1 of 5
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. —1 Timothy 6:10, NIV
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. —Adam Smith
I'm not in it for the money. —Commonly overheard saying in Silicon Valley
Last year in his Human Follies column for New York Press, Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger remarked on the tragic deaths of missionary Roni Bowers and her baby daughter Charity over the skies of Peru. With many others, Tiger raised the question of why the Peruvian drug interdiction plane felt it necessary to open fire on a planeload of teetotalers. Had he stopped there, the column would have been a well-crafted if readily forgettable effort. But after the pro forma lament of pointless death, Tiger segued into an anti-missionary polemic. He railed against the "extraordinary vanity and presumption. … of missionaries" who "disrupt the most fundamental ideals and values of the people on whom they inflict themselves." These "frank imperialists," he said, "enjoy a fuzzy kind of permission to conduct a kind of business that is largely impossible in other less ethereal spheres of life."1
A torrent of outrage, from all around the world, rose in response. Linked to by hundreds of websites, including the vaunted Arts & Letters Daily, a column in a free Manhattan weekly that might have drawn a few angry letters instead drew buckets full. Some of the reported postmarks: Birmingham, AL, Fremont, CA, Edgewood, KY, Toronto, Johannesburg, and Papua New Guinea. Is this the sort of thing people have in mind when they talk about "globilization"?
Well, yes and no. In the prologue to Globalization and the Kingdom of God, Duke University's James Skillen explains that globalization is "the growing interdependence of people throughout the world." This interdependence, he suggests, is so loaded with importance that it may shift our very "perspective on the meaning of life": what we are witnessing is nothing less than the creation of a "single global village." Skillen summarizes Dutch professor Bob Goudzwaard's delivery of the 1999 annual Abraham Kupyer lecture thus:
The burden of [Goudzwaard's lecture] is to shed light on the religiously deep wellspring of contemporary economic globalization. … [H]e arrives at the deepest level, where he sees people—especially westerners—hypnotized by acquisitiveness and competition, fearful of falling behind or not getting ahead fast enough, acting like children who believe there is no other way to "make progress," even though poverty and environmental degradation grow worse rather than better.
It is by now a strikingly familiar picture. It's globalization in this sense that Seattle anarchists saw reflected in the Starbucks windows they smashed during the World Trade Organization riots in 2000. And it is a perspective on globalization also shared by many prominent Christians, including the pope. In 1999, John Paul II publicly wrung his hands over the way things are going:
If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative. … More and more in many countries [and] in America a system known as neo-liberalism prevails; based on a purely economic concept of man, this system considers profit and the laws of the market as its only parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of and the respect due to individuals and people.
I speculate, but this may have been the notion in the back of theologian Massimo Salani's mind when he complained in an article in the Italian magazine Avvenire that McDonald's was a Protestant institution that is hostile to community bonds.
share this page
RSS Feed
