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The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
“[Berger] writes in a concise and lucid style, a rare talent among sociologists, but does so without losing any of the cogency of his material. More impressively, he is almost unparalleled in his creativity. The Sacred Canopy brings together all of these virtues and is easily his most important book. Indeed, I think it’s the most important contribution to the sociology of religion since Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” —Jeffery K. Hadden, Commonweal
“This is a brilliant analysis that gives evidence of a sociology of religion that is able to clarify the often ironic interaction of religion and society.” —A. Theodore Kachel, Union Seminary Quarterly Review
This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society. Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.
“This is a brilliant analysis that gives evidence of a sociology of religion that is able to clarify the often ironic interaction of religion and society.” —A. Theodore Kachel, Union Seminary Quarterly Review
This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society. Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Peter L. Berger
190 books229 followersPeter L. Berger was an internationally renowned sociologist, and the founder of Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. He was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. in his late teens. He had a master's degree and a doctorate from the New School for Social Research in New York. After two years in the United States Army, he taught at the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina before going to the Hartford Seminary Foundation as an Assistant Professor in Social Ethics.
In 1992, Peter Berger was awarded the Manes Sperber Prize, presented by the Austrian government for significant contributions to culture. He was the author of many books, among them The Social Construction of Reality, The Homeless Mind, and Questions of Faith.
In 1992, Peter Berger was awarded the Manes Sperber Prize, presented by the Austrian government for significant contributions to culture. He was the author of many books, among them The Social Construction of Reality, The Homeless Mind, and Questions of Faith.
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July 17, 2022
Berger applies a general theoretical perspective derived from the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon of religion. This approach is empirical and not concerned with the truth of religion. It is not a sociology of religion; i.e. it doesn't study the relationship between religion and other social institutions , etc., but rather seeks to understand religion as a historical product.
Berger says that "every human society is an enterprise in world-building. Sciety is a "dialectic phenomenon" because it is a purely human creation yet continuously acts on its producers. Religion fills the need for legitimation to ensure internalization of social norms, and gives a sense of continuity in the face of the brevity of life. It can do this effectively because it takes things out of historical time and positions them in the eternal and sacred, transforming human creations into supra-human.
Religion resists chaos. It only works if there is a "community of plausibility." Religion can impoverish individuals by shutting out alternatives and alienating individuals from their possible selves.
Berger says that "every human society is an enterprise in world-building. Sciety is a "dialectic phenomenon" because it is a purely human creation yet continuously acts on its producers. Religion fills the need for legitimation to ensure internalization of social norms, and gives a sense of continuity in the face of the brevity of life. It can do this effectively because it takes things out of historical time and positions them in the eternal and sacred, transforming human creations into supra-human.
Religion resists chaos. It only works if there is a "community of plausibility." Religion can impoverish individuals by shutting out alternatives and alienating individuals from their possible selves.
April 2, 2025
2025 Update:
The clue to the rise of “bad religion” (Ross Douhat’s term) in America was identified here.
*****
Berger’s writing is lucid and smooth—very readable. His painstakingly supported discussion of religion is anchored in sociological and mythical concepts that can be recognized in the writings of Eliade or Campbell. There is much of interest here, from an analysis of the Pauline gesture of faith, the Christian switch to a friendlier, approachable God, and the masochism [which dates the writing to the 60s] underpinning the whole structure. In later chapters he explains the trend of secularization that started—wait for it—with the Jews’ exodus...
Under secularization, which I found most enlightening, when Berger describes what happens to religion when exposed to pluralistic competition, he unwittingly provides a sociological explanation for the prosperity gospel:
“It is impossible, almost a priori, to market a commodity to a population of uncoerced consumers without taking their wishes concerning the commodity into consideration. … This means, furthermore, that a dynamic element is introduced … In other words, in this situation it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the religious traditions as unchanging verity. … Consumer preference reflects the “needs” of this sphere. This means religion can be more easily marketed if it can be shown to be “relevant” to private life that if it is advertised as entailing specific applications to the large public institutions. … As a result, the religious institutions have accommodated themselves to the moral and therapeutic “needs” of the individual in his private life. … The emphasis on family and neighborhood as well as on the psychological “needs” of the private individual.”
What is relevant to many Americans since the 1980s? Money. They don’t have enough of it. In the prosperity gospel, the answer is provided. The prosperity gospel is therefore not merely a sham mockery of Christian teachings, it is also a new product responding to a vital consumer need!
The same market forces that produce the prosperity gospel and mega-churches also produce the strengthening of neo-orthodoxy [brackets added]:
“The pluralistic situation presents the religious institutions with two ideal-typical options. They can either [A] accommodate themselves to the situation, play the pluralistic game of religious free enterprise, and come to terms as best they can with the plausibility problem by modifying their product in accordance with consumer demands. Or [B] they can refuse to accommodate themselves, entrench themselves behind whatever socio-religious structures they can maintain or construct and continue to profess the old objectivities as much as possible [i.e., build a stronger brand]”
Berger explains that the need to retrenching towards a stronger brand has been the cause of the U.S. neo-evangelical movement, which, he points out, found its start in Karl Barth’s “Epistle to the Romans,” which was a response to Bolshevism and Nazism. (Please see my review of that book for more detail.)
“If one is to understand the rise of neo-orthodoxy in the 1930s in Europe, it is most important to remember that “modern” at the time meant, above all, to be in accord with Nazism. … Neo-orthodoxy entails the energetic reassertion of the objectivity of the tradition. …Wherever this kind of objectivity can be plausibly asserted, to this day, it serves as an “Archimedean point” from which, in turn, all contradictory definitions of reality may be relativized.”
And, finally, a few notes of entertainment:
Berger seemed to be less than happy with married life at the time he wrote this. I can imagine him in the fleshpots of the sixties university campus:
“The individual may daydream of living in a state of delightful polygamy … In his daydreams the individual may be a Turkish pasha…”
But he is only daydreaming, because he is stuck playing the role of faithful husband:
“One way of defining bad faith is to that that it replaces choice with fictitious necessities. … The particular case of bad faith that interests us here is one where the individual, faced with the choice of acting or not acting within a certain role ‘program,’ denies this choice on the basis of his identification with the role in question. For example, the faithful husband may tell himself that he has ‘no choice’ but to ‘program’ his sexual activity in accordance with his marital role, suppressing any lustful alternatives as ‘impossibilities.’”
I hope he was able to work through his issues.
The clue to the rise of “bad religion” (Ross Douhat’s term) in America was identified here.
*****
Berger’s writing is lucid and smooth—very readable. His painstakingly supported discussion of religion is anchored in sociological and mythical concepts that can be recognized in the writings of Eliade or Campbell. There is much of interest here, from an analysis of the Pauline gesture of faith, the Christian switch to a friendlier, approachable God, and the masochism [which dates the writing to the 60s] underpinning the whole structure. In later chapters he explains the trend of secularization that started—wait for it—with the Jews’ exodus...
