Transnational Religious Communities Research Articles

Misperceptions and Identities Mis-taken: Interpreting Various Hostilities Encountered by Moravians in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania

This essay integrates Moravian studies, missiology and historical theology. It begins with a brief survey of the historiography of Moravian missions in colonial North America. It then surveys various reasons for periodic hostility against Moravians in New York and Pennsylvania between roughly 1740 and 1790. It recovers the ethnic and cultural diversity, prejudices and defensive actions of colonists that were a significant component of life in these contested spaces and turbulent times, thus demonstrating that so-called ‘religious’ persecution remains a complicated phenomenon. It suggests Moravians might have avoided certain instances of misperception and consequent ‘persecution’ had they adapted themselves culturally in ways they did not. Moravians were often perceived by other colonial Europeans as a threat to the security and stability of developing locales, and remained largely on the social periphery in colonial North America as a consequence of being both wrongly and rightly understood. As an international and transnational religious community pursuing its own global dispersal for the sake of mission, Moravian political neutrality and perceived ‘foreignness’ was misunderstood in times of war by English and Dutch colonists, especially, as sympathy for the enemy or even evidence of espionage, though the religious and secular fear of their being Catholic seems to have been eventually resolved. Because Moravians in the British colonies fraternised with Native Americans for the sake of mission and were part of an international fellowship also befriending Caribbean slaves, they were sometimes slandered by colonists who feared them as instigators of rebellion by these marginalised populations. Finally, the Moravian sense of being set apart by God from the broader society and called to suffer for the sake of their righteous difference and gospel influence, when acted upon, provoked hostility from colonists who perceived them as a threat to local balances of power, denominational order or family cohesion.

El budismo tibetano en el ciberespacio: nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en la Comunidad Dzogchen Internacional

The article explores the impact that new communication and information technologies have had on the recreation of Buddhism in the West. Taking as a case study the Dzogchen International Community, a group of Tibetan roots with presence in Argentina for more than three decades, the paper aims to understand the role played by the use of the internet in the construction of the ritual, community, corporal, and political dimensions of the aforementioned institution. In this way, the text focuses on analyzing the way in which cyberspace fosters the construction of a transnational religious community in which ritual practices mediated by virtual interfaces are coupled with the daily routines of its members. In addition, it explores the incidence that the virtual experience of religion has in the sphere of identity and corporality as well as in the sphere of power relations. The methodological approach on which the research is based included the ethnographic fieldwork and the investigation of the multiple digital media that the Dzogchen International Community uses, in order to enable the analysis of the interrelation between the online world and the offline field.

Neutral Spectators from a Distance? American Jews and the Outbreak of the First World War

As the First World War broke out in 1914, American Jews seemed far away from the upheaval in Europe. Yet their role as neutral spectators from the distance was questioned right from the outset because of their diverse transcultural entanglements with Europe. Seen from a specific Jewish perspective, the war bore the potential of becoming a fratricidal war. In particular at the Eastern front it was a likely scenario that Jewish soldiers fighting on either side would have to face each other in battle. For Jews, depending on how one defined Jewishness, could be regarded as citizens of a particular nation-state or multi-ethnic empire, as members of a transnational religious community or as members of an ethnic-national diaspora community. Against this background, this article attempts to shed fresh light on the still under-researched topic of American Jewish responses to the outbreak of the First World War. Although American Jewry in 1914 was made up of Jews with different socio-cultural backgrounds, they were often regarded as being pro-German. The war’s impact and the pressures of conformity associated with these contested loyalties for American Jews did therefore not just unfold in and after 1917, but, as this article emphasizes, already in 1914.

Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy. By Timothy A.Byrnes. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii + 196. $40.00.

Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy. By Timothy A.Byrnes. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii + 196. $40.00.

Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy. By Timothy A. Byrnes . Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. ix + 187 pp

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The consequences of increasing assertiveness of trans-national religious communities for international relations

The transnational communities, or in other terms, the migrant communities whowent to the US and the UK, or to any other European states had strong belief intheir religion in which they might not be contaminated by the secular ideology inthe Western countries. In this respect, the phenomenology of religion in internationalrelations is a relatively new and surprising. Accordingly, this paper aims atinvestigating the implications of the emergence of trans-national religious groupsfor international relations. The paper will argue that the rise of trans-nationalreligious groups has produced a profound impact on international relations. Thefactors that influenced this transformation in international relations is the contemporaryprocesses of globalization which scholars argue, are pivotal to bringingreligion to the centre stage of international relations. In order to deepen theunderstanding of this process, two case scenarios will be analyzed, namely, theSikh Diasporas and the imagined Islamic community, the umma. In this paper, ithas been argued that the rise of trans-national religious actors may affect statesovereignty in one way or another. Under secular ideology, the role of religion ismarginalized from the public sphere, in particular, the domain of politics and religion is being obviously separated. This separation, according to both groups,is problematic. It is therefore, the emergence of Islamic and Sikh communities isconsidered by some liberal democratic countries like India as a peril to its statesovereignty. In Islamic doctrines, the Muslims hold a principle in din wa dawla,the unity of state and religion, while in Sikhism, the Sikhs have to trust miri andpiri, the unification of religious and political institution.Masyarakat transnasional atau dalam terma lain disebut juga sebagai masyarakatmigran yang menetap di Amerika dan Inggris, atau ke negara-negara Eropalainnya memiliki keyakinan yang kuat terhadap agama mereka dan tidakterkontaminasi oleh ideologi sekuler Barat. Pada konteks ini, fenomenologi agamadalam perspektif hubungan internasional merupakan kajian baru dan menarikuntuk dibahas. Berdasarkan hal tersebut, makalah ini bertujuan untuk menyelidikiimplikasi dari munculnya kelompok trans-nasional tersebut terhadap kajianhubungan internasional. Makalah ini berasumsi bahwa munculnya kelompok sosialkeagamaan yang bersifat trans-nasional berdampak besar terhadap hubunganinternasional. Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi perubahan ini adalah prosesglobalisasi yang menarik agama ke dalam pola hubungan internasional. Untuklebih jelasnya, dua skenario kasus akan dianalisis, yaitu Diaspora Sikh dan konsepsi‘keummatan’ dalam Islam. Dalam pembahasan makalah ini, didapati bahwamunculnya kelompok masyarakat trans-nasional dapat mengancam kedaulatansuatu negara dalam berbagai bentuknya. Dalam ideologi sekuler, peran agamatermarjinalkan dari ruang publik, khususnya ranah politik. Pemisahan ini, menurutkedua kelompok tersebut, memiliki sejumlah permasalahan. Oleh karena itu,munculnya masyarakat transnasional Islam dan Sikh dianggap oleh beberapanegara demokrasi liberal seperti India sebagai ancaman bagi kedaulatan negara.Dalam perspektif Islam, prinsip din wa dawlah merupakan konsepsi kesatuannegara dan agama, sementara dalam ajaran Sikhisme, doktrin miri piri, merupakankonsepsi penyatuan lembaga keagamaan dan politik.

Reverse mission: transnational religious communities and the making of US foreign policy

Preface 1. Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy 2. Ours: Martyrdom in El Salvador, Mobilization in the United States 3. The People: On Mission from Nicaragua to the United States 4. Hospitality: A Covenant between Mexico and Vermont 5. Conclusion Notes

