The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion by Peter L. Berger

Author:Peter L. Berger [Berger, Peter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology of Religion
ISBN: 9780385073059
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1967-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6. Secularization and the Problem of Plausibility

ONE OF THE MOST obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality. This manifestation of secularization on the level of consciousness (“subjective secularization,” if one wishes) has its correlate on the social-structural level (as “objective secularization”). Subjectively, the man in the street tends to be uncertain about religious matters. Objectively, the man in the street is confronted with a wide variety of religious and other reality-defining agencies that compete for his allegiance or at least attention, and none of which is in a position to coerce him into allegiance. In other words, the phenomenon called “pluralism” is a social-structural correlate of the secularization of consciousness. This relationship invites sociological analysis (1).

Such analysis affords a very nice opportunity to show in concreto the dialectical relationship between religion and its infrastructure that has previously been developed theoretically. It is possible to analyze secularization in such a way that it appears as a “reflection” of concrete infrastructural processes in modern society. This is all the more convincing because secularization appears to be a “negative” phenomenon, that is, it seems to be without causal efficacy of its own and continually dependent upon processes other than itself. Such an analysis, however, remains convincing only if the contemporary situation is viewed in isolation from its historical background. Religion under the impact of secularization can, indeed, be analyzed convincingly as a “dependent variable” today. As soon, though, as one asks about the historical origins of secularization the problem poses itself in quite different terms. As we have tried to indicate, one is then led to consider specific elements of the religious tradition of Western culture precisely as historical forces, that is, as “independent variables.”

The dialectical relationship between religion and society thus precludes the doctrinaire approaches of either “idealism” or “materialism.” It is possible to show in concrete instances how religious “ideas,” even very abstruse ones, led to empirically available changes in the social structure. In other instances, it is possible to show how empirically available structural changes had effects on the level of religious consciousness and ideation. Only a dialectical understanding of these relationships avoids the distortions of the one-sidedly “idealist” and “materialist” interpretations. Such a dialectical understanding will insist upon the rootage of all consciousness, religious or other, in the world of everyday praxis, but it will be very careful not to conceive of this rootage in terms of mechanistic causality (2).

A quite different matter is the potency of religion to “act back” upon its infrastructure in specific historical situations. On this it is possible to say that such potency varies greatly in different situations. Thus religion might appear as a formative force in one situation and as a dependent formation in the situation following historically (3). One may describe such change as a “reversal” in the “direction” of causal efficacy as between religion and its respective infrastructures.

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