Globalizing the Rainbow
Madonna
Old Time Religion in the Present Age
Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie F. Marquardt
O
N THE morning of 17 December 1996, a client at the Seminole
Finance Corporation of Clearwater, Florida, noticed a strange
phenomenon on the building's facade: large panes of reflective glass
had become discolored, creating a three-story-high shape that bore a
striking resemblance to images of the Virgin Mary. Iridescent shades of color
formed a `Rainbow Madonna' with a covered head slightly tilted to one side,
eyes gazing downward toward the asphalt parking lot of the corporation.
Within two hours of the sighting, this parking lot was filled with curious
onlookers who had come from throughout Tampa Bay, armed with video
cameras and rosary beads. Most had seen a brief story on the apparition aired
on the local midday news. By early evening, traffic was stop-and-go on the
six-lane highway along which the corporation is located, amid gas stations
and strip-malls. Crowds overflowed on the road adjacent to the parking lot
and news helicopters swarmed overhead, carrying cameras which broadcast
the story on CNN and national network news. Over the course of the next
few days, stories of the apparition ran in newspapers across the globe. The
owner of the Seminole Finance Corporation granted interviews to reporters
from Brazil and England and bank employees gave directions to pilgrims
traveling from France and Australia. Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a
visionary named Rita Ring announced that she was receiving messages from
the Mary appearing in Clearwater. With the help of an international Catholic
organization called the Shepherds of Christ, she began to publicize these
messages.
Although the story of the apparition of `Our Lady of Clearwater' is
extraordinary in many ways, it is but one of the many recent sightings of
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Vol. 17(4): 119­143
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Mary worldwide. According to Pelikan (1996), more manifestations of Mary
have been reported since 1980 than between 1830 and 1930, considered the
`great century of Marian apparitions'. Almost 50 apparitions have occurred
since 1980, in places as diverse as the USA, Nicaragua, Brazil, Rwanda and
Australia.
How are we to explain the proliferation of Marian apparitions through-
out the world in an age that many have called postmodern? In this article,
we argue that this phenomenon is not merely the result of fin-de-millénaire
anxiety, nor is it just an impotent backlash against the extreme seculariz-
ation and rationalization of today's society. As the case of Our Lady of
Clearwater will show, in recent times Marian apparitions are part of a
complex process involving `the global creation of the local' (Featherstone
and Lash, 1995: 4), whereby traditional local religious practices and dis-
courses enter large-scale dynamics, including the Internet, TV and the
Vatican's New Evangelization project.
Since the article focuses on a religious phenomenon with an essentially
pre-modern core,1 we begin with a discussion of the theory of secularization,
the dominant modernist approach to religion and social change. Despite
claims that with secularization `old time' religious phenomena, such as the
Marian apparitions, will eventually disappear or become marginal, pre-
modern religious practices not only show enduring vitality but are gaining a
great deal of visibility worldwide. In view of the secularization model's limi-
tations, we offer our own reading of the apparition, drawing from theories of
globalization and transnationalism. Our aim here will be to show how, with
some caveats, globalization provides a more useful framework for under-
standing the key dynamics that accompany the apparition. Globalization, as
Bauman (1998: 1) rightly complains, `is on everybody's lips; a fad word
turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-key meant to unlock
the gates to all present and future mysteries'. We want to avoid this type of
obfuscation by specifying through a case study some of the ways in which
globalization is shaping religion. In the process, we begin to operationalize
globalization theories, which so far have remained at macro-structural and
institutional levels of analysis.
We continue with an exploration of the impact of the apparition at the
local level, on the town of Clearwater and in the parish of St Theresa's, which
is adjacent to the apparition site. As our focus is on how a local religious
phenomenon gained global visibility, we will not offer a full ethnography of
the site. Rather, we will only provide enough descriptive elements to illus-
trate the complex relation between the local and the global and the role
religion plays in mediating this relation. The interpenetration of global and
local processes has mixed, and even contradictory, consequences. On the
one hand, the apparition in Clearwater is articulating a new transnational
sacred space that challenges the provincial and static nature of the parish
of St Theresa's. On the other, the changing ethnic composition of the parish
­ exemplified most dramatically by the growing presence of Mexican trans-
migrants ­ leads to the emergence and reinforcement of exclusionary and
120 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
hierarchical practices. In short, `globalization divides as much as it unites'
(Bauman, 1998: 2).
The article closes with some reflections on the study of religion and
society in a globalizing setting. We argue for theories of religious change that
transcend the totalizing and teleological bent of modernist approaches
without falling into an uncritical celebration of fragmentation and hybridity.
Modernist Explanations
According to Wallis and Bruce (1992: 9) secularization `asserts that the
social significance of religion diminishes in response to the operation of
three salient features of modernization . . . namely (1) social differentiation,
(2) societalization, and (3) rationalization'. Since the Reformation, religion's
central role in social life has decreased. With the advent of modernity,
spheres of human action, such as politics, the arts and law, which were under
the tutelage of religion in the overarching Catholic medieval world, have
gained autonomy, generating their own rational foundations and rules. This
process has been connected to the collapse of the feudal order built on small
rural communities, which the Catholic world-view sanctioned, and the rise
of cities with their large industrial centers. Within this new, highly differ-
entiated context, the twilight of revelation as ground for legitimation and the
ascendance of critical and scientific thought meant for some, like Marx, that
religion was bound to disappear.
This reading of secularization is hardly defensible in the light of the
resurgence of religious movements, many fundamentalist, throughout the
world. A more sophisticated interpretation of secularization theory would
argue that it is not so much that religion is bound to disappear, but that it
will be dislodged from the public sphere and forced to change its con-
figuration to adapt to this displacement (Luckmann, 1967). Pointing to the
decline in church attendance and affiliation, especially among mainstream
churches, some argue that religion will become privatized ­ its proper scope
reduced to a personal, and at most local, relation with the sacred ­ and more
rationalistic, stripped of its supernatural referents and bound to the logic of
the market. As options increase through differentiation and globalization, a
religious market emerges in which traditions lose their normative power,
becoming nothing more than products that consumers purchase as emblems
of an individual lifestyle. However, the fact that religion is being lived so
publicly and emotionally, on the Internet, on TV, on the covers of Newsweek
and the New York Times Magazine, and at the Mall in Washington, DC (as
in the case of the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers), seems to
contradict this thesis of privatization.
Some argue that, in fact, all these religious expressions prove the pri-
vatization hypothesis. As Miles (1997: 56) observes, contemporary religion
in the USA is more than ever a case of `institutionalized anti-institutional-
ism'. `Americans', he tells us, `are particularly at ease with forms of religion
that require little in the way of organizational commitment and impose little
in the way of group identity. Religious books, television shows and one-time
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 121
events like marches and revivals all meet those criteria.'2 However, recent
sociological studies in the USA (Roozen and Hadaway, 1993) show that the
fastest growing Christian churches are evangelical, usually emphasizing the
power of the divine to irrupt into history and produce a total personal con-
version. Evangelical growth has occurred through both mega-churches and
more traditional small, storefront churches in poor urban and rural areas, a
combination that defies, on the one hand, the privatization claim, and on the
other, the assertion that religion is now bound only to the logic of the market.