Under secularization, which I found most enlightening, when Berger describes what happens to religion when exposed to pluralistic competition, he unwittingly provides a sociological explanation for the prosperity gospel:
“It is impossible, almost a priori, to market a commodity to a population of uncoerced consumers without taking their wishes concerning the commodity into consideration. … This means, furthermore, that a dynamic element is introduced … In other words, in this situation it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the religious traditions as unchanging verity. … Consumer preference reflects the “needs” of this sphere. This means religion can be more easily marketed if it can be shown to be “relevant” to private life that if it is advertised as entailing specific applications to the large public institutions. … As a result, the religious institutions have accommodated themselves to the moral and therapeutic “needs” of the individual in his private life. … The emphasis on family and neighborhood as well as on the psychological “needs” of the private individual.”
What is relevant to many Americans since the 1980s? Money. They don’t have enough of it. In the prosperity gospel, the answer is provided. The prosperity gospel is therefore not merely a sham mockery of Christian teachings, it is also a new product responding to a vital consumer need!
The same market forces that produce the prosperity gospel and mega-churches also produce the strengthening of neo-orthodoxy [brackets added]:
“The pluralistic situation presents the religious institutions with two ideal-typical options. They can either [A] accommodate themselves to the situation, play the pluralistic game of religious free enterprise, and come to terms as best they can with the plausibility problem by modifying their product in accordance with consumer demands. Or [B] they can refuse to accommodate themselves, entrench themselves behind whatever socio-religious structures they can maintain or construct and continue to profess the old objectivities as much as possible [i.e., build a stronger brand]”
Berger explains that the need to retrenching towards a stronger brand has been the cause of the U.S. neo-evangelical movement, which, he points out, found its start in Karl Barth’s “Epistle to the Romans,” which was a response to Bolshevism and Nazism. (Please see my review of that book for more detail.)
“If one is to understand the rise of neo-orthodoxy in the 1930s in Europe, it is most important to remember that “modern” at the time meant, above all, to be in accord with Nazism. … Neo-orthodoxy entails the energetic reassertion of the objectivity of the tradition. …Wherever this kind of objectivity can be plausibly asserted, to this day, it serves as an “Archimedean point” from which, in turn, all contradictory definitions of reality may be relativized.”
And, finally, a few notes of entertainment:
Berger seemed to be less than happy with married life at the time he wrote this. I can imagine him in the fleshpots of the sixties university campus:
“The individual may daydream of living in a state of delightful polygamy … In his daydreams the individual may be a Turkish pasha…”
But he is only daydreaming, because he is stuck playing the role of faithful husband:
“One way of defining bad faith is to that that it replaces choice with fictitious necessities. … The particular case of bad faith that interests us here is one where the individual, faced with the choice of acting or not acting within a certain role ‘program,’ denies this choice on the basis of his identification with the role in question. For example, the faithful husband may tell himself that he has ‘no choice’ but to ‘program’ his sexual activity in accordance with his marital role, suppressing any lustful alternatives as ‘impossibilities.’”
I hope he was able to work through his issues.
February 17, 2012
This book is an extension of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s earlier book, “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge” written in 1966, in which the authors begin with basic sociological assumptions about mental representations and how human beings come to know the world and form impressions of it. “The Sacred Canopy,” while heavily informed by the ideas in “The Social Construction of Reality,” was written only by Berger himself. The book is a thoroughly Marxist critique of religion with a dash of Freud thrown in for good measure.
The Marxism comes from Berger’s understanding of human consciousness. He emphasizes the dialectical nature of individual man and his relationship to culture and society. According to him, we can only “world-build” (or “cosmize,” to use his argot) through a process of constant internalization and externalization of distinct mental representations. Berger defines religion as a sacred form of world-building, an “audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant” (p. 28). (Forget temporarily, as I had to, that to call religion a “sacred” form of world-building seems to very much beg the question.) He argues religion to be the oldest, most powerful legitimizing order which plays a central role in construing order and rationality in our lives, and therefore in maintaining reality because they are the only things that can provide sacred legitimation for this socially constructed reality. Thus religion makes permanent the temporary, transcendentalizes the immanent, sacralizes the profane, and ensures a nomological (that is, rational and law-based) rather than chaotic reality.
Evil, death, injustice, and suffering can threaten the nomological world that is shored up by religious legitimation. However, theodicies minimize the threat to “nomos” by bestowing meaning on these things and by making them understandable in a larger epistemological scheme. Berger claims that religion is ultimately alienating, as it enforces the idea that the socially constructed world is not a human product, but rather a permanent product of divine construction; religion is, in other words, a source of false consciousness that perpetuates the idea that human beings had nothing to do with creating their social world. He also claims that the world is gradually becoming more secular.
For exactly these reasons, secularization is paradoxically both de-alienating, while at the same time anomic and ridden with existential anxiety precisely because religion, according to Berger, has lost its legitimacy, having slowly been replaced in the industrial world with a materialistic-positivistic model for knowledge. In short, secularization allows people to realize that the world is their own, not that of a distant, supernatural God, and that our disconnection from this leaves us hanging, alone, in a world devoid of any meaning or order.
Berger claims to break down the book into two parts, the first being the theoretical portion and the second providing the concrete, historical, empirical facts that support the theory. However, I found almost no substantive distinction in the level of theory used in the two parts. Both are highly theoretical and abstract, which is not to say that the text is difficult if afforded a careful reading. But the entire book is maintained on such a level of abstraction that it would be difficult to take any “applied” ideas away from it. This might have something to do with the fact that Berger recanted the central thesis of “The Sacred Canopy” about twenty years ago in the face of evidence that directly suggested that the boundaries of secularization and modernization were not necessarily coterminal.
Also, for being published less than fifty years ago, the ideas here seem much, much older. Connecting the ideas of secularization, alienation, and social anomy – which seem to me to the fundamental concept here – go back to the nineteenth century, and Berger doesn’t seem to work in any new ideas. This book is interesting for its historical value and arguments (it is still seen on sociology reading lists nearly everywhere), but it doesn’t bring much “value added” to the contemporary sociology of knowledge or religion.
The Marxism comes from Berger’s understanding of human consciousness. He emphasizes the dialectical nature of individual man and his relationship to culture and society. According to him, we can only “world-build” (or “cosmize,” to use his argot) through a process of constant internalization and externalization of distinct mental representations. Berger defines religion as a sacred form of world-building, an “audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant” (p. 28). (Forget temporarily, as I had to, that to call religion a “sacred” form of world-building seems to very much beg the question.) He argues religion to be the oldest, most powerful legitimizing order which plays a central role in construing order and rationality in our lives, and therefore in maintaining reality because they are the only things that can provide sacred legitimation for this socially constructed reality. Thus religion makes permanent the temporary, transcendentalizes the immanent, sacralizes the profane, and ensures a nomological (that is, rational and law-based) rather than chaotic reality.
Evil, death, injustice, and suffering can threaten the nomological world that is shored up by religious legitimation. However, theodicies minimize the threat to “nomos” by bestowing meaning on these things and by making them understandable in a larger epistemological scheme. Berger claims that religion is ultimately alienating, as it enforces the idea that the socially constructed world is not a human product, but rather a permanent product of divine construction; religion is, in other words, a source of false consciousness that perpetuates the idea that human beings had nothing to do with creating their social world. He also claims that the world is gradually becoming more secular.
