tion, allowing for the old to be appreciated as ever new and
the new to be received as clarifying or fulfilling the old, serves
to check the chaotic potential of change. Of course, tradi-
tions may be overwhelmed by a crisis of catastrophic propor-
tions, such as the European conquest of the Americas. Even
in these cases, however, features of the displaced tradition
often survive under the auspices of the successor tradition,
usually on the popular level in the form of an ongoing little
tradition.
While religious traditions are not necessarily opposed to
reform or renewal, revolutionary change is a different matter.
By definition, a tradition is opposed to changes that abrogate
the link with the past preserved in its fundamental tradita.
The completely new is intolerable in a traditional religion.
Even prophetic religions promising new and wondrous
things typically do so in a way that reflects the mind of tradi-
tion. Prophets depend on traditions of expectation—that is,
patterned ways of seeking and announcing the new—and
they use traditional paradigms to make sense of new develop-
ments. The Prophet Isaiah heralded the fall of Babylon and
the liberation of the Judean exiles in his day as “new things
... created now, not long ago” (Is. 48:6–7). But the rheto-
ric of novelty did not keep him from understanding the liber-
ation as a new Exodus and the liberator as the same Lord who
stood for Israel in ancient times.
Before modern times, the greatest challenges to religious
traditions came not from antireligious or nonreligious value
systems but from rival religious traditions. The coexistence
of different religious traditions in the same societies for long
periods of time was also a source of change. While the inter-
action of religious traditions before modern times has not yet
been studied in great detail, there is plenty of evidence to
suggest that the boundaries between traditions were much
more permeable than either the guardians of tradition or
their modern detractors suppose. Wilfred Cantwell Smith
went so far as to propose a “history of religion in the singu-
lar” based on the countless ideas, stories, practices and accou-
trements that have found their way into many different reli-
gious traditions (Smith, 1981, p. 3). Smith’s paradigm is the
legend of the Christian saint Josaphat (or Joasaph), the
young Asian prince who abandoned his opulent, cocoon-like
circumstances to seek salvation as a monk. The legend is the
story of Siddha ̄rtha Gautama, the Buddha, and it entered the
repertoire of medieval Christianity from the East through an
Islamic intermediary. By such a route did the Buddha be-
come a Christian saint.
There is general agreement that the pace of religious
change has quickened in recent centuries as a result of the
economic, social, political, and intellectual changes summed
up in the term modernization. The problem of tradition and
modernity concerns the fate of traditional value systems, in-
cluding religious traditions, in a world shaped by modern sci-
ence and market capitalism and the ideologies and technolo-
gies resulting from them, such as liberalism, nationalism,
socialism, and biological and social engineering. Despite nu-
merous studies of the problem of modernization in particular
societies, however, there is little consensus among scholars
about the lasting effects of modernity on religious traditions.When the problem began to be studied by social scien-
tists in the nineteenth century, progressivist ideologies, liber-
al or socialist, shaped the discussion. Most critics assumed
that tradition was fated to give way to modernity, either at
a stroke or through gradual evolution. This view received a
great deal of support from the spectacle of antitraditional,
Marxist revolutions coming to power in Russia and China
in the twentieth century. In the late twentieth century and
the early twenty-first century, however, with the worldwide
collapse of Communism and the decline of secularist regimes
in the Islamic world and elsewhere, more attention has been
given to the persistence of religious traditions. Evidence has
also been adduced to show that in many societies moderniza-
tion actually reinforces and even reinvigorates certain aspects
of tradition, as, for example, when modern technologies of
communication make it possible for religious groups to pro-
mote their messages with unprecedented militancy (e.g.,
Protestant Christian and Islamic fundamentalism), or when
economic and political revolutions result in power and
prominence for groups whose outlook remains deeply tradi-
tional (e.g., Hindu nationalism). In many places moderniz-
ing ideologies actually appear to require an alliance with tra-
dition, including religious tradition, in order to promote
their goals. The central role of nationalism in the contempo-
rary world is a good example of this type of linkage. Nation-
alism owes its dynamism to the fact that whereas it promotes
essentially secular values, it also serves to reaffirm traditional
solidarities.
Postmodernism has attempted a resolution of the prob-
lem of tradition and modernity by declaring modernity, as
such, to be over. Modernity in this context means the En-
lightenment project of reforming the world on the basis of
science, natural law (human rights), and a common human
rationality. Postmodernism rejects this universalism in prin-
ciple on the grounds of the endless plurality of human
cultures and the unfinalizability of discourse. Although post-
modernism was invented by radically secularized philosophi-
cal elites, its critique of Enlightenment liberalism has been
embraced by some apologists for religious tradition accord-
ing to the principle “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Yet
the use of postmodernism to defend religious tradition is
problematic. The world-historical religious traditions are
universalist in principle, and it is hard to see in the final anal-
ysis how a case for them can be based on radical relativism.
Postmodernists respond to this criticism by asserting that
supposedly universalist or “great” traditions are in fact a vast
congeries of essentially local and constantly changing beliefs
and practices. There is truth in this assertion, but also a prob-
lem. Classifications such as “Christian,” “Muslim,” “Bud-
dhist,” and the like appear to count for something in the tra-
ditions that claim these names. Religious communities seem
to aspire to identification with a great tradition, no matterTRADITION 9279