytheism is it perhaps surprising that Appadurai says nothing of 'sacriscapes'-flows of religious beliefs and practices. Yet these are also of increasing importance in today's world. Much secularization theory, produced earlier in the twentieth century, mistook the deregulation of religion for the decline of religion. Noting the falling rates of membership in, adherence to, and social influence of conventional organised religion in Western, modern countries, such theorists often assumed that the religious life in general was contracting. In terms of Christianity, however, it became clear that religion was, rather, being restructured (Wuthnow 1988). That term fitted well the US situation, at least. In some European countries and Canada, where churchgoing had fallen off since the 1960s, one could speak of 'believing without belonging' (Davie 1994), hinting at a shift away from 'structure' altogether. Yet there may be scope for what Daniele Hervieu-LŽgr calls 'affective parishes'-religious neo-tribes that have lost their connection to place but nonetheless operate as 'community'. Religion, in its post-institutional phase, seems to have become more a 'cultural resource' than a fixed, identifiable entity (Beckford 1989).
Rather in the style of Beyer, Waters sees one response to postmodernizing and globalizing trends as the emergence of a humanistic ecumenism, the search for unifying principles and common religious culture. Planetary theology, Gaia, and other such movements might answer to this, but at a grassroots level, other responses are much more likely. Indeed, the ecumenical turn could well be viewed by some as another evidence of the relativizing tendency of postmodernism. Cosmic universalism and credal vagueness probably go hand-in-hand. Such sacriscapes would seem to offer some attractive possibilities, seen best in the varieties of New Age outlook, which are not incompatible with postmodern or metamodern culture (Lyon 1996). They can also be appropriated by organizations-such as IBM-as a means of showing an appreciation of the spiritual, the human, or the natural, within the world of capitalist technoculture.
But contemporary sacriscapes may just as easily challenge or resist postmodernizing trends. Over against the disembedding of tradition and the (post)modern attenuation of meaning systems, fundamentalism offers some apparently solid alternatives. Fundamentalism also offers relief from the agonies of choice presented by consumer(ist) culture. Such sacriscape flows may depend upon ClTs-for the dissemination of voice, image, music, or for the Catholic talk-booths that appear in some shopping malls-without necessarily endorsing other aspects of globalized culture. Fundamentalism may embrace such media, while simultaneously denying the pluralism of present day cultures. So fundamentalisms may actually be fostered by postmodernizing trends. When not only formally religious verities, but even the certainties offered by modernity, seem to be breaking down, some means of reorganizing 'all spheres of life in terms of a particular set of absolute values' appear as very attractive alternatives (Lechner 1992: 79).
However, fundamentalisms both differ in type, and are but one feature of global sacriscapes. Conservative Islamic and Jewish movements may be seen as fundamentalisms, but they tend to be territorial and monopolistic just as, to a lesser extent, Catholicism is (Martin 1990: 293). But Protestantism (including fundamentalist varieties) seems to thrive where monopolies are breaking up, such as in Latin America. It has no obvious geographical centres, and is in fact polycentric. It is important to differentiate between Protestantism in its various forms, because some seem to take more easily than others in new contexts. In Latin America, but also on the Pacific Rim, it is Pentecostalism, a variety of Evangelicalism, that is growing fastest. And it is simplistic to equate either Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism with fundamentalism. Latin American Pentecostalism in particular may be viewed as a 'walkout from all that belongs to the status quo, especially the corruptions of the political arena, in order to create a space where local people can run their own show' (Martin 1993: 73), which hardly squares with authoritarian fundamentalism!
What evidence is there that glocalised religious activities are becoming more significant? After all, flows of religious ideas are nothing new. The universal thrust of the great religions depends on just such flows. Yet those earlier flows sometimes brought about much sameness, and a denial of local diversity. Although some Victorian missionaries were famed for 'going native' it was more likely that cultural patterns would be exported, leading to incongruities like mitred bishops in the African bush, which would later fuel the anthropological critique of religion as promoter of Western culture (Walls 1996). Glocalization would lead one to expect that today's flows would be much more diverse, locally flavoured, and dependent, to a greater or lesser extent on travel and communications media. Within them, no doubt one would also find elements of syncretism and experimentation, and also of attempts to contain or to channel change.
toronto airport: a glocalised blessing?