Book Review: Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy

Book Review: Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy

Public Faith and the Politics of Faith: A Review Essay

A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public and the Politics of Faith.The SymposiumThere were a number of reasons to call together a symposium of this nature. As organisers and in our own work we have been struck by the very limited extent of inter-disciplinary reading, discussion or collaboration about Our first wish was to create a place where scholars from different disciplines who have an interest in religion could converse together and be exposed to a diversity of questions, methods and literatures. In doing this, we hoped to open a debate about how religion has been studied in Southern Africa, what is missing and where the field should be moving. Drawing on the experience of Wiser' s 2007 Reasons of event, the organisers made efforts to invite the participation of historians, sociologists and anthropologists as well as those working from religious studies departments.Our second wish was to invite and stimulate more empirical attention to religion, particularly by social science and humanities scholars. We also hoped to raise a discussion on topics not normally encountered under the purview of religion in the social sciences. We were interested in the relationship between religion and the state, both in how religious communities attempt to influence the state, but also how the state structures its relationship with religious communities. The relationship of African nationalism to religion, both Christianity (independent and mainstream) as well as traditional, was also something we felt would lead to productive discussion. We were also interested in topics we felt had been neglected in the regional scholarship, such as personal conceptions and appreciations of faith; the public role of Christians who attend mainstream churches in Southern Africa; and the need to engage between traditional, independent and mainstream forms of religion in our theory and research. And we sought to pay attention to some of the growing religious phenomena of the last two decades, not least of which is the increasing Pentecostal involvement in public life. There is a great deal of work yet to be done on this.As part of our planning we carefully weighed up the use of our words. In choosing our symposium title, we opted for the more polysemie word faith, instead of the more normative religion. The former, we felt, offered a point of ingress into the symposium of a wider set of views on spiritual practice; it also offered a way to move beyond more dogmatic understandings of Faith also seemed to offer a way for comparative discussions between some of the major world religions practised in the region, allowing for a symposium in which scholars of Islam, Judaism, African spirituality and Christianity could speak alongside one another.A third rationale for the symposium lay in the great need for scholars working in South Africa and other Southern African countries to engage in dialogue on One reason is that there is an increasingly dense network of religious and labour migration across our respective borders. A regional perspective on such migration and the study of transnational religious communities is increasingly imperative.The call for papers elicited an enthusiastic response. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of abstracts were theological in orientation. The planning group decided to exclude them. Many reflected a narrow focus on Biblical scholarship, or were poorly-researched from a social scientific perspective. As such, they did not meet the requirements of our call for papers. The high volume of scholarly theological and Biblical publishing in South Africa does not evidence much attention to most of the issues referred to above. …

Religious Conflicts in Cyberage

The rise of the Internet has a profound impact on the way conflicts are carried out and the faithful practice their religions. This article explores new dimensions of religious conflicts by theoretically reflecting on new developments in cyberage and by substantiating this with an empirical case study—the Moluccan conflict (Eastern Indonesia). Due to the exponential growth of Internet access worldwide, religions and their followers are increasingly expanding into the online world as a new “marketplace” for religious symbols and identities that fosters religious transnationalism. At the same time conflict actors worldwide have been making increasing use of the Internet to expand their networks, plan actions and fight their enemies. While scholars have so far primarily focused on more globalized online terrorism, this paper analyses a conflict that has mainly been fought out between Christians and Muslims in a remote part of this world, but then expanded into cyberspace. Local conflict actors have used the Internet as a global stage for their cause, to connect to and seek support from their transnational religious communities, but also to manipulate the outside world's perception of the Moluccan conflict. Researching the online projects and identity politics of these actors and their offline contexts, it becomes clear that the Internet has helped to essentialize (religious) identities and to influence the conflict at the local level through the networking and mobilization of people worldwide.

Alternative models of Islamic governance in Southeast Asia: Neo‐Sufism and the Arqam experiment in Malaysia

In the prevailing political world order, sovereign nation‐states and secular political authority widely face competition from transnational religious communities, whose authority and agendas derive from different principles. This is particularly evident in Islam, where ulama may acquire political power, while governments appropriate religious interpretations to their own purposes, and even determine who is orthodox or heretical in their domain. This article focuses on the origins and spread of one Malay Islamic movement, Al Arqam, inspired by a rare mix of global Sufi and strict Shari'ah traditions, many of whose members were organized into residential communes and institutions promoting economic independence, mutual support, social service and extensive mission. With their schools, clinics, farms and factories, this amounted to an experiment in alternative development and governance, although not explicitly as an Islamic state. Arqam's moral example and its success in recruiting technically skilled, highly educated young Malays, however, was perceived by the Malaysian government, as its own loss, and a threat to its legitimacy, and the movement was eventually banned. Through this non‐violent ideological confrontation, Arqam became de facto political, as well as a ‘heresy’, in this local understanding of ‘political Islam’.