For exactly these reasons, secularization is paradoxically both de-alienating, while at the same time anomic and ridden with existential anxiety precisely because religion, according to Berger, has lost its legitimacy, having slowly been replaced in the industrial world with a materialistic-positivistic model for knowledge. In short, secularization allows people to realize that the world is their own, not that of a distant, supernatural God, and that our disconnection from this leaves us hanging, alone, in a world devoid of any meaning or order.
Berger claims to break down the book into two parts, the first being the theoretical portion and the second providing the concrete, historical, empirical facts that support the theory. However, I found almost no substantive distinction in the level of theory used in the two parts. Both are highly theoretical and abstract, which is not to say that the text is difficult if afforded a careful reading. But the entire book is maintained on such a level of abstraction that it would be difficult to take any “applied” ideas away from it. This might have something to do with the fact that Berger recanted the central thesis of “The Sacred Canopy” about twenty years ago in the face of evidence that directly suggested that the boundaries of secularization and modernization were not necessarily coterminal.
Also, for being published less than fifty years ago, the ideas here seem much, much older. Connecting the ideas of secularization, alienation, and social anomy – which seem to me to the fundamental concept here – go back to the nineteenth century, and Berger doesn’t seem to work in any new ideas. This book is interesting for its historical value and arguments (it is still seen on sociology reading lists nearly everywhere), but it doesn’t bring much “value added” to the contemporary sociology of knowledge or religion.
June 30, 2022
Berger may be a shit dialectician, but he's a capable sociologist of religion. He deserves criticism for a vulgar turn of phrase in the appendices, but this really is a thoughtful synthesis of a number of philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of religion with a lot to say. Great introduction to the field, even given its age.
September 20, 2023
3.5*
A precondition for being an academic or "theorist" is harbouring an exceptionalist view of oneself that is typically characterized by a fear of being misunderstood. Consequently, you end up with all these puffed up books full of imprecise language about what exactly? Second half is better than the first half, and so little of the first half is needed in order to understand the second half. What's wrong, little guy?
A precondition for being an academic or "theorist" is harbouring an exceptionalist view of oneself that is typically characterized by a fear of being misunderstood. Consequently, you end up with all these puffed up books full of imprecise language about what exactly? Second half is better than the first half, and so little of the first half is needed in order to understand the second half. What's wrong, little guy?
March 18, 2010
The Sacred Canopy is a classic in the sociology of religion, and is simply one of the finest studies I know of religious people acting in groups. I first read it in fall of 2001, and Berger was one of the few thinkers who helped me make sense of 9/11.
Based on the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, Berger examines how communities construct their own version of reality and then enforce it among its members. This socially constructed reality becomes the norm through which the world is interpreted, measured and judged. To violate the social construct, ie. to disagree with that reality, appears to its adherents as insanity. Not appearing insane is a powerful motivation to keep people toeing the line of orthodoxy.
This is a thin little book, but it is very meaty and very hard chewing. I recommend it ferociously.
Based on the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, Berger examines how communities construct their own version of reality and then enforce it among its members. This socially constructed reality becomes the norm through which the world is interpreted, measured and judged. To violate the social construct, ie. to disagree with that reality, appears to its adherents as insanity. Not appearing insane is a powerful motivation to keep people toeing the line of orthodoxy.
This is a thin little book, but it is very meaty and very hard chewing. I recommend it ferociously.
April 8, 2022
It seems almost unimaginable that I got by without Berger's terminology and lens for so long.
November 8, 2023
Some fascinating ideas. But the language is unnecessarily difficult, academic, wordy. Much of it went over my head. I wish he would rewrite this for laymen. While reading I also had the nagging sense that his arguments tried to do too much--like Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, the ideas stretch over all people, in all times, and lose me.
December 27, 2021
I know much has been written since, but Berger's work was just solid—and thoroughly enjoyable.
March 23, 2024
Way too difficult to understand if you’re not a literal scholar
May 13, 2021
Notes and quotes.
Anomie
English word spelling is entirely of our own making. It has no authority but what we give it, persists only as long as we collectively enforce it. And yet for each individual, English word spelling imposes itself authoritatively, to be complied with or defied but not to be wished away.
The same is true of every other institution, though they are often less obviously human-made than English spelling. With proper maintenance the social world will not just present itself as something "out there" to be accommodated and respected, but also as things introspectively discoverable "in here," intimately about me: I have a role like uncle, an occupation like civil servant, a status like American citizen.
When these more intimate institutions and roles are experienced as imposed or false, there's a problem. The death of a friend might bring this on. The part I play feels put on, my life feels unreal, meaningless. That uncomfortable condition is what sociologists call anomie.
How to safeguard against anomie? One solution is make the institutions seem natural, fixed, nonnegotiable. Religion can do that job. It sanctifies our all-too-human arrangements, makes our particular way of organizing our lives seem like something laid down with the foundations of the world. Then the social world is felt to accord with the cosmic order, and disturbing either invites chaos.
Here's Berger: "If one imagines oneself as a fully aware founder of a society, a kind of combination of Moses and Machiavelli, one could ask oneself the following question: How can the future continuation of the institutional order, now established ex nihilo, be best ensured? There is an obvious answer to the question in terms of power. But let it be assumed that all the means of power have been effectively employed—all opponents have been destroyed, all means of coercion are in one’s own hands, reasonably safe provisions have been made for the transmission of power to one’s designated successors. There still remains the problem of legitimation, all the more urgent because of the novelty and thus highly conscious precariousness of the new order. The problem would best be solved by applying the following recipe: Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. Let the people forget that this order was established by men and continues to be dependent upon the consent of men. Let them believe that, in acting out the institutional programs that have been imposed upon them, they are but realizing the deepest aspirations of their own being and putting themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the universe. In sum: Set up religious legitimations."
Theodicy
New problems can arise from this arrangement. A few impertinent types among us may begin to ask questions: can the ways of god be justified to man? why have evil at all? Does the comic ledger really add up? So theodicy begins.
Mysticism provides a neat response to these questions. It says the complaints about the cosmic ledger not adding up are misunderstandings. Your individual suffering and death are trivialities, insignificant non-events because this world is an illusion, your consciousness the smallest part of an unalterable cosmic whole -- so, actually, everything in fact is going well! Throw the ledger in the flames. Seek annihilation of the self, absorption in the divine. Rumi's mystical poetry is an example of this from Islam.
Another response that is nearly opposite along the same dimension is the Hindu one found in the the Upanishads. It says, actually, the cosmic ledger does add up via the accounting system of karma and samsara, where complaints of undeserved suffering and happiness are shown to be justified across rebirths, according to the individual's conformance with dharma across lifetimes.
A third response from Buddhism turns the complaints about cosmic justice around, declaring gods and demons irrelevant and informs the complainant that they alone must shoulder the burden of finding their own salvation by coming to understanding the impermanence of this world, its suffering, the fact of non-self, and thereby attaining nirvana.
Other responses include explaining discrepancies in the cosmic ledger by reference to a dualism, where some evil/disorder intrudes on and thwarts good/order. For Zoroastrianism the evil and good are posited as warring forces; in gnostic Christianity the evil is identified with the material world in which the individual's (good) spirit has unfortunately been placed, from which it must escape: "In that world [of darkness] I dwelt thousands of myriads of years, and nobody knew of me that I was there ... Year upon year and generation upon generation I was there, and they did not know about me that I dwelt in their world."
