Religion and proto-globalization. Contemporary globalization as a secular translation of the modern universalization of religion

Abstract

This exploratory study aims to analyse how certain biblical theological axioms provided the foundations for the universalist ideas of Christianity as the first religion with a globally expansionist outlook. Based on this theoretical perspective situated within the epistemological boundaries of religious history, the imagination and mentalities, we can examine the phenomenon of proto-globalization that emerges in the modern age as having a religious motive at its heart, just as its legitimation and explanation are also religious. It was also from the religious sphere that the first global instruments and solutions emerged to deal with the challenges brought by the process of becoming acquainted with the world, where peoples opened their doors to being known and received, peacefully or otherwise, the inter-influences of that openness. We largely forget the seminal times of the turbulent beginnings of the globalization that today we experience fully but no less turbulently. Some of the instruments created with a religious motivation in the 16th and 17th centuries to respond to the open world are today reproduced, stripped of that point of reference, in different ways and by different means, of which multinationals are the best example. But the modern secularization process ended up cutting the connection with the religious, taking on an areligious, civil nature.