11/02/2022 – Religion and Secularization: Peter Berger Part 2
What is the process of secularization and the problem of plausibility? I’m sure you woke up this morning asking yourself those very questions. I know I did. Actually, this is some really fascinating stuff. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.
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This is the second of a two-part series on Peter Berger, a well-known sociologist who passed away in 2017. As I mentioned in the first episode, 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. The last episode covered religion and world construction, and this episode is going to cover religion and secularization. Both are super interesting so if you haven’t watched the first part yet, you might want to go and do that before watching this part.
Okay, so where we left off in the last episode was humans create an objective reality as a meaningful order imposed upon the world. In many societies past and present this was “religionized,” or to use Pater Berger’s word, “cosmized” in a sacred mode. A sacred canopy is this sacred cosmos, sort of like a large tent shielding humans from the horrible contingencies of human existence. The sacred canopy’s process of legitimizing itself is called a plausibility structure, which includes theodicies, or ways of explaining negative experiences to make them meaningful. But...what happens if the plausibility structure starts to break down, or if one gets alienated from the sacred canopy? That’s the subject of this video and if you’re super religious things are gonna start getting a little dicey around here…
Chapter four, “Religion and Alienation.” Alienation is when the connection partially or completely breaks between the individual and this socially constructed objective reality. For those of you who are into historical poetry, Berger provides an excellent illustration with William Blakes’ poem, The Tyger:
Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I should have been a poetry reader. Probably makes more money than a low-quality Youtuber like me. Now don’t worry about the older spelling of the word “tiger.” Instead, focus on the questioning of a humanly-imposed meaning upon the tiger, and, throughout the rest of the poem, the same questioning is directed towards God. It kind of reminds me of the 2001 novel Life of Pi and the later 2012 film. That’s actually one of my favorite movies. If humans impose meaning on a tiger the same way that they impose meaning on God, then what happens to the humans, as in us. If all of these things, including sacred realities, are so alien to the human world, then the human world gets alienated in the process of creating these “objective” realities. This makes it a false consciousness in the sense that religion alienates humans from themselves. And that’s why it’s called alienation. This alienation is very powerful precisely because it shields humans from the horrifying terrors of meaninglessness and a loss of identity. When the false consciousness is established and maintained as a plausibility structure, it’s a huge source of inner strength, especially psychologically. But there’s a flip side to this coin. The people who want to find a way out of this false consciousness and break with the sacred canopy as a plausibility structure suffer, both psychologically and socially. They suffer psychologically because it no longer makes sense to them. They suffer social consequences as a result of questioning and/or rejecting the “objective” structure of reality. They are no longer seen as part of the group. One could always go back and sort of “de-alienate” religiously and re-accept the sacred canopy, but that’s pretty rare. Usually what happens is people live with the group and go through the motions to show compliance with all of the socially established and accepted beliefs and rituals so as to not rock the boat or cause other people similar psychological and social trauma. These huge projections of religious consciousness make reality humanly meaningful, at whatever the cost.
Chapter five, “The Process of Secularization.” Let’s now dive head-in into the process of secularization. It’s interesting because secularization originally was used in Europe to refer to the removing of territory or property from church authorities. Secularization nowadays doesn’t usually refer to land, but rather to the process by which conceptual areas of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and religious symbols. Since Berger was born in Europe (Austria, to be exact), and later lived nearly half his life in the United States, he uses mostly Jewish and Christian examples to make his points, but I’m sure there are other examples from many other cultures and religions. For example, Berger mentions that in the 14 and 1500’s when some Christian leaders and groups starting transitioning their plausibility structure from Roman Catholic to Protestant, the immanent human had only one main channel to connect with the transcendent God, and that was “God’s word” or the Bible. But when even that started to become implausible, the transition from Protestant to secular meant “God is dead.” Berger, writing this book in 1967, stated that a sky empty of angels becomes open to astronomers and astronauts. As soon as Protestants question part of the sacred canopy, it didn’t take long to question all of it. Religion became the source of its own demise. But an interesting question is just how far back does this go?
Berger suggests the answer to that question is all the way back to the biblical creation account in Genesis chapter 1, where elements of non-Israelite religion can be seen, specifically from Mesopotamian mythology. The name of the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat from whose waters the gods were formed becomes the Hebrew word tehom, or the “deep” over which there was darkness. So, in this case, a mythological god becomes adapted and changed to an abstract metaphysical category. In another example, the two major cultic festivals of the Hebrew Bible represent recreations of previously ancient mythological events. The Passover, in pre-Israelite origins was the festival celebrating divine fertility. In Israelite history it became the celebration of the exodus. In pre-Israelite origins, the New Year festival including the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, was originally the re-enactment of ancient sacred myths. In Israelite history it became the celebration of YHWH’s kingship over Israel. So, this practice of changing and adapting goes back a long way.