The Toronto Blessing may fruitfully be examined in terms of postmodernizing, glocalizing trends; as a flow, a sacriscape. It is not a national phenomenon (although the particular airport call-sign is not insignificant) and neither does it fall neatly within older categories such as church, sect or denomination (although it could be construed as a new religious movement). On the other hand, it is not exactly global either. Although its influence has reached many countries, this is not deliberate policy (as 'global marketing' would be) so much as the indirect effect of wishing to 'share the blessing of God's love' with others from within a major international communications and transportation node. So the question may be posed: is this a 'glocalised blessing'?
Airports figure prominently in contemporary accounts of the global-postmodern intersection. Airports, like Disneyland, offer a profusion of such themes as simulation, sameness-difference, and high-tech promise. To take the most obvious, airports and Disneyworlds share the characteristic of sameness. Instead of the same lookalike 'world' of Main Street and Mickey Mouse, or the technology-shrine called EPCOT, airports are brightly-lit, closed, self-referring systems of steel-and-cement buildings. To take a flight one must trundle down long, glass-bound corridors, through customs, immigration and security checks, past duty-free stores and gift boutiques and into the plane, via the gatelounge. After several fairly uncomfortable hours in limited seat-space, one emerges into what appears to be exactly the same place: the airport. Was the flight real? Is this placeless space real?
How interesting, then, that one of the best-known religious phenomena of the nineties occurs at an airport! The sense of movement, and the consequent blurring of boundaries-of space, time, and difference-can be viewed through the prism of the airport. Airports are never 'somewhere else,' they seem always to be 'here'. At the same time, they are cultural conduits. They deliver us, eventually' into contexts that are recognisably different (assuming we get beyond the ubiquitous strip malls, high rises, industry parks and suburban sprawls) We must use different currency (assuming we cannot simply use a credit card for all purchases) and speak a different language or local dialect (assuming English has not become the lingua franca here as well).
In 1994, an apparently new religious event took place in the warehousing area of Pearson International Airport at Toronto. What hit the headlines was stories of strange behaviour, especially falling, and 'holy laughter', and the huge crowds-including international travellers-that were quickly attracted to the scene. The church itself was then part of the California-based Vineyard network, and those headlines appeared first in the UK, starting with a Sunday Telegraph story in June 1994. The Canadian setting seemed, superficially, almost incidental to the action. By late 1995, however, the Vineyard churches disassociated from Toronto, and the renamed Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship went more-or-less amicably on its own way. The 'Toronto Blessing' (hereafter, 'Blessing') became an indigenous, if widely networked, local church.
The airport setting was significant, because it put the action neatly at the centre of a travel hub, of both international travel and ground transportation. As John Lovelace suggests, the Blessing is the 'jet-age version of the frontier camp meetings' (quoted in Hindmarsh 1995: 5). Out-of-town visitors come from many countries (over 25 in the first year) in droves (300,000 by mid-1996, 10% of whom were British) (Faith and Order Committee 1996). In the UK, over 4,000 churches are said to be touched by the Toronto Blessing (Hindmarsh 1995: 4). Indeed, it has been suggested that the Canadian context, defined by being 'not American', may have given the Blessing a credibility in the UK that it might have lacked south of the border (Faith and Order Committee 1996). Perhaps the Canadian airport setting is more than incidental to the spread of the Blessing.
Mere accessibility, even with value-added Canadian credibility, does not explain satisfactorily the success of the Blessing. Rather, it has to be understood in relation to a broad constellation of factors, both global and (post)modern. These include issues of communication and of consumerism, each of which may be viewed in both a positive and a negative light by those involved in or sympathetic to the Blessing. These issues are also in constant tension with each other, and are experienced differently in different cultural contexts. If, for instance, the charismatic experience, epitomised in the Blessing, is seen as breaking out of traditional authorities and structures of religious life (to establish a fresh market niche?) then the very use of ClTs and certain fresh kinds of organization could eventually put constraints on the movement, routinizing it in classic Weberian ways (Poloma 1996a).
