poverty

Globalising God: the New Internationalism

by Wendy Tyndale

At the Cutting Edge? Religions and the Global Development Agenda

It is much more beneficial to try to implement in daily life the shared precepts for goodness taught by all religions rather than to argue about minor differences in approach. The world needs them all. His Holiness the Dalai Lama said:

Many people who have been involved in inter-faith dialogue, either internationally or within their own countries, are coming to the conclusion that, unless the dialogue is grounded on the reality we know around us, in daily life, it is in danger of becoming irrelevant or even harmful.

The Jesuit priest, Tom Michel, of the Vatican’s Inter-Religious Secretariat in Rome is one such person. With reference to the Muslim-Christian dialogue, he warns that if it is separated from the “centrality of an ongoing dialogue with the poor”, it runs the risk of becoming “an elitist exercise in which scholars and religious leaders create among themselves a clubby brotherhood across religious lines to perpetuate and, in the worst case, justify the economic and social status quo.

So one reason for focusing interfaith dialogue on poverty and development is to make the dialogue itself relevant by grounding it in the commonly lived reality of the majority of this world. But an even more compelling argument is that the religious communities are, as the Dalai Lama says, all urgently needed. I want to argue that they are needed as a force for criticising the framework of the global development agenda and for positively changing it by transforming the attitudes and values on which it rests.

Values of the present system
There is no religion in the world whose beliefs and teaching promote greed, injustice, exclusion and a lack of compassion for the most vulnerable people in our societies. Buddhism may place less emphasis on social justice than Christianity or Judaism, for instance, but the high priority it gives to generosity and compassion means that Buddhism is equally adamant about providing protection to the poor. Christianity may have relinquished its objection to charging interest on loans but Christian teaching fully shares the Islamic rejection of the exploitation of debtors by those who lend them money. Hinduism may still be struggling to develop a united attitude towards the caste system but its belief in the indwelling of the divine spirit in each human being is a firm basis for taking care of everyone. Judaism and Islam may be less averse to accumulating wealth than Christianity or Buddhism, but both traditions are insistent about the duty of the rich to share their wealth with those who need it.

Yet the present global economic order not only promotes greed but depends upon it – or at least upon people developing insatiable needs and desires which bear little or no relation either to their essential needs or to the fundamental desire for peace and joy, common to all humanity. Moreover, despite all the talk of capitalism with a human face, inherent in the system is the notion of competition and of winners and losers and anyone who cares to look cannot fail to see that losers are the large majority. Millions of families who are superfluous to the success of the global economy are being left without a livelihood or dignity. They are the “left overs”, as a Chilean song of the 1980’s put it.

For the system to flourish, our culture and behaviour patterns have to be brought into line. People the world over are being subjected to a strongly value-laden intrusion into their lives by advertising and the mass media. Through highly sophisticated and insidious means, we are being persuaded that restraint is not a virtue and that all idea of responsibility either to other human beings or to the environment belongs to the domain only of a quirky social fringe. The aim of life is being reduced to seeking pleasure. As the Disney Annual Report of 1992 put it: “The fun now follows the sun round the globe”.

The global economic system provides the framework within which the mainstream agents of development: governments, multilateral agencies like the World Bank and also many non-governmental organisations, endeavour to reduce poverty in the world. The problem is that the values according to which the system functions are seldom articulated in government circles and therefore the contradictions embedded in trying to improve life for the poor within a world order which maintains and increases the wealth of the rich are never properly confronted.

I am going to look at three places in which people from faith communities can confront these contradictions: by the side of the poor, in the development debate and within their own religious institutions.

1. At the cutting edge alongside the poor
In India the daily life of up to 10 million people has traditionally been focused on fishing but their livelihoods are being destroyed by the globalisation of the fishing industry. It was in the 1970s that giant trawlers belonging to multinational corporations began to enter the coastal waters of the south-western state of Kerala, depleting stocks and thrusting the local fisher people into poverty. In recent times, the greatest predators of all have been the industrial fishing vessels, whose trade is sustained largely by the demand in the United States and Europe for fishmeal for farm animal feeds and pet food.

The plight of the inland fish workers in Kerala is probably even worse than that of their marine-based colleagues. Problems caused by the construction of huge dams, water pollution and deforestation have been compounded by the government’s push for aquaculture as part of its export-oriented economic programme. This involves large tracts of land being taken over for prawn farming by national élites and multinational investors, who export the prawns to the United States and Europe. After 10 years or less, productivity declines, so the aquaculturists move on, taking over more land and leaving behind them a saline and toxic wasteland of ruined mangrove swamps and paddy fields.

