Abstract
There are many colonial wounds to be healed and wrinkles to be ironed out and they relate to the issue of religious identities as well. This chapter takes a critical view of the Global Northern interpretation of contemporary religious scenario through the frame of secularization and fundamentalism without reference to the colonial history. Religion in the Global South has been a “weapon of the weak” in the struggle of the colonized peoples against the colonial rulers. It was religion through which colonized peoples and nations preserved their culture and identity—a reason for continued attachment of the people of the South to their religious universe. How does one make a transition from the postcolonial to the global? What role could religions of the South contribute to liberation at the local level and for universal solidarity at the global level? Like the global market, religions too, through a process of de-territorialization, get globalized blurring the borders between the local and the global in practices and beliefs. This chapter contests the widespread view that in the Global South religion is an expression of pre-modernity and postulates the need to bring into serious theorizing the religious experiences of the South, especially under globalizing conditions.
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Notes
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Wilfred, F. (2021). Religious Identities: From the Colonial to the Global. In: Religious Identities and the Global South. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60738-8_3
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