10/19/2022 – Religion and World Construction: Peter Berger Part 1

Are religions socially constructed? Why do they help humans understand the reality of the world around them? We’re going to look at one scholar who has an interesting theory about this. If you want to learn how this works dudes and dudettes stick with us. This is TenOnReligion.

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So, I decided to do a two-part series on Peter Berger, a well-known sociologist who passed away in 2017, but…I’m not going to be talking about his most famous work, The Social Construction of Reality. The reason for this is that he adapted ideas from that book and specifically tailored them to religion in a book titled, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. The ideas were so interesting in The Sacred Canopy that I had to split it up into two parts. This episode is going to cover religion and world construction, and the next episode is going to cover religion and secularization. Yeah baby. Both are super interesting so make sure you watch both parts and let me know what you think.

Okay, before we get to the religion part, an overview of the framework has to be explained first. In the first chapter on “Religion and World-Construction” Peter Berger starts off by making the point that the relationship between humans and society is dialectical. What that means is that humans create society and then that creation turns around and creates humans in terms of shaping, fashioning, and molding them into its own likeness. He uses three big words to describe this process: externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Externalization is the outpouring of human beings into the world. Objectivation is the attainment of the products of this activity which becomes external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation of this same reality into structures of subjective consciousness. This seems not all that different in form from Heidegger’s hermeneutical circle. This threefold process creates a culture which is objective meaning that it confronts humans as a group of objects in the real world existing outside their own consciousness, essentially for everybody to share. Culture is thus both collectively produced and collectively shared. Berger states that society is a product of human activity that has attained this status of objective reality. Humans are forced or coerced to live under the power of this objective reality because it is imposed upon us by the very language that we speak and use wherever we are born and happen to live.

Internalization is the reabsorption into consciousness of the created objective world in such a way that the structures of this world come to determine the subjective structures of consciousness itself. That is, society now functions as the formative agency for individual consciousness. That’s just a fancy way of saying that society forms all of our thinking processes. (I’m trying to translate Berger-speak into language normal human beings can understand.) The problem that emerges over time is that every society needs to transmit its objective meanings from one generation to the next. This is accomplished through what we call socialization. The individual not only learns the objective meanings, but identifies with them and is shaped by them, basically taking ownership of them. It’s a group activity or a group process whereby the individuals are formed in the course of an extended conversation, or dialectic, in which they are participants. Now in one sense this seems a little weird because while this is going on, individuals continue to be co-producers of the social world, and thus according to Berger’s argument here, they are simultaneously also producing themselves. Anywho, this humanly-created objective world is a nomos, or a meaningful order imposed upon the world and people live according to it.

Berger calls radical separation from the social world anomy. Anomy represents a powerful threat to the individual because it results in a loss of a sense of reality and identity in the society. Humans are creatures which crave for meaning and possess a strong desire to impose a meaningful order upon reality. The ultimate danger of such separation from society is the danger of meaninglessness. This seems to be an important key to Berger’s thought as we will see later.

The social world intends, as far as possible, to be taken for granted. Socialization achieves success to the degree that this taken-for-granted quality is internalized. This is where religion comes into the picture. Whenever the socially established habits creating human thinking attains the quality of being taken for granted, there occurs a merging of its meanings with what are perceived to be the fundamental meanings inherent in the universe. Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religion is a “cosmization” (another Berger word) in a sacred mode. By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than humans and yet related, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience. The cosmos posited by religion thus both transcends humans while still including them. It is confronted by humans as an immense power of reality other than themselves. Even though the book is titled The Sacred Canopy that phrase never appears in the book. What sacred canopy means is this sacred cosmos. Sacred canopy, though, is a great metaphor like a large tent shielding humans from the horrible contingencies of human existence. And all of that was just the first chapter!

Chapter two, “Religion and World Maintenance.” Berger uses the word legitimation to mean socially objectivated “knowledge” that serves to explain and justify the social order. Basically, why the world works the way it does according to the way “our” society has taught us. Children and even adults often “forget” the legitimating answers so they must be repeated. Clearly such repetition will be especially important on those occasions of collective or individual crisis when the danger of “forgetting” is most acute. Any exercise of social control also demands legitimation over and above the self-legitimating facticity of the institutional arrangements precisely because the particular social understanding of reality is questioned by the resisters who need to be controlled. Are you a resister? Me too. You see, when a challenge appears, in whatever form, the social understanding of reality can no longer be taken for granted. It’s now clear that the essential purpose of legitimation is simply reality-maintenance.