What, then, accounts for the flourishing of this vocal, affective and
non-rational (sometimes outright anti-rational) religion? Are we witnessing
a revival of old, dying traditions? Is it a case of spiritual backlash, in the
face of a world that has become, as Weber (1958: 181) had feared, an `iron
cage'? The hypothesis of re-enchantment of the world provides yet another
side of the core secularization claim. According to the Frankfurt School, heir
of the Weberian tradition, scientific rationality, which was meant to liberate,
ends up leading to the emptying out of all meaning and the objectification
of human subjects through the logic of the capitalist market and the rise of
the omnipotent bureaucratic state (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972). Along
these lines, Habermas (1987:153­97) warns us against `pathologies in the
life-world' generated when the sphere of interpersonal communication and
meaning is colonized by the demands of the system. Deprived of its norms
of reciprocity, authenticity and rational debate, the public square becomes
the domain either of `specialists without spirit' or of religious fanatics threat-
ening to escape modernity by taking us back to pre-modern times. Could
this be what is behind the proliferation of Marian apparitions?
Certain patterns in the apparitions support this hypothesis. A great
majority of the apparitions have happened in the countryside, harking back
to the simplicity of the agrarian way of life that was so violently overturned
by modernity. In the case of Medjugorje, the apparition occurs in the midst
of an utterly broken civil society. The visionaries were village children, once
again suggesting a nostalgia for pristine origins. In Conyers, one of the most
frequently visited apparition sites in the world, the landscape has changed
rapidly, as this formerly rural area has become a booming suburb of Atlanta.
In the midst of this change, visionary Nancy Fowler brings tens of thousands
of people to her non-functioning farm, evoking memories of simpler times.
The apparition messages in general are critical of humanity for having
turned its back on God and for worshiping secular, anti-life and consumerist
values. Mary calls upon devotees to repent and change their ways lest it be
too late to escape final divine judgment. In Clearwater, for instance, the
Virgin calls us to task for having made money `our God. Do you know how
cold are your hearts? You turn away from my Son, Jesus, for your money.
Your money is your God.'
Thus, the resurgence of religion would appear as resistance to the
rationalization of the world under neoliberal capitalism. As the world
becomes more `McDonaldized' (Barber, 1995), there is a powerful, sub-
limated longing for meaning and depth that gets expressed in pre-modern
122 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
ways. Pointing to the apocalyptic content of Mary's recent messages, one
might even add that in a postmodern time of general disenchantment,
miraculous apparitions and other contemporary religious phenomena are
desperate responses to increasing anxiety about end of the millennium.
Castells summarizes this view well when he states that there is in our age a
`split between [the] abstract, universal instrumentalism' of what he calls the
network society and `historically rooted, particularistic identities' built on
the basis of religion and ethnicity. According to Castells, we live in a world
`typified by the widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of
institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural
expressions.' In this context,
. . . people increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but
on the basis of what they are, or believe they are. Meanwhile, on the other
hand, global networks of instrumental exchanges selectively switch on and off
individuals, groups, regions, and even countries, according to their relevance
in fulfilling the goals processed in the network . . . (1996: 3)
The apparition at Clearwater, however, shows a far more complicated
picture. First, why, as an article in the News and Observer of Raleigh, North
Carolina, asks, `would the Holy Virgin appear next door to the Pelican Car
Wash and the Quick Lube oil change? On a business that specializes in auto
loans that carry up to 25 percent interest?' (Snow, 1997). The owner of the
bank on which Mary appeared does not seem to think that the apparition is
a condemnation of his capitalist enterprise. Rather, he reported in several
interviews in front of his now famous bank that he was `enjoying Christmas
. . . [and] feeling inspired more and more' (Leiser, 1996). Further, within few
days of the apparition, the parking-lot-turned-sacred-space was full of
vendors hawking glossy photos of the Virgin, airbrushed T-shirts that read
`I believe . . . The Miracle on US 19', greeting cards and key chains, all
bearing the image of the Rainbow Madonna. It thus seems counter-intuitive
to hypothesize that the apparition is a reaction against the obstreperous con-
sumerism of the suburban business strip. As we shall see later on, the
parking lot at Clearwater differs greatly from the farm at Conyers and similar
settings in New York, New Jersey and Texas. Although once a very small
town, Clearwater is now a sprawling city of malls and highways. The large,
box-shaped Seminole Finance building, where the epiphany occurred, is
right in the midst of this urban bustle. In this context, Mary does not seem
to be protesting against modernity by calling us back to a beleaguered farm.
Rather, she seems to be using the supposed tools of secularization to make
her point. The apparition is popular not despite the trappings of our `post-
modern world', but because of them.
Our Lady of Clearwater and Globalization
Before analyzing the apparition at Clearwater from the perspective of global-
ization, we need to clarify the meaning of the term and provide some
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 123
theoretical background. As Wallerstein (1974) has shown, the rise of
national economies and their interconnectedness is not a new phenomenon,
but dates back to the mercantilist period. Robertson (1992), too, traces the
beginnings of the trend towards making the world a `single place' to as early
as the 15th century, taking into account not only economic and political
factors but also cultural dynamics such the standardization of time through
the first widespread use of the Gregorian calendar. Nevertheless, in the last
three decades of this century we have experienced what David Harvey
(1989) calls a radical `time-space compression', due to a complex host of
variables, including advances in information and transportation technology,
a shift to flexible production and an accelerating turnover in the production,
exchange and consumption of goods. Part and parcel of this time-space com-
pression is the pervasiveness of transnational flows of capital, goods, people
and information. Especially significant for our purposes are the latter two:
tourists, pilgrims, migrants and refugees, in constant motion, join infor-
mation traveling through an increasingly globalized media and the World
Wide Web to bring into contact areas of the world that previously had been
relatively isolated from each other. This contact creates a `hyperspace' that
transcends traditional (national) boundaries. In this hyperspace various
(contradictory) discourses and practices interact, are juxtaposed and/or
mixed, at times, to give rise to `hybrid cultures' (García Canclini, 1995), and
at other times, to lead to tension, conflict, and the violent reassertion of
particularity and locality.
The current production of hybrid cultures is different from previous
forms of syncretism. What we are currently experiencing is qualitatively
different from age-old practices such as tourism, missions, mercantilism and
colonialism in terms of the speed, breadth and depth of the sociocultural
fragmentation and re-articulation made possible by the recent time-space
compression. At least two dynamics are at play here: first, there has been a
radical autonomization and intensification of cultural production, as re-
flected in the rise of a global consumer culture (Featherstone, 1995). Second,
the rise of new media, like videos and the Internet, has contributed to a
decoupling of signifiers from the signified, leading to a general skepticism
towards capital `T' Truth so characteristic of postmodernism (Baudrillard,
1981). Together, these two dynamics have made possible the rapid global
circulation of symbols, their constant attachment and re-attachment to
varying objects, and their combination and re-combination in various
settings. This, in turn, has blurred the spatial, temporal and conceptual dis-
tinctions at modernity's core.