Without slipping into a modernist-style reductionism, it is worth viewing the Blessing in the light of glocalizing consumer cultures. The deregulation of conventional religion may be seen as part of a more general expansion in the range of specialists and intermediaries who offer a variety of religious (along with other cultural) experiences. Life in the so-called advanced societies has become increasingly aestheticized-in terms of music, art, and concern for the body-and new values, experiences and modes of expression are constantly sought. While this has often been dismissed or attacked as anti-religious hedonism (Romanowski 1996), it may also be harnessed for religious ends. As Featherstone says, 'the sacred is able to sustain itself outside of organized religion within consumer culture' (Featherstone 1991: 126).
The Blessing relies on CITs for contact and for a show-business style, focuses on the body as much as on words, and encourages visits to the airport or to local epicentres (such as Holy Trinity Brompton, in London, UK). Leadership in the movement has attempted to downplay the spectacular and bizarre (farmyard-to-jungle noises, for instance) and has taken steps to reassure the wider Christian community of the Blessing's orthodoxy (Christ-centredness), effectiveness (changing lives), and even historicity (such manifestations have precedents from the first century to the eighteenth and nineteenth century revivals) (Chevreau 1994). But the Blessing is nonetheless known for its unusual features.
CITs help to spread the word about the Blessing. Internationally, this may be seen in the website-voted in the top 5 percent of church websites for 1997!
It would be surprising if there were not also local reasons why the 'fire' is more readily 'caught' in some settings than in others (or to maintain the metaphor, why the flows follow some channels and not others). The Toronto Blessing may, for instance, touch certain groups that evidence few features of California-style Vineyard Fellowship, or even airport-culture cosmopolitanism. In Pensacola, Florida, for example, the relevant sister church is, according to Margaret Poloma, much more like good old southern Pentecostalism, which suggests that the flames of the fire may burn quite differently in different locales, even though the spark may have come via Toronto. Of course, by the same token, Toronto itself could be seen as a special case of Pentecostalism. The Latin American connection reminds us that a much larger and more influential fire burns on the southern part of the continent than the northern.
Word of mouth from Blessing pilgrims helps publicity. Visitors return to their countries of origin, tell the story, and others come to see for themselves. But perhaps 'pilgrim' is the wrong word. In John Bunyan's classic hymn, the pilgrim shows steel-eyed determination to fulfil sacred vows and to 'labour night and day to be a pilgrim'. With the Blessing, things seem quite different. 'Let's check it out' may be the first proposal (Faith and Order Committee 1996), thus linking the trip with experimentation and experience-like going to Graceland, home of Elvis, or returning to Woodstock after 25 years-rather than with the quest of a kingdom, citizenship in which yields identity and purpose. Once, moderns became 'inner worldly pilgrims', still trying to make sense of life, but latterly have encountered more and more difficulties along the way, as persons and things became less solid (Bauman 1996). Today, the tourist replaces the pilgrim, as living-for-the-moment has replaced progress. Perhaps Toronto attracts tourists, not pilgrims.
Tourism also connects with bodily experiences, as fitness-'ready to go' anywhere-supersedes health. Bodily inhibition, characteristic of a more ascetic stage of capitalist development, has given way to a huge focus on and concern with the body in the present (Shilling and Shilling 1997). To be relatively freed from bodily constraints is to construct one's own identity, rather than to fit a mould. The body is not the natural, taken-for-granted object presented by modern ways of thinking. Today, it is more a cultural artefact, a setting for drama (Sampson 1996). The Blessing, it seems, has a specific take on this, and one that sidesteps (but not necessarily denies) the conventional focus on the 'word'. The body falls, jerks, shakes, emits noises and is used in extravagant demonstration as part of the deregulated religious experience. Here, non-verbal experience gives plausibility to the 'message'. At the same time, regulation reappears; care is taken to ensure that only authorised catchers cushion bodily falls, and only approved counsellors pray with the troubled, which is often accompanied by touching the body.
