The future of Christianity is promising
27.01.2017
The following is from an interview transcript
Whether Trump's policy can lift up traditional values - I think the answer is yes. But it's going to take time.
Globalization de-tradtionalizes. Whenever globalization comes into a culture, it replaces all the things that make that culture unique with very standardized transcultural processes.
I like to use the example of the mall. We have our shopping malls where all the stores are the same. They are not local, they are not selling specifics from this town, village or city. Most of our malls have movie theaters with Hollywood movies that are playing at every single mall. That's globalization.
Therefore globalization has over the last several decades really devastated the traditional values of morality, Christian values.
What are we seeing around the world and particularly in Russia, because Russia is the leader of this, is a massive blowback of nationalism and tradition.
Scholars have found that when local people find their customs and traditions being threatened, they tend to tightly rally around their customs, traditions, and religions as mechanisms of resistance and fight back against this globalization.
I think that's what we are seeing all over the world. We are seeing it in Japan, China, India, Israel, in Russia, and in Eastern Europe.
This summer, we saw something similar to that in Brexit’s blowback against the European Union. This was primarily an English movement. The Irish, Scots, and Welsh - they tend to like the EU. It's the English who want their country back.
The question is whether or not these national movements involve grabbing our traditions again. And the answer is - yes.
People rediscovering their traditions, their customs and their religions - the church seems to be exactly upon that.
Donald Trump represents those kinds of processes in the American content. So, the amazing thing that happened in the November of last year is that the nation that was most committed to globalizing processes has jumped the fence and joined the nationalists. And now we are going to see some very interesting developments because there is a common tradition that is guiding the nationalist processes.
