Globalization, we have been told, goes hand in hand with secularization. As commerce, profit, and technological improvement overtake older value systems, rituals and traditions fall away, and the sacred is assailed by the profane. Traditionalists may fight back, but they are fighting a rearguard battle against the inexorable march of progress. The political scientist Benjamin Barber memorably articulated this antagonism in the title of his 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld. Most observers in recent decades, whether they regard universal disenchantment as a spiritual catastrophe or an enabling condition of perpetual peace, have accepted this approximate framing.