One other feature of the Blessing connects it with the glocalization debate- diversity and (overcoming) division. Leaders express the hope that denominational differences might be submerged, as 'official religion' is transcended by 'revival' and a united front is presented to the world (Hindmarsh 1995: 6). Here we see the dream of global spiritual activity, with the Blessing as a first fruit. Yet alongside this vision, it must be noted that the actual reception of the Blessing in different contexts has been very mixed. Indeed, so far from some peaceable ecumenism emerging, in the UK it is the 'divisiveness' of the movement that had dominated the headlines in the religious press. In the Internet discussions, too, questions have been raised about the theological appropriateness, the historical precedents, and the non-Christian analogues of the Blessing. Among the latter, it has been argued that the Blessing echoes many themes of the ancient occult energy practices of kundalini.
The Blessing may be viewed, then, as one channel for the flows of religious practices and, to a lesser extent, ideas, within the glocalization processes of the late twentieth century. This 'sacriscape' reveals the influences of postmodernizing cultures, with its focus on the spectacle, a lack of bodily inhibition, a varied and contemporary aesthetic, extensive use of CITs, and the encouragement of spiritual tourism. Local congregations, touched by the Blessing, are not discouraged from remaining local, but continued contact with the 'virus' is assumed Though there is also evidence of control-both external and internal-and of expressed desires to be orthodox, this is largely outside the bounds of conventional churches. Even the history that is claimed for precedent is the history of the unusual, the extraordinary, not the history of the amazing intact preservation of a sacred tradition.
glocal sacriscapes and religious prospects
The case of the Toronto Blessing is a good one for exploring the dimensions of contemporary sacriscapes, enabled by today's global circumstances. This particular flow of religious practices, and their associated but perhaps less significant beliefs, blurs national boundaries, using CIT-based media and spiritual tourism. One sees here both some tendencies towards supra-denominational cooperation, and towards local factionalism. Further studies of the reception of the Blessing in particular places would be necessary too see how this works out in practice. But the cultural 'filters' discussed by David Martin with regard to local patterns of secularization would likely operate in similar ways within glocalizing processes (Martin 197S). These would affect tendencies to sameness or diversity in given local settings.
Rather than seeing the social relations of religion merely in conventional terms of fixed or even flexible structural features such as provided by the language of 'denomination' or the 'nation-state', I suggest that concepts such as 'flows' and 'filters' throws new light on what is going on today. Margaret Poloma, for instance, suggests that since the parting of the ways with the Vineyard movement, the partially blocked American conduit could offer new opportunities for a non-American evangelical approach (Poloma 1996b). By detaching the Blessing from the major headquarters of evangelical groups, while at the same time maintaining the global connections and channels, Christian renewal of a fresh type becomes possible. Such deregulation, that allows flows to spill beyond time-honoured boundaries of nation-state and church-structure, speaks at least of the relocation, rather than the mere decline of religion in the postmodern world.
At the same time, challenges to religious practice, if nor actual re-regulation may well occur in these changing circumstances. When Anglican bishops from what used to be called the Third World call in question the acceptance of gays and lesbians as priests within the Episcopal Church in the USA, not only numerical but also moral strength appears to be shifting its centre of gravity. Lest this be thought of as a form of reaction, however, from the same quarter-geographically and theologically-are coming calls for liberation. At the WEF conference in Abbotsford, it was a Kenyan, Judy Mbugua, who argued most strenuously for women to be 'released' for Christian ministry, and David Kima, from Papua New Guinea, who called for credible and compassionate social and political action among evangelicals. What if this were to militate not only against Americanization, but also the Brazilianization mentioned above? Such flows, again enabled by contemporary conduits of communication, signal shifts in the currents of influence whose significance can at present only be dimly perceived.
On the other hand, certain phenomena are clear enough. Although the power of Pentecostalism is underestimated by social scientists both within Latin America (because few Pentecostals hold university positions, and because Pentecostalism may be seen as a threat to Catholic hegemony) and outside (because most descriptive literature is in Spanish and Portuguese) there can be little doubt that, since the 1980s, Pentecostalism has become a force to be reckoned with (Freston 1998). While Protestants comprise 10% of the Latin American population, or some 45 million persons, two-thirds of those are Pentecostals. One country, Brazil, has the second largest evangelical group in the world, after the USA. Growth rates are accelerating in Brazil and Chile. For instance, in Greater Rio the number of Protestant places of worship exceeds that of Catholics, and in the poorest districts the ratio rises to almost seven to one.
