Robert Wright argues that globalization can be good for the three Abrahamic religions and, ultimately, for the entire world:
However far Paul’s Christian love may have been from truly universal, its indifference to ethnic and national bounds is admirable—and, from a modern perspective, encouraging. If an ancient religion adapted to conditions comparable to globalization by expanding people’s moral horizons, maybe modern religions can do the same thing. Certainly it would be nice if all Christians, Jews, and Muslims had moral horizons expansive enough to encompass one another.
Auspiciously, the early histories of both Islam and Judaism show them to possess the kind of pragmatic flexibility that ancient Christianity evinced. An imperial environment—a globalizing world, if on a smaller scale—brought out each religion’s benign side and subdued its belligerent side.
[…]
For all three Abrahamic faiths, then, tolerance and even amity across ethnic and national bounds have a way of emerging as a product of utility; when you can do well by doing good, doing good can acquire a scriptural foundation. This flexibility is heartening for those who believe that, in a highly globalized and interdependent world, the vast majority of people in all three Abrahamic faiths have more to gain through peaceful coexistence and cooperation than through intolerance and violence. If ancient Abrahamics could pen laudable scriptures that were in their enlightened self-interest, then maybe modern Abrahamics can choose to emphasize those same scriptures when it’s in their interest.
And if some people find it dispiriting that moral good should emerge from self-interest, maybe they should think again. At least, the Abrahamics among them should think again. The Hebrew Bible, considered a holy text by all three Abrahamic faiths, sees the pragmatic value of virtue as itself part of divine design.
Read his entire piece in The Atlantic.