This is the global development agenda that the fishing people of Kerala – and all over the world – have found themselves up against: production for exports bringing quick profits for a few at the expense of the livelihoods of many. And it is in the context of this agenda that a group of Catholic nuns and priests decided, in the 1970s, to take sides with the impoverished fishing communities and went to live among them.

It was from within the fish workers’ struggle that the fishing people themselves as well as those who went to work with them came to understand their Christian faith no longer in terms of personal salvation through church going but as the living faith of communities concerned with love, justice and peace in this world. Based on this insight, for them “development” has come to mean inner liberation from self-oriented attitudes and rigid church dogma on one hand and, on the other, the liberation of the poor and the oppressed from the structural relationships which cause or maintain their poverty and oppression. One of the fishermen said to me: “For me spirituality means that we do some good, and people become resurrected and establish their rights”.

In their own church they have been prepared to confront priests who held onto an “other-worldly” view of their religion as well as rich merchants with vested interests and they are challenging the Indian government and international bodies, such as the World Trade Organisation. They have also been prepared to work with fisher people of all religions, a decision which led to the foundation of the secular National Forum of Fish Workers to include everyone.
This was partly a political decision, as it is only in the south of Kerala that the fishing villages are largely Christian, but it was also a theological one. “We always had an inclusive attitude”, one of the nuns told me. “Our idea was creatively to work together for a new society of justice, love and peace. Different people bring a commitment from their own faith. Development cannot be one-sided. If Christians alone develop, then that is only one side of the face of God. We expressed our faith wrongly, when we said that there was no salvation outside the church. God has created the whole world and would not want anyone to be lost”.”

The story of the Kerala fisher people is a story shared by many other people of faith for whom engaging with issues of poverty and justice has been a two-way process. It has led them to re-discover the meaning of their own faith and their relation to people of other faith traditions and it has also helped them to understand what development is about for their own fishing communities. Here we have no “experts” coming with an agenda from outside, telling the fisher people what to do and here we have no religious sectarianism either.

Looking to their faith for inspiration and guidance, the fish workers and their Christian supporters have challenged the global economic system from the standpoint of one of the groups most marginalised and impoverished by it. They have carried out research and made careful plans for their actions but they have also allowed room for hope and prophetic imagination, as they have dared to venture beyond what would be considered in many circles as “feasible”. And they have had many successes, ranging from gaining permission for women to carry their fish-laden baskets on local buses in Kerala to a national ban on trawling during the monsoon period when the fish reproduce.

There are plenty of people from different religious traditions who through sharing the struggles of the poor have found that their own lives have been transformed. Theirs is an alternative reading of religion as well as of the current social, political and economic order, alternative because their standpoint is not that of the rich and the powerful but of those whom the global economic system has devalued and marginalised.

A different vision of “development”
The action of the people working on these programmes is rooted in a different vision from the dominant one of what development itself is about, a vision which draws for its source on the spiritual insights of their different religious traditions. It is not a question of a blanket rejection of modernisation resulting from scientific discoveries or technology but of holding on to values such as responsibility, justice and inclusion and rejecting the trivialisation of life’s purpose, which the globalisation of capitalism is seen to bring with it.

The strong sense of community of religiously-inspired groups and their vision of the ultimately transcendent reality of life mean that their aims go beyond economic improvement or the delivery of social services. Equally important to them are the generation of spiritual fulfilment and inner contentment and also human qualities such as compassion, respect, hope and dignity. Many would share the view of the Christians in Kerala that the process has to be one of inner liberation from both religious dogma and individualistic attitudes as well as liberation from outside oppression.

Dr Christian Aurenche, the medical doctor and Catholic priest who leads the Project for Human Promotion among mountain tribal people in Tokombéré in northern Cameroon is convinced that “it is the way one human being sees another which allows people to flourish, to develop”. This understanding of the importance of valuing all human beings led to the transformation of a traditional clinic in Tokombéré into a health programme run by the tribal people themselves and later into a multi-faceted development programme for the region.

