Religion in the Global East: Challenges and Opportunities for the Social Scientific Study of Religion

religions Article Religion in the Global East: Challenges and Opportunities for the Social Scientific Study of Religion Fenggang Yang Center on Religion and Chinese Society, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA; Received: 25 September 2018; Accepted: 9 October 2018; Published: 10 October 2018



 Abstract: This essay is based on the Presidential Address at the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Inaugural Conference on 3–5 July 2018 in Singapore. It discusses some aspects of the key concepts, some of the distinct characteristics of religion in East Asia, and some implications for the social scientific study of religion in general. Keywords: Global East; religion; religiosity; atheism; Sheilaism; spiritual but not religious 1. The Notion of the Global East The Inaugural Conference of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion set the theme as “Religiosity, Secularity, and Pluralism in the Global East”. The terms “religion”, “religiosity”, “secularity”, and “pluralism” all need careful examination and reexamination in the context of the Global East. But first of all, what is the Global East? The Global East is a cultural and social concept that includes East Asian societies and ethnic communities of East Asians around the world that maintain East Asian cultural traditions, are closely connected with East Asia, and play important roles in East Asian developments. These societies, communities, and individuals share distinct social and cultural characteristics. The Global East, as a new concept, is necessary primarily because the existing groupings of countries in the world are either Euro-centric or North-Atlantic-centric and may lead to improper understanding or misunderstanding of East Asian societies, communities, and individuals. Moreover, this concept may help in the effort to reconceptualize and improve measurements of “religion”, “religiosity”, “secularity”, and other key terms in the social scientific study of religion in general. When we take a broad view of the contemporary world, there have been two widely-used ways of grouping countries in some sort of geographical sense: East versus West, which was commonly used during the Cold War, and North versus South, which has become popular since the 1970s. While the East-West dichotomy was based on the ideological conflict between the Communist-ruled countries and the so-called “free world” (Buchholz 1961; Loth 1994),1 the North-South division is primarily about the economic divide between developed countries and underdeveloped or developing countries (Horowitz 1966; Erb 1977; Eckl and Weber 2007; Reuveny and Thompson 2007). However, it is difficult to fit East Asia into either of these constructs. 1 Loth summarizes it well: “The conflict between East and West had its origins in diverging views of how society should be organized, which emerged in the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization: The contrast between the pluralism of ‘Western’ civilization, which in principle permitted a multiplicity of ways of life and patterns of power, and the centralized all-powerful state with its ‘Asiatic’ imprint; the contrast between capitalist means of production and socialist planning; the contrast between a parliamentary state under the rule of law and a totalitarian state” (Loth 1994, p. 193). Religions 2018, 9, 305; doi:10.3390/rel9100305 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2018, 9, 305 2 of 10 Ideologically, some of the major East Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, or the Republic of China on Taiwan, belonged to the so-called West during the Cold War. Although ideological conflicts have waned in the contemporary world, Communist ideology has notably persisted in three major Asian countries: China, North Korea, and Vietnam (with the only other Communist nation being Cuba in Central America). The ideological persistence in these Asian countries cannot be brushed off because it has significant social, political, and cultural consequences for the residents of those societies and beyond.2 Economically, some East Asian countries are said to belong to the so-called South, even though they all lie in the northern hemisphere. More importantly, in terms of the economy, things have been changing dramatically in the last few decades. Japan was the first developed country in the Far East. Since the 1960s, we have witnessed the rapid rise of the four little tigers or dragons: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Midgley 1986; Vogel 1992; Morris 1996; Hamilton 2007). This was followed by the so-called tiger cubs of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand (Heng and Niblock 2014), and the big dragon of China (Burstein and De Keijzer 1999). In recent years, Vietnam has also experienced an economic upsurge (Hayton 2010). In contrast, some of the Eastern European countries in the so-called global North have struggled economically in recent decades (Tlostanova 2011). It was Max Weber who first brought scholarly attention to the relationship between religion and the economy. He tried to explain why modern rational capitalism first emerged in the Protestant West, but not elsewhere, and he made careful examination of the religions of China (i.e., Confucianism and Daoism) and India (i.e., Hinduism and Buddhism) in addition to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Weber [1904] 1930, Weber [1920] 1951, Weber [1917] 1952 and Weber [1916] 1958). I would acknowledge that these books by Weber are full of insights and should be read by all students and scholars who study religion in East Asia, but I must also say that many parts of these writings, even some of Weber’s main conceptualizations, are off the mark. One of the most obvious problems is that Weber grouped Buddhism into the religion of India. In fact, by the time that Weber was writing on these in the 1910s and 1920s, Buddhism had been a major religion in East Asia for nearly two thousand years, but was negligible in India proper. More importantly, throughout East Asia, shamanism and folk religions were much more prevalent in society than institutionalized religions (see, e.g., Yang 1961). Furthermore, for much of the last two millennia, several institutionalized religions have coexisted without a religious monopoly in most parts of East Asia, a situation radically different from the West where one of the multiple forms of Christianity dominated for centuries. In short, both of these commonly used groupings are Euro-centric or North-Atlantic-centric notions. That is, both of these groupings are from the vantage point of Western Europe and North America. Additionally, that presents a problem for properly understanding a large segment of the world population. The North-Atlantic world has a combined population of about 1.1 billion, whereas East and Southeast Asia have a combined population of 2.3 billion people, or 30 percent of the world population. When 30 percent of (...truncated)