The main traditions of the Biblical religions posit a radical and ethical monotheism, and thus face the toughest accusations when it comes to the unbalanced cosmic ledger. Shiva dances on the skulls of the dead, but he is one among other gods; Yahweh is alone and sovereign. If put on trial, his move will be to denounce the legitimacy of the court and demand submission. The complainant must then abase himself, as Job: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him... Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The tables are turned, and the accountant begins to tally the individual's sins against god.
Alienation
What makes religion such a strong bulwark against anomie is that it alienates us from the world. We mistake the social world we ourselves are producing as something given to us from outside. Social arrangements we could change are made to seem unalterable. Indefensible institutions are presented to us as glowing with more-than-human legitimacy.
Its interesting to consider how religion pulls this off. Berger connects it to Rudolph Otto's analysis of the sacred in *The Idea of The Holy*: encounters with the holy are dreaded, people have "the fear of god," not because punishment or anything as stupidly mundane as that is expected, but because the sacred is so incomprehensibly other as to undo or annihilate the self. Arjuna goes slightly insane when Krishna reveals his divine form.
Berger explains that religion "provides a semblance of stability and continuity to the intrinsically tenuous formations of social order. We can now identify more accurately the quality that permits religion to do this—to wit, the quality of its alienating power. The fundamental 'recipe' of religious legitimation is the transformation of human products into supra- or non-human facticities. The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production. The human nomos becomes a divine cosmos, or at any rate a reality that derives its meanings from beyond the human sphere."
Exception: de-alienation via religion
It can happen that religious ideas attain a level of sophistication and life of their own, acting back on the social world to de-alienate it and strip its institutions of legitimacy, sanctioning anarchy. This is strange and rare but there are famous examples. Antinomianism in Christianity can have revolutionary effect, but other traditions have more conservative upshot, as seen in this passage from the Theologia germanica: "Thus order, laws, precepts, and the like are merely an admonition to men who understand nothing better and know and perceive nothing else; therefore are all law and order ordained. And perfect men accept the law along with such ignorant men as understand and know nothing other or better, and practice it with them, to the intent that thereby they may be kept from evil ways, or if it be possible, brought to something higher."
This kind of exception, where religion shows our institutions to be merely human is not unlike what happens with Protestantism kicking off secularization.
Secularization
A society secularizes when religion ceases to dominate its institutions or consciousness, when the religious justifications for our social arrangements lose their plausibility for ordinary people. Ironically, most scholars agree that one particular religious tradition, Christian Protestantism, bears most of the responsibility for secularization in the modern world. The thinking is, Protestantism's peculiar emphasis on salvation through God's grace alone removed the sacred mediating elements (mysteries, miracles, magic) that are essential for legitimizing our human institutions via alienation.
You can see how this might have happened in the exceptional, de-alienating traditions in some religions mentioned earlier: from the perspective of eternity, our worldly arrangements are shabby affairs unworthy of divine endorsement. Protestantism made a program of this and set about expunging all the mediating elements between God and man, and incidentally made room for rational investigation of a disenchanted universe by science and technology. As industrial society gets going, people with scientific mindsets are needed to keep things in order; they hold sway in the economic snd political sphere, entrenching secularism.
So much is the usual story. What Berger adds in the further argument that this wasn't something new that came only with the reformation, but a seed that was waiting to be watered since Yahweh was a desert god. He was unusual among gods in a few respects: radically transcendental, standing outside creation, demanding but not needing sacrifices, immune to magic, intervening in affairs that are unusually human-centered and historical, endorsing a rationalized ethics. This was all there from the start. Viewed in this light, the introduction of Jesus as mediating element is thus a backward step, bringing Yahweh into the world in a way that was more more typical for religions. Protestantism walked that back and released the secularizing potential that was always there.
Remainder
The last chapters of the book are about how theology has evolved since secularization began. Schleiermacher and Barth are important. This stuff is further from my interests, so I'll wrap it up here.
Anomie
English word spelling is entirely of our own making. It has no authority but what we give it, persists only as long as we collectively enforce it. And yet for each individual, English word spelling imposes itself authoritatively, to be complied with or defied but not to be wished away.
The same is true of every other institution, though they are often less obviously human-made than English spelling. With proper maintenance the social world will not just present itself as something "out there" to be accommodated and respected, but also as things introspectively discoverable "in here," intimately about me: I have a role like uncle, an occupation like civil servant, a status like American citizen.
When these more intimate institutions and roles are experienced as imposed or false, there's a problem. The death of a friend might bring this on. The part I play feels put on, my life feels unreal, meaningless. That uncomfortable condition is what sociologists call anomie.
How to safeguard against anomie? One solution is make the institutions seem natural, fixed, nonnegotiable. Religion can do that job. It sanctifies our all-too-human arrangements, makes our particular way of organizing our lives seem like something laid down with the foundations of the world. Then the social world is felt to accord with the cosmic order, and disturbing either invites chaos.
Here's Berger: "If one imagines oneself as a fully aware founder of a society, a kind of combination of Moses and Machiavelli, one could ask oneself the following question: How can the future continuation of the institutional order, now established ex nihilo, be best ensured? There is an obvious answer to the question in terms of power. But let it be assumed that all the means of power have been effectively employed—all opponents have been destroyed, all means of coercion are in one’s own hands, reasonably safe provisions have been made for the transmission of power to one’s designated successors. There still remains the problem of legitimation, all the more urgent because of the novelty and thus highly conscious precariousness of the new order. The problem would best be solved by applying the following recipe: Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. Let the people forget that this order was established by men and continues to be dependent upon the consent of men. Let them believe that, in acting out the institutional programs that have been imposed upon them, they are but realizing the deepest aspirations of their own being and putting themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the universe. In sum: Set up religious legitimations."
Theodicy
New problems can arise from this arrangement. A few impertinent types among us may begin to ask questions: can the ways of god be justified to man? why have evil at all? Does the comic ledger really add up? So theodicy begins.
Mysticism provides a neat response to these questions. It says the complaints about the cosmic ledger not adding up are misunderstandings. Your individual suffering and death are trivialities, insignificant non-events because this world is an illusion, your consciousness the smallest part of an unalterable cosmic whole -- so, actually, everything in fact is going well! Throw the ledger in the flames. Seek annihilation of the self, absorption in the divine. Rumi's mystical poetry is an example of this from Islam.
Another response that is nearly opposite along the same dimension is the Hindu one found in the the Upanishads. It says, actually, the cosmic ledger does add up via the accounting system of karma and samsara, where complaints of undeserved suffering and happiness are shown to be justified across rebirths, according to the individual's conformance with dharma across lifetimes.
A third response from Buddhism turns the complaints about cosmic justice around, declaring gods and demons irrelevant and informs the complainant that they alone must shoulder the burden of finding their own salvation by coming to understanding the impermanence of this world, its suffering, the fact of non-self, and thereby attaining nirvana.
Other responses include explaining discrepancies in the cosmic ledger by reference to a dualism, where some evil/disorder intrudes on and thwarts good/order. For Zoroastrianism the evil and good are posited as warring forces; in gnostic Christianity the evil is identified with the material world in which the individual's (good) spirit has unfortunately been placed, from which it must escape: "In that world [of darkness] I dwelt thousands of myriads of years, and nobody knew of me that I was there ... Year upon year and generation upon generation I was there, and they did not know about me that I dwelt in their world."