The Hindu Swadhyaya (“Discovery of self”) Movement in India is built upon the same conviction, that “what human beings need is dignity and recognition, which can only come from genuine mutuality and caring, not just from some political programmes of social justice”. Swadhyaya has inspired thousands of villagers with hope and, in bringing spiritual regeneration, has given people the self-confidence to work towards raising their material standard of living.
Buddhists often refer to development as a process of awakening . “This awakening has to begin with oneself, with every individual, then extend to the family, the country, the nation, the world. The awakening must be an integrated whole where spiritual, moral, cultural, social, political and economic aspects of life are included”, says Dr A T Ariyaratne, the founder of a Buddhist development programme which has transformed the lives of thousands of villagers in Sri Lanka.

Such an awakening or increased awareness brings with it the obligation to respond, but not on any terms. The Muslim organisation Sarkan Zoumountsi (“Chain of Solidarity”) which works with impoverished communities in Yaoundé, Cameroon, forfeited finance from the European Union for a micro-credit programme because, following the Muslim laws against usury, it refused to charge interest on its loans. “The aim of our association”, explain Sarkan Zoumountsi’s leaders, “ is certainly to seek development, the well-being of individuals in society, but not at any price, for in Sarkan Zoumountsi we take action following the great guide, Islam.”

The approaches of the different religions of the world are different, but they all provide a source of energy, wisdom and hope to those who, while not “of” the world, in the sense of being drawn into its values, are deeply enough “in” it to identify with its suffering people. It seems to me that the key contribution that the religious traditions have to make is to offer a different perspective on where we think we should be heading, on what “progress” actually means and on the desirability of rushing headlong into consumerism.

For some the religious alternative means a retreat from society. Others have tried to replace it and still others to reform it. Kenneth Leech suggests that we should remain within society but as salt which, without aspiring to become the whole meal, transforms it.

2. The global development debate
There is much that is good about the global development agenda set by governments and multilateral development agencies, such as the UN agencies and the World Bank. The Development Millennium Goals, for example, to which almost all the governments of the world have subscribed are, in themselves, laudable. They aim, among other things to ensure that by the year 2015, the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger will have been halved, all boys and girls will be at primary school, the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases will have been reversed and the environment will be being treated with more respect.

A problem with the Millennium Development Goals, however, is that there has never been agreement about what kind of development we are trying to bring about. Are these goals primarily an instrument to ensure that the poorest countries can incorporate more of their population into the production process and thus successfully insert themselves into the world’s free market system? If so, are we still talking about the underdeveloped world “catching up” with the so-called developed one? Or is the prime aim of the goals to bring about the well-being of the peoples of the world?

Some would say that economic growth and the well-being of people are one and the same thing. However, even if we accept, and by no means everybody does, that the economic growth of a country is essential for the development of its people, there are still many questions to be asked. As we saw with the fisher people there are questions about who will benefit from increased production and how the extra revenue will be distributed and there are questions about what the economic process will do to human relationships and communities.

The integration of southern countries into the world’s markets with cheap labour, deregulation and export incentives seems much more likely to work in favour of the already rich, both rich countries and rich multinational corporations. They could only possibly catch up if the rich world agreed to live in less luxury – a necessity for any real changes for the poor but only very marginally, if at all, part of the official agenda.

If we are really talking about placing people at the centre of the agenda, it is important to recognise that people in different places and from different cultures will give priority to different goals and that the qualitative as well as the quantitative results are important. If outside experts come in with plans to reduce hunger by removing land from small-scale food producers in order to produce crops for export, peasant farmers are unlikely to agree. If parents fear that their children might be taught values at school which clash with those of the religion and culture of the family, they will not make much effort to send them there.

It is here, as well as in action at the grass roots, that the faith communities are sorely needed. Whether we like it or not, the debate about the kind of development we want for our world is essentially a religious debate, in the sense that at the heart of it lie questions about the nature and purpose of human beings and of life in general. This debate is happening but it is not at all easy.

Dialogue with the development agencies and governments
In 1998, James Wolfensohn and Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, inspired the foundation of the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) as a dialogue on development and poverty among people from the different religious traditions and between them and the multilateral development agencies. The UN has been in dialogue with religious organisations for a long time and now the Inter-American Development Bank and, even if somewhat timidly, the IMF, as well as bilateral development agencies such as the Swiss and the British, are all showing some interest.

One trigger for this may have been the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancellation of the unpayable debt of the most highly indebted countries, which demonstrated how powerful a force religious organisations could be if they chose to lobby together on a single theme. Some of those interested in the dialogue view the religious institutions as purveyors of moral values which are important for bringing a fairer deal for the poor onto the development agenda. Others show more interest in practical co-operation.