All of which makes Featherstone's comments on 'Brazilianization' even more interesting. For while evangelicalism may be associated with the American middle-classes and, to an extent, with the political New Right, in Latin America, especially in Brazil, it has been dubbed the 'option of the poor'. Although Brazilian Pentecostalism began as an American import, it must be remembered that it is comprised mainly of the Azusa Street-exuberant, black, 'primal religiosity'-type, that has been quickly globalized through international networks of counter-establishment religion. So Pentecostalism came from the USA, but from its underside. Freston argues that this helps account for Pentecostalism's rapid spread in the Two-Thirds World; it is a 'globalization from below Here is no abstract theological cosmic Christ, or a quest for common ethical approaches to the environment, but a raw, earthy form of practical empowerment, based in conversion. As Martin says, here is an 'indigenous Protestantism based in the hopes of the Latin American poor' (Martin 1990: 5).
Today, new opportunities present themselves for understanding the development of glocal sacriscapes. On the one hand, within the history and sociology of religion, many more studies are available of actual practices, and forms of networking, as well as the more conventional denominational, parish and biographical studies, that characterise contemporary concern with the sacred. On the other hand, what might be termed the 'cultural turn' within sociology has highlighted a general proliferation of flows and scapes, often analysed in terms redolent of religious language. The latter has also (re)opened debates about the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere, in ways that are illuminating for the sociology of sacriscapes in particular. The work of Featherstone is especially pertinent here. He avoids both the Scylla of economistic approaches to global culture that see it merely as an effect of capitalist production, or a Western export, and the Charybdis of postmodern approaches that claim autonomy for culture, as if economy had nothing to do with Disney, Coca-Cola or, for that matter, Billy Graham.
In an early formulation of the globalization argument, Robertson suggested that several significant phenomena could be placed in this context: growing church-state tensions, the rise of new religious movements (NRMs) and the spread of fundamentalism. Then, Robertson suggested that the release from 'life in society' provided by globalization generates concerns about world order, but also about human identity and selfhood. Growing out of these, he predicted increasing conflict on a 'civil religion' axis, in which movements such as the fundamentalist New Right in the USA try to establish their world-view as the civil religion of America. Such concerns, especially when they are seen in tension with 'world civil religion' problems-the survival of the planet, for example-would, he thought, lead to new religion-politics interactions, in both directions.
Robertson was, and is, a good guide. Since the mid-1980s a number of studies has appeared, examining the growth of globalized fundamentalisms. How they are understood depends partly on one's view of the relation of modernity to globalization. If globalization is seen as a product of modernity (as, for instance, Giddens understands it 11990]), then the spread of the latter may be read as a threat to traditional social systems-notably, it is said, Iran-that then generates fundamentalistic reactions. If, on the other hand, the relation is reversed, such that modernity is seen as an outgrowth of increasing globality, to which Protestant Christianity contributed and contributes still, then the equation becomes more complex. It was Iran, after all, that provided some early fuel for the fire of secularization revisionism. Here was a country becoming more modern and more religious at one and the same time.
The question of religion-and-politics, on a world scale, becomes more, not less significant. It takes myriad forms, though patterns are discernible. We have already seen that global circumstances have implications for secularization. As noted above, religious conservatism has appeared in several quartets over the past two or three decades, but with different dynamics, depending on the religious form. In Latin America, the old monopolies-in-conflict-Catholic and Enlightenment-have found their power eroding, permitting the expansion of Protestantism, among other things, in the cultural realm. Where once Puritanism offered the 'calling' concept that helped produce capitalism and bureaucracy, and Pietism a 'calling' concept that led to missions, now Pentecostalism offers a new kind of 'calling' to mutual support, healing and betterment, spread through story and song, in biography and migration. It is easier to export and adaptable enough to be indigenized, although as yet its political consequences are unclear. What seems indisputable is that as life itself becomes politicized, religion and power are reunited, and the political powers-that-be will increasingly have to take account of the 'religious factor' (Robertson 1989).