The main traditions of the Biblical religions posit a radical and ethical monotheism, and thus face the toughest accusations when it comes to the unbalanced cosmic ledger. Shiva dances on the skulls of the dead, but he is one among other gods; Yahweh is alone and sovereign. If put on trial, his move will be to denounce the legitimacy of the court and demand submission. The complainant must then abase himself, as Job: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him... Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The tables are turned, and the accountant begins to tally the individual's sins against god.
Alienation
What makes religion such a strong bulwark against anomie is that it alienates us from the world. We mistake the social world we ourselves are producing as something given to us from outside. Social arrangements we could change are made to seem unalterable. Indefensible institutions are presented to us as glowing with more-than-human legitimacy.
Its interesting to consider how religion pulls this off. Berger connects it to Rudolph Otto's analysis of the sacred in *The Idea of The Holy*: encounters with the holy are dreaded, people have "the fear of god," not because punishment or anything as stupidly mundane as that is expected, but because the sacred is so incomprehensibly other as to undo or annihilate the self. Arjuna goes slightly insane when Krishna reveals his divine form.
Berger explains that religion "provides a semblance of stability and continuity to the intrinsically tenuous formations of social order. We can now identify more accurately the quality that permits religion to do this—to wit, the quality of its alienating power. The fundamental 'recipe' of religious legitimation is the transformation of human products into supra- or non-human facticities. The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production. The human nomos becomes a divine cosmos, or at any rate a reality that derives its meanings from beyond the human sphere."
Exception: de-alienation via religion
It can happen that religious ideas attain a level of sophistication and life of their own, acting back on the social world to de-alienate it and strip its institutions of legitimacy, sanctioning anarchy. This is strange and rare but there are famous examples. Antinomianism in Christianity can have revolutionary effect, but other traditions have more conservative upshot, as seen in this passage from the Theologia germanica: "Thus order, laws, precepts, and the like are merely an admonition to men who understand nothing better and know and perceive nothing else; therefore are all law and order ordained. And perfect men accept the law along with such ignorant men as understand and know nothing other or better, and practice it with them, to the intent that thereby they may be kept from evil ways, or if it be possible, brought to something higher."
This kind of exception, where religion shows our institutions to be merely human is not unlike what happens with Protestantism kicking off secularization.
Secularization
A society secularizes when religion ceases to dominate its institutions or consciousness, when the religious justifications for our social arrangements lose their plausibility for ordinary people. Ironically, most scholars agree that one particular religious tradition, Christian Protestantism, bears most of the responsibility for secularization in the modern world. The thinking is, Protestantism's peculiar emphasis on salvation through God's grace alone removed the sacred mediating elements (mysteries, miracles, magic) that are essential for legitimizing our human institutions via alienation.
You can see how this might have happened in the exceptional, de-alienating traditions in some religions mentioned earlier: from the perspective of eternity, our worldly arrangements are shabby affairs unworthy of divine endorsement. Protestantism made a program of this and set about expunging all the mediating elements between God and man, and incidentally made room for rational investigation of a disenchanted universe by science and technology. As industrial society gets going, people with scientific mindsets are needed to keep things in order; they hold sway in the economic snd political sphere, entrenching secularism.
So much is the usual story. What Berger adds in the further argument that this wasn't something new that came only with the reformation, but a seed that was waiting to be watered since Yahweh was a desert god. He was unusual among gods in a few respects: radically transcendental, standing outside creation, demanding but not needing sacrifices, immune to magic, intervening in affairs that are unusually human-centered and historical, endorsing a rationalized ethics. This was all there from the start. Viewed in this light, the introduction of Jesus as mediating element is thus a backward step, bringing Yahweh into the world in a way that was more more typical for religions. Protestantism walked that back and released the secularizing potential that was always there.
Remainder
The last chapters of the book are about how theology has evolved since secularization began. Schleiermacher and Barth are important. This stuff is further from my interests, so I'll wrap it up here.
October 8, 2024
I’m left wanting a little more content and consistency in clarity with this book. I thought first half was interesting and well written, which is a big deal because a lot of the academic stuff in this field is horrible to read. In the second half of the book, every other section felt kinda confused and all over the place, and then all of a sudden the writing would become clear again. It was a strange experience. Between the beginning being largely a reiteration of his other book the social construction of reality, the end only focusing on Protestantism out of all religions as a sort of prototype, and the whole thing being like 180 pages, I just feel like this one of the few books that would be improved by being longer.
There were like a million points where Peter hamburger says “we obviously can’t discuss this right now” or “this isn’t the place for this discussion about religion and society” and I’m all for clarity with content but why can’t this be the place for those discussions? This is an academic book about the sociology of religion, so I can’t imagine a better place. In any case, I don’t regret the read and the author writes in an enjoyable and instructive way. Saving this one for the grandkids.
There were like a million points where Peter hamburger says “we obviously can’t discuss this right now” or “this isn’t the place for this discussion about religion and society” and I’m all for clarity with content but why can’t this be the place for those discussions? This is an academic book about the sociology of religion, so I can’t imagine a better place. In any case, I don’t regret the read and the author writes in an enjoyable and instructive way. Saving this one for the grandkids.
March 9, 2023
This book was absolutely fascinating. While, of course, I don’t view religion as a purely man-made construction, I respect that that was the angle necessary to take from an empirical and sociological perspective. Given that, I found this book to be deeply revealing and compelling in its discussion of the effects of secularization on religion in general, and Protestant Christianity in particular.
November 26, 2018
The sociological theory expressed in this treatment is unarguably whole; however, I disagreed with it as a whole.
To begin with, the atheistic assumptions that the theory is based off of willfully ignore that the way man objectivates and internalizes sociological phenomena is not so different from how he does the same with all objective nature. Berger shifts too easily between "man as mankind" and "man as individual," ignoring the important differences brought about by the equivocation. By reading religion as a purely sociological or group-psychological fact, Berger completely ignores the implications of genuine religious belief as opposed to socio-religious identity.
Lastly, in brief, Berger takes too many liberties in generalizing and summarizing historical and social facts in support of his theory. Perhaps more detail would repulse any possible readers, but conclusions come to without more established arguments and examples become very shakey indeed.
The read was interesting, but I found essential elements I disagreed with from top to bottom.
To begin with, the atheistic assumptions that the theory is based off of willfully ignore that the way man objectivates and internalizes sociological phenomena is not so different from how he does the same with all objective nature. Berger shifts too easily between "man as mankind" and "man as individual," ignoring the important differences brought about by the equivocation. By reading religion as a purely sociological or group-psychological fact, Berger completely ignores the implications of genuine religious belief as opposed to socio-religious identity.
Lastly, in brief, Berger takes too many liberties in generalizing and summarizing historical and social facts in support of his theory. Perhaps more detail would repulse any possible readers, but conclusions come to without more established arguments and examples become very shakey indeed.
The read was interesting, but I found essential elements I disagreed with from top to bottom.
