Marshalling the Powers: The Challenge of Everyday Religion for Development

Abstract

Over the past decade development theoreticians and practitioners have shown increasing interest in religion. In the same year as Ver Beek (2000) labelled religion ‘a development taboo’ the World Bank organized, with the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa, a conference in Nairobi entitled Faith in Development: Partnership between the World Bank and the Churches of Africa (documented in Belshaw et al., 2001). Four years later the UK Department for International Development announced a ?ve-year research programme on ‘Faiths in Development’ (which became the ‘Religions and Development’ group based at the University of Birmingham). This recent attention has re?ected a wider renewed interest in religion across the social sciences (see for example Petito and Hatzopoulos’s (2003) Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile). This has been attributed to a number of reasons, including the emergence since the 1960s of the ‘developing world’ with diverse cultural and religious heritages in a context of dramatically increasing global communications (Haynes, 1993), and the recent rising awareness of Islam and religious fundamentalism. Thomas interprets the global resurgence of religion as ‘part of the larger crisis of modernity’ (2003, p. 22). It re?ects a disillusionment with the ‘modern’ ethos which refuses to recognize the existence or relevance of anything outside the positivist epistemology of science and rationality, as well as a failure of mod-ernization to produce democracy and development in less-developed countries and a ‘struggle for cultural liberation, or the global struggle for authenticity’, as part of a ‘revolt against the West’ (ibid., p. 22). It is also linked with contestations of the modernist secularization thesis, indicating that religion in Western societies may be transforming rather than declining (Cameron, 2003; Heelas & Woodhead, 2005), and that elsewhere it is expanding rapidly (Barrett, 2001; Martin, 2001). There is increasing awareness that ‘modernity’ is not a universal state to be arrived at through a standardizing process of modernization, but that there are ‘many modernities’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1993, p. ix), to many of which religiosity and spirituality are intrinsic.