The Sacred Canopy
Peter berger’s religion theory
As noted, Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy shortly after his first book with Luckmann, and he applies their approach to religion. The book falls in two parts, a theoretical and a historical one. The beginning of the theoretical part is based on the dialectical perspectives developed in The Social Construction of Reality. By drawing upon classical concepts of nomos, cosmos, and chaos, Berger defines a space for religion. For Berger, a society’s nomos consists of society’s overall meaning system. Nomos organizes the world in a meaningful way for the individual in the sense that it creates perceptions of a normative and stable social order. This perception protects the human subject from the idea that the universe is perhaps an incomprehensible and anomic chaos. In this way, nomos or the socially constructed world is “an ordering experience.” Nomos is created by human subjects, who continually engage in an “ordering, or nomizing. Once nomos has reached such a quality that it is taken for granted by the human subject, it attains stability. This is where religion enters the picture, as religion is “the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established”. By “sacred cosmos” Berger an all encompassing system that creates meaning and legitimates institutions and authority structures in society. By drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane, Berger claims that the sacred is different from everyday life as something extraordinary. There are sacred objects (rocks, animals, texts), sacred people (chiefs, priests), sacred space, sacred time, and sacred beings (spirits, divinities). Religion is a result of man’s externalization and implies that the “human order is projected into the totality of being”. Religion protects the human subject against insecurity and chaos, or the world’s potential meaninglessness. It provides human beings with a purpose and place in the world, and with moral means codes. When religion is established, it must be maintained, which takes place through processes of socialization and legitimation. Legitimation processes in a given society is about more than religion, but Berger thinks that religion has historically been the most widespread and effective form of legitimation. The reason is that religion “relates the precarious reality constructions of empirical societies with ultimate reality”. Religion legitimates social institutions, for example the political structure, by locating them within “a sacred and cosmic frame of reference”. Berger outlines a dialectic process whereby religious legitimations arise from human activity, but once religious ideas become part of a religious tradition, they can obtain autonomy and an “objective” status and act back upon human activity. In order for religion or any other legitimations to continue to exist, it requires a social “base,” which Berger calls a “plausibility structure”. All religions need plausibility structures to exist. When the plausibility structure loses its intactness or continuity, the religious tradition ceases to be a self-evident truth. According to Berger, the situation of pluralism changes the picture drastically. Once different religions are in competition with each other, only limited plausibility structures can be formed, and these plausibility structures become weakened, end up in crisis or come under the threat of anomic disintegration. Since every religious world is based on a plausibility structure, every religion is inherently precarious. Once religion is constructed through processes of externalization and objectivation/institutionalization, it is also internalized in socialization. Religion becomes a part of the subjective consciousness of the socialized individual. Berger claims that there is an alienating propensity in any religion. The individual forgets what religion is, namely a human product, and continues to be affected by it. Religion tends to alienate the human from itself, for example by mystifying institutions in religious terms. As religion becomes objectified and appears to exist independent of human beings, it often becomes a form of false consciousness. The objectivation of religion makes human beings passive and rob them of their potential to act. For Berger, religion is a projection of human meanings into the universe, a projection that “comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers”.
Secularization
In the historic part of The Sacred Canopy, Berger gives an outline of the secularization process. He defines secularization as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols”. In pre-modern societies, religion formed an overarching universe or sacred cosmos. Religion was like a protective canopy that provided legitimation, meaning and order to the vulnerable construction that society calls reality. As society differentiated, several societal institutions, such as the economy, the state, and politics separated from religion. The Western religious tradition also “carried the seeds of secularization within itself”. The “disenchantment of the world” began in the Old Testament with the positioning of a transcendent God who stands outside cosmos. Christianity served secularization unintentionally by forming churches, which isolated religion further from other institutions in society. The effects of secularization imply the decline of religion in the arts, philosophy, literature, science, and individual consciousness. There is a “crisis in credibility” in religion, which results in subjective secularization. There is also an internal secularization in the sense that religion explains fewer areas of life. Another effect is the privatization of religion, where religion has become “a matter of “choice” or “preference” for the individual or the nuclear family. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger outlines secularization as a global phenomenon that will affect every religious tradition across the world . Nevertheless, secularization differs, as men are more secular than women, working class more than middle class, Protestants and Jews more than Catholics. The United States also constitutes an “exceptional case” in this book, as Americans are both modern and relatively religious.
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