September 5, 2011
The first half of this is essentially an application of basic principles of sociology to religion. It is wordy, rambling, uses the royal "we" in an annoying way and probably could just be skimmed. Part two then seeks to apply those principles to the Christian church. This section moves a bit more easily and held my interest inasmuch as it sought to explain why secularization has taken place (and attributes that to the ancient Israelites). However, much of the author's style continued to annoy me throughout. Certainly understand why this was assigned in a multi-cultural context course for Christians, but wonder if someone's written something similar since the late 1960s, with gender inclusive language and easy readability.
Hoping the rest of the reading for this course gets more interesting!
Hoping the rest of the reading for this course gets more interesting!
March 26, 2019
This is an inspiring book, worthy of its classic status. It explains why religion is so powerful a force in world building and world maintenance, and explains how religion functions in a socio-psychological sense. It can also serve as a template to understand how non-religious ideology (such as Marxism and even a lot of so-called corporate "values") operates to maintain nomos for a specific group.
Even though Peter Berger has moved away from his secularization theory, upon close reading it still holds plenty of merit. In the book, Peter Berger actually discussed how modernity spawned pluralism along with secularization. The weakness of this theory, which he addressed in his later works, lies in relying too much on the notion of rational consciousness. However, it is not the case that he attributed the decline of religion to secularization alone.
Even though Peter Berger has moved away from his secularization theory, upon close reading it still holds plenty of merit. In the book, Peter Berger actually discussed how modernity spawned pluralism along with secularization. The weakness of this theory, which he addressed in his later works, lies in relying too much on the notion of rational consciousness. However, it is not the case that he attributed the decline of religion to secularization alone.
November 21, 2018
This made some sense. Don't read it while drunk; then it makes NO sense.
I think I got this book because of Fromm. There's a fair amount of Weber here, along with Durkheim, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Heidegger. Overall, interesting ideas, but ones that may not be new to you if you're well-versed in the aforementioned thinkers. Further, I don't understand why some reviews praise Berger's "concise" and "lucid" writing style. This was one of the driest books I've ever read.
If you're the average reader, and not a student of sociology or religious studies, I'd say eschew reading this text and find a summary of Berger's ideas. I even saw some Goodreads reviews that would fit the bill, and I guarantee they're a lot less painful to read.
I think I got this book because of Fromm. There's a fair amount of Weber here, along with Durkheim, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Heidegger. Overall, interesting ideas, but ones that may not be new to you if you're well-versed in the aforementioned thinkers. Further, I don't understand why some reviews praise Berger's "concise" and "lucid" writing style. This was one of the driest books I've ever read.
If you're the average reader, and not a student of sociology or religious studies, I'd say eschew reading this text and find a summary of Berger's ideas. I even saw some Goodreads reviews that would fit the bill, and I guarantee they're a lot less painful to read.
May 1, 2022
A classic and though not an easy read as a Christian- one must swallow the idea of Christianity as socially constructed- there are important points for believers to understand. For a book written at the beginnings of pluralism, I’m still uncertain people today fully understand the power of social construction. I give it four stars because I think it’s well done and a classic read.
December 12, 2011
So informative, but SO dry. It was difficult to trudge through. I learned so much about how religion is constructed and how it is studied, but it was just so dense and I had to reread paragraphs a few times to understand the meaning. Definitely not for the casually interested.
October 13, 2021
getting through this book was a chore because peter berger is wrong and has even admitted as much. it's also just such a boring read for such an interesting topic. there's better sociology books on religion. two stars just because this is an essential read for the field, which i hate to admit.
July 29, 2010
Sociology of Religion is an aquired taste. I had a proffessor I really enjoyed and he was able to take the information in the book and paint it into a beautiful picture.
April 30, 2020
Un libro clásico de sociología que en realidad nunca leí en mi formación en la disciplina. Se compone de dos partes muy bien delimitadas. En su primera parte, “Elementos sistemáticos”, pretende dar una metodología, una forma de aproximarse al estudio sociológico de las religiones en general. La segunda parte, “Elementos históricos”, se supone que es una aplicación de estos ‘elementos sistemáticos’ a la historia reciente de las religiones en Europa y Norteamérica – al fenómeno de secularización que habrían experimentado. Había escuchado que la primera mitad era más densa y teórica pero, quizás porque soy más dada a las abstracciones conceptuales que a lo empírico o quizás por mi ignorancia histórica se me hizo más fácil de seguir.
Aunque su foco en la segunda mitad es en la secularización de Occidente y por ende en las religiones cristianas, me gustó más cómo discutía "la religión primitiva" (94), en que hay "no sólo una continuidad entre el individuo y la colectividad, sino también una continudad entre la naturaleza y la sociedad" (95). Sus descripciones de cómo en esas religiones el mundo humano se inserta en un cosmos sagrado y de esa forma se le da sentido al mundo social me hizo pensar mucho en algunas historias de Ursula K. Le Guin como "The Birthday of the World" (en el libro The Birthday of the World and Other Stories), que se podría leer desde la forma en que Berger explica la cosmización/lo sagrado del mundo como un todo, por ejemplo. Esa integración de lo humano al cosmos también tiene algo del abordaje que hace Le Guin de la relación humano-naturaleza en Always Coming Home. Lo interesante es que si bien uno suele pensar que estas culturas más integradas a la naturaleza viven menos alienadas que nosotros, en la definición de Berger de alienación podría decirse que lo son más, en la medida que se contrapone a un mundo "humanizado", reconocido como un mundo (social) que "fue y continúa siendo coproducido por él" (129).
De hecho, lo que más me llamó la atención del libro fue justamente su distinción entre anomia y alienación. Siguiendo a Berger, en el fondo la religión es súper "nómica" (¿existe esa palabra? en fin, da orden a la sociedad mediante la instauración y legitimación de normas, lo cual en general es bueno para la estabilidad del mundo social) pero al mismo tiempo puede ser super alienante en tanto presenta al mundo social como dado anteriormente en vez de construido por humanos. Dado que en general se habla de anomia y alienación como fenómenos que van de la mano, me llama la atención plantearlo así, de forma que en realidad podrían ser contrapuestos, o al menos fenómenos súper distintos, donde puede haber uno sin el otro y que incluso la alienación actúe contra la anomia, ayudando a sostener los mundos humanos:
“Todos los mundos socialmente construidos son intrínsecamente precarios. Sostenidos por la actividad humana, están continuamente amenazados por el egoísmo y la estupidez del hombre” (51)
Poco esperanzadora la cita quizás, pero resuena como bastante cierta.
Por otro lado, me pareció útil su concepto de objetividad, muy anti-posmo, que permite afirmar la existencia de hechos "objetivos" a la vez que reconoce que estos hechos puedan ser socialmente construidos: “La cultura es objetiva en tanto que confronta al hombre con un conjunto de objetos que existen en el mundo exterior y fuera de su propia conciencia. La cultura está ahí. Pero la cultura es también objetiva en cuanto que puede ser experimentada y aprehendida por así decirle en comunidad. La cultura está ahí para todos.” (24-25) Es decir, la objetividad de cultura como “facticidad compartida” es lo que la distingue de ideaciones individuales o de mera subjetividad, y evita caer en un 'todo vale' epistemológico.
Tengo varios otros apuntes recogidos y desordenados, pero creo que estas son mis principales impresiones.