Scholars are divided on the overarching cultural effects of globaliz-
ation. Some argue that it leads to homogeneity, as the lifestyles and values
of the core capitalist countries penetrate peripheral societies (Giddens,
1994: 96­7). In contrast to `homogenizers', the `heterogenizers' contend that
the global media provide access to a plurality of discourses and practices,
which people around the world can use to create new individual and col-
lective identities (Neederveen Pieterse, 1995). To overcome the dichotomy,
124 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
Robertson (1995) suggests that homogenization and heterogenization are
complementary processes. The case of Clearwater supports the claim that
homogenization is not opposed to heterogenization; rather the two processes
are `mutually implicative' (Robertson, 1995).
How then is globalization, understood as this time-space compression,
related to Our Lady of Clearwater?
Global Pilgrimage and Transnational Migration
As mentioned above, the Seminole Finance Corporation is sandwiched
between a Mitsubishi car dealership and an Amoco gas station in an over-
crowded suburban business district, barely distinguishable from other such
areas. With Mary's apparition on the side of the bank building in the midst
of this homogenized geography, one small square of asphalt, the parking lot,
was circumscribed by the Clearwater police with yellow crime-scene tape,
effectively transforming it into a sacred space. This space stands out, setting
itself apart from the surrounding strip-shopping malls and chain super-
markets. A long, 3-foot high concrete wall has become the makeshift altar
along which visitors place thousands of candles bearing the image of our
Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and
Jesus. Visitors have also draped hundreds of rosary beads, flowers and potted
plants along the wall, and posted prayer requests written on all kinds of
scraps of paper. Most requests are written in English or Spanish, but others
are in German or Italian. Many visitors to the site express a sense of awe at
the transformation of a parking lot into a place where people kneel down to
say the rosary while others whisper quietly as if in a sanctuary. A policeman
directing traffic at the site explained to the St. Petersburg Times how visitors
to the apparition `become very pious, very quiet'. He described the visitors
saying, `They embrace, they cry, they pray together. It's a pretty heavy scene'
(Norton, 1996: A10).
While the newly created sacred space is local in the physical sense, it
is clearly subject to globalizing tendencies. It has become a cosmopolitan
place, as Tampa natives meet, pray and exchange stories of apparitions and
miraculous healings with pilgrims from various parts of the world. On any
given day at the site, one might encounter visitors speaking German, Italian,
Spanish, English or any number of other languages. This linguistic plural-
ism is just one expression of the crowd's diversity. One member of a local
parish described the site in the following terms: `There were biker chicks up
there, there were hippies up there, there were people in suits, people in short
pants, people from Canada that were burnt redder than lobsters ­ all stand-
ing around talking together.' Indeed, the image reflected off of the Seminole
Finance Building was dubbed the `Rainbow Madonna' not only because of
her curved shape and bright colors, but also because, as one letter to the
editor explains, `the people who visit the site are a rainbow of all ages,
nationalities, and beliefs. . . . As a rainbow forms an arc or a circle of many
colors, the Rainbow Madonna's appeal is one of inclusiveness' (Canale,
1996: 9A). Tampa Bay residents repeatedly voiced the theme of `unity in
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 125
diversity' as Mary's paramount message in Clearwater. This theme has
become especially salient in the region as the Latino population continues
to increase and racial tensions have recently exploded into riots in nearby
St Petersburg.
Another important globalizing dynamic is illustrated by the consis-
tency between the ways in which pilgrims make sense both of the apparition
in Clearwater and of experiences in other Marian sites throughout the world.
Pilgrims in various parts of the world share a script which shapes and legit-
imates their encounters with Mary. This script comes in part from the insti-
tutional Catholic Church's new evangelization project, which we discuss later
on, but it also includes other significant elements which are less clearly insti-
tutionalized ­ most notably, the circulation of symbols and rituals commonly
associated with devotional practices in traditional popular Catholicism in the
mass media. One is as likely to see makeshift altars with candles, rosary
beads, written prayer requests and flowers in Clearwater as in Medjugorje.
Further, the miracles witnessed at Clearwater bear striking similarities to
experiences in Medjugorje, where pilgrims see the sun spinning and pulsat-
ing; in Conyers, where Polaroid pictures reveal the glowing gates of heaven;
in San Nicolas, Argentina, where the links of the rosary beads turn to gold;
or in Mexico City, where in February 1988 Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared
reflected on the floor tiles of a busy subway station.
Whether they have traveled physically to the various apparition sites
worldwide or visited them via some form of media (we discuss the Internet
later), pilgrims at Clearwater are drawing from a global script to construct
their local sacred space and to make sense of their personal experiences.
This generalized script is constantly disseminated through various forms of
media which pilgrims deploy locally, adding their own inflections. It is in
this sense that homogenization ­ characterized by sets of discourses and
practices shared across the world which have attained a certain canonical
force through which they legitimize apparitions ­ and heterogenization ­ as
the local deployment of the scripts which acquires its own autochthonous
flavor ­ are mutuality implicative, as Robertson argues.
Even acknowledging the use of generalized apparition scripts, could
one not explain pilgrimage in Clearwater without making reference to global-
ization as we have defined it? After all, pilgrimage and apparitions are really
nothing new to Christianity. In fact, in the Middle Ages, these practices were
inextricably linked to the consolidation of popular religious traditions. Nor
are they inimical to modernity. Several studies detail how the 19th century
witnessed an increase in miracles and apparitions. However, whereas in the
last century apparitions and pilgrimages were part of a complex process of
turning the local into the national, today they occur in the context of a crisis
in nation-states. Kselman (1983), for instance, describes how the Catholic
Church saw in promotion of devotions to Virgins at La Salette and Lourdes
an excellent strategy to counter humanist and anti-clerical tendencies
through an appeal to French nationalism. According to Kselman, Church-
approved miracle cults `were designed to create a national community of
126 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
Catholics and so to replicate in the modern world the kind of belief thought
to have characterized an older, more stable [and more Catholic] France'.
Our Lady of Clearwater shatters this nationalist imaginaire, in which
the Catholic Church represented the only legitimate glue joining the various
nation-states. For one thing, there were reports of busloads of European
tourists/pilgrims paying up to $2,000 to come and see the Virgin and, on the
side, take in some of the Florida sights (Coyne, 1996: D1). More significant,
however, is the presence among the pilgrims of transnational Mexican
migrants, who come to revere the apparition as an expression of the Virgin
of Guadalupe, the quintessential symbol of Mexican national identity. These
migrants, Roger Rouse (1991) argues, challenge both the fixity of US borders
and the ideal of the melting pot. In their constant back-and-forth movement
across national borders, they problematize the notion of homogeneous, geo-
graphically and culturally bounded communities arranged hierarchically in
the capitalist world-system through the binary opposition of center and
periphery.
Here, however, we need to sound a note of caution. Mexico­USA
migratory flows do not originate with the recent period of globalization, for
Mexicans have been crossing borders since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
in 1848, when half of Mexico became part of the USA. Nevertheless, as we
shall see later when we discuss Clearwater, recent dynamics closely tied to
globalization such as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Treaty),
repeated economic crises in Mexico, the decline of agriculture and the
growth of the service sector in central Florida, have led to increased mi-
gration from Mexico and to the expansion of settled Hispanic communities
in the area. Clearwater, which up until 1980 had a negligible Latino popu-
lation, is now home to many Mexican immigrants, most of them from the
municipality of Ixmiquilpan in Hidalgo, one of Mexico's poorest states.
