PETER L. BERGER
187
is not only in the Third World that intellectuals and politicians
purport to speak for the poor or in the name of "the masses." It is
not only among Papuans that magical " distributionism" has
popular appeal .
It
is all the more important, for this reason, to pay
attention to the human realities that provide plausibility to this
rhetoric in Third-World countries.
One does not have to be a Third Worlder to be stirred by what
has been happening in the less-developed countries of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, by the vision of vast numbers of human beings
on the move toward what they hope will be a better life for
themselves and their children . Westerners often visualize the Third
World in images of misery. To be sure, there is such misery, often
degrading to the point of dehumanization . But misery is nothing
new in human history; what
is
new is that this misery is increasingly
perceived as unnecessary and that increasing numbers of people are
striving to make it obsolete. Many of these people are entering the
stage of history, as it were , for the first time , and the awareness of
this fact infuses their actions with passion . In every part of the Third
World one finds groups (most of them peasants or recent peasants)
who have been mute ever since anyone can remember and who now,
for the first time, are finding a voice to insist on their human dignity
and on their right to a decent life. Again, one does not have to be an
adherent of liberation theology to understand that the eruption of
passionate hopes would take religious forms. This happens most
easily in societies shaped by the Christian and Muslim traditions,
with their rich heritages of eschatological expectations . Thus the
theme of modernization as a religious hope finds eloquent
expression (not always , one must add, pleasant to a North–
American or European observer) in the popular religious
movements of Latin America, Africa, and the Muslim world. The
same theme, however, has also been expressed in religious
movements in South and East Asia.
Despite the great differences between these Third-World
movements, they share a common perception-to wit, that the
struggle for a better life, brought within reach by modern science
and technology, is a religiously valid enterprise. Despite other
divisions,
this
unites followers of a charismatic cult in
afavela
of Rio
de Janeiro, disciples of one of the many prophets of the indigenous
Christian churches of sub-Saharan Africa, or members of rural
Muslim cooperatives in Indonesia. At somewhat greater distance, it
