Introduction: Religion and Development

Abstract

After World War II, most Western governments and development agencies saw religion as part of the development problem, not as a potential aspect of its resolution. More recently, this negative consensus about religion has fractured, partly as a result of the widespread failure of secular development trajectories to achieve widespread poverty reduction or reductions of inequality and injustice in the developing world. As a result, the emphasis of development thinking has shifted to include various religious expressions that are now widely seen as potentially important components of achieving development gains, although those associated with ‘religious extremism’ are not. Primarily concerned with the holistic human development dimension, visions of development from faith perspectives differ significantly from those expressed historically by secular development organisations, which often appear to be singularly concerned with ‘economic development’ to the exclusion of other aspects of development. From a generally religious perspective, such development programmes and policies often appeared to be what Goulet calls ‘one-eyed giants’, because they ‘analyse, prescribe and act as if man could live by bread alone, as if human destiny could be stripped to its material dimensions alone’ (Goulet 1980).