Mexicans in Clearwater maintain a close connection with friends and rela-
tives in Ixmiquilpan through the same changes in technology that have
allowed news of the presence of the Rainbow Madonna to explode across the
globe: rapid communication technology allows them to call home, send audio
and videotapes, and wire remittances with ease; transport technology gives
them the ability to return home frequently for baptisms, marriages, burials
and vacations.
This transnationalism ­ the flow of people, goods and, more import-
antly, ideas, across national boundaries ­ has had an impact on the appari-
tion at Clearwater. On the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, many of the
Mexican migrants come to venerate the Rainbow Madonna dressed as
Matlachines, wearing body paint and head-dresses as they imagine their
ancestors did in their `pagan' ceremonies. Then they dance in honor of the
Guadalupana, as millions of pilgrims do in Mexico City. Mario Esquivel, a
Matlachin from neighboring Plant City, explained that the Rainbow
Madonna is `showing us that you cannot distinguish between races and kinds
of people here. All kinds of people are talking to each other' (Headrick,
1996: 6B). Here Esquivel is pointing toward the articulation of a hybrid
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 127
sacred space. The Matlachines, with their traditional dances, highlight the
already hybrid nature of Guadalupe, in particular its association with
Tonantzin, an Aztec goddess of fertility at Tepeyac, the hill where the Virgin
appeared to the recently converted native American Juan Diego. In Clear-
water, the Matlachines add yet another layer to this syncretic tension, bring-
ing together pre-Columbian and colonial symbols with the Virgin on the
bank.
The Rainbow Madonna thus provides an example of how religion can
become a medium for hybridity in a globalizing setting. Rather than seeing
the homogenization of culture, as the rationalization hypothesis would have
us believe, we see the production of new sacred spaces, practices and col-
lective identities through the blending of the pre-modern (apparitions and
pilgrimages) with the modern/postmodern (the media and the Internet). A
miraculous event, to many a symbol of the supernatural in our midst, unfolds
itself globally through the tools of our rational and monetarized age. This
stands in direct contradiction to the hypothesis that religion and society are
becoming increasingly disenchanted.
Mediascapes
Another crucial ingredient in the construction of a globalized local sacred
space in Clearwater is what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990) has
termed `mediascapes'. According to Appadurai, the rapid production and
worldwide circulation of images facilitated by recent changes in computer
and communication technology have made possible the development of
transnational audiences. While the images shared may lead to a certain
homogenization of experience, often they become indigenized, that is, appro-
priated with different local inflections. Mediascapes are:
. . . image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what
they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements
(such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be
formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of other living in other
places. (1990: 299)
In other words, precisely because of their configuration and content, media-
scapes allow local discourses and practices such as those connected with
Marian apparitions to survive, and even thrive, in a globalized setting.
The popularity of the apparition at Clearwater, in large part, relies on
the construction of a mediascape. Within two days of the apparition's arrival,
the story had been picked up by a major TV network (NBC News at Sunrise),
and soon after, ABC nightly news ran a segment on it. In the ensuing days
several newspaper articles documented the translocal aspect of the appari-
tion through interviews with people who had come to Clearwater after travel-
ing to Medjugorje, Fatima, Mexico, Conyers and Lubbock, Texas.
The Internet adds an important element that we may call `virtual pil-
grimage'. In contrast to early forms of pilgrimage, or even to the gathering
128 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
of people at Clearwater, in this electronic pilgrimage people do not move
physically or interact face to face, in a public arena bounded by the miracu-
lous event. Indeed, the boundaries created by the police crime-scene tape
to circumscribe Clearwater's local sacred space are transgressed as a
person from Australia, India or Mexico enters the space through his/her
computer and glances at the vivid image of the Rainbow Madonna
[http//:www.frontier.net/Apparitions/apparitions.html]. At a distance, the
pilgrim inscribes his/her existence in a global sacred `hyperspace', a
protean translocal space, `a place that is no place' (O'Leary, 1996: 799) that
is custom-made to fit his/her specific needs, as s/he invests her/his crises
and desires on the various apparitions. This geography, to draw from
Derrida (1967), defies the `metaphysics of presence', it is a `trace', neither
here nor there, always ephemeral, blinking in and out of the computer
screen, and only charted on paper as the pilgrim downloads it. It is a geog-
raphy that defies passports, national immigration laws, and clerical and
state regulation. Nevertheless, the fact that this new shifting religious geog-
raphy is a personal articulation does not make it into a private phenom-
enon. As the virtual pilgrim enters talk groups and electronic conference
rooms, leaves her/his testimony of conversion, or reads those left by other
fellow travelers, s/he becomes a member of global, often polyglot `virtual
community' of believers (Rheingold, 1993). Appadurai (1996: 8) argues
that, just as, at modernity's outset, print capitalism was instrumental in the
emergence of nationalism by bringing together groups that never had met
face to face (cf. Anderson, 1983), today it is the electronic mass media that
are creating global `communities of sentiment', that `begin to imagine and
feel things together'. In these transnatonal `sodalities of worship and
charisma', religion, particularly the lived religion of devotional practices
like those connected with Marian apparitions, provide what, borrowing from
Raymond Williams (1977: 128­35), we may call `structures of feeling',
psycho-cognitive horizons which enable and delimit the construction of self
and group. The emergence of web sites such as `Jesus 2000: Virtual Pil-
grimage to the Holy Land' [www.Jesus2000.com] and another connected to
the Muslim Hajj [www.Haj2000.com], both created by a Luxembourg-based
company, portends an auspicious future for electronic pilgrimage.
What we see, then, in the electronic pilgrimage to Clearwater, is not
the disappearance of a practice connected to a medieval world of villages,
with the values of small community and attachment to the land crushed
under weight of the rootlessness of urban sprawl or of the global media.
Rather, in what a recent New York Times article (Stanley, 1998: A1) on the
Turin shroud and its 30 web sites describes as `an odd marriage of ancient
faith and cyberspace', pre-modern religious expressions, such as Marian
apparitions, find themselves projected beyond the local, past the national,
on to a worldwide stage, where they can incite and fulfill multiple desires.
Indeed, as the Rainbow Madonna enters a mediascape, she becomes a new
fragment of the script that the electronic pilgrim may now use to re-enact or
stage a new apparition in his/her own locality.
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 129
We should not assume that this newly found freedom for religious
images and scripts to roam around the world in an instant has finally liber-
ated lay popular religiosity from the shackles of institutional orthodoxy or
corporate influence. Our Lady of Clearwater is implicated in another key
global dimension: the Vatican's New Evangelization project, which has
sought to foster personal forms of devotion, especially those connected to
Mary, as an antidote to the crisis of modern emancipatory projects and the
rapid growth of evangelical and fundamentalist movements worldwide.