Aunque su foco en la segunda mitad es en la secularización de Occidente y por ende en las religiones cristianas, me gustó más cómo discutía "la religión primitiva" (94), en que hay "no sólo una continuidad entre el individuo y la colectividad, sino también una continudad entre la naturaleza y la sociedad" (95). Sus descripciones de cómo en esas religiones el mundo humano se inserta en un cosmos sagrado y de esa forma se le da sentido al mundo social me hizo pensar mucho en algunas historias de Ursula K. Le Guin como "The Birthday of the World" (en el libro The Birthday of the World and Other Stories), que se podría leer desde la forma en que Berger explica la cosmización/lo sagrado del mundo como un todo, por ejemplo. Esa integración de lo humano al cosmos también tiene algo del abordaje que hace Le Guin de la relación humano-naturaleza en Always Coming Home. Lo interesante es que si bien uno suele pensar que estas culturas más integradas a la naturaleza viven menos alienadas que nosotros, en la definición de Berger de alienación podría decirse que lo son más, en la medida que se contrapone a un mundo "humanizado", reconocido como un mundo (social) que "fue y continúa siendo coproducido por él" (129).
De hecho, lo que más me llamó la atención del libro fue justamente su distinción entre anomia y alienación. Siguiendo a Berger, en el fondo la religión es súper "nómica" (¿existe esa palabra? en fin, da orden a la sociedad mediante la instauración y legitimación de normas, lo cual en general es bueno para la estabilidad del mundo social) pero al mismo tiempo puede ser super alienante en tanto presenta al mundo social como dado anteriormente en vez de construido por humanos. Dado que en general se habla de anomia y alienación como fenómenos que van de la mano, me llama la atención plantearlo así, de forma que en realidad podrían ser contrapuestos, o al menos fenómenos súper distintos, donde puede haber uno sin el otro y que incluso la alienación actúe contra la anomia, ayudando a sostener los mundos humanos:
“Todos los mundos socialmente construidos son intrínsecamente precarios. Sostenidos por la actividad humana, están continuamente amenazados por el egoísmo y la estupidez del hombre” (51)
Poco esperanzadora la cita quizás, pero resuena como bastante cierta.
Por otro lado, me pareció útil su concepto de objetividad, muy anti-posmo, que permite afirmar la existencia de hechos "objetivos" a la vez que reconoce que estos hechos puedan ser socialmente construidos: “La cultura es objetiva en tanto que confronta al hombre con un conjunto de objetos que existen en el mundo exterior y fuera de su propia conciencia. La cultura está ahí. Pero la cultura es también objetiva en cuanto que puede ser experimentada y aprehendida por así decirle en comunidad. La cultura está ahí para todos.” (24-25) Es decir, la objetividad de cultura como “facticidad compartida” es lo que la distingue de ideaciones individuales o de mera subjetividad, y evita caer en un 'todo vale' epistemológico.
Tengo varios otros apuntes recogidos y desordenados, pero creo que estas son mis principales impresiones.
October 5, 2025
A prime work in the sociology of religion, this work explains the creation of theological realities in that religion has certain beliefs that are upheld through a dialectical relationship between the subjective experiences of individuals towards their community that is then reflected back into the subjects who give it existence. Following his prior book co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, it dives into why certain religions exist and why throughout history why certain constructed realities were broken by wars and conquest. It delves deep into why religions such as Judaism maintained their reality through ethnic peculiarity and why Christianity, with its universalism, opened the door to relativism in that Christianity became its own grave digger because the guarantee for all people to be saved put responsibility at the foot of private persons, enabling each person to seek their salvation through free will guaranteed by grace. All is not lost however in that the evolution of apologetics, which is defined as the practice of defending the faith from the onslaught of natural science and The Enlightenment™, went from natural theology, which defined faith from the premise of human reason, no doubt a product of St. Thomas Aquinas to William Paley, to the liberal theology, a product of the Romanticist reaction (see: figures like Frederich Schleiermacher) which put the primacy of “total dependence” at the forefront (a response to David Hume's claim about the passions being the root of morality - and the famous “correlation does not equal causation” divorcing the claim of reality existing outside human perception). Figures like Johann Hamann responded by asserting that the passions were the root of faith anyways and had nothing to do with reason in the first place. Further along, inspired by Soren Kierkegaard, Neo-Orthodoxy radicalized this claim by stating direct knowledge of Christ was the only path to salvation, independent of any psychological or political claims to legitimacy. However Berger asserts that Neo-Orthodoxy was a hiccup in an otherwise unmitigated march into religion's irrelevance as the 21st century approached, brought on by mass literacy and increasing globalization. Although he would never claim as such as he's a converso Lutheran of Jewish background, since it would hit him in the gut on a cultural psychological level, one can glean from the last chapter that Christianity's only defense against hyper-modernization is by building a fortress, both ideological and physical fortresses such as the castle towns that books like “Medieval Cities” by Henri Pirenne speaks of or even something like Rod Dreher's “Benedict Option” on a grander scale (I have yet to parse that title but will sooner or later despite Alasdair MacIntyre's condemnation of the book). Sort of like Militant Anabaptist, but I'm getting carried away here. Berger however does mention that psychologists like Carl Jung and Rollo May have worked the concept of religious faith into therapeutic practices, so despite the waning influence of religion and religious realities it can still have a place in a postmodern world without the need to build up militant stone, steel and mortar fortresses to protect it from the encroaching ideas of science and the “repressive tolerance” that antifascist thinkers like Herbert Marcuse preached, even if that's been compromised by way of Sigmund Freud who was an absolute enemy of revealed faith. I'm not as optimistic, however. Four stars.
September 16, 2023
کتاب جامعهشناسی دین پیتر برگر به دنبال طرح موضوع سکولاریسم در دنیای مدرن است. نویسنده با باز کردن این ایده که آیا سکولاریسم ذاتا از تجربه غرب به وجود آمده بحث خود را آغار میکند. نویسنده به این می پردازد که سرشت دین در درنیای امروز چه تفاوتی با گذشته پیدا کرده؟ از دید اون مولفه تکثرگرایی و سکولاریسم موجب تغییر اساسی معنی دین در دنیای امروز شده. از سویی سکولاریسم به معنی کوتاه شدن دست نهاد دین از اداره جامعه از قدرت آن کاسته و از سویی تکثرگرایی موجب ممتنع شدن ادعاهای مطلقانگاری ادیان شده است. نویسنده براین موضع است که این سکولاریسم نهادیست که موجب سکولاریسم از حیث آگاهی میشود. از دید او تجربه تحولات الهیاتی مسیحی به خصوص پروتستانتیسم تاثیر مهمی بر پیدایش سکولاریسم داشته، پروتستانها به دنبال روزآمد کردن و همسو کردن دنیای جدید و مسیحیت بودند اما این همسویی به معنای قطع واسطه های کلیسایی و سبک کردن دین نهایتا به کمرنگ شدن آن هم ختم شده. از دید نویسنده در دوره معاصر دو واکنش به سکولاریسم به وجود آمده، اولی نگاه اردتدوکسی جدید که به دنبال دفاع از دین است و اگر ناکام بماند جزیره های دینی ایجاد میکند و دیگری نگاه نولیبرال که با تکثرگرایی عملا بساط ادعاهای گسترده دینی را مسدود کرده، نویسنده مدعیست که مسیحیت پروتستان لیبرال سهم به سزایی در ساختن فضای بین الاذهانی دوره مدرن دارد. ازینجا به بعد بیشتر نگاه او درباره دین را باز خواهم کرد. نقش دین به شکل کلی توضیحی کیهانی از واقعیت جهان است، به این معنا که مجموعه ای از باورها که مانند قوانین فیزیکی هستند درباره جهان توضیحات متقن ارائه دهند، دوره جدید این نوع تلقی از دین را به علت نقش برجسته علم به شکل کلی زیرسوال برده و دین بیش از آنکه بتواند توضیح قابل قبول کیهانی ارائه کند به مجموعه باورهای شخصی و وجودی تبدیل شده که بعدی روانشناختی پیدا کرده و از همین حیث نیز دین کارکردی رواندرمانی پیدا کرده. یکی از دغدغه های برگر درین کتاب تعارض بین نگاه الهیاتی و جامعهشناختیست. اگرچه که جامعهشناسی حاوی این نگاه کلی به دین است که دین فرافکنیای بشریست، اما از دید او ازآنجا که دین تعالی های انسانی را به یک مجموعه تبدیل کرده امری ارزشمند است. دین دوکارکرد همزمان را دارد، از سویی با معنابخشی از آنومی میکاهد، اما از سوی دیگر با بیگانه کردن فرد از واقعیت برای او آگاهی کاذب ایجاد میکند. نقش دین این است که برای جهان تفسیری جاندار ارائه دهد.