There is no doubt that people in the development and religious worlds share much sincere commitment to reducing poverty and a dialogue between them is highly desirable, even essential, if the poor of the world are to get a better deal. There are, however, many challenges inherent in such a dialogue. I would like to mention two.

The first is that although we seem to be talking about the same the reality, we see that reality differently. The Buddhist philosopher, David Loy, points out that religions are sometimes criticised for their idealism: “for encouraging a non-materialistic way of life that goes against the grain of our main desires and motivations” . However many would share his view that the economists “who tend to live in an idealised, one-dimensional world of statistics and equations that do not accurately reflect human values and goals” are the ones who are out of touch with reality.

Although it has long since been recognised that poverty, for instance, means much more than merely low income levels, economists and development experts still tend to talk about poverty only in terms of what can be quantified or measured. The solutions they offer are also in these terms, hence the purely numerical targets of the Millennium Development Goals.

Dr. Ariyaratne from Sri Lanka voices the concerns of many religious communities when he says: “In the first place the concept of ‘poverty’ as used by macro organisations and national leaders and politicians is a very limited way of looking at the lives of people. In our concept of a good life, even those in the so-called developed world are ‘poor’ in many respects.”

Social networks provide another example of a different view of the same reality. Both development specialists and religious communities lay great store by the importance of community and family life. Whereas, however, for most people these are key elements for human stability, happiness and fulfilment, in the eyes of development theorists they are important primarily as what is termed “social capital” –an instrument necessary for increasing economic growth.
What makes it all even more complicated is that the two realities overlap. The religious communities would not deny for a moment that poverty includes lack of food, housing, clothes, education, health and clean water etc. Nor would they reject the idea that co-operation among members of families and communities is important to raise people’s material standard of living. Probably the greatest challenge for them here is to hold on firmly to their realisation that disciplines such as economics and even sociology, while useful, are insufficient as tools to deal with all aspects of life and that, whilst abstraction, analysis and summary are all one valid way of understanding reality, experience and intuitive knowledge are equally important.

A second challenge of the dialogue is that the development agencies are hoping to use the religious organisations, with their wide-spread networks and influence, as an instrument to advance their own agenda of simply raising the material standard of living of people in poor countries. Here again, the work of religious communities may well overlap with the kind of work the agencies want to do, such as building schools, training community leaders, digging wells, improving the quantity and quality of harvests and combating the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Technical training and financial resources can all be helpful to carry out these goals but the challenge lies in the need to hold in balance both the way in which religious communities want to carry out their work and their long term objectives. Speed and cost effectiveness are important in the implementation of projects, for instance, but even more important might be the inclusion of as many people as possible in the making of decisions, which could well slow things up but get better results for the life of the community.

As the people from Sarkan Zoumountsi say, it is a question of wanting the best material progress possible, but not at any cost.

3. Dialogue within and between the faith traditions

It is not only within the secular world that people inspired by their faith to work alongside the poor are propagating a counter-culture. They are almost always to be found at the margins of their own religious institutions. Indeed, they are often rejected by them.

We have seen many a Christian in Latin America who has been admonished and even abandoned by the hierarchy of the church for siding with the poor or criticising the global economic and political agenda. In Thailand Buddhists who are encouraging people to protest against the increasing poverty in the countryside caused by the government’s modernisation programme are regarded by many a monastic leader as an embarrassing aberration. In India there are many Hindu temples where the main concern seems to be to make money and wield power rather than to care for the beggars who stand at their gates. The rigidity of many Muslim leaders is causing them to focus more on control than on the liberation of the oppressed.

There are countless cases of religious leaders and their institutions being held fast in positions of status and power but in the long run, it may be the easy relationship of most churches of the western world with the global economic system and its values which does most harm to those who are the victims of this system. Despite some encouraging signs, such as support for agencies such as Christian Aid and CAFOD and for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, our churches are, on the whole, very far from being at the cutting edge of the global development debate. This may well be because it is impossible to change the agenda while adhering to it.

If they are going to be able to make a contribution to transforming the societies in which we live, the religious institutions must go back to their spiritual roots. The Hindu social activist, Swami Agnivesh, longs for deeper sense of the spiritual to bring the religious institutions closer together. “Unlike the mechanisms of institutionalised religions”, he writes, “the call of true spirituality has all along been to transcend the familiar boundaries drawn by individual and corporate ego and to discover the unity that underlies the diversity that marks our world.”