The Shepherds of Christ and the New Evangelization: An Example of
Glocalization
When it comes to Our Lady of Clearwater, not everything goes. The task of
constructing an orthodox reading of the apparition has fallen into the hands
of Shepherds of Christ Ministries, a movement founded in June 1994 by
Father Edward J. Carter, a professor of theology at Xavier University in
Cincinnati, Ohio. If one is to take the movement's self-description at face
value, a complex picture emerges. A handout at the apparition site describes
the ministry as `multi-faceted, international', `open to priests, religious and
the laity . . . [with] over 150 prayer "chapters" in its worldwide network
devoted to the spiritual welfare of priests'. A further exploration of their
bilingual (English/Spanish) home page [http://www.Shepherds-of-Christ.org]
reveals that they publish four newsletters ­ with Shepherds of Christ as the
flagship, soon to be offered in Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Russian and
other languages ­ with copies sent to `individuals who in turn distribute the
materials in foreign lands from Sri Lanka to Nigeria to Nepal to Puerto Rico'.
They have also produced 11 books, including God's Blue Book, Father
Carter's Tell My People, an associates handbook (a prayer manual), and
several inspirational audio and videotapes.
From their headquarters in Cincinnati, hundreds of miles from Clear-
water, the Shepherds have sought to establish a monopoly over the correct
interpretation of the apparition through the work of visionary Rita Ring. On
this score, the Rainbow Madonna has been very explicit in her messages to
Ring. Again, quoting from handouts at the apparition site:
I appear to you on the building to draw men to the messages given in God's
Blue Book, Rosaries from the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and Tell My People.
These books are messages we give from our hearts to draw men to our hearts.
They are the messages my Son gives to bring about the reign of His Most
Sacred Heart.
Or even more explicitly:
I ask you to circulate Mary's Message [an audiotape] in Florida and the
rosaries [special Marian meditations and messages] of December 13, 1996,
and January 13, 1997. These messages were given to reveal insights into His
Most Intimate Love. My appearance in Florida and the Shepherds of Christ
Movement must be connected.
130 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
Notwithstanding this drive to fix a normative reading of the apparition,
could the Shepherds of Christ be a movement independent from, even in
opposition to, the official Church? After all, the Virgin (not Jesus) is reveal-
ing herself to a woman (not to a priest). In fact, the diocese of St Petersburg,
which includes Clearwater, has been very reluctant to accept the miraculous
event. According to a spokesperson from the diocese, `there is no reason for
us to believe it [the image at the bank] is beyond natural causes. . . . If you
want contact with the Lord, you can keep his commandments and love one
another and help those in need' (Coyne, 1996: D1). This reading, nonethe-
less, proves too charitable when we learn that the Virgin's messages through
Ring `are meant to be disseminated to everyone in the world after Father
Edward Carter, S.J. has thoroughly discerned them'. Here the mention of
Father Carter is followed by a citation of his credentials, including promi-
nently his membership in the global Society of Jesus. According to the
movement's homepage, its handbook `now carries the Imprimi Potest
approval of the Jesuit Provincial of Chicago but, as each translation emerges
the prayer manual section of the handbook is being submitted to the Arch-
diocese of Cincinnati for Imprimatur'. The homepage also includes letters
of support from Archbishop Daniel Buechlein (through his Vicar General)
of Indianapolis and from Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati. Inter-
estingly, what sectors of the official Church are endorsing here is not the
voice of Ring, but the work of the Shepherds, who, as transnational actors,
have appropriated a local, lay-produced message to advance their over-
arching pastoral goals. We will return to this `disciplining' of the local later.
The endorsement of the Shepherds' work by the dioceses of Indi-
anapolis and Cincinnati sets up an interesting tension with the diocese of St
Petersburg, in which the phenomenon has occurred but which has reserva-
tions about it. The tension is a new expression of the old tension between
particularity and universality in Catholicism (Casanova, 1997). Indeed, to
carry out its New Evangelization campaign, the Vatican has relied heavily
on translocal movements such as the Opus Dei and the Charismatic Renewal
Movement. This approach, which benefits from the latest innovation in
media technology (through Lumen 2000), exists in tension with the preser-
vation of the hierarchical parish and diocesan structures that are based on
medieval notions of a clearly defined locality and a unified community.
But what is this New Evangelization? And how does the work of the
Shepherds of Christ dovetail with it? The New Evangelization (NE) is a broad
initiative launched by Pope John Paul II in 1983, in preparation for the
upcoming celebration of 500 years of the discovery of the new world (the
beginning of the first evangelization) and the third millennium. Partly a reac-
tion to the increasing fragmentation of the global religious field, dramatized
by the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America, long a
Catholic stronghold, the New Evangelization has sought to redirect the
Church's energy towards gaining new converts and renewing the faith of
nominal Catholics. The NE also comes at a time of ideological and insti-
tutional re-alignment within the Church. Seeking to reaffirm the Church's
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 131
unity, universality and hierarchical authority against the most radically his-
toricizing consequences of the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican has
undertaken a `restoration offensive'. In practical terms this has meant a con-
solidation of the clergy's monopoly of legitimate symbolic goods through an
emphasis on the sacraments and personal spirituality and a reaffirmation of
the ban on women becoming priests.
But how can the Church reconcile the need to proselytize with renewed
fervor, which requires active work from the laity, with the Vatican restora-
tion and its call for unity and universality in the face of the fragmentation
produced by globalization? The Church's solution has been to develop global
pastoral strategies flexible enough to be deployed by the laity in various
settings but still susceptible to the centralizing oversight of the clergy. The
Church has used the term `inculturation' to characterize this synthesis
between particularity and universality. Inculturation is defined as the `call
to bring the power of the Gospel into the very heart of culture and cultures'.
And what better a way to `penetrate' indigenous Catholic culture than
by returning to devotional traditions, such as apparitions and miracles,
which are inherently local. Under the right clerical supervision, devotional
traditions, including those connected to Mary, provide a good vehicle to
renew faith in everyday life, at the local and personal levels, through the
work of the laity. They also present the Church as a spiritual beacon in the
normative wasteland created by postmodernism without challenging the
authority of the hierarchy. John Paul II has, in fact, made Mary, in her
various expressions, one of the key elements in his pastoral work. He
devoted his papacy to her with the slogan `totus tuus' (`entirely yours') and
by designing a coat of arms which bears a large `M' for Mary in the bottom
right corner. He has visited numerous apparition sites ­ the last in El Cobre,
Cuba ­ and attributed his survival from an assassin's bullet to the protec-
tion of Our Lady of Fatima (Cunneen, 1996: 271). Moreover, there has been
much speculation that Mary might be proclaimed co-redemptrix during John
Paul II's papacy (Woodward et al., 1997: 49­55).
Against the backdrop of the NE and the papal emphasis on Marian
devotions, we can say that in the hands of the Shepherds, the apparition at
Clearwater is an instance of `religious glocalization'. This term is a neolo-
gism that describes the Japanese practice of dochukuka, that is, adapting
one's practices to local conditions. As a business model, glocalization has
meant `micro-marketing: the tailoring and advertising of goods and services
on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and par-
ticular markets' (Robertson, 1995: 28). Amin (1994) and Harvey (1989) have
documented the crisis of Fordist modes of production in a climate of
increased global competition. In the endless search for profits, rigid, corpo-
ratist economies of scale that produce for homogeneous national markets are
giving way to flexible, decentralized production for diverse global markets.