January 25, 2022
This is a manual on how to build a successful religion.
On a serious note, this is one of the more lucid and engaging sociological books out there, despite the apparent theoretical depth and breadth of the material. Either that’s because i’ve read the ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ before opening this book or what is said is mostly self evident today or Berger is just a good communicator. It could be all three.
I have several qualms however. First, and least worrying, is that the vast majority of the book consists of theory (with few examples interspersed here or there), which although enlightening, has little empirical applicability and leaves me a bit puzzled on how to apply this methodologically.
Also, as many rightly point out (like Giddens), Berger’s analysis of religion pays almost no attention to power in human relationships and diverges from the constructivism that was central to his previous work with Luckmann. He carries some foundationalist presuppositions from his political conservatism to this work, such as “the importance of social order” as being an immutable anthropological facticity. Even if that was granted, this is not explanatory to any particular social order (after all many unpalatable societies had order), which again highlights his lack of engagement with the idea of power and non-critical approach to ideology.
Apparently Berger recanted the parts where he overplayed the ubiquity of modern secularisation saying that this might just be so in the insulated Ivory Towers and not broader society.
On a serious note, this is one of the more lucid and engaging sociological books out there, despite the apparent theoretical depth and breadth of the material. Either that’s because i’ve read the ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ before opening this book or what is said is mostly self evident today or Berger is just a good communicator. It could be all three.
I have several qualms however. First, and least worrying, is that the vast majority of the book consists of theory (with few examples interspersed here or there), which although enlightening, has little empirical applicability and leaves me a bit puzzled on how to apply this methodologically.
Also, as many rightly point out (like Giddens), Berger’s analysis of religion pays almost no attention to power in human relationships and diverges from the constructivism that was central to his previous work with Luckmann. He carries some foundationalist presuppositions from his political conservatism to this work, such as “the importance of social order” as being an immutable anthropological facticity. Even if that was granted, this is not explanatory to any particular social order (after all many unpalatable societies had order), which again highlights his lack of engagement with the idea of power and non-critical approach to ideology.
Apparently Berger recanted the parts where he overplayed the ubiquity of modern secularisation saying that this might just be so in the insulated Ivory Towers and not broader society.
October 18, 2023
Maybe this was not the book for me, but I really did not enjoy this book much.
I think the first chapters and the final ones are by far the best. The initial chapters are great because the book creates a solid foundation for what's to come in terms of clarifying concepts and methods of analysis. The explanation of the relationship between externalization, objectification, and internalization in the context of religion was amazingly well-written and it really hyped me up. Having said that, the middle section of the book went into the depths of the semantics of certain concepts and gave examples of religious texts and interpretations that did not provide a solid point. (Again maybe it was me, but I did not really know where the book was trying to lead the reader or how certain sections provided much elaboration of a thesis).
Fortunately, the ending was great, it did summarize a lot of important aspects and analyses showcased in the book. I can tell that this book was done with a lot of care and dedication, I really want to highlight that Peter L Berger is a great thinker. Unforntlatly, this book was not my cup of tea :)
I think the first chapters and the final ones are by far the best. The initial chapters are great because the book creates a solid foundation for what's to come in terms of clarifying concepts and methods of analysis. The explanation of the relationship between externalization, objectification, and internalization in the context of religion was amazingly well-written and it really hyped me up. Having said that, the middle section of the book went into the depths of the semantics of certain concepts and gave examples of religious texts and interpretations that did not provide a solid point. (Again maybe it was me, but I did not really know where the book was trying to lead the reader or how certain sections provided much elaboration of a thesis).
Fortunately, the ending was great, it did summarize a lot of important aspects and analyses showcased in the book. I can tell that this book was done with a lot of care and dedication, I really want to highlight that Peter L Berger is a great thinker. Unforntlatly, this book was not my cup of tea :)
February 25, 2024
Despite numerous problems (I believe) with his overall theory and his claims about the discipline of sociology as a whole (and its relationship to theology), and despite that he doesn't seem to realize that the task of nonfiction writing is to make difficult things understandable, not simple things incomprehensible, this book was (and is) a major step forward in making sense of 20th-/21st-century secularization. Berger's insight really shines in part 2 of this work, where he convincingly argues that individuals' growing tilt towards nonreligion is strongly influenced by how modern society (and economy and politics) works—it's much more than the sum of mere individual choice and (un)belief. Even this analysis of his is not perfect, I believe, and he overstates his case in certain ways. Still, Berger introduces us to how deeply a functional atheism is built into modern societies as a preconscious presupposition of simply "how things are," no matter what individuals in those societies say they believe about God.
October 30, 2021
This book presents a sociological theory of religion that can help to explain the role that religion serves in building a society and the way that it can help in the maintenance of different parts of the society. his theory is based predominantly on how religion builds plausibility structures to maintain the societies' structure. This is a classical work of theory, but it also is very accessible to undergraduate and graduate readers. It has something to say about the way that religion and particularly theodicy functions within a society. Berger emphasizes four systematic elements of religion in sociological context: world-construction, world-maintenance, theodicy, and the process of alienation. Berger also discusses three historical elements: secularization, secularization and the problem of plausibility, and finally secularization and the problem of legitimization.
December 29, 2018
This book follows on from Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality but is written by Berger alone. Many insights that might provide clarity for the situation the church finds itself in today. Of course, this was written fifty years ago so these insights are not new but religious folk often seem to think themselves and their institutions beyond or immune to such ‘truths.’ Such is the canopy which covers their world. E.g. “As we have seen, the fundamental problem of the religious institutions is hard to keep going in the milieu that no longer takes for granted their definition of reality.”
April 7, 2023
A good followup to the fantastic The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. A good summary of arguments to understand declining religiosity across the world and the changing role of religion in society: from something legitimating the social order to competing in a market for followers.
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