Urban Aspirations, Globalisation, and Religious Fundamentalism: A Reaction to Modernity

Walk through any big Indian city today and you’ll see the contrast everywhere. A glass-fronted mall selling international fashion brands sits a few hundred metres from a centuries-old temple. A tech park buzzing with global clients shares a road with a mosque calling the faithful to prayer. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s actually one of the more fascinating puzzles in urban anthropology: why does religion, often assumed to fade away as societies modernise, instead grow louder and more visible in the world’s most globalised cities?

Globalisation and the crisis of identity 🔗

Globalisation isn’t just about trade agreements and smartphones crossing borders. It’s a constant flow of capital, images, people, and ideas that blurs the edges between “here” and “elsewhere.” A teenager in Pune can watch the same shows, wear the same sneakers, and follow the same influencers as someone in Seoul or São Paulo. This creates what scholars describe as mixedness – a blending of cultures that can feel exciting, but also deeply unsettling.

Global cities are where this tension is sharpest. They function as beacons of material aspiration: better jobs, better lifestyles, better futures. But that same aspirational pull generates anxiety. When everything familiar seems to be dissolving into a generic, homogenised “global” culture, people start to feel a loss of grounding. Research on identity in global cities points out that as transnational lifestyles spread and a shared “cosmopolitan culture” takes hold, many individuals experience a growing frustration and a longing for the specific, local ways of life that globalisation seems to be flattening out.

This unsettled feeling doesn’t just disappear. It often turns into nostalgia – a pull toward something that feels stable, rooted, and unmistakably one’s own. For many communities, that anchor is religion.

Two ways religion responds to a globalising world 🔗

Not every religious community reacts to globalisation the same way. Sociologist Peter Beyer, in his influential work on religion and global society, argued that religious traditions tend to split into two broad orientations when confronted with a globalising, functionally differentiated world.

The liberal path: adapting and engaging 🔗

One option is to lean into globalisation’s core values – progress, pluralism, and universal concern. Communities on this path treat globalisation as an opportunity rather than a threat. A good example is religious environmentalism, where religious teachings are reinterpreted to address global concerns like climate change. Faith groups across traditions have used scripture and doctrine to build environmental ethics, essentially using religion as a bridge to engage with a shared planetary problem rather than retreating from it.

The defensive path: fundamentalism 🔗

The other option runs in the opposite direction. Here, religious communities view globalisation’s relativising, boundary-blurring effects as a danger to be resisted. This orientation tends to be tradition-focused, exclusive, and resistant to blending with outside influences. Beyer’s framework describes this bifurcation clearly: religion splits into liberal and conservative orientations, with the conservative side often trying to reassert religious authority over domains – politics, law, education – that had become separated from religious control under modern conditions. This second path is where religious fundamentalism takes root.

Fundamentalism as an antithesis to urban modernity 🔗

Sociologist Anthony Giddens offers one of the clearest explanations for why fundamentalism specifically flourishes under conditions of globalisation. His argument centres on a process he calls detraditionalisation. As global flows of information and culture expose people to endless alternative ways of living, the traditions that once gave people a stable sense of self start to lose their grip. Without that stability, Giddens argues, institutions like the nation-state, the family, and organised religion struggle to offer the sense of security and clearly defined norms people once relied on.

Fundamentalism, in this reading, is a direct reaction to that loss. It offers something globalisation seems to take away: certainty. According to sociological analysis of Giddens’ work, globalisation creates significant insecurity, and fundamentalist religion responds by offering very simple, unambiguous answers in a world that otherwise feels confusing and unpredictable. There’s no room for multiple interpretations or grey areas – just one truth, clearly stated.

Giddens also links this to a broader idea: that detraditionalisation strips away the comfort of continuity with the past, and fundamentalism becomes one of the ways individuals try to rebuild a stable identity when constant exposure to other cultures and worldviews erodes traditional certainties. Ironically, fundamentalist movements are not “anti-modern” in a simple sense – they often use thoroughly modern tools like satellite television, social media, and global networks to spread their message, even while rejecting the values those tools represent.

Why cities become the battlefield 🔗

If fundamentalism is a reaction against the world globalisation is creating, it makes sense that global cities – the most visible symbols of that world – become its central stage. Cities are where modern, secular, consumerist lifestyles are most concentrated and most visible. They’re also where global media is headquartered and where international news cameras are already pointed. For a movement trying to broadcast a message to the widest possible audience, a global city offers exactly the platform it needs.

This is why urban anthropologists studying religion in cities describe an intensification of religious visibility and contest precisely in globalising urban centres. Academic surveys of the field note how migration, diversity, and transnational connections have made religious identities and associational life change rapidly within globalising cities, as different faith communities negotiate space, visibility, and belonging alongside one another in the same streets and neighbourhoods.

The result is that cities aren’t just where fundamentalist movements happen to be based – they’re strategically chosen. A protest, a rally, or a symbolic religious gathering staged in a major city generates far more attention than the same event in a small town. Coursework on the anthropology of globalisation points out that media and communication technologies amplify the reach of fundamentalist and extremist movements, allowing them to recruit and mobilise far beyond their immediate geography. The city becomes both the base camp – where organisation and mobilisation happen – and the battlefield, where the clash between traditional identity and global modernity is performed in full public view.

An everyday example, not just an extreme one 🔗

It’s worth remembering that this dynamic doesn’t only show up as dramatic conflict. It also shapes everyday urban life. A neighbourhood temple committee organising a large-scale festival, a mosque expanding its public presence, or a church running high-visibility community outreach in a metro city are all, in smaller ways, examples of religious communities asserting identity and belonging within a rapidly changing urban landscape. The scale differs, but the underlying anthropological logic – using urban visibility to reaffirm identity against the pull of homogenisation – is the same.

What do you think? 🔗

If globalisation is what pushes some communities toward religious fundamentalism, does that mean urban development itself is partly responsible for religious tension in modern cities? And can a city genuinely make space for both liberal, adaptive religious movements and defensive, fundamentalist ones without one eventually dominating the other?

References

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-6765.12700
2. https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/93/3/372/8234299
3. https://revisesociology.com/2016/08/21/anthony-giddens-runaway-world-summary/
4. https://www.tutor2u.net/sociology/reference/sociology-fundamentalism-explained
5. https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/politics/political-ideology/anthony-giddens/
6. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190922481/obo-9780190922481-0030.xml
7. https://fiveable.me/anthropology-of-globalization/unit-12/religious-identities-global-transformations/study-guide/dchjtCgUjOFbRNXt