Glocalization is precisely a set of flexible production strategies, which
increase the `local content' of products, and thus allow for a rapid response
to changing local needs, while facilitating the concentration of management
132 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
and profits in `global cities' (Sassen, 1991), where transnational companies
are based. Glocalization then appears as a triumph of diversity and the local,
when in fact, it is also part and parcel of the global process of capitalist
penetration. But this process does not simply lead to homogenization, as the
Frankfurt School would have it. Rather it elevates diversity and the local as
a globally feasible economic practice ­ or, as Robertson puts it, `diversity
sells' (1995: 29).
Since religious markets are also becoming increasingly global and
competitive, it is not a stretch to transpose the notion of glocalization to the
religious field. Indeed, we can hypothesize that the parish ­ the cornerstone
of the Catholic edifice ­ tends to operate in a Fordist mode, as a religious
economy of scale that dispenses `one-size-fits-all' products in an impersonal
fashion. In contrast, the NE, with its stress on inculturation and spiritual
renewal through Marian devotions and movements like the Charismatics,
both of which address personal and community needs but are not bound geo-
graphically, would conform more to post-Fordism. Applying the glocaliza-
tion hypothesis to the apparition at Clearwater, we can see how the
Shepherds' work is simultaneously a source of personalized religious goods
(built through the global circulation of their scripts of the apparition) and a
vehicle for the reaffirmation of Catholic orthodoxy and hierarchy (as the
scripts are sanctioned by the institution). Seen in this light, the Shepherds
offer a flexible strategy that allows the institutional Church to embody itself
in the local, that is, to impress upon the local its discipline, hierarchy and
global aims and methods. In this process, however, the local is not obliter-
ated; it maintains its locality, but it is shaped and re-appropriated in the
context of the overarching narrative provided by the universal Church.
The Rainbow Madonna, as an instance of the NE's religious glocaliza-
tion, thus shows the other side of the global­local tension embodied in the
apparition at Clearwater. While mediascapes provide a way for the local tra-
ditional religious practices to explode on to the global level, the NE offers
an example of how global processes impress themselves on the local. In the
case of Our Lady of Clearwater these two dynamics feed each other, leading
to an ascending spiral of religious renewal. Religious renewal here is not
just a desperate reaction to disenchantment. While the latter may provide
the background condition in which renewal happens, we need to go beyond
secularization-based models to understand how religion operates in a global
context.
Clearwater on a Global Stage
We have been referring to the local and the global throughout this essay and,
while we have given examples of global processes in the mediascapes and
NE, we have not dealt adequately with the local. Let us take the local in its
most traditional sense: as a geographically bounded setting. What are the
effects of the apparition and its globalizing force on the town of Clearwater?
Up until 1970, Clearwater was a sleepy, sparsely populated resort
town. Although nearby Tampa had a significant Spanish-speaking immigrant
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 133
population as early as the turn of the century, Clearwater remained an
enclave of primarily white middle-class residents and middle-to-upper-class
seasonal visitors. In the last three decades, however, the population of Clear-
water has doubled, reaching just over 100,000 by 1995 (Floyd et al., 1996:
16). This increase has been accompanied by a diversification of the city's
population. According to United States census figures, from 1980 to 1995
Clearwater's Spanish-speaking population more than tripled to reach almost
4,000, an estimate that can be considered conservative given the source.
Many of these Spanish-speakers come from the impoverished state of
Hidalgo in Mexico; more specifically from the small municipality Ixmiquil-
pan. Local legend has it that the first Ixmiquilpenses settled in 1987. They
were driving toward the orange groves in South Florida, hoping to find work
there, when their car broke down. They quickly found work in a beachfront
hotel and decided to stay in Clearwater, letting their friends and relatives
know about the plentiful job opportunities in the area. So many
Ixmiquilpenses have come to Clearwater since then that the mayor of the
municipality paid an official visit to the city in 1995. This event signifies the
transnational character of the population, as does the fact that Ixmiquilpan
receives the highest volume of international mail and monetary remittance
of any municipality in Hidalgo (INEGI, 1994: 81­2, 85).
Most of the Spanish-speaking population in Clearwater can be classi-
fied as working class, and most work in Clearwater's burgeoning service
industry. Since the late 1970s, Clearwater has followed national trends
toward rapid growth in the service sector of the economy and toward the
segmentation of the labor markets in two groups: a core of professionals
working in the finance, real estate, managerial and tourist industries, and a
much larger peripheral group of low-wage earners such as janitors, sales
clerks, secretaries, waiters and maids (Sassen, 1988). As the high-paid core
managerial class formed enclaves in the city's suburbs, the demand for low-
wage service workers (such as housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and dog
walkers) to support their lifestyles has increased. Because African-Ameri-
cans are already firmly established in their urban communities and perceive
open discrimination in the suburbs, this demand has been met primarily by
recent immigrants, many of whom have left the unpredictability of seasonal
work in the fields to enter the service sector (Mahler, 1996). This is cor-
roborated in the oral histories we collected at the parish of St Theresa, in
which informants tell us that jobs are very easy to find, especially in restau-
rants and hotels.
Parallel to these changes in the receiving society, the Mexican
economy has suffered repeated shocks under neoliberal policies, endorsed
by multilateral organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, seeking to
integrate it into global markets. The consequences for Mexico's poor and
working class have been severe, particularly in view of widespread reduc-
tions in welfare programs. Under these conditions, Mexicans have increas-
ingly relied on defensive strategies such as the informal economy and
migration to the USA. Thus, the combination of push-pull factors in the USA
134 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
and in Mexico in the context of increasing globalization explains the rapid
growth of Latino communities in places like Clearwater.
This context of rapid change, dislocation and immigration may also
help us understand the Marian apparition at Clearwater. We might argue that
the creation of a new integrated, multicultural and multinational sacred
space might be a reflection of deeper structural changes at the local level.
Under this hypothesis, the religious phenomenon may be a manifestation
and a legitimation of the erasure of sharp racial, and possibly economic,
boundaries. Indeed, rather than zeroing in on Rita Ring's calls from Cincin-
nati not to make money our God, Tampa Bay residents have chosen to
emphasize the theme of `unity in diversity', which has circulated widely in
local newspaper articles, letters to the editor and TV reports. Commenting
on the apparition, one resident said:
Now, if we can just maintain these feelings toward one-another and use this
event as a catalyst toward better understanding and respect for our cultural
differences, then we will all have our Christmas miracle. . . . People of all
races, colors, and creeds are standing side-by-side as one community, united,
indivisible, and loving toward one-another. (Canale, 1996: 19A)
Perhaps, then, the apparition can be understood as both an expression of
and a means to order the increasing fragmentation and diversity at the local
level.