Similarly, in the matter of the increasingly central self, now cut loose from traditional social collectivities, we see glocalizing tendencies. The construction of identities in relation to more fluid social groupings appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, at least in places where consumer culture has taken a firm hold. This is seen in the New Age movement, for instance (1996). Hervieu-Leger also discusses this as the growing autonomy of believing subjects within high modernity (Hervieu-LŽgr 1997: 1), cut loose as they are from traditional constraints of regulated religion, and open to a cosmopolitan range of influences. She points to the emerging phenomenon of religious identities being constructed around a 'bricolage' of beliefs, along with new forms of religious sociability.
Some religious groups may capitalise on this, as happens in parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. In Korea, sports activities may be combined with Christian forms of religion. Within Pentecostalism, in several contexts, the expressive individualism of high or postmodern situations is contained and incorporated (Martin 1990). Of course, the bricolage may have ethnic aspects to it. While Bolivian Assemblies of God Pentecostals split away from that American denomination, in West Africa similar groups are known for their promotion of inter-ethnic marriage (Freston 1998). In other religious groups, different patterns may emerge. Muslim youth in Canada, for instance, increasingly identify with a global 'ummah' (religious community) rather than ethnic or national groups, even though their parents' identity may be bound up with these (Zaidi 1997; Jacobsen 1997).
That such phenomena are glocal is clear from a number of studies. The use of contemporary music and ClTs within Christian groups is visible not only in the Toronto Blessing movement, the Disneyfied Christian festivals and theme parks in the North Atlantic region, but also in some Asian and Latin American countries. David Martin observes that the old Catholic monopoly has given way to a 'lively pluralism and a huge variety of options' in an 'open market' (Martin 1993). The bricolage is visible here too; people move easily between the worlds of advanced technology and 'healings, exorcisms and providential interventions'. Equally, one finds in this postmodernizing context, consumer-and leisure oriented patterns of behaviour among believers, but also patterns of control and constraint that rein them in. As Martin notes, the antecedent cultures still play a great part in determining local outcomes.
All of which returns us to the local. Theorists of globalization all too often fail to keep their feet on the ground. Indeed, some globalization theory is patently elitist either in its obeisance to the supposed dictates of a global economy, or in its stress on patterns of consumption, of travel and tourism. It already assumes a certain standard of living and a desire to travel-not to mention an available visa. Yet much movement is today's world is that of migrant workers and refugees; the alien and marginalized Other. Just as secularization theories were often elitist, for example assuming forms of abstract rationality probably shared little beyond the (male) academics expounding the theories, so globalization theories can give a misleading, elitist impression.
In the end, religious flows and sacriscapes originate in or at least connect with some place or places. And however far they travel, they are still experienced in particular places, where people live. Thus globalization is, as John Urry observes, 'associated with the dynamics of relocalization' (Urry 1995: ch. 10). However far-flung the charismatic neo-tribes or even the virtual (religious) community on the Internet, local, grass-roots manifestations of religious life still require careful study-albeit as part of the local-global nexus in conditions of post- or high- modern cultural change. The work of Nancy Ammerman on local congregations is instructive here (Ammerman 1996).
If local conditions and cultural patterns do still filter global flows, and if, as is increasingly the case, local groups are also aware of the effects of distant events, then resistance and receptivity are reflexive processes. The cultural hegemony of US media, for instance, is not everywhere passively absorbed, any more than religious hegemony is. Brazil has the second largest Christian TV enterprise in the world, after the USA. What began as import substitution now offers independent networks. The CITs that mediate the modern and the global to polytheistic tribes may also lubricate the 'wheels within wheels' that transport the universal-local Christian God.
In a Christian (Mennonite) study of French urban locales, Frederic de Conninck demonstrates a profound understanding of contemporary consumption and style, and of glocal Brazilianization (without using that term) (de Connick 1996). He also connects it with classic Christian concern for the marginalized, the homeless, the stateless, as incarnated 'good news'. Thus here, in an 'advanced society' setting, one finds an echo of the 'globalization from below' that characterises vibrant new religious movements in Two-Thirds World contexts. Such work, contextualized and appropriated locally, may contribute not only to the persistence but the radicalization of contemporary sacriscapes.
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