Transnationalism, Religion, and Immigration

With the centrality of processes of globalization-economic, political, religious, and cultural-transnational fieldwork, once a clarion call for reform by anthropologists, has increasingly become common in many detailed and focused ethnographies, such as James Watson's 1975 seminal study of the emigration patterns of a Cantonese lineage in Hong Kong and London or Ellen Oxfeld's 1993 study of Chinese entrepreneurs in Calcutta and Toronto. Kenneth Guest's study of Chinese transnational religious communities is a good example of such a transnational ethnography, spanning Fujian province and New York City and the movement of people in-between. The Chinese immigrants who journey to the United States in pursuit of their visions of the good life rely, as Guest concludes, on social networks generated by immigrants through their participation in transnational religious communities. Religious communities serve as the primary area for the mobilization of social capital necessary for people's survival of the immigration process through the exchange of information and financial support in the United States. As a result, religion is a major factor in the identities of Chinese immigrants to the United States. In this ethnography, Guest starts his exploration of the role of transnational religious communities on the social and economic survival of undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York by examining the people involved in a variety of religious communities (Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and Daoist) and their connections with communities in China. While the scope of Guest's study is ambitious, he brings in the detailed particularities of these transnational processes by bringing out the voices of these immigrants who live globally, demonstrating the heterogeneity of the so-called ethnic enclave that is usually singularly identified as Chinatown. Immigration and Heterogeneity in By relating the individual experiences and life histories of a number of recent Fuzhou immigrants to New York's Chinatown, Guest situates both the contemporary situation of immigrants (legal and illegal, men and women) from China and the history of in the wider context of American immigration history. Although the social solidarity of an apparent shared Chinese ethnicity helps immigrants survive in a foreign land, Guest documents how the internal dynamics of a socially-stratified community, with its dense networks of social obligations for the immigrants, also serve to establish a socioeconomic hierarchy-a hierarchy where recent immigrants find themselves at the bottom. is not a harmonious place for these recent immigrants, a gateway for them to pursue the American dream; instead, it is a highly-stratified community where differences of regional origin, language, educational background, and other socioeconomic and political markers serve as mechanisms with which elite economically exploit these highly vulnerable newcomers. Herein lies both the weakness and strength of Guest's ethnography in general. Guest clearly states that his focus on immigrants from Fuzhou serves to give voice to the social category most exploited in the process of immigration, as is seen in his critique of the elite aspect of Ong and Nonini's (1997) and Ong's (1999) studies of Chinese transnationalism in chapter two; Guest asserts that Ong and Nonini's focus on the business elite masks the diversity within the social experiences of transnationalism. While Guest convincingly demonstrates the difficult plight faced by immigrants by giving voice to these marginalized newcomers, he does a less thorough job with what he labels as the elite-those more wealthy residents of who had emigrated from other Chinese communities such as Hong Kong or southeast Asia, or had immigrated earlier. For example, while Guest demonstrates the heterogeneity within Chinatown, I was surprised at the relative lack of discussion of Cantonese or Hakka immigrant experiences, and other than allusions to differences in regional association and language, the experiences of these immigrants were homogenized as Chinatown elites. …

Transnational religious actors and international politics

This article generally examines the phenomenon of transnational religious actors and seeks to assess the claim that their activities can undermine state sovereignty. It starts from the premise that globalisation facilitates the growth of transnational networks of religious actors. Feeding off each other's ideas and perhaps aiding each other with funds, they are bodies whose main priority is the well-being and advance of their transnational religious community. The article focuses upon two specific transnational religious actors: the Roman Catholic Church and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. It concludes by noting that, like Islamic radicals, the Catholic Church has been influential in some national contexts in helping undermine the hegemony of authoritarian governments, but that this should not be seen as a more general threat to state sovereignty.