Standing anew: inculturation and its challenge to globalisation

Abstract

This thesis is a theological critique of globalisation that engages and builds on three interconnected ideas or concerns. The first is to understand the historical forces out of which globalisation emerges and, in turn, creates the political and economic world. The second concern is to flesh out the religious dimension that enables, legitimates and sustains globalisation. Finally, the idea of inculturation is introduced to demonstrate how the Catholic Church grapples with its institutional "fit" in the globalisation architecture. Globalisation is a neologism that emerges in common usage through most forms of discourse during the middle to late 1980s. Remarkably, given the relatively recent arrival of the word in the English language, globalisation lacks clear conceptual definition. Even so, this paper understands globalisation as something more than just a radically confused term. By analysing the neologism as an essentially contested concept, globalisation is understood historically as the name given to the structural changes in capitalism that happened as a result of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system during the period from 1971 to 1992. At one end, the key marker is Richard Nixon's announcement of his "New Economic Policy", which floated the US dollar and effectively ended the system of pegged but flexible exchange rates. At the other end is the demand by the Non-aligned Movement for a new articulation of global political and economic reality that adequately captures the exigencies of poverty and exclusion. The "Washington Consensus" is the name commonly given to the set of policies and economic tools that are normally associated with globalisation. Other names for the Consensus are Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), sometimes simply Economic Reforms, and the Third Way. The Consensus emerged out of the economic restructuring policies that were applied in Latin America - in particular, Mexico and Argentina. Deliberately, this study examines the meltdown of the Mexican economy not only as a case study of the "Washington Consensus" in action but also as an attempt to more realistically understand the NAFTA treaty, which is often cited as a model of globalisation. The Consensus, or its variants, is a constitution of investors' rights that facilitates foreign direct investment - highly mobile or predatory capital - into local economies while preventing the local populations from protecting themselves. Globalisation is distinguished by structures of inclusion and exclusion, of core and periphery. In the discourse of the core globalisation is predicated on the split between politics and economics, and the banishment of religion to the private realm. The process of secularisation makes religion an unconscious, and therefore dangerous, force in globalisation. In contrast, religion in the periphery is public and political. It is on the periphery that religion and globalisation collide - most notably with Islam. A key concern of this paper is to understand the plausibility structures that make acceptable the systemic exclusion of about sixty percent of the world's population. The devastating impact of globalisation on the peoples of the periphery raises serious questions for the religious believer. This paper ponders the religious significance of globalisation through an analysis of technology and its Manichaen intent, and the emergence of "economic man". Philosophically, these questions fall under the ancient epithet of the one and the many. However, the question is whose "one" and whose "many"? Inculturation, it is contended, is the Church's response to the globalisation agenda of the one and the many. Inculturation is identified as the process of the Catholic Church institutionally appropriating its emergence as a World Church, which is the deeper significance and meaning of the Second Vatican Council. In particular, inculturation is the dynamics of a Church that is learning to speak in the vernacular, appropriating its becoming as a Church in and of the periphery, and witnessing to the universality of salvation. Inculturation is the working out of those pivotal dynamics as the Church struggles with its position in the nexus of ideas, power, and institutions that is globalisation. In the end, the Church does not need globalisation, but globalisation needs the compliance of the Church. Inculturation, as the institutional response to globalisation, is the Church standing anew and becoming not only a voice of hope to the excluded but also the voice of the excluded.