John Austin, too, Bishop of Aston, speaks of the need to confront the new constellation of ideas, attitudes, values and assumptions which is being forced upon us by technological and scientific changes with deeper spirituality. “Where are we, in the developed world in particular”, he asks, “to find the spiritual strength and energy to undergo the ascesis, the simplification of our life styles, the surrender of what we currently enjoy, in order that planet Earth and humankind may have a future?”

People of faith need to enable their institutions to find the spiritual strength to dare to be open to a process of perpetual change. There is a lot of work to be done to interpret the beliefs and teaching of the different traditions, so that they that they can help us to find our way through the problems we are facing in the 21st century. If the religious institutions cling onto truths in such a static way that they destroy them, they will all too easily become a barrier rather than a support to transforming the world into a more just and peaceful and contented place.

Dealing with conflict
Whatever direction we take, we shall always have to deal with the knotty problem of differences of opinion, not only between different religious traditions but also within all of them and at all levels. At the grass roots I have known of Pentecostal pastors in Central America who oppose any sort of action in favour of material improvements for the poor and consider that even smoke-reducing cooking stoves are the work of the devil.

Whilst Sarkan Zoumountsi is encouraging more education and independence for women in Yaoundé, some of their own Islamic leaders are preaching against it. Whilst some Buddhists are eager to put their values of service and giving into practice through development work with villagers, others believe that their spiritual tradition is only about acquiring individual enlightenment. And in our own country there are many Christians in business, in the government and even in non-governmental organisations who are happy to go along with the imposition of a globalised free market economy on the poor of the world without too much concern about what happens to the people whose livelihoods are ruined by it.

That the interfaith scene is riddled with disagreements is plain for all to see, however much they may be glossed over through joint statements which in the end say nothing or, as Tom Michel puts it, through “clubby brotherhood” breakfasts with the President of the United States. If we focus our dialogue on the lives of the poor, we shall have to grasp the nettle of differences of belief but also of conflicts of interests, between the rich and the poor, among the poor themselves and between different groups from different religions.

These differences of opinion are not going to be solved through arguments round the table, nor through struggles resulting in the most powerful groups asserting themselves over others. They should not, either, be dismissed as unimportant by “progressive” sectors within all the religions who find it easy to work together, leaving out the majority who disagree.

We may find no problem in getting on with Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists etc. who happen to share our views on social justice, for example but this is a very dangerous route to take as it can all to easily lead to people who are excluded heading off into defensive positions which may become extremely intransigent. I am not convinced that we shall all somehow in the end slide into what Hans Küng has called a “global ethic” but at least we should aim at showing a global recognition that people of all persuasions have the same right – and duty – to be part of the debate.

However difficult it is, people from the different religious communities must aim to be as inclusive as possible and I suggest that this is only to be achieved by humility and by example. None of us, neither the development agencies nor the religious communities, have a blue print for a solution to the extremely complex problem of how to organise our world today, but we can work at it, and if we work at it together, we are much more likely to succeed than if each religion goes at it alone or if we demonise the people in the development institutions with whose policies we disagree.

We who live in the industrialised countries of the western world need seriously to reconsider the division which we normally take for granted, between the so-called “developed” and “developing” world. It is not only those who work in India or Thailand who should be asking what “development” really means and how we can reach it, indeed, unless we ask the same question with equal urgency and act upon the answers, there will be no hope for lasting development for anyone.

If we return to a more spiritually-filled life, we shall be able more fully to grasp the need for our commitment to contribute to building a fairer and less destructive society, by working alongside the poor in our own communities, by adopting simpler life-styles, by cutting down the resources we are wasting, by causing less pollution and by working for more justice in our own countries as well as globally.

Development is about technology, science and political and economic strategies and, where we can, we should contribute to the thinking going on in these fields. However, it is about far more than that. To make a long-lasting contribution we need to listen hard to the fisher people and others who see development as a transformation of ourselves in a dialectic relationship with the transformation of the world around us. It is only through the process of freeing ourselves, as well as our institutions from the pressure of power and status and from the illusions fed to us daily by the consumer society in which we live, that we shall be able to come up with authentically alternative ways of living which will include everyone on our planet.

Suggestions for further reading
Brueggemann, Walter, The Prophetic Imagination (2nd Edition) Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2001
Goulet, Denis, Development Ethics, Apex Press New York & Zed Press, London. 1995.
Ed. Knitter, Paul Fr. & Muzaffar, Chandra, Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy, Orbis Books, 2002.