A closer look at conditions in the local parish, nevertheless, throws
this reading into question. The apparition is neither a mere epiphenomenon
of socioeconomic changes, as a crude materialist interpretation would con-
clude, nor is it necessarily contributing to erasing boundaries and hierar-
chies at the local level. What one observes is, rather, a disjuncture between
the dominant discourse of unity in diversity and the power relations within
the parish. In the spring of 1993, St Theresa's parish was home to 2,500
families in Clearwater. Most of these families were middle-to-upper-middle
class, white United States citizens. By 1995, also congregating at St
Theresa's were 659 Spanish-speaking families, most of them Mexican immi-
grants from Ixmiquilpan residing in lower-income areas near the parish seat.
Most of the members of St Theresa's parish, both Spanish and English-
speaking, have visited the apparition at least once; many even go weekly to
pray. And while these members also all voice a desire for the dissolution of
boundaries and affirm the unity in diversity discourse at the newly created
sacred site, they agree that there exists a clear and virtually impenetrable
boundary between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking members of the
parish. In interviews, we constantly heard such statement as `two parishes
have developed', `[we] have two totally separate systems', `it's such a segre-
gated community', and `[we] have St Theresa and Santa Teresa's'. One of the
members of the parish staff explained in reference to the church's Spanish-
speakers that `they're almost a separate little community. . . . They really
like to stay to themselves.'
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 135
This racial and cultural divide has both spatial and temporal com-
ponents. Although English-speaking parishioners share the same physical
facility with the Spanish-speaking members of the church, the two groups
almost never come together for common activities. The schedule is carefully
orchestrated to maintain this separation. The parish manager, who has the
responsibility for assigning the use of the physical facilities, explained:
There is still a disconnection . . . in that their [the Spanish-speaking parish-
ioners'] Mass is on Sunday night at eight o'clock, so the majority of our 5,000
parishioners don't see them. They see it in the bulletin. They know that there's
a Spanish Mass, but there's not mixture.
The parish manager's comments above indicate that the Spanish-speaking
members of the church are a group at the margins, an invisible `them' versus
`us' ­ `us' being the 5,000 `real' parishioners, who can have a Mass in the
morning, not under the cover of darkness. As one English-speaking parish-
ioner explained:
I don't think the parish has accepted that the practice [of a Spanish Mass]
exists in the parish. I think there is one parish with a poor third cousin ­ I
mean the parish has not even accepted the fact that it exists, at least not in
my eyes.
This parishioner's statement is especially striking in light of a comment
made by the priest who celebrates Spanish Mass: `I bet you that half of the
total population of the parish right now is Mexican.'
The physical segregation of `us' versus `them' is often accompanied by
other discursive and non-discursive strategies that create distinct identities
drawing on stereotypes and fears in the larger society. Borders are con-
structed around clusters like `illegality', poverty, language, ethnicity, geo-
graphic origin and culture. We see, then, that along with the articulation of
a `unity in diversity' rhetoric at the apparition site ­ a rhetoric readily appro-
priated by members of the St Theresa parish ­ there is the construction of
power asymmetries within the parish. There seems to be a gap between the
`cosmopolitanism' created in the Rainbow Madonna's sacred space through
global and virtual pilgrimage and the provincial character of the parish
space. Globalization seems to be affecting the local in its various forms (the
apparition and the parish) at different rates and in different manners. The
existence of these divergent realities in the same geographical locality
supports Bauman's contention that time-space compression does not have
`the commonly assumed unity of effects' (1998: 2).
Nevertheless, even within division one finds unity, for globalization has
also affected one segment of the parish in ways similar to the effects on the
apparition space. The weekly Spanish Mass is attended and planned not only
by Mexicans, but also many Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Central and South
Americans. Esperanza Montoya, a Mexican parishioner, explained this Mass
to us saying:
136 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
The Mass is now a complete mixture [mezcla] of different cultures. It includes
the styles of Mexicans, Caribbeans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians. . . . When I
arrived here, I had to learn a little about how things are done here. I asked
why? Why is it different? But I learned that in the Caribbean, already the mix
of people is different. What has happened here is that people have arrived
with so many mixtures already, and they form another type of environment,
and then another environment. It's a change, but it's good because people mix
their ­ well, we learn from different cultures. Each learns from the others.
The `mezcla' which Esperanza describes is not simply the result of
combination of discrete national styles of worship. Individuals arrive at St
Theresa's `with so many mixtures already'. They are already drawing on mul-
tiple sources to construct their worship both at the personal and collective
levels. What goes on each Sunday night at St Theresa is an expression of
hybridity `all the way down', which challenges assertions about cultural
purity and the boundaries of national and ethnic groups, fulfilling within the
institution the `unity in diversity' enshrined in the Rainbow Madonna's
sacred space. Like the `unity in diversity' motto surrounding the Rainbow
Madonna, this hybrid worship practice serves as one of many possible
strategies for `chart[ing] our way through the confusion of the present' in
which different ways of life are constantly brought into `vivid, often violent
juxtaposition' (Rouse, 1991: 18­19).
As the parish of St Theresa's shows, globalization is a complex
phenomenon, not leading automatically to homogeneity or heterogeneity in
every aspect of local life. The effect of globalization can be best described
as multi-layered and differential. At some levels, it may produce hybridity
and unity in diversity, harmoniously juxtaposing symbols, goods and people
previously separated. At others, it may create dissonance, reinforcing
entrenched boundaries, practices and power asymmetries, or encouraging
their redeployment along new lines of `us' and `them'.
Conclusion
The case of the apparition at Clearwater challenges some of the fundamental
assumptions of secularization theory, in particular its teleological and total-
izing vision of the fate of religion. In the face of contemporary social and
cultural transformations, religion is neither disappearing nor just becoming
privatized. Nor is it just an impotent or pathological reaction to the disen-
chantment of the world. As Rudolph puts it, modern social science `asserted
that religion would fade, then disappear, with the triumph of science and
rationalism. But religion has expanded explosively, stimulated as much by
secular global processes ­ migration, multinational capitalism, the media
revolution ­ as by proselytizing activity' (1997: 1).
If Clearwater is any indication, what we are seeing in some cases is
rather a re-sacralization of the secular. Mary is using modern technologies
associated with our post-industrial age literally as a mirror on which she can
project her old-time devotion worldwide. The building at Clearwater is
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 137
acting as a prism that magnifies and disperses the colors of the Rainbow
Madonna. In the process, that which is most secular, a bank, the ultimate
symbol of the logic of the market, is sacralized, appropriated into a shifting
sacred space and time. In a twist that further transforms the profane into the
sacred, the Shepherds have acquired the bank building to convert it into a
shrine, a `center for spiritual renewal'. And, in hopes of attracting more
pilgrims to the new center, they have recently unveiled an 18-foot cedar
crucifix next to the apparition.
