Religion in the Age of Development

religions Article Religion in the Age of Development R. Michael Feener 1, * and Philip Fountain 2 1 2 * Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Marston Road, Oxford OX3 0EE, UK Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand; Correspondence: Received: 9 October 2018; Accepted: 20 November 2018; Published: 23 November 2018



 Abstract: Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which ‘religion’ and ‘development’ interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development. Keywords: Religion; Development; Humanitarianism; Buddhism; Islam; Southeast Asia A Sarvodaya Shramadana work camp has proved to be the most effective means of destroying the inertia of any moribund village community and of evoking appreciation of its own inherent strength and directing it towards the objective of improving its own conditions. A.T. Ariyaratne (quoted in Bond 1992, p. 246) Islam regards law as a tool, not as an end in itself. Law is a tool and an instrument for the establishment of justice in society, a means for man’s intellectual and moral reform and his purification. Law exists to be implemented for the sake of establishing a just society that will morally and spiritually nourish refined human beings. Ayatollah Khomeini (1981, p. 80) Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century of diverse institutional interventions aimed toward the economic and social ‘improvement’ of society, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. From Muslim Indonesia to Buddhist Thailand, new visions of religion and its role in society have been crafted in ways that reflect complex entanglements between religion and development that emerged both parallel to and distinct from those centered in the Christian West. 1. Development Discovers Religion The intersections of religion and development have become a focus of academic research that has resulted in a recent spate of production across fields including sociology, anthropology, and development studies. Much of this literature is characterized by a pervasive rhetoric of the ‘rediscovery of religion’ by the international development sector. At the same time, there is an Religions 2018, 9, 382; doi:10.3390/rel9120382 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2018, 9, 382 2 of 23 increasing critical awareness of a pre-history of entanglements between religion and development. Major works by Michael Barnett (2011), Thomas Davies (2013), Didier Fassin (2012), Peter Stamatov (2013), and Gilbert Rist (2014) have examined the diverse pathways by which religion has informed the history of development. From the perspective of scholars concerned primarily with ‘religion’, on the other hand, there have emerged new critical conversations on ways in which this redefined sphere of human experience was coming to be thought of in a new way, in relation to activist agendas for the improvement of life in this world. This history, however, has tended to be elaborated in relation to institutional and intellectual trajectories of a modernizing ‘West’. In unfolding his genealogy of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor (2007, p. 85) traced a progression of “deliberate attempts by élites . . . to make over the whole society, [and] to change the lives of the mass of people,” and “the rise of the disciplinary society” stretching back to the fifteenth century across the lands of Western Christendom. By the nineteenth century, he argues, this had emerged into a full-blown age of mobilization in which religious communities began organizing for diverse projects of social transformation as reconfigurations of religion’s engagement in the public sphere were inextricably intertwined with broader transformations in secularizing processes of modernization. In this paper, we aim to pursue another line of investigation to explore some of the ways in which religion has come to be reconfigured in diverse development and humanitarian contexts over the past half century—with reference to two particular trajectories traced through non-Christian traditions of Southeast Asia. In order to highlight their comparative value, they are set here alongside a critical review of established narratives of the origins of the religion-development nexus as it emerged in the US and the UK. Activist movements driven by religious leaders substantively informed a number of the signature causes of twentieth-century progressivism, including prohibition, social welfare, and civil rights.1 This also animated a host of transnational projects ranging from new institutional bodies for the coordination of international missionary activity and the proliferation of new organizations including the YMCA and the Scouts. As Robert Woodberry (2012) has argued, the missionary movement had far-reaching, if also frequently inadvertent, political and social consequences, significantly shaping development outcomes over the ensuing decades. In the United States, this broader mood of activism and social intervention was also manifest at the state level though major development initiatives. The most ambitious such project was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) which combined new technologies with agendas for far-reaching social reform aiming to improve the lives of communities in Appalachia. David Ekbladh (2010) has drawn attention to the importance of the TVA for the elaboration of new American visions for global development through figures like Walt Rostow. This involved a conceptualization of the TVA as a ‘model’ which could be attractive for the newly independent nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War period. In pursuit of this aim, leaders of many new nations were brought to the US to tour key sites of the project’s work with the intention of sending them home with new aspirations for development along the lines embodied by America as the ascendant leader of the ‘free world.’ At the same time, more practical efforts were also launched for the actual transplantation of the TVA model into a (...truncated)