The concentration of religious activities and symbols in a single institutional sphere, however, defines itself over against the rest of society as “the world” – some sort of profane realm at least relatively removed from the jurisdiction of the sacred. Now this wasn’t a problem in Europe as long as Christendom, the domination of Christianity in all aspects of understanding and interpreting the world, was a social reality. But over the last century or two, probably for the first time in history according to Berger, the religious legitimations of the world have lost their plausibility, not only for a few intellectuals in their ivory towers, but for broad masses of entire societies.
Chapter six, “Secularization and the Problem of Plausibility.” As I already mentioned, religion has been kind of its own gravedigger. But the other source of secularization was in the economic area, specifically, in those sectors of the economy being formed by the capitalistic and industrial processes. This is fascinating because one major theory on the origin of money is rooted in the concept of religious debt. Check out my episode on that earlier this year. Secularization started economically and moved outwards from there. This created a tendency for religion to be polarized between the most public sectors of the institutional order, or the state, and the most private, or the family. One of the most important consequences of this is that since the state is no longer dominated by religion, it no longer serves as an enforcement agency on behalf of the previously dominant religious institution. Theoretically, the role of the state is now of impartial guardian of order between competing religious groups who are independent. This situation represents a severe rupture of the traditional task of religion which was precisely the establishment of an integrated set of definitions of reality that could serve as a common universe of meaning for the members of a society. The world-building power of religion is now restricted to the construction of sub-worlds, making universes of meaning which are completely fragmented. Secularization brings about a de-monopolization of a religious tradition and this leads directly to a pluralistic situation. That’s why I said “theoretically” a minute ago because people who don’t like the lack of control that de-monopolization brings often push back against it by attempting to use the political process. But this only exhibits insecurity and a fear of change or a fear of others being different.
The key characteristic of all pluralistic situations is that the previous religious monopolies can no longer take for granted the allegiance of their populations. Allegiance is voluntary and thus, by definition, less than certain. Religious folks are now referred to as adherents. As a result, the religious tradition, which previously could be authoritatively imposed, now has to be marketed. It must be “sold” to a clientele that is no longer compelled to “buy.” Berger says the pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation. Religious traditions become marketing agencies and the religious institutions become consumer commodities. Stepping away from the book for a second, I find this point absolutely fascinating because economics and capitalism broke this thing down and now religions take on and employ the very qualities of the entity that caused them to lose power in the first place. Not sure what to make of that. If you know…you know.
Anywho, religions are forced into friendly collaborations engaged in the religious market. Religious rivals are regarded not so much as the enemy but as fellows with similar problems. It is often easier to extract favors from a religiously neutral government when different religious groups act together rather than by their trying to undercut each other. But this pluralistic situation plunges religion into a crisis of credibility. Their religious messages are relativized because each of them contains their respective objective reality of the world. And their “reality,” insofar as it is still maintained by the individual, is still rooted within the consciousness of the individual rather than in any reality of the empirically external world. This makes religion no longer referring to the cosmos or to history, but to individual existentialism or psychology. In religious thought, this set of circumstances explains the widespread linking of theology and other religious thought with the abstract categories of existentialism and psychology. That’s why figures like Paul Tillich still remain popular even today. Religion no longer legitimates “the world.” Rather, different religious groups seek, by different means, to maintain their particular subworlds in the face of a plurality of other competing subworlds. Those who continue to adhere to the world as defined by the religious traditions then find themselves in the position of intellectual minorities – a status that has social, psychological, as well as theoretical problems. The pluralistic situation presents the religious institutions with two general options, either accommodate to the changing view of the world, or not accommodate, resist, and maintain an old-school view of reality. And fight with politics, culture wars, and in extreme cases, mobilize the military to keep it that way because one’s social construction of reality is threatened causing meaninglessness and a loss of identity. People are just too afraid of change, and dude…well…not good.
And there you have it. So, what do you think about Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy? Again, if you haven’t seen the first part, go check it out. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think about religion as social construction and legitimation. Also, does his explanation of the process of secularization make sense to you? Why or why not? 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.