We contend that the apparition at Clearwater is not an isolated instance
of the sacralization of the secular; that, in fact, this process is more general-
ized. We live in a time when everyday practices such as shopping are
`religious experiences that re-charge us spiritually' through the consumption
of products `awash' with an `aura', a `nameless energy', which gives us an
individual and collective `sense of well-being . . . security and contentment'
(Dellilo, 1984: 20, 36­7). While these mystical experiences at the heart of
the `secular' are no doubt linked to a fetishism of commodities, they cannot
be seen as a mere reflection of the current capitalist mode of production. The
re-sacralization of the secular is partly the result of the autonomization of
popular culture and the rise of technologies like the Internet, which, having
the ability to detach signifiers from the signified in ways that increase the
likelihood of syncretism, make it possible for us to experience transcen-
dence, transgression and surplus of meaning ­ aspects which are central to
the experience of the sacred. Free-floating, opaque messages come to us as
revelations unfolding in popular culture, full of mystery and fascination,
bringing down to earth Rudolph Otto's (1923) holy from its `tremendum'
heights. In this sense, it is misguided automatically to oppose the `Net', with
its `abstract, universal instrumentalism', to the `Self' and its expressive and
hermeneutic aspects, as Castells does, following the Frankfurt School's criti-
cal modernism. As Wilbur (1997: 9­10) notes, despite its imbrication with
corporate power, the Internet has symbolic and ludic dimensions. After all:
. . . the deepest roots of virtuality seem to reach back into a religious world
view where power and moral goodness are united in virtue. And the charac-
teristic of the virtual is that it is able to produce effects, or to produce itself
as an effect even in the absence of the `real effect'. The air of the miraculous
that clings to virtue helps obscure the distinction between real power effects
and/or goodness and the effects that are as good as real.
All this is not to say that secularization has not taken place or does not
occur. What we need to realize is that secularization and sacralization
sustain complex relations that defy mechanistic models and require analy-
sis of local conditions rather than efforts to fit data on to fixed paradigms.
While it is common for secularization and sacralization to enter into agon-
istic relations, sometimes they reinforce each other, so that the Protestant
ethic might be a condition for the rise of the spirit of capitalism at one point,
and strip malls, banks and the Internet might be the carriers of ancient
138 Theory, Culture & Society 17(4)
hierophanies at another. This is because reason does not stand in opposition
to faith. At a time when rationality has been shown to be implicated with a
`will to power', faith and religion can no longer be understood just in nega-
tive terms, as a lack, anomie or any other social pathology of an incomplete
or extreme process of rationalization and emancipation from superstition.
Rather, religion is abundance of meaning, a font for the cosmopolitan juxta-
position and/or syncretism of multiple practices and discourses.
From the foregoing discussion it may seem that we are rejecting
modernist approaches tout court and advocating a full-blown adoption of
postmodernist readings that stress the local, ephemeral, undecidable and
aesthetic nature of current social and religious practices. Nonetheless, we
have shown how local processes are mutually implicated with global pro-
jects, making the rejection of macro-perspectives unwise. It is one thing to
give up grand metaphysical narratives and quite another to lose sight of the
historical global processes in which local practices are embedded. The latter
would lead to a failure to recognize the persistence of institutional, struc-
tural and systemic power dynamics which seek to normalize practices and
discourses in various settings. These hegemonic effects are clear in the new
evangelization and the efforts of the Shepherds of Christ to impose an ortho-
dox reading of the apparition at Clearwater. Furthermore, globalization does
not automatically mean that every boundary is erased or transgressed, that
all hierarchies have been dismantled, or that the social space is inescapably
fluid and incomprehensible due to the rapid process of hybridization. As we
saw in Clearwater, there is a sharp disjuncture between the sacred space
surrounding the apparition, with its cosmopolitan juxtaposition and mixing
of pilgrims, and the parish, with its creation of two churches, one predomi-
nantly Anglo and another at the margins made up by a growing number of
Latinos. This disjuncture issues from the fact that globalization is not a
mechanical, totalizing process, but a polyvalent phenomenon that has
differential effects, producing different forms of change at varying rates
across the social space.
If Robertson (1991: 283) is right that globalization `produces variety ­
more accurately, it encourages heterogeneity-within-homogeneity, or differ-
ence-within-identity . . . [since] it involves the universalization of particu-
larism and the particularization of universalism', what we need then are
approaches to religion which take into account the complex roles it plays at
both the local and global levels, in deterritorializing and reterritorializing
sacred spaces and times, transgressing and re-inscribing power dynamics,
blending traditional symbols and rituals with contemporary discourses and
practices and emerging media, and in homogenizing and heterogenizing the
social space. Methodologically, this would require that we go beyond overly
abstract and theoretical studies of religion and globalization (Robertson,
1992; Beyer, 1994; Rudolph and Piscatori, 1997) to study the specific links
between the macro and the micro by comparing locations within a global
framework, or by analyzing how the global is embodied in the local and how
the local is the context where the global is reproduced and/or contested
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 139
(Marcus and Fischer, 1986; McMullen, 1998). To do this we would have to
work with various sources, combining ethnography with institutional, struc-
tural and systemic approaches, and with textual analysis of a variety of
media such as the Internet, TV news, newspapers, magazines and handouts
at the site.3
We cannot predict the future of `old time' religion in a globalizing age.
It may come to exist side by side with the new religions, or it may become
part of a `new spiritual marketplace of virtual culture as raw material for
playful cyborgs who cut-and-paste at will through the fragments of our tra-
ditions' (O'Leary, 1996: 804). This latter option may eventually erase the
boundaries between new and old religions. Perhaps both scenarios are poss-
ible. However, we can no longer see `old time' religion as nothing more than
a fading anachronism in our rational, informational age or as just a desper-
ate reaction to the millennium.
Notes
We wish to thank Nancy Eiesland, Dennis Owen, Anna Peterson and our two anony-
mous readers for their helpful suggestions.
1. Here we define pre-modern primarily in a conceptual sense. Following Weber
(1958), pre-modern religious discourses and practices, such as those surrounding the
cult of the saints and Marian devotions, presuppose that the natural world is imbued
with and ultimately grounded on the supernatural. The Reformation, with its empha-
sis on individual conscience and direct approach to the Scriptures, `disenchants' this
Catholic world, leading to a modern `religion within the bounds of reason alone'
(Kant). This does not spell the end of pre-modern religious expressions. Rather, they
are displaced to the life-world of the `popular' classes, where they exist always in
tension with the normative, rationalized religion of the elites. Part of our argument is
that globalization appears to be reversing this retrenchment.
2. Luckmann (1991: 178) also points to the example of New Age religions, as `invis-
ible religion . . . [with] no stable organization, canonized dogma, recruitment system,
or disciplining apparatus', that is the product of an `individual bricolage'. By the
same token, one can argue that religion has become mainly a spectacle, one that
has proven very lucrative for the entertainment industry. A case in point is pop artist
Madonna's latest album, Ray of Hope.
3. According to Hexam and Poewe, `most new and contemporary religions are legiti-
mate expressions of spirituality that can be best understood from an interdisci-
plinary perspective grounded in a theory of global culture' (1997: xiii). We argue
that the prism of globalization can also be helpful in understanding the renewed
vitality of old time religion throughout the world.
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Manuel A. Vásquez is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of
Florida, Gainesville. He is the author of The Brazilian Popular Church and
the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Currently, he is
an Andrew E. Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan Uni-
versity, where he is working on a book (co-authored with Marie Marquardt)
on religion, social theory and globalization.
Marie Friedmann Marquardt is a Doctoral candidate in the Ethics &
Society program of Emory University's Graduate Division of Religion. Her
current research among Mexican transmigrants explores the intersection of
gender, religion and transnational migration.
Vásquez & Marquardt ­ The Rainbow Madonna 143