What is the best way to ensure the future continuation of the humanly-created institutional order? Are you ready for this religious explanation? Hold on to your hats. First, let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been created out of nothing appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. Second, let the people forget that this order was humanly-established and continues to be dependent upon the consent of society. 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. Translation: set up religious legitimations.

Religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, making them “real” by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. A more ancient form of this was an institutional order directly reflecting or manifesting the divine structure of the cosmos. This was kind of like Plato’s philosophy. Something like “here below” has its analogue “up above.” Another form was more of a political structure where the power of the divine cosmos was directly in the human sphere of society. Human power, government, and punishment become sacramental via some agent of the gods or divine incarnation or the king. Berger’s word “cosmization” means inherently unstable and temporary constructions of human activity are given the appearance of ultimate security and permanence, in some cases becoming immortal. If an individual tries to deviate from the appropriate actions or way of thinking bad things are going to happen to you. You’re siding with the forces of darkness, evil, madness, the underworld…the devil!

Religious things that people say and do, as in rituals, help restore the continuity and transcend any given time period or historical context. This is especially clear when religion maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations (things like death) in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality. It’s a way for humans to create a universe that makes sense. One interesting aspect of this is that religious legitimations become important whenever a society must motivate its members to kill or risk their lives, thus consenting to being placed in extreme marginal situations. The “official” exercise of violence is usually accompanied by religious symbolizations. How ironic, no?

One’s entire socially-constructed reality is called a plausibility structure. It’s a social base for a socially-constructed and socially-maintained world. Conversion amounts to an individual transferring to another world – a differing plausibility structure. Thus, migration between religious worlds equals migration between their respective plausibility structures. One disassociates with the old structure and reassociates with the new structure, exclusively, if possible.

Chapter three, “The Problem of Theodicy.” The last thing we need to talk about in this first episode on Berger’s The Sacred Canopy book is what happens when this religiously social construction of reality doesn’t seem to work. This is referred to by religious scholars as the problem of theodicy. One common example of this is how to explain how an all-powerful god who is good still allows humans to suffer. A plausible theodicy permits the individual to integrate the negative experiences of life into a socially accepted understanding, at least as far as their conscience is concerned. It’s not about turning the negative experiences of life into happiness, but about creating a meaning for the negative experiences that makes sense in the socially-constructed world.

There are different types of theodicies. One the one side is the idea that the individual is expendable but the collective is immortal and lives on. It doesn’t really matter what happens to you, as long as the society survives. On the other side is the idea that every conceivable negative experience is integrated within a thoroughly rational, all-encompassing interpretation of the universe. One example is the Hindu idea of samsara and karma. You keep going around until the negative is purged. Okay, that might have been a slight oversimplification. In between these two are several other forms. One is a type of theodicy which projects compensation for negative experiences into a future understood in this-worldly terms. The problem with this type is that it’s highly vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation. The world is going to end on such-and-such a date. The solution? Humans conceived of an afterlife in which the sufferers would be consoled and the unjust would be punished. The theodicy is transported to another world or another reality somehow hidden within this one to make it immune to disconfirmation. Genius. Another type of intermediate theodicy is the dualistic struggle between good and evil, like Zoroastrianism or ancient Gnosticism, for those of you who know what those things are. One more extreme example of a theodicy occurred during and after World War II. The horrendous Nazi atrocities were religiously rationalized, not by calling into question the credibility of the Christian God, which would have been a theological interpretation. Rather, it was interpreted anthropologically as a confirmation of the Christian view of human sin. There’s nothing wrong with God, it’s a just a group of humans who’ve been corrupted. Ironically, many Jews tended toward the opposite conclusion, namely, the idea of God needed to be renovated, or in some cases, jettisoned altogether. Anyway, those are the major forms of theodicies. All human societies are communities in the face of death and other horrible things. A theodicy represents the attempt to come to terms with that.

So, what do you think about Peter Berger’s social construction of religion? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think about religion as social legitimation. Also, which type of theodicy do you think works the best? The second part of Berger’s The Sacred Canopy is coming up with religion and secularization. It’s gonna be good! Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion!