Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion: 50 Years afterThe Sacred Canopy 9781350061880, 9781350061910, 9781350061897

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion
2. Vulnerability and Plausibility Structures: Peter L. Berger, Arnold Gehlen and Philosophical Anthropology
3. From Canopies to Conversations: The Continuing Significance of ‘Plausibility Structures’
4. The Sacred Canopy as a Global Construction Project: Incorporating both Emotional and Cognitive Resources
5. The Sacred Canopy as a Classic: Why Berger’s Conceptual Apparatus Remains Foundational 50 Years Later
6. Sacred Canopies and Invisible Religions: The Dialectical Construction of Religion in Berger and Luckmann
7. Secularization: From Sacred Canopies to Golf Umbrellas
8. Islamic Revivalism and Europe’s Secular ‘Sacred Canopy’: Exploring the Debunking Capacity of Public Religion
9. Religious American and Secular European Courts, or vice versa? A Study of Institutional Cross-Pollination
10. Assessing the Influence of The Sacred Canopy : A Missed Opportunity for Social Constructionism?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion

Also available from Bloomsbury Is God Back?, edited by Titus Hjelm Religion and Space, Lily Kong and Orlando Woods Religion and the Global City, edited by David Garbin and Anna Strhan

Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion 50 Years after The Sacred Canopy Edited by Titus Hjelm

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Titus Hjelm and Contributors, 2018 Titus Hjelm has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hjelm, Titus, editor. Title: Peter L. Berger and the sociology of religion: 50 years after the Sacred canopy / edited by Titus Hjelm. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2018009832| ISBN 9781350061880 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350061897 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Berger, Peter L., 1929-2017. Sacred canopy. | Religion and sociology. Classifi cation: LCC BL60.B42 P48 2018 | DDC 306.6092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009832 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6188-0 PB: 978-1-3501-5211-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6189-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-6190-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements 1

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Introduction: Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion Titus Hjelm

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Vulnerability and Plausibility Structures: Peter L. Berger, Arnold Gehlen and Philosophical Anthropology Bryan S. Turner

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From Canopies to Conversations: The Continuing Significance of ‘Plausibility Structures’ Nancy T. Ammerman

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The Sacred Canopy as a Global Construction Project: Incorporating both Emotional and Cognitive Resources Doyle Paul Johnson

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The Sacred Canopy as a Classic: Why Berger’s Conceptual Apparatus Remains Foundational 50 Years Later David Feltmate

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Sacred Canopies and Invisible Religions: The Dialectical Construction of Religion in Berger and Luckmann Hubert Knoblauch and Silke Steets

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Secularization: From Sacred Canopies to Golf Umbrellas Steve Bruce

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Islamic Revivalism and Europe’s Secular ‘Sacred Canopy’: Exploring the Debunking Capacity of Public Religion Riyaz Timol

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Religious American and Secular European Courts, or vice versa? A Study of Institutional Cross-Pollination Effie Fokas

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Assessing the Influence of The Sacred Canopy: A Missed Opportunity for Social Constructionism? Titus Hjelm

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Notes Bibliography Index

175 179 202

List of Contributors Nancy T. Ammerman is professor of sociology of religion at Boston University’s School of Theology and in the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Since September 2015, she has served as Associate Dean of the Faculty in the Social Sciences. Her most recent book Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the ways religion and spirituality are part of the everyday world of work, home, health and public life. She has written widely on American congregations, including  Congregation and Community (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and  Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners (University of California Press, 2005). Steve Bruce taught at The Queen’s University, Belfast, from 1978 to 1991 and since 2001 he has been professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen. In 2003 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy and in 2005 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His most recent published works include Scottish Gods: Religion in Modern Scotland, 1900–2012 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has also revised and augmented Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On (Oxford University Press, 2016). David Feltmate is associate professor of sociology at Auburn University at Montgomery. He is a specialist in the sociology of religion, religion and popular culture, religion and humor, and social theory. He is the author of Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humour in The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy (New  York University Press, 2017) which uses Peter Berger’s sociological theories of knowledge and religion as a foundation for rethinking the religious role of satire in popular culture.

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Effie Fokas is principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project ‘Directions in Religious Pluralism in Europe: Examining Grassroots Mobilisations in the Shadow of European Court of Human Rights Religious Freedoms Jurisprudence’ (Grassrootsmobilise), based at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), where she is a research fellow. Dr Fokas was founding director of the London School of Economics Forum on Religion and is currently research associate of the LSE Hellenic Observatory. Her publications include Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence, co-edited with Aziz Al-Azmeh (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, co-authored with Peter Berger and Grace Davie (Ashgate, 2008). Titus Hjelm is reader in sociology at University College London, UK. His publications include Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion (ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and Social Constructionisms: Approaches to the Study of the Human World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in addition to articles in journals such as Critical Sociology, Journal of Historical Sociology, Media, Culture & Society, Religion, Social Compass. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Religion in Europe (Brill) and the founding chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Sociology of Religion Group. Doyle Paul Johnson is emeritus professor of sociology, retired from Texas Tech University in 2013, where he served as department chair 1990–2006. He was editor of the  Review of Religious Research, 1990–2000, and president of the Religious Research Association, 2001–2. His publications have appeared in the  Review of Religious Research, Sociological Analysis  (currently  Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review),  The Sociological Quarterly, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour,  and others. He is the author of two sociological theory textbooks and is currently working on a book-length analysis of the distinctions between religiosity, spirituality and morality.   Hubert Knoblauch is professor of general sociology at the Technical University of Berlin. His major research areas are sociology of knowledge, communication, religion and qualitative methods. He has published

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books on qualitative methods in religious studies, popular religion and the communicative construction of reality. Silke Steets is Heisenberg Fellow at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Leipzig University, where she currently conducts an empirical project entitled The Structure of Cognitive Minorities: Evangelicals in Leipzig and Unitarians in Dallas. Her research interests revolve around the relationship between space, religion, materiality and the city. In her latest monograph Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt (Suhrkamp, 2015), she extends Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality to the built world. Recent publications include the article ‘Seductive Atmospheres, Conflicting Symbols’ on religious landmark buildings (Eurostudia, 2017) and the co-edited book Religious Pluralism and the City (Bloomsbury, 2018). Riyaz Timol is a research associate at Cardiff University’s Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK where he obtained his PhD in 2017. His research interests include ethnographic methodology, intergenerational transmission of Islam in Britain and the relationship of Islam with modernity. He has taught courses on religion, theology and qualitative research methods at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervises Islamic studies dissertations at Manchester University. Bryan S. Turner was presidential professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York (2010–17). He is currently professor of sociology at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and honorary professor of sociology at Potsdam University, Germany. He recently edited ‘Max Weber on Religions and Civilization’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70, no. 276 2016(2), pp. 137–272.

Preface and Acknowledgements This book started as a special journal issue in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy, published in 1967. Berger and Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality had been celebrated in several places the previous year, and I thought it would be only fitting to critically assess the significance of The Sacred Canopy – a book unambiguously deserving a similar classic status in the sociology of religion. Two things happened on the way from that initial special issue idea to the book at hand. On the positive side, the response to my invitations was so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that I soon had an abundance of papers to choose from. All had a place in what was shaping up in my head, and soon I could not bear to part with any of them. This was inconvenient for journals who work with strict word counts. Hence the book. What was most exciting was that in January 2017 Berger, through an intermediary, expressed an interest in contributing a response to the chapters, as he had done in Hunter and Ainlay’s Making Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology (1986) and Woodhead, Heelas and Martin’s Peter L. Berger and the Study of Religion (2001). A couple of years earlier I had invited Berger to contribute a biographical chapter for my anthology Studying Religion and Society: Sociological Self-Portraits (2013), but he declined on the grounds that his scholarly memoir Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist was just in press at that time (2011). Now, not only had I a new chance to collaborate with one of my sociological idols, but a response chapter would definitely crown the book project. This response chapter, of course, never materialized. Berger’s passing in June 2017 changed the outline of this book, but affected its contents otherwise as well. References to the man in the text had to be changed into past tense, which made the loss more real. In a more intangible way, for me at least, the mood of the book also changed. Not only was Berger not going to respond to the chapters, but writing about a person’s work feels

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different when it is done posthumously. Critiquing Marx and Weber is a fulltime profession for some in the twenty-first century and done without much concern for Karl and Max as people. Dissecting the work of colleagues (even those who one looks up to) is another endeavour entirely. When a person crosses from one status to another during the making of a book like this, the critic is left confused: Is critique appropriate in this situation? I am quite confident that Berger’s answer would have been a resounding ‘yes’. His theoretical work is a great example of this: the classics – Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Schutz – are appropriated whenever it suits the purposes of the argument. Never for form’s sake, or in spirit of reverential reference. Berger had little love for theoretical purity, even if that meant renouncing, with Luckmann, ‘social constructionism’ itself, when they thought that it had been used to create a new scholarly orthodoxy. For sociologists of religion, Berger’s reversal of his influential thinking on secularization is even more famous. The brief preface above provides the background for the focus and logic of the chapters in this book. The original theme was The Sacred Canopy, and so it remains. Berger wrote about religion from many angles, including as a theologian, and capturing that breadth consistently is a major task not even attempted here. Berger’s views on secularization and his occasional denouncement of ‘constructionism’ in its contemporary forms notwithstanding, he mostly retained the sociology of knowledge perspective presented in The Social Construction of Reality and The Sacred Canopy, indeed explicitly returning to it in his final book, The Many Altars of Modernity (2014). Hence, the first half of this book presents commentaries on different aspects of that sociology of knowledge perspective, as applied to the sociology of religion. The chapters discuss key themes and concepts, such as social construction, philosophical anthropology, plausibility structures, cognition and emotion, and definitions of religion in Berger’s work. As in The Sacred Canopy, which is divided into ‘systematic’ and ‘historical’ sections, the second half of this book examines Berger’s theorizations of secularization, and applies his ‘systematic’ ideas to case studies of contemporary religion. There was no template to the chapters. I, as an editor, did not impose topic, perspective or style. Yet, more or less all of the chapters end up examining what works in Berger’s theorizations, but also how these ideas could work better. Sometimes the critique takes the authors into diverging directions. The

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book is not a guide to a ‘correct’ interpretation of Berger’s work, so this is as it should be. The most enduring works in sociology have been those that are open-ended enough to provide food for thought for scholars of different theoretical persuasions and generations. As the chapters in this book show, The Sacred Canopy continues to inspire fifty years after its publication. That, surely, is a sign of a sociological classic. *

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I like to think of edited volumes as opportunities to explore important themes that I couldn’t possibly cover as broadly and expertly by myself. This book, thanks to the contributors, is one of those volumes. Thanks are also due to Cynthia Eller and Elisabeth Arweck, whose comments helped shape the original journal issue idea into the present book. Thank you Lalle Pursglove and everyone at Bloomsbury Academic – always a pleasure to work with you. Finally, a posthumous thank you to Peter L. Berger, who inspired so many of us in the sociology of religion. Titus Hjelm London, January 2018

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Introduction: Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion1 Titus Hjelm

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) was one of the most influential sociologists of the last century. In the sociology of religion his classic status is uncontested. Since the publication of The Sacred Canopy (1967) it has been almost impossible not to cite Berger in discussions of secularization and, later, desecularization. The idea of a ‘sacred canopy’ has itself been a key metaphor for the sociology of religion for more than fifty years now. When Berger recently passed away, mainstream media ran obituaries discussing the many facets of his scholarly contributions – evidence of his influence beyond a small circle of professional sociologists. This introduction is an exposition and assessment of Berger’s main contributions to the sociology of religion. It is not a systematic review of Berger’s sizeable oeuvre, and sidesteps his theological work entirely. Rather, the focus is on the ideas presented in The Sacred Canopy, namely the application of his sociology-of-knowledge approach to theorizations of religion, secularization, and his later espousal of ‘desecularization’. All of these ideas will be revisited in a slightly different form in later chapters, but this brief introduction sets the scene for the explorations and critiques that follow.

Sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge In an early article titled ‘Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge’ ([1963] 1969), Berger and his most famous collaborator, Thomas Luckmann (1928–2016) show the reader a glimpse of their approach to the sociology

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of knowledge that would later be expanded into The Social Construction of Reality, and which colours their respective takes on the sociology of religion as well. They argue that instead of ‘religious market research’, religion should be understood sociologically as an institution that provides meaning and legitimates the social order, that is, as an essential part of ‘world-building’, which in turn is the domain of sociology of knowledge. The subtitle of The Social Construction of Reality – ‘A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge’ – is modest, if not misleading; Berger and Luckmann’s project is much more wideranging. Indeed, already in 1963 they admitted conceiving the sociology of knowledge ‘as being properly concerned with the whole area of the relationship of social structure and consciousness’ (Berger and Luckmann 1969: 416). This is nothing less than an attempt at cracking what has later been referred to as the ‘structure-agency problem’ in sociology (e.g. Giddens 1979). Hence, in order to fully appreciate Berger’s sociology of religion, it is important to understand it in the context of the sociology of knowledge outlined in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967: vi–vii). Indeed, although he might have famously changed his mind about secularization, the sociological backcloth of his thinking remains the same: I have remained smugly satisfied with the theoretical approach we [Berger and Luckmann] concocted in those early years. … As I increasingly turned from theory to empirical problems, I found the sociology-of-knowledge paradigm of my early work very useful and have not been motivated to exchange it for another. (Berger 2001b: 454)

As I will argue in Chapter 10, the success of Berger’s application of the ‘sociology-of-knowledge paradigm’ to the sociology of religion can be questioned. Nevertheless, in terms of intellectual framing and conceptual development, any discussion of Berger and the sociology of religion should – I think – begin with The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann distil their approach into the following muchquoted idea: ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 61. Emphasis in the original). This dialectical process of world-building is comprised of three ‘moments’ that correspond to the different parts of the definition: externalization (society is a human product), objectivation (society is an objective reality) and internalization (humans are a social product).

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World-building is a precarious endeavour, however. Social order risks a lapse into chaos unless it is continuously maintained or, in Berger and Luckmann’s terms, legitimated. ‘Symbolic universes’ are the most comprehensive of all forms of legitimation. They are ‘processes of signification that refer to realities other than those of everyday experience’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 95). When institutional arrangements are seen as the will of the god(s) or as an outcome of ‘natural law’, these arrangements are legitimated on a cosmic scale. Philosophy, science and religion are examples of these kinds of symbolic universes – and it is as a symbolic universe that Berger’s views on the nature of religion should be approached. Berger’s attitude towards defining religion has been a reluctant one at best. The following is the closest that The Sacred Canopy comes to giving a definition of religion: [Religion is] the establishment, through human activity, of an all-embracing sacred order, that is, of a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the ever-present face of chaos. … Every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death. The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk inevitably towards it. (Berger 1967: 51)

Religion is, then, functionally speaking, a bulwark against the terror of chaos. Yet, secular alternatives, such as ‘personal philosophies of life, scientific world-views, secular philosophies such as Marxism and nihilism, or commonsensical ideas about luck and fate’ (Wuthnow 1986: 127) could be argued to fulfil the same function. Therefore, it is the substantive part of the above definition that makes religion special: the ‘sacred cosmos’ is unlike other functional legitimations. The sacred is, in a tone strongly echoing Rudolf Otto, ‘a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience’ (Berger 1967: 25). Now, even with the qualification of sacredness as a qualitatively different form of legitimation, doesn’t the idea of symbolic universes smack of functionalism still? The idea of legitimation seems to suggest, by definition, that religion is socially and sociologically meaningful by virtue of the fact that it provides a ‘sacred canopy’, that is, it has a social function.

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I would argue that it is misleading to call Berger a sociological functionalist. In fact, it is the structural–functionalist tradition associated especially with Talcott Parsons that is the foil of The Social Construction of Reality (Pfadenhauer 2013: 103). Instead, it is the foundational assumptions from phenomenology and philosophical anthropology that constitute, or require, the functional parts of Berger’s definition. Instead of arguing that religion is a functional requisite of a well-integrated society – although religion can play a legitimating role – Berger’s ‘functionalism’ refers to the propensity for meaning-making and need for order that are, Berger argues (following Arnold Gehlen), part of the human condition. Characteristic of Berger’s ‘nomadism’ between sociology and phenomenology, he manages to be a foundationalist and a constructionist at the same time – a trait that has led some scholars identifying as social constructionists to abandon Berger’s assumptions regarding human nature while retaining the sociological focus on interaction (e.g. Beckford 2003: 29). Indeed, what is interesting about Berger’s discussions about the definition of religion is that he continues to work within the functionalist–substantive binary, without being particularly constructionist.

Elements of a sociological theory of religion Berger did not purport to offer a comprehensive theory of religion – constructionist or otherwise. The subtitle of The Sacred Canopy is ‘elements of a sociological theory of religion’. As with Berger’s way of defining religion, his positioning on the theory of religion map depends on which of his ‘elements’ one focuses on. These elements – which demonstrate Berger’s embeddedness in the canonical classics of sociology – are (1) anomy, (2) theodicy, (3) alienation, and (4) plausibility structure. The first two attempt to explain the appeal of religion, that is why there is religion in the first place; the latter two tackle the questions why and how religion is successful. Anomy. Starting with Durkheim, Berger applies the concept made famous in Suicide ([1897] 1979). As is often the case with Berger, his point is not to be exegetical or particularly faithful to the original usage (also changing the word from the commonly used French original, anomie). For Durkheim, anomie/y is a state of normlessness, where old norms and values do not unite society

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anymore, but new ones are yet to replace them. Anomic suicide is the result of the psychological anxiety caused by this ultimately social source. Berger, however, uses the term in the phenomenological sense: anomy means terror in the face of disorder which threatens to make human existence meaningless for both individuals and societies alike (Berger 1967: 22–3). The human answer – again both on the level of consciousness and on the social level – to the constant threat of anomy is nomization, the imposition of meaningful order upon reality. Unlike for Durkheim, for whom anomie is a state of social disintegration, Berger sees nomization as part of the human condition: ‘The anthropological presupposition for this is a human craving for meaning, which appears to have the force of instinct’ (Berger 1967: 22; See Turner in this book). Theodicy. Continuing in Durkheimian tones, Berger suggests that the sacred is not just the opposite of the profane, but ‘on a deeper level’, the opposite of chaos: ‘The sacred cosmos, which transcends and includes man in its ordering of reality, thus provides man’s ultimate shield against the terror of anomy’ (Berger 1967: 26). Now, this rhymes with one of Weber’s key concepts in the sociology of religion, theodicy, which Berger appropriates: ‘An explanation of [anomic] phenomena in terms of religious legitimations, of whatever degree of theoretical sophistication, may be called a theodicy’ (Berger 1967: 54; Campbell 2001: 77). This is, as with Weber, a much broader use of the term originally associated with the Christian problem of evil in a world created by an omnipotent and good God. In Berger’s terms theodicy refers to worldmaintenance in a religious framework. Here again we witness Berger’s dual functional–substantive approach: theodicy is a (functional) shield against the terror of anomic chaos, but it is so in a very special sense, because the (substantive) ‘religious framework’ refers to a ‘transhumanly legitimated realm’ (Paden 2016: 68). Alienation. For all his (rather long-standing and consistent) vitriol against Marxism, Berger’s work shows intimate familiarity with the work of Marx, whose ideas pop up in both The Social Construction of Reality and The Sacred Canopy. Berger’s Marx is first and foremost the early Marx of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology, and the key concept Marx provides for Berger’s ‘elements’ is alienation. For Marx, alienation is the consequence of the exploitative nature of labour under capitalism, and he identified several forms of alienation (see e.g. Ollman 1976). For Berger,

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alienation is a specific feature of religious symbolic universes. In the broadest sense alienation in Berger refers to the process in which The individual ‘forgets’ that this world was and continues to be co-produced by him. Alienated consciousness is undialectical consciousness. The essential difference between the socio-cultural world and the world of nature is obscured – namely, the difference that men have made the first but not the second. (Berger 1967: 85)

Religion is supremely alienating because it transforms ‘human products into supra- or non-human facticities. The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production’ (Berger 1967: 89). Plausibility structure. The last element of Berger’s theoretical formulation of religion – plausibility structure – is his most original (although it bears resemblance to the idea of the ‘reference group’, associated with the work of Robert K. Merton). Religious worlds are precarious: On the one hand, there are many competing religions offering their version of the only truth out there. On the other hand, science challenges many strict interpretations of sacred texts. These religious worlds need to be constantly reaffirmed. Plausibility structures are the social networks that maintain the plausibility of religious beliefs even when these beliefs are challenged by competing explanations. Plausibility is provided simply by belonging to a community of similar-minded people, and by rituals that strengthen the sense of belonging to these communities (Berger 1970: 34–8; see Ammerman in this book). What emerges from the above ‘elements’ is very characteristically Bergerian: eclectic and consistent at the same time. Eclectic in the way he freely appropriates concepts and ideas from sociology’s three founding classics; consistent in the way the anthropological ‘constant’ of humans’ search for meaning features in the centre of the theorizations – and how this foundation shapes the use of the sociological concepts.

Secularization and desecularization Berger’s ‘elements’ constitute the ‘systematic’ part of The Sacred Canopy. The second part of the book deals with the ’historical’ application of these

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elements, namely secularization. Berger’s theory of secularization has been discussed by many (e.g. Dobbelaere 1981; Bruce 2001; cf. Warner 1993), so only a brief exposition will suffice here (see Bruce in this book). Instead, the focus will be on Berger’s attempt to revise his own theories under the concept of ‘desecularization’. Berger defines secularization as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger 1967: 107). He goes on: In modern Western history, of course, secularization manifests itself in the evacuation by the Christian Churches of areas previously under their control or influence – as in the separation of church and state, or in the expropriation of church lands, or in the emancipation of education from ecclesiastical authority. (Berger 1967: 107)

This type of secularization Berger calls structural or objective secularization, as it pertains specifically to the differentiation of social institutions and the ‘location’ of religion in the objectivated structure of society (cf. Hammond 1986: 146). The description of the process of differentiation is rather uncontroversial as such, and most sociologists of religion would agree that this indeed has been the case for much of Europe, at least. Things get messier when ‘secularization’ is expanded to include individual loss of faith, and is tied together with a theory of modernization. The second type, subjective secularization, or the secularization of consciousness, refers to the loss of religious plausibility at the individual level. The ‘ultimate’ meaning of life is no longer provided by religion, but by secular alternatives – if provided at all (Berger 1967: 107–8). Berger points especially to psychology and psychotherapy as important sources of individual meaningmaking in the modern world (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 175–80; Berger 1967: 151–2). The secularization of consciousness is dialectically connected to structural secularization, and cannot be properly understood in terms of simple mechanistic causality (Berger 1967: 128). His most famous assertion, that pluralism begets secularization, should also be understood dialectically, on both levels of secularization. On the one hand, structural secularization itself leads to pluralism, when a single religious tradition loses the monopoly on

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truth (Berger 1967: 137). Pluralism, in turn, reinforces secularization on both the structural level and the level of consciousness: The pluralistic situation multiplies the number of plausibility structures competing with each other. Ipso facto, it relativizes their religious contents. More specifically, the religious contents are ‘de-objectivated’, that is, deprived of their status as taken-for-granted, objective reality in consciousness. They become ‘subjectivized’ in a double sense: their ‘reality’ becomes a ‘private’ affair of individuals, that is, loses the quality of self-evident intersubjective plausibility. … And their ‘reality’ in so far as it is still maintained by the individual, is apprehended as being rooted within the consciousness of the individual rather than in any facticities of the external world. (Berger 1967: 151–2)

This is perhaps the most original part of Berger’s theorizing. In his discussion on the historical sources of secularization Berger follows Weber rather faithfully: The two main ‘carriers’ of secularization are modern capitalism and the rationalization it begets, and the Christian tradition itself, Protestant (Calvinist/Puritan) Christianity especially. The most controversial aspect of Berger’s argument has been to tie together modernization (à la Weber) and secularization. In The Sacred Canopy and his other earlier writings, Berger seems to think of secularization as a linear process and an inevitable result of modernization, which leads to the change of the structural location of religion and, ultimately, to the erosion of religion at the level of individual consciousness. Like so many other sociologists of religion of his time, the early Berger saw little future for religion in the modern world. Fast forward thirty years, and Berger’s argument has turned on its head: ‘The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false’ (Berger 1999: 2). Instead of secularization, Berger asserts, we have a world that is ‘as furiously religious as it ever was’ (1999: 2). Instead of simply finding that his earlier analyses had ‘little empirical substance’ (Berger 1992: 15), we are witnessing a ‘desecularization of the world’ (Berger 1999). Berger’s reversal can be considered problematic on many accounts (Williams 2001). Most importantly, there is no attempt to engage with the theoretical dynamics of the putative resurgence of religion in The Desecularization of the World, the most famous source of the new claim. Proof of religious vitality (which also can be measured in different ways) is not in itself proof against the secularization thesis – unless it explicitly challenges some of the theoretical

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assumptions of the thesis. As Steve Bruce (2001: 94; see Bruce in this book) puts it, the religious evolution in Iran does not really refute what has happened in Essex. In his last major book on religion, The Many Altars of Modernity (2014), Berger addressed his reversal in more theoretical terms. He conceded that secularization on the objective level is an empirical fact. The following line from The Many Altars of Modernity could have been written in 1967: In the course of modernization, for various reasons, societal functions that used to be vested in religious institutions have now become differentiated between the latter and other (mostly new or redefined) institutions – church and state, religion and the economy, religion and education, and so forth. (Berger 2014: x)

The problem, then, which Berger did not explicate in The Desecularization of the World, is that if and when this objective secularization happens, how come individuals remain religious? If pluralism begets institutional secularization, it should beget secularization on the level of consciousness as well. However, the empirical evidence and conceptual formulations such as Grace Davie’s (1994) ‘believing without belonging’, and the rise of ‘spirituality’ to explain the resilience of religion in the modern world challenged this assumption. Berger acknowledged this already in 2001 at least when, in a response chapter to an anthology of other scholars’ essays on his work on religion, he stated that ‘pluralism affects the how of religious belief, but not necessarily the what’ (Berger 2001a: 194). ‘Religion’ might have moved away from the pews, but that does not mean it has disappeared. Owing to a ‘rather unexpected idea’ in 2012, Berger started putting together a more systematic treatment of the question of pluralization and secularization of consciousness: As a duly accredited specialist in the sociology of knowledge, I should have recalled a basic insight of this approach: If it is to function in society, every institution must have a correlate in consciousness. Therefore, if a differentiation has occurred between religious institutions in society, this differentiation must also be manifested in the consciousness of individuals. (Berger 2014: x)

Pluralization and differentiation do not lead to the disappearance of religion in individual consciousness (as the original argument went), but rather the

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realignment of the role of religion in individual lives (the ‘how’ of religious belief). ‘Modernity necessarily leads to pluralism’ (Berger 2014: 20), but the choice is not between religion and no religion. Hence: Most religious people, even very fervent ones, operate within a secular discourse in important areas of their lives. Put differently, for most believers there is not a stark either/or dichotomy between faith and secularity but rather a fluid construction of both/and. (2014: x)

Berger adopts Eisenstadt’s concept of ‘multiple modernities’ for his explanation of the continuing vitality of religion on the individual level. Hence, even though pluralism might have led to institutional differentiation, this does not automatically lead to the secularization of consciousness. The multiple spheres of the structural level are replicated in consciousness. Secular discourse is just one discourse among others. We can be completely secularized in our economic life and transactions, Berger argues, but still go to church on Sundays. I will discuss the plausibility of this position in Chapter 10.

Engaging Berger Although Berger wrote about various issues pertaining to religion, sometimes contradicting his own earlier work, it is safe to say that the concepts and ideas discussed above are the ones that have generated most commentary and further applications in the sociology of religion, and the study of religion more broadly conceived. As I intimated in the Preface, Berger’s work is sufficiently eclectic to provide potentially endless variations for critique and development. On the one hand, it is possible to look at Berger’s sources and the way he appropriates ideas from sociology and phenomenology, for example. On the other hand, his work inspires further development, based on both theoretical arguments and empirical re-evaluation. In this sense, Berger resembles the sociological classics (especially Marx and Weber) more than contemporary sociology, where the construction of waterproof theoretical systems seems to be the highest form of practice.

Introduction

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The chapters in this book, all in their own way, engage in both types of examination and critique. They discuss Berger’s influences but, most of all, engage in a constructive critique of his ideas in The Sacred Canopy. The chapters show the theoretical shortcomings of Berger’s ideas, and complement these with new ones – often ideas that the authors have themselves pioneered. Some of the chapters apply Berger’s ideas to empirical cases and use these cases to point to further theoretical and conceptual development. The final chapter, although a pale substitute for the initially discussed response by Berger himself, tries to assess Berger’s influence and argues specifically for a re-examination of the role of social construction in his work.

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Vulnerability and Plausibility Structures: Peter L. Berger, Arnold Gehlen and Philosophical Anthropology Bryan S. Turner

In this chapter I explore the influence of Arnold Gehlen (1904–76) and philosophical anthropology on the sociology of Peter L. Berger (1929–2017). This influence was prominent throughout the 1960s. While Berger continued throughout his life to write many successful and fascinating books, the basic theoretical framework had been established in this early period when he was obviously studying Gehlen’s contributions to philosophical anthropology. Thus Gehlen provided much of the philosophical underpinnings of Berger’s early humanist sociology, especially regarding his interest in institutions and their social construction, and that influence continued at least into the 1980s. I suggest that the influence of philosophical anthropology on the work of Berger was constitutive, but has been neglected in the secondary literature on Berger. Berger was clearly influenced by Gehlen’s analysis of institutions and modernity. The explicit connection with Gehlen was signalled by the article with Hansfried Kellner (1965) on Gehlen’s theory of institutions and by Berger’s appreciative ‘Foreword’ to Man in the Age of Technology (1980). In The Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist Berger (2011: 83), commenting on the article with Kellner, said that it was ‘probably the first presentation in English of the work of this important German social theorist’. On the surface, Gehlen’s theories dropped off Berger’s sociological journey once the basic idea of institutions had been incorporated into The Social Construction of Reality (1966) that came quickly to be regarded as a ‘classic’. In many respects the work of Berger and Luckmann provided a bridge between European social theory, including philosophical anthropology, and American sociology. The

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overt influences on their approach to knowledge were Alfred Schutz and George Herbert Mead rather than Karl Mannheim. Their original approach to knowledge did not involve ideologies such as conservatism that had interested Mannheim but rather ‘everything that passes for knowledge in society’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 14–15). Berger developed a distinctive framework for the study of religion in which ‘sacred canopies’ have an objective facticity and a subjective reality in the everyday world. As a bridge to European traditions, his approach to the study of religion thus contrasted sharply with, for example, the Detroit Area studies which established an influential tradition of survey research culminating in Gerhard Lenski’s The Religious Factor (1963). Gehlen’s work also provides some interesting clues to Berger’s early secularization theory in The Sacred Canopy (1967). We might say that Gehlen had developed an implicit rather than explicit theory of modern secularity. He claimed that contemporary societies are going through a process of deinstitutionalization in which the secure and stable institutions of traditional society are being eroded by a modernization process that gives more prominence to identity, subjectivity, emotions and individualism than to social structure. The idea that the modern personality is no longer deeply embedded in social structures can be seen as the basic message of Berger’s The Homeless Mind (1973), written together with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner. Thus the declining influence of Gehlen was connected to the abandonment of the standard secularization thesis. Berger came to reject this primarily Weberian view in arguing that among other things there had been two great eruptions of religion in modernity, namely Pentecostalism and Islam. Furthermore, there was little evidence in the 1960s that religion was in decline in the United States. Out of this development came the theory of the two pluralisms and European exceptionalism, which I discuss later. While I argue that Gehlen was fundamental to Berger’s view of religion, knowledge and the ‘subjectivation’ of modernity, Gehlen appeared only in three footnotes of The Sacred Canopy and largely disappears in later work as Berger abandoned his theory of secularization and embraced ‘the desecularization of the world’ (Berger 1999). In Berger’s recorded interviews (e.g. ‘Religion and Other Curiosities’ at The Salzburg Institute of Religion, Culture and the Arts and ‘The Challenge of Religious Pluralism’ with Gregor Thuswaldner), neither Gehlen nor philosophical anthropology was discussed. In the excellent

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Wikipedia entry for Berger, it is claimed that the main and long-lasting influence on Berger was Max Weber. In the various obituaries that appeared after his death on 27 June 2017, there is no discussion of Gehlen. Personal correspondence with two of Berger’s former students at the New School and a colleague at Boston University have confirmed that Gehlen was either not discussed at all or ‘only in passing’.1 Does it follow that Gehlen was only of limited interest in Berger’s early sociology? My argument in this chapter is that Gehlen’s analysis of the role and character of institutions has never been abandoned by Berger. Institutions from the family to religion, from capitalism to monasticism, or from money to jokes are human products that answer to underlying issues of our biological construction. They are in one sense or another ‘sacred canopies’ and they have a certain everyday facticity that is an outcrop of our taken-for-granted knowledge of the world.

Gehlen and Berger on institutions In 1933 Gehlen had joined the Nazi Party and swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. He worked in the Leipzig School with Hans Freyer and eventually replaced Paul Tillich at the University of Frankfurt. He was influenced by Helmut Plessner (1892–1985) and by Max Scheler (1874–1928). In 1943 he was eventually drafted into the Wehrmacht. After the War he went through a process of post-war de-Nazification, and he was marginalized within the university system. He held a minor position in an administrative college in Speyer, but eventually found a teaching position at Aachen University of Technology in the 1960s (Thies 2000). Gehlen was and remains a controversial conservative figure in contemporary German philosophy and sociology. He was a critic of the student movements of the 1960s which had a destabilizing effect on institutions. Many of his ideas – ‘sensory overload’, ‘deinstitutionalization’ and ‘post-history’ – have found their way into modern social theory. Two works were especially influential – Der Mensch (1940. Translated as Man: His Nature and Place in the World, 1988) and Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (1957. Translated as Man in the Age of Technology, 1980). Clearly, Gehlen

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was deeply conservative in both his political and social views, which raises a question, not about Berger’s own views, but about the social implications of his theory of institutions. Philosophical anthropology attempted to take developments in biology seriously and to create an understanding of human society that incorporated biology into the social sciences. This approach was not necessarily reductionist, but rather integrated phenomenology, biology and anthropology. Gehlen’s basic idea was that human beings are instinctually impoverished (Instinktarmut) or incomplete in biological terms. Human beings, unlike other mammals, are not equipped to cope with the challenges of existence at birth. Thus, a newborn foal can be up and running with its mother shortly after birth. By contrast, the human infant is helpless. Humans require a very long period of training under the care of their parents and other adults in order to acquire basic skills of survival, especially language. Sociologists would add that, in fact, socialization is a lifelong process as humans pass from infancy to old age. There is also socialization within institutions such as the professions. This absence of a secure biological world means that humans construct a cultural world around them, and this primarily involves building institutions. We might say that humans develop institutions as an alternative or supplement to their primitive instinctual structure. Without secure and distinct instincts, humans produce cultural institutions or, in Berger’s terms, a ‘sacred canopy’. Berger saw a close connection between habituation at the individual level and institution building at the societal level. In passing we can note that habit and virtue were always connected in Greek philosophy from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2012) onwards. One can see therefore that religion has historically been fundamental to these processes of habit formation, normative standards and social cohesion. Habit allows us to operate in the everyday world without the effort of distraction and inspection. In the classic example of habituation, when I get on my bicycle I do not have to relearn how to stay upright. It has become an unreflective habit. Other institutions can assume the same relationship between habit and practice. In the everyday performance of tasks, habit gives institutions a facticity. Nevertheless, there is social change and new circumstances can create uncertainty in which institutions can be challenged. To take one dramatic example, the Black Death in Europe created labour scarcity, undermined whole

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villages, brought people to a new vision of death as a vicious predator, and traditional patterns of behaviour began to collapse. In modern times global epidemics have had a similar impact on taken-for-granted assumptions about values, knowledge and institutions. Perhaps another example is the process of secularization in the nineteenth century in Europe with urbanization and industrialization. What Berger calls the ‘plausibility structures’ of society were shaken, at least in Europe, by secular modernity. These objective structures are eroded by modernization or deinstitutionalization, because habit, values and practices are no longer in full harmony. Modern cultures are characterized by subjectivity and the endless search for identity. For Gehlen, ‘personality’ in traditional societies was in the background and securely anchored in institutions. With modernity, personality is in the foreground and no longer buried in supportive social structures. As a conservative, Gehlen believed that modernity posed a serious threat to the basic institutionalization of human existence. Personality along with institutions was in a state of flux. Therefore, the fluidity of social structures was conducive to the emergence of ‘the homeless mind’. Perhaps one weakness of Berger’s sociology, which is not present in Gehlen, concerns the facticity of everyday life. This could be construed as a conservative theory of society; revolutionary social change is uncommon, because of the solid facticity of institutions. For example, attempts to remove religion from society in both China and Vietnam by the Communist Party have failed. We know that the Catholic Church survived, and that folk religion (such as spirit possession) thrives in modern-day Vietnam. Despite constant social change, institutions are robust because they are embedded in everyday life and we have no pressing need to question or investigate them on a regular basis. However, Berger also argues in a manner consistent with Gehlen that institutions are fragile because their plausibility structures are open to implicit and explicit interrogation. Precisely because institutions are socially constructed, they can be deconstructed. Humans need to work hard to sustain the credibility of the knowledge that supports institutions. Marriage, the family and the gender division of labour are in the contemporary period examples of fragile institutions, because legislation and referenda are challenging their takenfor-granted facticity. The ambiguity of Berger’s sociology is that it is both conservative and radical.

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We might reasonably speculate that Berger accepted Gehlen’s view of institutions, but later abandoned the underlying idea of instinctual deprivation. In short, the anthropology of habit-forming instincts was no longer treated as necessary to a theory of institutions. Nevertheless, Berger’s sociology makes little sense without the backdrop of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, but the opportunity to build a more elaborate biological foundation of social theory for example via a sociology of the body was never undertaken in Berger’s work on modernity.

The ambiguities of Berger’s notion of ‘facticity’ The 1960s was a radical time especially in American and, to a lesser extent, in European universities. This was the ‘disobedient generation’ that emerged out of what Talcott Parsons had called ‘the expressive revolution’, namely a new emphasis on personal experience, emotions and feeling rather than reason and objectivity (Turner 2006a). The Vietnam War had been an important turning point in student radicalization in creating widespread distrust of the causes and rationale of the war. Various social movements – the civil rights movement, peace movements, the women’s movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and so forth – emerged to challenge existing assumptions and to offer new ways of organizing society. Indeed, social movements became a key area of sociological research in the United States. These developments were of course very consistent with Gehlen’s view of how modernization would develop. In particular student radicalism in the university influenced the way in which Berger and Luckmann’s understanding of socially constructed knowledge would be received. Their definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘everything that passes for knowledge in society’ can be construed as a democratization of understanding. Furthermore, the idea of what ‘passes for knowledge’ invited the assumption that ‘knowledge’ could be and is open to contestation. What ‘passes’ for knowledge invites criticism of existing truth claims. Berger and Luckmann embraced the double notion that society is both an objective reality and a subjective reality. Through the process of socialization, the subjective world of the individual is eventually embraced, so to speak, by the objective structures of the family, the school, the workplace

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and so on. Their work in the 1960s showed how the legitimacy structures underlying religious authority were compromised in the supermarket of religious options in American society. Religion was never exhausted by these developments and in Luckmann’s terms there was ‘an invisible religion’ (1967) and for Berger there was always the possibility of a ‘rumor of angels’ (1969). Social constructionism has probably developed in ways that Berger and Luckmann did not intend and perhaps did not welcome. Their constructionism does not propose that there are no objective truths or that there is no objective reality. People are born and they die. However, there are legal and medical debates about what constitutes ‘death’. Is it when the brain is dead? Is it when relatives and doctors decide the patient can no longer enjoy any ‘quality of life’? Can we talk about ‘social death’? The idea that ‘death’ becomes a contested category should not obscure the fact that death is the unavoidable conclusion of life. However, the idea of social construction was embraced by social movements outside the academy as a strategy to undermine what had hitherto appeared as objective truth or as common sense. Categories that had never been systematically questioned – race, gender, disability and ageing – were now being disrupted and replaced. The impact of these social movements was to bring into question the ‘expert opinion’ of psychiatrists, doctors, priests, judges and indeed any figure of authority. Expert opinion was no longer automatically underpinned by law, professional power and widespread social consensus. The authority of professors in the university was challenged by students who wanted to develop the syllabus on their own terms. Professors might protest, as Allan Bloom (1987) did in The Closing of the American Mind, but the writing was on the wall. Berger and Luckmann thus published The Social Construction of Reality in 1966 in the context of emerging discontent, especially among the 1960s generation. The book was welcomed not just in sociology but more broadly in the student body as a radical text, because it demonstrated that what appeared to be the solid social structures of authority and power were in fact fragile. The legitimacy of these basic structures had to be constantly reinforced by shared forms of knowledge, but these could be challenged, transformed and reassembled. The social world is continuously constructed and it can be reconstructed. The same argument applied to religious structures. Humanist and atheist societies offer alternative ways of looking at the world, as did sociology. The Social Construction

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of Reality and The Sacred Canopy achieved the status of classics, but they were serious and complex, not popular books. These works required some previous knowledge of both sociology and philosophy. However, Berger had already published his Invitation to Sociology in 1963 and, as it were, captured the undergraduate or popular market. It became the benchmark against which other introductions came to be measured. The analysis in the Invitation, namely how social institutions are put together and how they influence individual behaviour often when the individual does not realize that, laid the foundations for The Social Construction of Reality. These two volumes promoted the basic idea that social institutions have the external appearance of objectivity, but their plausibility and facticity can be challenged especially during periods of problematic social change. In modernity, the processes of ‘universe-maintenance’ could no longer be taken for granted. Hence, Berger’s early work was interpreted in the late twentieth century as a challenge to all forms of authority. While Berger was embraced as a radical thinker in the 1960s, his social theory is, I shall argue, conservative. Precisely because the social fabric is a constructed reality, it is fragile and, consequently, we have to work hard to sustain it. Without a sacred canopy, there is endless contestation between competing definitions of reality. Indeed, without a sacred canopy, there are no secure taken-for-granted norms for behaviour. Habits are disrupted. The current debate in the United States over same-sex marriage is a good example. There is now considerable public disagreement about what meaningfully constitutes ‘marriage’. The traditional understanding that marriage is the (more or less) permanent union between a man and woman, with the assumption that they would reproduce, is in tatters. Marriage evolved over the centuries as a form of companionship between a man and a woman, and childlessness was thought to be involuntary and tragic. This view of marriage has been disrupted by late or no marriage, by no-fault divorce and by rising levels of low fertility. Voluntary childlessness is no longer stigmatized. Traditional marriage practice is now challenged in many societies by the legal provision for marriage between people of the same sex. Indeed, if we accept the legal redefinition of marriage as incorporating unions between people of the same sex, then the conventional definition of marriage is seriously challenged by legal authority. The debate about marriage also divides Christians such as conservative Catholics and liberal Episcopalians. It may also have implications for other institutions

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within the Christian world. Is priestly celibacy a necessary condition of the priesthood? But what in fact is the new definition of marriage? Is it merely some form of coupledom? The expert opinion of lawyers cannot resolve public conflicts over what the purpose of marriage is. If same-sex marriage is now increasingly available, why not polygamy? We may conclude that marriage is not made in heaven; it is socially constructed. Conservative views of marriage and related institutions are, in general, being successfully challenged by liberal lobby groups whose basic ideas receive implicit and often explicit support from sociologist promoting the idea of social constructionism. These radical changes in modern societies call into question any notion of a sacred canopy.

Vulnerability and fragility An impartial reader might ask why I have dwelt on Gehlen when the evidence suggests he became less important as Berger’s sociology developed and matured. The answer is that Berger was influential in my own intellectual development, especially given my interest in developing the sociology of the body. I had completed my PhD thesis in 1969 and was in the student generation that had read and absorbed Berger’s sociology of knowledge. In The Body and Society (Turner 1984), I was influenced by various sociologists and philosophers from Gehlen to Michel Foucault. I adopted and then adapted two ideas from Berger’s interpretation of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, namely human frailty and institutional precariousness. My initial starting point was that the biological condition of human beings means that we are frail. We are prone to infections, accidents and disease. Our lives are often cut short by chronic illness or by sudden accident. We inherit many genetic conditions that can severely limit our survival, and hence we typically struggle to survive especially as infants. As Thomas Hobbes famously proclaimed life is nasty, brutish and short. Happiness – the aim of all human activity – often proves to be temporary and limited by the contingencies of our existence. Human beings are vulnerable because the particular features of their embodiment leave them open to illness, disability, disease and eventual death. To overcome or manage this ontological vulnerability, we build and maintain a great variety of institutions to reduce our exposure to risk. Building institutions

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is, however, never a complete answer. The whole social edifice is an ensemble of sacred canopies, but institutions are rarely successful or at least not all of the time. In a changing world, they often become no longer fit for purpose; they become obsolete; and they are easily corrupted by powerful elites and interests. In short, the institution-building processes of human society have limited successes. Therefore the facticity of everyday life is never enough to compensate for the inevitable erosion and compromise of institutional life. In my view of society, flux and change are continuous; institutional legitimacy is constantly questioned; and humans find that their lives are unsatisfactory. Here then is the foundation of religion in human society; it answers to the unsatisfactory character of everyday life. To take one prominent example, the Buddha argued that he came with one message and one message namely to teach that life is unsatisfactory or dukkha. Religion is the key institution to human survival that has been the core of human institutions since the axial age (800–200 BCE). The axial age, which was the time of the Buddha, the ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates, Confucius, Lao-Tse, and Zoroaster, was ‘the age of criticism’ (Momigliano 1975) that described an alternative existence outside this earthly world of toil. The analysis of this period – the age of the axial religions – has given rise to a major debate in the sociology of religion that returns to issues raised by Weber and Karl Jaspers concerning the origins of what it is to be human (Bellah 2011; Bellah and Joas 2012). In my own development of these ideas about the existential problem of our embodiment, I used ‘vulnerability’ rather than ‘frailty’ to describe the human condition. Now ‘vulnerability’ is from the Latin vulnus which means ‘wound’. This word thus perfectly describes the idea that human embodiment means that we are easily wounded both physically and psychologically. I combined these two ideas – human vulnerability and the precarious character of institutions – in my Vulnerability and Human Rights (Turner 2006b) to argue that in modern society human rights have emerged as what we might call a ‘late sacred canopy’. Human rights are a twentieth-century invention and were only systematically enunciated in 1948 in the Declaration of Human Rights. Their roots can, of course, be traced further back. For some researchers, human rights discourse starts with the Enlightenment, but an alternative position argues that the origin of human rights was located in the concern for human dignity that gained momentum in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s (Moyn 2015).

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The Irish Constitution of 1937 referred to the ‘freedom and dignity of the individual’ but Catholic theologians and Pope Pius XII, in particular, sought to separate a Christian notion of dignity from secular individual human rights. After all rights, both civil and human, had been associated with the French Revolution. Dignity became a standard aspect of constitutions in the 1940s for example in Bavaria in 1946 and in Italy in 1947, and culminating in the West German claim that ‘human dignity is inviolable’. A crucial institutional development in Europe was the emergence of Christian Democracy which became the main vehicle for spreading and developing Christian social and political policies including dignity as a guiding principle. While human dignity has become the core value of human rights legislation that in particular seeks to protect humans from the indignity of torture and to punish regimes that inflict such degradation on fellow humans, I want to argue that the idea of vulnerability is more fundamental. We suffer indignity because we are embodied and hence vulnerable to psychological and physical trauma. Our sense of wholeness and well-being is too readily punctured by the fact that our bodies are so easily violated. We are literally and metaphorically not thick skinned. Human rights institutions were developed precisely to address that vulnerability. Human rights institutions are, in Berger’s terms, a protective canopy, but they are also precarious. They fail for many reasons – governments are often unwilling to implement them; they have been used to conduct so-called human rights wars; they are mobilized by Western activists to criticize Asian societies and their governments; and states resist them in defence of their own legal sovereignty. Human rights are socially constructed, and they can be deconstructed. There is, in fact, ample criticism of human rights not least because they neglect the importance of human duty. These critical responses can be seen as bringing into question the taken-for-granted knowledge about the importance of rights that is embedded in the Declaration. Criticism suggests that the rights canopy needs to be reinvented (Moyn 2017).

Conclusion: On changing one’s mind Academics should not be criticized for changing their minds. Berger has openly admitted that he changed his mind with respect to the secularization

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thesis. As a student of sociology in the 1950s, he would have taken on board the secularization thesis of European social theory. It is present in The Sacred Canopy where the plausibility structures of Western society are challenged by religious and social diversity. Berger clearly changed his mind to recognize that secularization in fact opens up endless possibilities for religious and social experimentation and development. While the churches as formal institutions may decline, spirituality grows apace. Berger also introduced an important geographical dimension to this argument. The only region where the secularization thesis may have some traction is in northern Europe, whereas American exceptionalism is alive and well. In other parts of the world Latin America, Africa and China there are many religious movements that testify to the vitality of religious traditions. These doubts about the original secularization theory gave rise to an interesting account of pluralism as complexity between both religious and secular institutions. Unlike Weber, Berger had a positive view of secularization as opening up new possibilities for religious expression. Did Berger change his mind about the basic framework he created in the 1960s? I do not think so. He did three things. He added more and more examples such as humour and jokes. He elaborated the idea of pluralism. He expanded his ideas into publications on capitalism. However the basic framework of the 1960s remained in place, and that framework owed a lot to Arnold Gehlen. In this chapter I have argued that the theory of social construction of knowledge was constructed in part through an application of Arnold Gehlen’s theory of institutions, and that the idea about social construction remained throughout Berger’s later development. I have also implied but so far not developed a distinction between the theory of social construction and its reception. While the theory was conservative – we need institutions that have an objective facticity – its reception was radical – institutions are human constructs and they can be changed. Berger and Luckmann’s theory came to attention in a context where Western views of the Orient were being condemned as ‘Orientalism’ (Said 1978) and when postmodernism was also beginning to change the ways in which sociologists thought about ‘knowledge’ (Lyotard 1984). The subtitle of Lyotard’s book that had appeared in France in 1979 was ‘A Report on Knowledge’. Armed with this critical epistemology, activists saw ‘sex’, ‘race’ and ‘disability’ as rhetorical devices that had supported

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sexism, racism and ableism. Many sociological concepts came to function as what I call ‘advocacy concepts’ that seek to promote action rather than understanding. Age and ageing are good examples. The ageing process has been disconnected from our physical embodiment by the longevity project which denies the reality of ageing by promoting exercise, cosmetic surgery, vitamin regimes, and medical interventions through nanotechnology (Turner and Dumas 2016). Age is socially constructed and now, along with sex and race, it can be rejected. However, this advocacy strategy confuses ‘age’, which is indeed a social category, with the physical process of bodily ageing. With this analysis in mind, my argument can be repeated as a conclusion. Berger and Luckmann’s social construction thesis was essentially conservative, but it was received as a radical doctrine among social movement activists. Given Gehlen’s deep conservatism and his criticisms of the 1960s social movements, this outcome is an irony which I suspect Peter Berger would have enjoyed.

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From Canopies to Conversations: The Continuing Significance of ‘Plausibility Structures’ Nancy T. Ammerman

When Peter Berger published his foundational text in 1967, it was a logical extension of the work he had done with Thomas Luckmann in the preceding years (Berger and Luckmann 1966). The Social Construction of Reality, now recognized as among the most influential books of the twentieth century, had laid out a phenomenology of consciousness that placed the innermost realms of knowledge and identity squarely in a social matrix of micro-interaction and macrostructures. It built on classical social theory, but also on European critical theories and especially the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. How is it, they asked, that we come to act in the world as we do? In short, we engage in a process of externalizing our experience through language, internalizing the responses of others to us, and coming to accept the resulting social product as objective reality. As Berger then argued in The Sacred Canopy, the same social processes that produce the rest of reality also produce religion. Throughout, he brilliantly combines Schutz’s phenomenology with Marx’s dialectical materialism and Mead’s symbolic interactionism. The picture of a dynamic social process that structures religious ideas and experience was a powerful one. The theory took as its ‘normal’ state of affairs a situation where the responses of others were more or less congruent; the resulting taken-for-granted reality was more or less the same for the people interacting with and in it. That interactive context is what Berger termed a ‘plausibility structure’. In one of his late works, he mused, ‘I am very fond of this concept. I coined it’ (2014: 31). In The Sacred Canopy, he defines it thus: ‘Each world requires a social “base” for its continuing existence as a world that is

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real to actual human beings. The “base” may be called its plausibility structure’ (Berger 1967: 44). These are the relationships and social structures within which we go about our lives in an ‘of course’ kind of way.1 Berger illustrates this with a stinging and poignant account of the way Spanish conquest destroyed the activities and social relationships on which Inca civilization was built – its plausibility structure – transforming the Inca world into ‘first, unspeakable anomy, then a more or less nomized existence on the fringes of the Spaniard’s world – that other world, alien and vastly powerful, which imposed itself as reality-defining facticity upon the numbed consciousness of the conquered’ (Berger 1967: 46). No postcolonial thinker in subsequent decades could have said it better. But the larger point, for our purposes, is that religious ways of life rest on the social structures in which they exist. This basic insight, and the concept he used to describe it, are among his most troublesome – and most useful – contributions. The concept is troublesome for a number of reasons. First, it is so often misunderstood. Using the term ‘plausibility’ has deceived more than one first-time reader into thinking this is about logic and reason. Religious ideas, they think, have to be reasonable and logical to maintain their ‘plausibility’. The decline of religion in the modern world is therefore a matter of the logical implausibility of superstition. Not at all. Only if the ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ in question is understood in the phenomenological sense of Berger’s argument. The logic we impute to our world is a logic based on our taken-for-granted assumptions about how things work. That, in turn, is built on a structure of social relations; and it is that social setting that constitutes the plausibility structure, not the ideas themselves. The notion that religious ideas rest on a structure of social relations was also troublesome in a way that Berger recognized in his own text. It seems to imply that religion is the ‘dependent variable’ in every case. He, however, emphatically rejected the Marxian notion that religion is a mere reflection of the social structure, opting for a more Weberian tack. Not unlike Weber’s notion of ‘elective affinity’, with its skirting of causal arguments, Berger’s understanding of religion’s relationship to the social structure decidedly allows for influence in both directions. Social arrangements can make religious ideas and practices more and less possible; religious ideas (and he mostly addresses ideas, not practices) can drive changes in social arrangements.

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The other conceptual problem that Berger addressed in The Sacred Canopy is the fact that plausibility structures are never fully internalized. They are subject to manifold shocks. Children will arrive and ask ‘why’? Dreams and prophecies will interrupt the world as it is. Exile can remove all the familiar props. As a human construction, the plausibility structure is subject to the dynamics of human interaction and change. Berger’s chapters on religious legitimation and theodicy gave his answer to the social mechanisms that are necessary for maintaining the worlds we live in – in spite of the fragility of social (and biological) life. In the face of the threats, we still strive to establish a social world in which we can return to ‘normal’. Less clearly resolved in Berger’s formulation is the ‘normal’ he assumes. He noted the fragile and changing nature of social structures, but he assumed that there would be an equilibrium, a ‘nomos’ that would replace the ‘anomy’. True enough. What we have learned since about cognitive psychology would support that view of human cognition (DiMaggio 1997). But more problematic is his imagination of that all-encompassing religious plausibility structure – the ‘sacred canopy’.2 While he did note the difference between a ‘religious monopoly’ and the ‘sectarian’ situation of living in a subworld (having a ‘sacred tent’ perhaps), the sectarian world he described is no less encompassing than the monopoly one – just smaller. He spoke of the different ‘social engineering’ necessary in the two situations, but the picture is still one where a religious view of the world is maintained by a single religious plausibility structure. That sectarian social engineering task was, in fact, the theoretical question that informed my own earliest research, examining the plausibility structure for a ‘fundamentalist’ view of the world (Ammerman 1987). That world was a religious ‘normal’ that fit Berger’s theory. Where a religious monopoly exists or where a religious subworld attempts to maintain very tight boundaries, the picture Berger paints is a theoretically useful one. The religious person is sustained in a religious view of the world by being surrounded in all her most significant relationships by others whose actions and assumptions reinforce the taken-for-granted nature of that world. The reality of modern pluralism and competition, however, is less wellexplained by the theory Berger offers us in The Sacred Canopy. This is the site of some of the most troublesome conclusions in the book, some of which he later attempted to resolve.3 In the final chapters, as he developed his theory of

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secularization, he assumed that being surrounded by social worlds in which multiple religious and secular ideas compete would make religious ideas less sustainable, with secular explanations crowding out the religious ones. Living in a world whose structures are technological and market-driven, the habits and beliefs of religious traditions would be sustainable only in individual consciousness and as consumable commodities. In contrast to the situation of religious monopoly, all religious traditions in pluralist contexts must be marketed, he said. ‘[They] must be “sold” to a clientele that is no longer constrained to “buy.” The pluralistic situation is, above all a market situation’ (Berger 1967: 137; italics in original). Religion becomes, in this view, socially insignificant. Having lost its coherent social supports, it is too fragmented and privatized to have any effect on individual or collective life. In spite of this unfortunate detour in Berger’s theorizing, I want to suggest that we need not discard the notion that religions rest on social plausibility structures. What we must do, however, is alter both our understanding of what religion is and our understanding of how a plausibility structure works. For the former, we have to go beyond what Berger gave us in The Sacred Canopy. For the latter, however, we can return to the foundational theoretical work he gives us in the early part of the book. I turn first to those strands in Berger’s own theory.

The power of conversation In Berger’s recapping of the argument he and Luckmann made in The Social Construction of Reality, language and conversation play critical roles. He points out that we appropriate our view of the world in conversation with others, and the language we use provides us with the categories that order that world. ‘On the foundation of language, and by means of it, is built up the cognitive and normative edifice that passes for “knowledge” in a society’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 20). Building on Mead and the symbolic interactionists, Berger points to this very human activity of using language to navigate the world. Arranged into stories, admonitions and descriptions, our words become conversations, exchanges between people, in which the meaning of the words is expressed, modified and internalized. This is the micro-foundation of what

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Berger means by a plausibility structure. There are also macrostructures that cannot be ignored, but it is everyday conversation that maintains the takenfor-grantedness of the world. As Berger points out, ‘The world begins to shake in the very instant that its sustaining conversation begins to falter’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 21). This is a way in which the concept of a plausibility structure can continue to serve us well. In my 2013 book Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life, I examined that micro-foundation, looking at the social world as framed in narratives and expressed in conversations. Following Somers (1994), I have conceptualized religious identity as an individual autobiographical narrative (what Somers labels ‘ontological’) by which persons orient their actions so that they are in continuity with who they have perceived themselves to be, but which (like any script) allows improvisation and revision. That individual story, of course, is always in dialogue with the many ‘public narratives’ of the institutions that constitute our shared lives. Whether as a family or a corporation, a team or a congregation, we share a story about who we are; and that story, too, is constantly being revised and improvised. Finally, we live inside a few master stories, or metanarratives (like Schutz’s world taken for granted) with such hegemonic power that we often do not see their authorial hand. What I suggested in a 2003 essay is that religious identity is like all other identities, residing in just this sort of multilayered narrative (Ammerman 2003). Out of early socialization and deep existential experiences, there is an autobiographical narrative that may include any of a wide range of spiritual orientations. A more or less pro-secular hegemonic metanarrative in the culture may limit expectations about what sorts of spiritual presence and action one might expect. But both those internal narratives and the metanarratives are constantly staged in particular institutionalized social settings with their own expectations about the kinds of stories that can be told and enacted there. All three layers are always present; each can shape the others; and none is by definition beyond the reach of enchantment. The presence or absence of spiritual characters and actions in those narratives is one way to look for the socially constructed reality of religion in the world. The variation in spiritual narration reflects both differences between individuals and differences in the cultural and institutional contexts being narrated. Some locations and

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situations call forth religious realities, while others present themselves as wholly secular. And some people are far more spiritually attuned than others and can find the spiritual strands in the most secular of contexts. But beyond the individual and institutional differences, our research found differences that were traceable to the presence or absence of religiously relevant relationships and conversations.4 Not surprisingly, spiritual stories about everyday life were most common among those who attend religious services most frequently – no matter which tradition they were in. Congregations and other organized spiritual groups are still important sites of religious culture production (contra Bender et al. 2011). Most telling, however, it was not just being there that mattered most. It was participating in activities beyond weekly worship in which informal conversation was a typical mode of interaction. Whether choir practice or committee meeting, women’s spirituality group or weekly Torah study, participation with a community mattered. These conversational sites of interaction are the smaller, portable, flexible and permeable plausibility structures of complex modern societies. This is where spiritual discourse can be a primary lingua franca, but where everyday life is also very present, where elements of spirituality can naturally intersect with accounts of who people are and what they do with themselves. They learn and use spiritual language, and it shapes their way of being in the world. The more deeply embedded our subjects were in organized sites of spiritually infused conversation, the more likely they were to carry strands of that conversation with them. As participants in a religious community, people develop a way of talking about life that carries within it expectations about the presence of divine actors, about mysteries beyond human comprehension, and about the normative goodness of living by the Golden Rule. As people chat over a potluck dinner or pray during a meeting of a women’s group, the everyday stories they tell are likely to foreground spiritual interpretations. They come to think of sacred and secular as intertwined. What happens in these religious gatherings is not just a matter of otherworldly ritual and doctrinal teaching. What happens is the creation of a particular kind of conversational space. In some sense this is what Berger (1967) meant when he described modern religion as existing in ‘sheltering enclaves’. But it is more. These are not enclaves with high walls, where the sacred world is kept pure and well-defended. Their ability to be powerful producers of sacred consciousness does not depend on

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keeping all other realities at bay. It depends on their ability to evoke sacred reality in powerful ritual events and proffer coherent explanations of the cosmos. But mostly, their power as sacred culture producers is in the degree to which they allow sacred and profane to combine. The conversations in these spaces are inevitably full of the stuff of everyday life, with mundane and sacred realities intermingling. Indeed, the two may become part of one multivocal reality. As Ziad Munson (2006) wrote about the pro-life activists he was observing, the funerals held for aborted foetuses are both religious and political at the same time. Activists use religious symbols, rituals, and consciousness to express ‘something beyond’ at the same time that they send a political message about how our common life ought to be arranged. One need not look to something so ritually potent to see this intermingling, however. Wherever we see everyday concerns expressed in religious language and company, the symbols of each will shape the other. Congregations gain their potency as producers of sacred consciousness not through their exclusivity or high boundaries, but as they create spaces for and encourage opportunities to imagine and speak about everyday realities among spiritual compatriots. When people step beyond their religious communities, of course, they encounter an enormously plural and functionally complex modern world. People move through life with a shifting cast of characters in a shifting array of institutional settings. The primary mode of discourse and interaction in much of that world is likely to be very this-worldly and non-spiritual. The task is to get the airplane built or get the politician elected or measure out the right doses of medicine. Berger is right that the dominant reality mode is a pragmatic secular one that we assume others share and that allows us to proceed on common reality grounds. That dominance, however, does not mean monopoly, nor does it mean inevitability. While the balance of sacred and secular assumptions may shift over time and place, most social scientists have joined Berger himself in asserting that the balance is by no means one that must always shift in a secular direction. Nor, as Mary Douglas observed in the 1980s, should we assume that earlier generations were living in an utterly enchanted world (Douglas 1983). What we have increasingly recognized is that we moderns are living in a world that is not nearly so disenchanted as Weber and most of sociology once

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imagined (Weber 1958). To observe mundane empirical explanations emerging in science or medicine, ‘as if God does not exist’, does not predetermine where or whether other parts of life may be infused with spiritual presence (or even that the scientists see their work as without religious significance). It is nevertheless the case that religious presence is sometimes constrained (and sometimes encouraged) by the particular social settings in question. There was evidence in our research of the modern ‘differentiation’ of social functions, but it was by no means a complete segregation. Sacred consciousness was part of the story more often when the story was about family and home, for instance, than when it was about working as a business person. Working as an artist or scientist, in contrast, was more often interwoven with a spiritual sensibility. Most people recounted their efforts to eat right and stay healthy as guided by secular science and education. Their response to serious illness and death, on the other hand, was often heavily laden with prayer and spiritual presence. The multiple layers of reality and multiple narratives are perhaps nowhere better seen than in the person who prays for God to guide the doctor’s hand. The presence of multiple realities, each perhaps primarily institutionalized in a particular sector of society, creates the possibility for conflict, doubt and power struggles. There can be boundary disputes when a way of framing a situation is deemed inappropriate for the context. There can be doubts when sacred consciousness is called into question by secular expertise. As the neo-institutionalists have argued, there are dominant logics at work in each organizational ‘field’ (Friedland and Alford 1991). What has become increasingly clear in other studies of organizations, however, is that these logics are never air-tight. The ‘cultural capital’ (as Bourdieu [1991] would describe it) from one field might or might not be permitted and useful in another. Decades ago feminists began arguing that ‘the personal is political’ and that inflexible boundaries between home and work were not good for people. They were pointing to the ways institutional boundaries were and should be more permeable than theorists (and some managers) had assumed them to be. Berger (2014) describes the presence of multiple secular and sacred realities as ‘code switching’. That is certainly apt, but I suspect it may still draw too clear a distinction between codes and the fields they belong to. Sometimes people are aware of moving back and forth, but just as often they seem to

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occupy a single location that is both secular and sacred at the same time. It is not that our intrinsic foundational reality is secular, while our extrinsic world of choice can be religious if we wish. Rather, I am convinced that the mix of sacred and secular is more like ‘Spanglish’ than like being bilingual. Words from both languages appear in the same sentence, sometimes modified in ways not native to either language. A person eats a kosher vegetarian diet both to express religious devotion and to stay healthy. A scientist reads his journals with a prayerful attitude that opens his mind to the solution he has been puzzling over. In neither of these cases is this fully a matter of individual invention and choice, although it is that. These are modern actors, after all. They have developed their spiritual ways of seeing and acting in the modern world through socially constructed and institutionalized arenas of conversation. Spiritual presence is a social reality. Religion is expressed and reproduced in actions and conversations. There are forms of social interaction that function as religious plausibility structures in the midst of the multiple layers of structure and constraint that may also be present. The characters with whom we share the stage at any given moment are not neatly compartmentalized by the stage we are on, and narratives from different parts of life are drawn on and refashioned across domains. Wherever there are social spaces in which religious and spiritual assumptions can enter the conversation, there is a religious plausibility structure. One spiritually inclined person discovers another such person, and they start to talk. People of faith seem, in fact, to have a knack for finding each other. We may  not be surprised to find that roughly three-quarters of household partners share a common religious affiliation, but it is surprising that twothirds of the work-based friendships we documented were described to us as religiously homogeneous—not necessarily people sharing exactly the same religious tradition, but people who think of each other as religiously similar. And in those religiously similar work friendships, people were more likely to report that they talk about religion. What I am suggesting here is that religious identities are part of the package of cultural cues that constitute the evershifting ‘tribes’ of modern society (Maffesoli 1995), the signals by which we recognize each other. We establish relationships, across multiple institutional domains that either constrain or enable the production of religious realities.

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Plausibility structures are, then, as relevant as an analytical tool as they ever were. The key is recognizing that they need not be totalizing structures. While there are societies where something like a religious (or atheist) monopoly exists, that is not the only way a plausibility structure works. Nor must a religious plausibility structure be sustained by a tightly bounded sectarian institution. By recognizing the fluid character of the social networks of modern social life, we can also recognize the fluid and shifting relationships in which religious conversations constitute the religious plausibility structures of everyday life.

Religion beyond consciousness Equally important, a contemporary understanding of religion has to go beyond Berger’s emphasis on consciousness and world view. Even his later writing often assumes that whatever spiritual reality finds its way into the secular world is carried inside the individual mind. His remains a mid-century Protestant understanding of religion that focuses on individual belief, and as the sociological study of religion slowly expands to encompass empirical encounters around the world, such definitions have rightly been called into question (Bender et al. 2011). The inadequacy of belief- and membership-based understandings has been highlighted by many recent writers, among them Talal Asad (1993). Like other postcolonial thinkers, Asad points to the historically situated nature of the very category ‘religious’ itself. What counts as religious in any time and place is not a matter of some universal essence, but a product of the powers and authoritative disciplines at work in that place. Our preoccupation with worldviews, Asad argues, is a very modern one. He critiques Geertz’s (1973) classic ‘cultural’ definition of religion for its attempt to put everything into a cosmic framework, essentially making theology the defining practice of religion. ‘It is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate that knowledge’ (1993: 36). Asad could as easily have been talking about Berger. In some circles, Asad’s critique nearly brought the study of ‘religion’ to its knees, but that need not be so. The turn of which his thinking was a part was a turn to a broader definition of religion. It travels under many banners

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– religious practices, material religion, folk religion – but one useful rubric is ‘lived religion’, most prominently developed by McGuire (2008), Hall (1997) and Orsi (2003). This growing body of work has provided new ways to think about how modern people manage to be both religious and secular at the same time and how religion is expressed in more than words. The study of lived religion has been useful, but it has sometimes been limited by its own preoccupations with what it is not.5 Research often set up artificial binaries between institutional religion and lived religion or between elite religion and the lived religion of ordinary lay people. While that emphasis on moving beyond institutional membership and official dogma has been necessary, the most fruitful work in this field has placed religion in a field of practice that is fully material and can happen anywhere and among any population. In introducing the concept, David Hall (1997) says that ‘one term – “practice” – does have particular importance’ (p. xi). As Aune (2015) demonstrates in her study of feminists in the UK, practice is central to their sense of what it means to be religious or spiritual. They, like the subjects of much lived religion research, freely adopt practices both from their own religious traditional origins and from others, but it is rituals and ways of living that matter. These rituals and ways of living are ‘everyday’, but they are not always – or even mostly – disconnected from religious institutions and traditions. The European ‘folk’ or ‘majority’ churches, for example, may have relatively empty pews on Sunday morning, but their yearly holidays, rituals, music, and service to the community have not disappeared from the everyday world (Davie 2000). Theirs is neither a sacred canopy nor a sheltering enclave nor a privatized world view. Lived religion is found in shared religious practices, some traditional and some not. The focus on practice also means a focus on embodiment. McGuire (2007) turns our attention to gardening, healing and dancing as spiritual practices, while others venture into more exotic practices such as mixed martial arts (Greve 2014). We have learned about rituals of birth (Klassen 2001) and death (Laderman 1995) that take the unavoidably physical aspects of those human experiences seriously. Rather than confining religion’s domain to the ‘beliefs about’ experience, we have asked how bodies enter into and express connections with spirituality. Bodily sensations of touch, smell, and movement are vehicles for religious creativity (e.g. Løvland and Repstad 2014). The conversational

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plausibility structures we inhabit are made up of more than just words. There are bodies and physical sensations in those spaces as well. Nor can one live religion without feelings (see Johnson in this volume). Attention to emotion has been one important product of attention to gender. The turn to the experience of women – and to men as men, not just as the default universal – has been an important aspect of the first generation of studies of lived religion. The emotional dimensions of human life are highly complex, of course, and sociologists will need to draw on the work of psychologists and cognitive scientists to bring this fully to bear. Riis and Woodhead (2010), however, have laid out a very helpful framework for the sociological study of religious emotion. It is a starting point for understanding the individual and social patterns that shape intense human experiences and mark those experiences as religious. The study of lived religion has distinctly turned our attention to the way bodies, emotions and extraordinary experiences are critical to any analysis of how religion is situated in social life, both as expressed in institutionalized activity and as encountered beyond organized religion. We can be equally interested in the embodied experience of Eucharist or Friday prayers and in the embodied experience of a home birth. When we examine the human dimensions through which sacred things are being produced, encountered and shared – wherever they happen and whoever the actors are – we are studying plausibility structures for modern spiritual life. It is not just belief or institutional location that gives something religious meaning. One does not have to be a ‘believer’ to be moved by the ritual acts of kneeling or candle lighting or communal eating (Sack 2000). Singing together has spiritual power, even when not everyone shares a common view of the world (Heider and Warner 2010). In addition to adding bodies to the religious mix, lived religion research has also incorporated the emphasis on material culture that has long been present in our sister disciplines of anthropology and religious studies (McDannell 1995; Vasquez 2010). The cultural turn in Sociology has followed with its own turn to the material (Edgell 2012; Neitz 2011), a turn reflected in the study of religion. We have learnt about food ways (Diamond 2002; Koepping 2008) that are situated in religious ways of being in the world. And with the increasing presence of Muslim veils on European and American streets, we have noticed

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how clothing and jewellery of all sorts can express religious identity (Arthur 1999; Furseth 2011). Wherever a veiled Muslim goes, she introduces the reality that not everything is governed by modern reason, secular efficiency and pluralist neutrality. When she wears her hijab under a hard hat or laboratory goggles or graduation cap, she stands as a visible reminder that sacred and secular exist side by side. Methodologically, attention to material culture has meant new attention to visual evidence (Williams 2015), along with the textual. In her study of hospital chaplains, for example, Cadge (2013) analyses chapel spaces as well as bedside routines. Omar McRoberts (2003) makes urban streets a factor in the religious lives he studied. My own research has demonstrated that spiritual experience can be embedded in everything from clothing and jewellery to mementos on a desk and a favourite chair by a window (Ammerman 2013). Places and things are a critical dimension of lived religion, ways that people literally touch transcendence. The people we interviewed needed no grand theory to explain what was important about an object or place, although there was almost always a story. This thing or this place, the story said, participated in producing, encountering and often sharing something sacred about life. The material and spatial dimensions of religious cultural life are important to understanding religious life both outside religious institutions and inside. If we shed the Protestant preoccupation with sermons, and pay attention to all the ways in which institutional religion is itself material, we learn a great deal. I have long advocated that students of congregational life ask their informants to take them on a walking tour of the space the congregation occupies (Ammerman 1998). The artefacts unearthed on such a tour may bear little resemblance to the official guide to the congregation’s building. They represent instead the way the people in the congregation live in its space. They are using that material environment as part of their production of and encounter with the sacred they share, and their different appropriations of the space may reflect the different cultures they bring in (Hoover 2014), as well as what they have collectively created. Across the world, institutional religious spaces play constantly evolving roles in the cultures they inhabit (Vasquez and Marquardt 2003). Otherwise non-religious spaces can be collectively marked as sacred, as well, while individual sacred spaces abound, often marked by physical symbols of their

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meaning and function. Often sacred spaces are transient, as when memorials mark the public spaces where someone has tragically died. Sidewalks, candles, teddy bears and ribbons are very mundane secular objects that are sacralized by the collective actions of a community (Grider 2006). And in the midst of televisions and dining tables and all the other mundane stuff of everyday living, home altars are reminders of sacred presence and sites of religious ritual (Konieczny 2009). Again, attention to religion as practised enlarges the scope of inquiry and points away from assumptions that religion is diminished by its presence in mundane form. Paying attention to what people do and how they inhabit the material world does not mean we ignore what they say. As Robert Wuthnow (2011) has admonished, we should ‘take talk seriously’. In addition to the texts people produce and the way they answer questions, lived religion suggests attention to words found in musical lyrics, internet interactions and popular culture as ways people create everyday transcendence. My own work (2013) has focused on how people tell stories about their everyday lives. This attention to discourses is an attempt to listen for how ordinary people make meaning – not grand coherent theories of life, but small stories that weave together pieces of a life and connect them to something bigger. When Robert Orsi wrote The Madonna of 115th Street (1985), he called these attempts to talk about divine presence in ordinary life ‘theologies of the street’, and theologians themselves have begun to take up the task of working from grassroots experience.6 Here the emphasis is not so much on establishing the meanings and belief structures reflected in words as in examining the practices that use words. Like other practices, religious discursive work is portable, occurring across the social contexts in which people live their lives. Some practices are deeply embedded in religious tradition, while others engage sacred realities with words and forms that borrow widely. The study of lived religion has, then, reinforced the importance of understanding religion itself as more than cognitive, more than a world view. It is still the case that conversations are the plausibility structures that sustain religious life, but we must situate those conversations in material and embodied practices. The plausibility structures that sustain religious life are social settings as well as social relationships, embodied actions as well as modes of discourse.

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Conclusion In The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger set out a theory of religion that has endured. He drew together foundational social theories from the century before him, providing an account of how human beings create and live in worlds that are ordered and meaningful. He showed us how religious consciousness and religious action are socially produced and maintained, and he gave us the theoretical tools to go beyond his own account. Religion, it turns out, is as multidimensional as the social world itself. It is neither confined to individual minds nor to self-contained religious institutions; but it is still social, still emergent in interactions where the people and the place and the words all conspire to make religious practice possible and even taken for granted. The notion that religion requires a plausibility structure is no less true and is as theoretically useful as ever. It simply needs a broader understanding of the structures in question and a deeper understanding of how plausibility is constituted. Those structures are as broad as the places where religiously inflected conversation can happen, and as deep as the gestures, objects and experiences that are as real as the words and ideas that were more central to Berger’s work. Our current and future study of religion both builds on his theorizing and must go beyond it.

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The Sacred Canopy as a Global Construction Project: Incorporating both Emotional and Cognitive Resources Doyle Paul Johnson

The analysis of religion in Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967) was grounded in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) sociology of knowledge perspective. Religion was viewed in this perspective as socially constructed to help satisfy human beings’ basic psychological needs for a sense of ultimate meaning and ontological security, particularly in the face of human disappointments and tragedy, threats of chaos and the inevitability of death. Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) ‘social constructionist’ theoretical model was highly significant at the time for addressing the long-standing challenge of linking macro-level institutional structures and cultural worldviews on the one hand with the micro-level formation of individual consciousness through social interaction on the other. The underlying phenomenological foundation of this perspective is the notion that our perceptions of the external world, plus our interpretations of all aspects of our experiences, are filtered through the intersubjectively shared cognitive categories and frameworks of our subjective consciousness acquired through the socialization process (Schutz 1967). Although the ontological status of ultimate reality, including the reality referenced in individuals’ religious beliefs, was of course not addressed, this phenomenological approach clearly applies to the transcendent world of such beliefs as well as the material world. The introductory section to follow will briefly situate Berger’s 1967 analysis of religion in the broader context of then-current sociological discourse as it was oriented towards the challenges of balancing our understanding of linkages between micro and macro levels of the social world. Subsequent sections will

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then be devoted to three primary goals. The first goal will be to show how the innate sociality of human beings that Berger emphasized should be elaborated beyond his primary cognitive focus on ultimate meaning systems and overarching worldviews by dealing more explicitly with the socioemotional dynamics of various types of social relations. This applies to in-group social relations as well as the sometimes sharp contrasts between in-group versus out-group relations. In short, the argument to be made is that human beings’ innate sociality requires insights from the sociology of emotions as well as the sociology of knowledge. With these socioemotional aspects highlighted, our second goal is to make the case that Berger’s empirical portrayal of religious pluralism, plus other forms of cultural pluralism, is more consistent with the emotional aspects of the innate sociality of human nature than the theoretical model of an overarching and taken-for-granted ‘sacred canopy’ of ultimate meaning at the cognitive level. This is because pluralism itself tends to stimulate social processes that result in strengthening multiple sacred canopies. It does this by reinforcing the social solidarity and thus the psychological security and level of commitment of those who live under them – often in contrast to those under different canopies. Even before the current ascendance of the market perspective on religious organizations, Berger had described the process whereby religious leaders themselves respond to the challenges of pluralism by developing marketing strategies oriented towards the specific religious preferences of their members and potential recruits in a competitive environment with multiple preference niches. Such strategies typically involve efforts to engage both cognitive and socioemotional processes, as successful clergy well understand, even though the relative emphasis on intellectual versus emotional appeals varies in different religious groups. Our third goal is to expand this pluralistic perspective to the global level where it can be applied not only to religious cultures and identities but to other types of cultural meaning systems and personal identities as well. Almost fifty years after The Sacred Canopy, Berger himself expanded greatly his analysis of pluralism by analysing multiple forms of globalization as this process varies in different local and national contexts, giving rise to divergent local reactions and thereby intersecting in different ways with national and local traditions (Berger 2014). A deep understanding of the propensity for our socioemotional

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lives to reflect the innate tendency to reify in-group/out-group distinctions is crucial in the face of expanding levels of global interdependence and the resulting increase in the salience of sociocultural pluralism in its many forms. Going beyond the purely academic goal of detached theoretical analysis, the analysis herein highlights the importance of supporting advocacy efforts to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the shared humanity of all peoples, regardless of cultural and lifestyle distinctions in different local contexts. By no means should the above goals be seen as detracting from Berger’s overall sociology of knowledge perspective on religious beliefs and orientations or religiously grounded worldviews. Nor should it be assumed that Berger’s cognitive focus ignored or excluded the socioemotional level or the importance of the emotional security that is no doubt related to a sense of cognitive security. But the emotional level seemed mostly to be in the background. The overall goal herein is to seek to balance Berger’s strong cognitive emphasis with an equally strong and explicit emphasis on the socioemotional level of human experience. Before we pursue the three primary goals described above, a brief review of the general intellectual context of Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967) in sociological discourse should help put his analysis in perspective.

The Sacred Canopy’s intellectual context At the time of its publication fifty years ago, The Sacred Canopy seemed implicitly to reflect imagined memories of a more cohesive and homogeneous social world than existed in the turbulent world of 1967. These memories include traces of the socially constructed image of the medieval Western world in which Christianity was presumed to be widely diffused among the population, providing a level of cultural homogeneity and integration that was irretrievably broken with the Reformation. This image persists despite its exaggeration of the level of religious homogeneity and integration that it portrays. More recent images among sociologists include the once-dominant functionalist model of society, developed in large part by Talcott Parsons (1951, 1971) and his followers and collaborators, in which the overall institutional integration of American society reflected a widely shared value system that

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could arguably be seen at the time as grounded partially in the civil religion version of our Judeo–Christian heritage (cf. Herberg [1955] 1983). Although the social world is socially constructed in Berger’s perspective, it also exists as an objective reality that members of each new generation confront and must internalize in their consciousness and are expected to reproduce in their behaviour. The continuity of the social world depends on this ongoing reproduction process, generation after generation (though often with significant variations). But despite this dialectical interplay, there seems to be more emphasis on how the objective sociocultural world forms and shapes individuals’ consciousness (via the internalization process) than on how individuals actually construct the social world (through the externalization process). This emphasis on the external objectivity of the social world was also evident in the opposing macro-level orientations of both Parsons’s functionalism and Marxist or neo-Marxist conflict or critical perspectives, even though these perspectives also acknowledged the importance of individuals’ subjective consciousness, particularly as manifested through the performance of their various social roles whereby the objective structures of the social world are maintained. As Berger pointed out, his overarching ‘sacred canopy’ model of religion did not correspond to the way things were in modern secular societies or to the religious pluralism of American society. This leads to two contrasting perspectives on the role of religion in The Sacred Canopy. One is a theoretical portrayal of an overarching sacred canopy that is characterized by a high level of cultural homogeneity and supported by institutional plausibility structures, and that also contributes to a subjective sense of psychological security; the other involves a more realistic view of multiple but limited and sometimes contested canopies, providing opportunities for individual choice but often provoking competition or conflict between those under different canopies or with different worldviews, and thereby undermining the takenfor-granted certainty associated with a more homogeneous religious and cultural world view. The inevitability of secularization was widely accepted among sociologists when Berger’s book was published in 1967. Berger, however, has long since recanted his earlier analysis of the pervasiveness of the secularization process and also the effects of pluralism in eroding the viability of religion in many

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people’s lives and its influence in modern society (Berger 1999; see Bruce’s chapter in this book). To be sure, Berger’s revision of his earlier views did not deny the effects of secularization in many domains of life. But he denied that this will lead to religion’s disappearance and maintained instead that religion continues to be salient in our modern and increasingly globalized world as people are able to shift back and forth as appropriate between religious and secular perspectives. To help us better understand Berger’s two views on religion, I offer here a view of human beings’ innate sociality that highlights their socioemotional needs as equal in importance to their cognitive needs for ultimate meaning as emphasized by Berger.

Innate sociality Berger’s social constructionist perspective starts with the developmental incompleteness and obvious helplessness of human neonates and their inability to survive on their own, coupled with his strong emphasis on the innate sociality and plasticity of human nature. This innate sociality and plasticity obviously allow for a great deal of social and cultural diversity, including differences in cognitive world views. But it apparently was not Berger’s goal to deal explicitly with the emotional aspects of human beings’ sociality. For our purposes, however, we begin by noting that human beings’ innate sociality also includes the potential near the very beginning of their lives for developing a deep socioemotional attachment to parental caregivers, typically the mother primarily but also the father in two-parent families and/or other adult caregivers (Bowlby 1969, 1988; Goldschmidt 2006). The resulting socioemotional bonds are manifested in the neonate’s early nascent recognition of distinctions between parental figures (and other familiar adults) and strangers, who are sometimes feared. Although preverbal, these emergent and highly specific socioemotional bonds may be said to provide the earliest cognitive experience of implicit recognition of in-group/outgroup distinctions. Moreover, in the ideal type situation, this socioemotional bonding process provides a sense of security that serves as the foundation for subsequent developmental stages (Erikson [1959] 1980), but it precedes the

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emergence of intellectual questions or cognitive struggles with issues involving the ultimate meaning of life requiring the use of language. Although Berger’s explicit focus on ultimate meaning systems involves primarily the cognitive level, it certainly seems implicit in his work that a sense of cognitive certainty underlies a sense of emotional security. Berger also emphasized the fundamental importance of socialization for learning the ordinary routines of everyday life, particularly in view of the inadequacy of human beings’ instinctive behavioural programming. Such routines also contribute to a sense of emotional security (cf. Garfinkel 1967; Giddens 1984). And once such routines are internalized, their disruption (as illustrated, for example, by Garfinkel’s ‘breaching experiments’) leads to feelings of frustration and anomie, though certainly of a different genre when compared to the disappointments, tragedies and grief addressed explicitly by religious theodicies. Our analysis herein will not focus on such ordinary commonsense secular aspects of everyday life canopies but, following Berger, aspects that can be categorized as sacred. Given the utter dependence of human neonates on others for their survival and development, it should not be surprising from a long-range evolutionary perspective that they are equipped from the beginning with an innate reflexive capacity to signal their inchoate feelings or needs, both physiological and emotional, in ways that typically elicit caregiving responses from parents or other caregivers. When their needs are satisfied, this then triggers the emission of natural signals of contentment and security whereby their caregivers also experience emotional gratification. Prioritizing the emotional aspects of human experience and social relations in this way is consistent with the sociobiological perspective and highlights the evolutionary primacy of the potential for limbic system emotional arousal over neocortex cognitive rationality (MacLean 1973; Turner 2000; Barash 1977, 1979; Goldschmidt 2006; see Wenegrat (1990) for an application of the sociobiological perspective to religion; and Johnson (2008: 491–518) for a textbook overview of this perspective as applied to different patterns of social behaviour). This process of early-life emotional exchanges with parents or other caregivers leads to socioemotional attachment with them well before the innate cognitive capacity for language or for discursive learning of the culture is developed (Bowlby 1969). Later in life it is possible for this innate emotional attachment

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to be extended to larger and more abstractly defined groups (Hammond 2003) or transferred by religious people to their perceived relationship to God (Kirkpatrick 2005), thereby dovetailing with (and supplementing) Berger’s emphasis on the cognitive content of widely shared and socially reinforced beliefs in God. In the end, both the cognitive and the emotional dimensions of interaction with others are crucial for acquiring not only the knowledge and social skills but also the requisite motivation and emotional attunement necessary to become a competent participant in society. These emotional dimensions of innate human sociality, plus the opposition between one’s own impulses, needs and interests on the one hand versus social expectations and cultural rules on the other, are crucial in understanding human beings’ innate sociality (see Maryanski and Turner 1992). Every encounter human beings have with one another is fraught with some form of emotional exchange, either positive or negative, intense and enduring or superficial and fleeting, that does not necessarily involve participants’ explicit concerns with ultimate meaning (Collins 2004). In many such encounters, conscious attention is often focused on practical situations participants face – though these may sometimes be suffused with implicitly shared understandings about ultimate meaning (as Berger certainly recognized) as well as emotional arousal. The emotional aspect can be particularly consequential if the nature of the social bond is itself the focus of attention – a situation that often occurs when misunderstandings occur or when various tensions and conflicts emerge, including those between individuals’ autonomy needs or interests versus their social obligations or the expectations of others (Scheff 1997). Although conflicts are ubiquitous in social life (Collins 1975), their dynamics differ greatly depending on whether they involve ruptures in close personal relationships or disagreements, misunderstandings, competition or conflicting interests among more casual acquaintances. In personal relationships and in-groups of all types, the challenge of repairing the social bond by dealing with the shame, anger or guilt aroused by tensions, conflicts or misunderstandings must sometimes be faced (Scheff 1997). Repair of the social bond often occurs through some form of confession and apology, followed by forgiveness and reconciliation – processes suffused with emotion that are incorporated explicitly among the religious rituals of various Christian groups and that are clearly linked with their cognitive beliefs regarding their relations to God. The

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key point in this context is that nourishment of socioemotional bonds among in-group members and their repair, when needed, are probably as crucial for a sense of security and meaning as the cognitive belief systems or worldviews they share. In a different context, some years after The Sacred Canopy (1967), Berger (1974) noted the faith-based quasi-religious character of the ideologies of both capitalism and socialism, both of which can transcend national boundaries. The distinctive feature of the religious beliefs that constitute a sacred canopy in Berger’s perspective is that they are believed to be grounded in an ultimate, cosmic or divine reality that transcends social definitions and human traditions and that extends even beyond this mundane material world itself. On a more general level the cognitive content of various religious belief systems addresses more general issues that go beyond one’s personal experiences, such as widespread undeserved suffering (as illustrated, for example, in the biblical story of Job), natural disasters, pervasive patterns of cruelty and injustice, and all forms of evil and potential chaos that threaten human life and well-being. Specific religious responses to such situations at the cognitive level vary greatly, both within and between different religious belief systems, but often include some type of assurance that current sufferings are temporary and serve some larger but unseen purpose, that individual strength and character are enhanced through adversity, and that all will eventually be made right. Such beliefs no doubt help in providing believers with emotional support, comfort and encouragement, particularly when reinforced through rituals and social relations in faith communities. These positive emotional effects are clearly implicit in Berger’s analysis. But the key point for our purposes is that these beneficial socioemotional effects are just as crucial as cognitive explanations for those experiencing personal tragedies and grief. Moreover, religious organizations typically are regarded as uniquely equipped to provide both cognitive assurance and emotional support in such circumstances and others as well. Accordingly, we turn now to a consideration of why organizational pluralism in the religious domain should be expected to be more effective than a single overarching sacred canopy, not only in satisfying individuals’ cognitive needs for ultimate meaning and purpose but also in providing a sense of inclusion and belonging, plus emotional support in all of life’s varied circumstances.

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Religious pluralism versus monopolies Berger’s theoretical analysis of religion in The Sacred Canopy suggests that the strength of religious orientations in people’s consciousness is best secured if their beliefs and practices are supported and reinforced culturally and institutionally as the core of an unquestioned, highly consensual and monopolistic world view. Without alternatives people do not consider the possibility of interpreting and responding to their life experiences in any other way. In his empirical analysis Berger shows, however, how pluralism introduces the element of doubt in that awareness of competing alternatives allows questioning whether one has made the best choice. Consequently, we should expect that in-group social support becomes particularly important for the specific choice one makes. The overall result is that the distinctive beliefs and world view shared within one’s own religious or cultural in-group are matters of explicit conscious awareness and commitment, as opposed to tacit and unquestioned acquiescence. The ‘will to believe’ thus contrasts with passive acquiescence to ‘the way things are’. While much research has been devoted to the discovery of how differences in religious preferences and commitment levels are related to gender, age, race and ethnicity, family background and current family status, educational level, socioeconomic status, social network contacts and overall social context, the key point for our purposes is that a pluralistic religious market provides options for satisfying a wider range of preferences in the population than a religious monopoly seeking to uphold a society-wide sacred canopy. Although religious monopolies themselves may offer a limited range of options, the overarching canopy they reflect and support would not thereby be threatened with competition. Within the medieval Catholic Church, for example, the formation of monastic orders provided an option for those whose high level of religious commitment led them to withdraw from secular life and devote their lives to God. However, these subgroups were subsumed under the broader canopy of the larger institutional structure. Even so, the overall level of religious consensus and commitment that prevailed in medieval times as compared to modern times was no doubt less than that which is implied by popular stereotypes, even though the monopolistic religious establishment may have had the support of the political authorities at the time. But as noted

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by Beckford (2003, 83–6), political support of religious monopolies does not ensure individuals’ subjective religious commitment. Nor do efforts to enforce conformity eliminate religious diversity, despite policies sometimes adopted by religious and political authorities to repress religious minorities or deviants in various ways, including persecution. In contrast to the medieval world, the pluralistic religious market of American society includes multiple religious groups, with many of the mainstream Christian denominations existing under organizational canopies that have themselves been subsumed under a broader canopy. Both the limited intraorganizational options of the medieval world and the interorganizational pluralism of the American world can be seen as subsumed under a larger all-encompassing cultural canopy of broadly congruent religious beliefs and orientations. In neither case, however, there is (or was) an absence of minorities whose specific preferences are not subsumed under the overarching religious canopy. Recent decades have witnessed increases in the numbers and the visibility (in some areas) of various religious minority groups representing even greater diversity in religious and cultural traditions. This increased diversity can be seen as congruent with our widely professed belief in the ‘sacred’ value of individual freedom in the religious domain and in all other areas of life as well. Our idealized overarching canopy can thereby be defined in even more expansive and inclusive terms, despite contemporary exclusionary interpretations of these values that appeal to some segments of the population (Gorski 2017). Any type of overarching cognitive canopy situation changes if the prevailing consensus (or acquiescence) breaks down or erodes. As Berger pointed out, the Protestant Reformation ruptured the putative consensus of the medieval Roman Catholic world and was followed by multiple forms of Protestantism. The Protestant canopy of earlier years in American history was initially challenged but later expanded by Catholic and Jewish immigration as well as by the proliferation of new religious organizations representing different versions of Protestantism. More recently, immigration from Asia and the Middle East have resulted in additional religious and cultural alternatives (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Warner and Wittner, eds. 1998), many of them distinctive forms of Christianity but many reflecting other religious and cultural traditions. In addition, there are increasing numbers in American society who do not identify with any particular organized religious tradition.

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In the theoretical model of The Sacred Canopy, Berger treated both the secular culture and the religious pluralism of modern society as challenges to the broad consensus necessary for sustaining a sacred canopy. Instead of serving as an overarching and tacitly accepted homogeneous world view pervading all aspects of society, religion has been confined primarily to the private sphere – although individuals are certainly free to make their voluntary choice from among the multiple options that are available for becoming involved in organized religion, or to refrain from such involvement. Moreover, as Berger recognized, religious organizations in this type of social environment must make specific efforts to sustain their members’ beliefs and voluntary commitment in the absence of a society-wide taken-for-granted consensus whereby the implicit plausibility of those beliefs is sustained. Even before Stephen Warner’s (1993) frequently cited announcement of a ‘new paradigm’ for understanding religious vitality in the largely unregulated and pluralistic religious market of the United States, Berger’s 1967 analysis emphasized that different religious groups in the American environment must compete with one another as they seek to attract and retain members and ensure their commitment and support. Their ‘marketing’ strategies involve efforts to strike an appropriate balance, consistent with their distinctive identity, between ‘standardization’ and ‘marginal differentiation’ (Berger 1967: 145–53), with the former helping to ensure that competition does not erode the broad core of general beliefs held in common, and the latter emphasizing the distinctions whereby different groups each attempt to ensure the commitment of their constituents and enhance their appeal to potential recruits in their particular preference niche – which of course they may attempt to broaden. Competition between different religious groups in a population with multiple preference niches and without government support for any religious group has become central to the current market perspective on religious organizations and individuals’ organizational commitment in the United States (Finke and Stark 1992; Stark and Finke 2000). With the necessity for individual choice in a social environment that is both highly pluralistic and highly individualistic, part of the strategy religious leaders may use in their efforts to retain participants and recruit additional adherents is to persuade them to discover the plausibility of their religious beliefs deep in their own subjective experience (as opposed to widespread

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social consensus or objective plausibility structures), and also to assure them of the manifold rewards – psychological, emotional, social, spiritual – of such a discovery (Berger 1967: 166–7). (‘Prosperity Gospel’ proponents would no doubt put material well-being near the top of the list of rewards to be gained.) Of course, we might expect that such nonmaterial rewards would be greatly enhanced when intersubjectively reinforced through the rituals and the social relations experienced within particular religious in-groups (see, for example, Witten 1993). This emphasis on the appeal to individuals’ subjective experience as the foundation for the plausibility of religious faith is consistent with the ‘inductive possibility’ to sustain religious beliefs that Berger elaborated in his 1979 book The Heretical Imperative. And despite the significant differences in terminology and underlying paradigms, this emphasis on rewards (including nonmaterial emotional or spiritual rewards) is generally consistent with the contemporary ‘rational choice’ approach to individual religious commitment and religious markets and organizations (see Finke and Stark 1992; Stark and Finke 2000; cf. Chaves and Gorski 2001; Jelen 2002). This perspective does not explain the origins of individuals’ specific religious preferences but makes the case that satisfaction of these preferences is indeed experienced as rewarding. Pluralism provides a wider range of options for satisfying the multiple religious preferences in the population when compared to religious monopolies, especially when such monopolies have official government support and alternative organizations are repressed. Despite the diversity of religious orientations and organizations in any society, and the (often friendly) competition among mainstream religious groups in American society, organizational pluralism within a broadly defined mainstream need not always necessarily undermine or erode some type of overarching sacred canopy. Instead, high levels of pluralism provide multiple options for satisfying a wide range of preferences in the population within the overall cultural context of general (and likely more abstract) beliefs and orientations that are widely shared throughout society. In other words, under a broad canopy of widely shared beliefs and orientations, the multiple religious groups honeycombing society can provide fellow believers in different preference niches with their own ‘sacred canopy’ (or subcanopy) as they reinforce one another’s particular beliefs, experiences and practices.

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And despite disagreements among many of these groups on some issues (some of them quite serious), it certainly seems plausible to argue that mainstream groups in American society have long shared an overarching canopy infused with widely endorsed but rather abstract religious values that largely transcend (but do not eliminate) their differences (Herberg [1955] 1983). The process may be seen as illustrating what Parsons (1971) identified as a pattern of ‘value generalization’. Toleration under a broad canopy is by no means universal, however, as witnessed by historical examples of bitter Catholic/Protestant conflicts and anti-Semitism in both Europe and America and the centuries-old conflict between Sunnis and Shiites among Muslims. In fact, intolerance towards religious deviants and heretics that claim the same broad canopy as the mainstream sometimes seems to be as great as, if not greater than, intolerance towards those under a different canopy. The limits to peaceful coexistence among different religious groups can be illustrated by lower levels of tolerance towards minority religious groups that are seen as too far out of the mainstream.  For certain segments of the population this would include some of the ‘new religious movements’ of the 1960s (see Glock and Bellah, eds. 1976; Ellwood 1994; Cowan and Bromley 2008; Shupe and Bromley 1980). With increased religious diversity since that time, tolerance for those outside the mainstream varies greatly among different segments of the population in American society, with Muslims regarded less favourably than other religious minorities, along with avowed atheists, although at least one national survey showed that feelings were less negative towards all non-Christian minorities in 2017 than in 2014 (Pew Research Center 2017; cf. Merino 2010). With regard to the threat of secularization, the liberal wing of the religious mainstream has made persistent efforts over the years to reconcile a modern scientifically informed world view with what are seen as the important underlying and enduring (but demythologized) values represented through various biblical narratives and essential Christian teachings. And in some mainstream religious groups, the validity and significance of doubt in one’s ‘faith journey’ is accepted (though its ultimate resolution is typically expected to be some form of affirmation). While these various accommodation strategies may be seen as efforts to preserve a significantly modified sacred canopy – or repair its tears – the overall outcome has been to reduce the

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cognitive distinctions among the various mainstream groups as well as the distinctiveness of their appeal vis-à-vis the secular culture of modern society. However, based on Gorski’s (2017) long-range historical analysis, the core values of America’s somewhat inclusive (within limits) and relatively tolerant (also within limits) ‘civil religion’ (Bellah 1967, 1975) contrast sharply with the divisive ‘religious nationalism’ of the contemporary ‘New Christian Right’ and its conflation of religious and political identities with militant hyperpatriotism. In contemporary American society it is conceivable that the presumptive sacred canopy (however interpreted) could be defined (or defined away?) in much more vacuous terms as asserting the priority of individual freedom and autonomy, not only in religious matters (Bellah et al. 1985; Hammond 1992; Roof 1999) but all else as well. However, highly exaggerated forms of individualism entail a significant risk that any type of overarching canopy (religious or otherwise) could become socially irrelevant or unravelled. Some would argue that it is now badly frayed if not already torn asunder. Peter Berger emphasized the increasing privatization of religion in the modern world, and he and his colleagues have linked this process to certain intrinsic features of modernity that result in the erosion of any type of overarching sacred canopy, thereby contributing to feelings of ‘homelessness’ (Berger, Berger and Kellner 1973). Among these features are high levels of specialization in the economic, political and other institutional domains, leading to greatly increased levels of pluralization of consciousness and everyday lifeworld experiences. In addition, the impersonal nature of social relations in economic, political and other institutional domains arguably may contribute to insecurities in people’s sense of inclusion beyond their own private lifeworld. Finally, too, the emphasis on cognitive rationality (or ‘instrumental rationality’ in Weber’s terms) and the need to control or subordinate one’s emotions in various institutional settings (economic and political in particular) no doubt leave deficits in people’s ‘affect hunger’ (Goldschmidt 2006). But as noted earlier, human beings are endowed with an innate ‘sociality’ that at some level should be expected to set limits on their individualism. This can be illustrated by the way individualistic nonconformists of various types sometimes identify with one another as they celebrate their resistance or their free-spirited nonconformity.

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In the end, different religious groups (and other groups as well) do not necessarily require some overarching homogeneity or consensus in shared beliefs to sustain the plausibility of their own particular world view or ultimate meaning system, at least for themselves. Instead, it is the very contrast between different religious groups, whether mainstream or deviant, that enhances and reinforces the tendency for each group to seek to strengthen its adherents’ solidarity and commitment and the plausibility of its own particular beliefs and practices. Indeed, the socioemotional solidarity of different groups, plus the individual and collective identities of their members or adherents, are likely to be elevated as they compare the selfidentified superiority of their own beliefs and practices with others. Within this pluralistic context, the underlying cultural contradiction is between mainstream (or other) groups whose adherents are willing to ‘live and let live’ under a broadly defined canopy and opposition groups whose members reject the dominant consensus and seek either to change it or to withdraw under their own alternative canopy. The challenges of reconciling freedom, tolerance, and mutual respect in a pluralistic context are magnified when we move from any single society to the global context wherein the contrasts in religion and overall world view are far greater. This is the topic to which I now turn.

Global universalism versus multiple particularisms As Robertson (1992) emphasized, the world is increasingly experienced in the consciousness of more and more people as a single place. This is due in large part to the increasing interdependence and interconnectivity of people in different societies and different regions of the world. Ironically, however, despite the image of the planet Earth as a single place (particularly as viewed from space), many people are increasingly conscious of the sharp contrasts among different societies and regions around the world in terms of cultural and lifestyle traditions, including religious differences. This awareness no doubt helps enhance people’s feelings of the uniqueness (or superiority) of their own particular identity, world view, history and traditions while at the same time it increases the challenges – and the importance – of understanding and relating

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to others whose worldviews, histories and traditions are different (see Beyer 1994, 2006; Kurtz 2012; Halafoff 2013; Vásquez and Marquardt 2003). Several distinct but interrelated dimensions of the current globalization process can be identified: economic, military, political, social and cultural, with various forms of international economic, military and political relationships (not necessarily on a global scale) antedating the current intensification of the social and cultural dimensions. As shown by Immanuel Wallerstein (1979, 2004), the origins of the contemporary capitalist world economy can be traced back to sixteenth-century Europe when trading patterns expanded beyond the boundaries of local ‘minisystems’. But regardless of how extensive they have since become, the defining feature of economic transactions is that they are oriented towards the pursuit of individual, corporate or national interests, often involving exploitation and resulting in increased inequality (see Centeno and Cohen 2010). Economic transactions as such do not involve concerns with the formation of socioemotional ties or the common good, and whatever commitment there may be to shared values is focused primarily on market predictability and compliance with the terms of contractual exchange agreements. In addition to economic transactions, and overlapping with them, various types of political relationships, both adversarial and cooperative, that exist between nation states are also key features of globalization. Like economic actors, nation states clearly tend over time to prioritize their own national interests, not the global common good. This is not to say that broader concerns for human rights and welfare or shared values are completely absent. In fact, they may be given relatively high priority, particularly in responding to crises such as natural disasters, extreme poverty, human rights abuses, wartime victimization of civilian populations, refugee assistance and environmental degradation. Human welfare concerns may also be reflected through alliances such as the United Nations and by international non-government organizations. For nation states, however, national interests tend to trump human welfare concerns, especially over the long run. Although some nation states may sometimes develop policies oriented towards acute human welfare needs or basic human rights in other societies, such policies are likely also to be considered strategically important for their own overall national interests, in addition to being rationalized in terms of their professed humanitarian values.

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The last couple of centuries have featured major transformations in economic, political and military relations among different societies throughout the world while various nation states and regions of the world have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This process has accelerated greatly over the past several decades, along with extensive social and cultural interpenetration of different societies and different regions around the world. This obviously reflects advances in transportation and communication technologies, making increased migration and rapid travel between different countries and regions possible, along with almost immediate mass media news coverage and electronic communication on a global scale. Despite language differences, possibilities today for global communication suggest that some sectors of various countries constitute a virtual ‘global society’ (Luhmann 1995, 430–2; Beyer 2006). Moreover, TV network reports and images of human experiences around the world, including images of human suffering in crisis situations, have the potential to increase the likelihood that some people will vicariously experience at least some level of emotional identification and empathy for their fellow human beings in far-off places. For most of us, however, the cognitive and emotional effects of globalization processes, including those resulting from episodic and superficial exposure to mass media news reports and images, are probably less salient in our consciousness than the pervasive effects of our embeddedness in our own local environment and our own particular social networks and cultural milieu. Moreover, there is no compelling global canopy that is sufficiently internalized in individuals’ consciousness, or represented by institutional plausibility structures, to overcome or compensate for the human tendency to maintain (or even reify) in-group/out-group distinctions, whether on a national, regional, local, ideological, racial/ethnic or some other basis. Such developments in 2016 as the Brexit vote in Britain and the populist/nationalist appeal of Donald Trump in the United States provide apt and persuasive illustrations of particularistic resistance to the perceived threat of globalized universalism. If in-group/out-group distinctions are indeed inherent to human nature, this resurgence of particularistic priorities should not be surprising, despite contemporary trends of steadily increasing globalization and its effects in stimulating and reinforcing a more cosmopolitan orientation among some segments of the populations of different societies.

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To varying degrees, the world’s major religious traditions have historically included idealistic teachings that transcend in-group boundaries and promote a more universalistic image of humankind, including respect for basic human dignity, concerns for the welfare of all peoples, and compassion for those who suffer. Admittedly, such ideals regarding shared responsibility for human welfare on a global scale are often regarded as impractical and unrealistic, if not actively resisted or subverted as a result of various political, economic and cultural interests. It is undeniable that certain religious teachings promote strong in-group sentiments and practices, plus an insistence on cognitive homogeneity to the point of sometimes persecuting their own deviants and heretics as vigorously as they seek to convert or conquer adherents of other religions – or even more so. Our current context of intensified globalization tends to exacerbate our consciousness of fundamental differences in underlying cultural worldviews and religious orientations. It also increases the risk of clashes between those who live under sharply contrasting canopies, especially when they seek to defend or to expand their own particular canopy (Huntington 1996). As Robertson (1992) has shown, the dynamics of universalism and particularism are such that each intimately entails the other. Without elaborating this mutuality in detail, we might note that universalistic values can only be expressed in specific local contexts (although in different ways) while at the same time particularistic values are defined in part by their contrast with alternative values and ideals, either other groups’ particularistic values or more abstract (and divergent) universalistic values. This mutual entailment of universalism and particularism at the level of religious beliefs and cultural worldviews parallels the equally important real-life social tensions between globalism and localism – that is, the simultaneous intensification of globalizing intrusions on local areas on the one hand and adaptation or resistance to this process as expressed in efforts to preserve, strengthen, revitalize or expand specifically local cultural orientations, practices and social relations on the other. Both the impact of globalism and local reactions to it vary greatly in different parts of the world (Berger and Huntington 2002), and Berger’s relatively recent work focused explicitly on the challenges of multiple forms and patterns of pluralism on a global scale (Berger 2014). The challenges faced today by all types of religious groups include the pervasive and continuing

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reality of strong secularizing influences permeating the modern world in all aspects of the various mundane domains of life, plus the inescapable reality of often highly divergent religious traditions and orientations coexisting at both global and local levels (Berger 2014). Even in this pluralistic context, however, Berger highlighted the resilience and continued salience of diverse religious orientations and noted various strategies, historical as well as contemporary, whereby adherents of different religious traditions manage to sustain the plausibility of their particular beliefs. The religions of the world have the potential to contribute significantly to the processes of identifying and reinforcing universalistic principles and ultimate values that could conceivably be incorporated in a global canopy. One such ultimate and sacred value that is widely shared among adherents of different religious orientations and others as well (including secularists) is the value of human life itself and the survival of humanity on a global scale. This leads to the obvious implication of taking seriously the challenge of seeking to reduce the sufferings human beings inflict on one another and working to develop realistic strategies to improve human well-being throughout the world. A global ‘sacred’ canopy based on respect and reverence for human life and dignity can certainly be distinguished from the more localized ultimate meaning systems in terms of which individuals continue to live in their particular sociocultural contexts. A rather simplistic and admittedly inadequate analogy is the fact that sports fans have no difficulty identifying emotionally with their home-town team and fellow fans while at the same time sharing common values and ideals regarding sportsmanship with fans everywhere. Strategies of collaboration with others from different religious and cultural traditions in the cognitive and discursive tasks of identifying potentially overlapping or shared ideals and values can lead to the development or the strengthening of social networks through which mutual understanding of such ideals and values might be attained (see Teasdale and Cairns 1999; Halafoff 2013). Efforts to achieve mutual understanding with respect to divergent religious beliefs and values would exemplify the communicative process Habermas (1987: 77–111) described as the ‘linguistification of the sacred’ (see Bahram [2013] for an overview of the development of Habermas’s perspective on religion). Such a process is fraught with challenges as individuals with divergent religious and cultural backgrounds (and often different languages) seek through open and

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rational discourse to discover basic universalistic principles and values that could enable them to transcend their differences. In pursuing this goal, it would be essential for all parties to take steps to ensure that their communication is not distorted or misunderstood by differences in backgrounds and economic and political interests. Although oriented towards rational discourse to discover the universalistic normative implications of their religious orientations and worldviews, the salience of the emotional aspect is likely to become particularly relevant if participants’ communication also includes relevant experiences of their everyday ‘lifeworlds’ (in contrast to rationalized aspects of national or global systems). This process would clearly involve the type of communication emphasized by Nancy Ammerman (2013; see Ammerman in this book) in which individuals recount their own personal narratives of religious or spiritual experiences and understandings, interweaving such accounts with secular or alternative religious frames of reference or shifting perspectives as appropriate, particularly when relating to people across different social, cultural and religious boundaries. In addition to seeking greater cognitive understanding of different traditions and orientations, this focus on personal narratives allows such differences to be acknowledged explicitly as an important step in reaching mutual understanding plus emotional attunement, and without mutual disparagement of one another’s particular cultural traditions and orientations. This narrative process has the potential to go well beyond the goal of simply identifying and clarifying cognitive differences and similarities in religious beliefs and cultural worldviews, important as this is; it also involves an effort to understand (verstehen), both cognitively and emotionally, the realities that constitute what Meredith McGuire (2008) identified as the ‘lived religion’ of participants’ everyday lives. Through this process, participants could discover certain underlying commonalities in their multiple and varied ‘lived religion’ experiences and narratives that contrast with the clear differences that exist in some aspects of the formal institutional aspects of their religious traditions – and that also offer the possibility of undermining negative stereotypes. It seems likely also that friendship ties could emerge across cultural and religious boundaries through this process. In any case, participants in interreligious and intercultural groups and networks are likely to become increasingly aware of the similarities of human beings’ experiences around the world in coping with life’s universal exigencies and frustrations – and may even be able to identify

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opportunities to develop strategies for collaboration in dealing with these exigencies and frustrations. The overall goal would be neither to downplay nor to reconcile divergent religious beliefs regarding any particular form of ultimate or transcendent reality above or beyond the reality of the existing material and social worlds. Although discovering commonalities in religious sentiments, beliefs and orientations could presumably ensue, the top priority would be to discover universalistic values regarding humanity that could be directed towards expansion of efforts to ensure human survival and basic well-being, plus normative standards that transcend differences among people with widely varying backgrounds. More importantly, the expansion of intergroup or transnational social networks could provide a foundation for seeking to influence public policies oriented towards the identification of new opportunities for the pursuit of overlapping interests and the reduction of currently high levels of oppression, exploitation and violent conflict within and across national boundaries. Such values and normative standards should be expected eventually to be advocated for international relations as well as for relations among other types of groups that differ in overall culture and lifestyle as well as specific religious beliefs and practices. This is admittedly highly idealistic, of course, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to develop specific proposals or strategies that might be undertaken by the responsible political authorities of different societies, even when such policies could arguably be shown to be in the best long-range interests of the societies involved. But if these ideals could lead us to envision a process whereby tolerance and mutual respect expand and grow among people with different cultural and religious backgrounds, it is conceivable that this could indeed help motivate the development or expansion of collaborative programmes designed to improve the security and well-being of human beings’ lives on a global level. It is also conceivable that specific collective rituals could be developed by groups committed to these ideals that would have the potential to arouse the kind of emotional identification that would transcend – but need not undermine – particularistic in-group loyalties. The Olympic Games, for example, demonstrate how peoples of different countries can experience collective emotional arousal through rituals that focus on celebrations of outstanding athletic performance as well as the distinct identities or traditions of the different countries that are involved.

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It is also possible that a deep and meaningful sense of personal fulfilment can be experienced as people from different backgrounds collaborate in efforts to promote their shared idealistic goals of peace, justice, compassion and the basic welfare of all peoples. Such a process would, of course, need to engage both the cognitive and the emotional levels. It should also appeal to overlapping or interdependent interests as well as shared values. At the cognitive level, it is important to emphasize that a global sacred canopy such as this does not require the disparagement or deconstruction of more limited in-group ‘subcanopies’. These in-group canopies in different countries and regions of the world can continue to provide meaning, purpose and identity for those who live under them, as well as social and cultural resources for helping people cope with life’s uncertainties and tragedies at a local level. But even while these distinctive in-group boundaries are sustained, the identities, values, and interests of the adherents of all such groups could be greatly enhanced by collaborating across religious and other types of cultural boundaries in efforts to preserve human life itself on our planet and promote human well-being around the world.

Conclusion The concept of a widely and implicitly accepted ‘sacred canopy’ of religious beliefs as a source of ultimate meaning that was developed by Peter Berger in 1967 can be seen as an ‘ideal type’ theoretical construct that reflects the intellectual context of sociological discourse at the time. However, as Berger recognized at the time, this notion of a sacred canopy of homogeneous religious beliefs and worldviews that are supported by society-wide plausibility structures is contradicted in the empirical world by secularizing processes and by widespread religious pluralism. The extent of pluralism, the salience of religious beliefs in people’s lives, and the overall social influence of religion vary greatly in different ways over time in different societies. But much contemporary evidence supports the notion that religion continues to be highly salient among large numbers of people in the modern world in various ways, despite pluralism and despite secularizing influences. As has often been noted, Berger himself rejected his initial arguments regarding the inevitable effects of secularism and pluralism in undermining religious beliefs and commitment in the modern

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world. And from his 1967 The Sacred Canopy to his 2014 analysis of different forms of modernity in The Many Altars of Modernity, much of his work has focused explicitly on religious pluralism and the strategies that adherents of different religious traditions employ to maintain and reinforce the plausibility of their particular religious beliefs and worldviews in the face of competing beliefs and worldviews, both religious and secular, extending to the global level. The initial and foundational argument developed herein was that the multiple socioemotional aspects of people’s various social relations should be considered as equal in importance to Berger’s cognitive focus on religious beliefs and cultural worldviews in providing a sense of ultimate meaning and security. This aspect of our innate human nature leads to a consideration of how the socioemotional solidarity of in-groups (both religious and secular) and the identities of their members and adherents are typically maintained and reinforced not only through in-group interaction but also through contrast with various out-groups. As boundaries between in-groups and out-groups change over time, however, overarching religious and cultural canopies can sometimes be developed that subsume in-group subcanopies, just as divergent subcanopies can emerge and sometimes undermine an overarching canopy. In view of the manifold forms of suffering that human beings persist in inflicting on one another, plus the contemporary global threats faced by all humanity (nuclear war and global climate change, for example), an overarching global sacred canopy is urgently needed that would (or could) be grounded in the ideals and values regarding humanity held in common by the world’s religions and secular people as well. With the future survival of humanity at stake, this highly idealistic goal is consistent with the long-range practical interests, properly understood, of all people and all societies around the world. Actions oriented towards increased implementation of universalistic values can be not only emotionally rewarding but also contribute to the survival and well-being of humanity on a global scale.

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The Sacred Canopy as a Classic: Why Berger’s Conceptual Apparatus Remains Foundational 50 Years Later David Feltmate

When I started my PhD studies in 2006 I asked my supervisor a relevant question about becoming a professional sociologist of religion: ‘Where do I start?’ He directed me to six books and the first two remain indispensable for my research: Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967). There are less than 400 pages between the two books, but the material contained within them is adaptable to a wide range of subject matter, enables both micro and macro sociological analysis, and provides a foundation for explaining human action in a way that few other thinkers have been able to systematize. To this day, The Sacred Canopy is the only full book I have my undergraduate sociology of religion students read because it covers such a broad swath of human behaviour. Which is to say that The Sacred Canopy remains relevant. Berger’s theory of secularization has had much ink spilt over it, yet for most working sociologists of religion the most important material is arguably contained in the first half of the book. Here Berger explains how religious systems arise out of basic human practices and provide a systematic explanation for life as we live it. Fifty years later, the ideas in this section remain relevant, although some might consider them so obvious as to no longer need explanation. Of course, the fact that Berger’s arguments may seem to be apparent for professional sociologists should give us pause. That which is obvious to the working scholar should always be carefully considered and revisited to see if it remains relevant or if it obfuscates and obstructs our labour. This chapter quickly summarizes

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part 1 of The Sacred Canopy to point out the important analytical frameworks for a constructionist sociology of religion. It then argues that the way scholars have built upon Emile Durkheim’s work in the study of religion and popular culture yields insights into how to use classics for contemporary scholarship. I will not only review some contemporary works, but also show how they would have benefitted from a greater engagement with Berger’s ideas, showing The Sacred Canopy’s ongoing relevance. The article then turns to how I have used The Sacred Canopy as a foundation for research. Indeed, The Sacred Canopy’s ongoing analytical utility in a social constructionist paradigm stands as the most significant reason that it is a living classic and not a disciplinary relic.

Part 1 of The Sacred Canopy: The systematic elements The Sacred Canopy is a classic in the social construction of religion because within its first 100 pages it contains the theoretical tools necessary for outlining why a religion exists, why people would adhere to it for generations, how it would change over time, how it would respond to existential challenges, and how it can socialize people into acting and thinking in accordance with its teachings. It is a conceptual treasure trove for the beginning sociologist of religion and, sadly, not enough of its concepts have become commonplace in everyday sociology of religion writing. The Sacred Canopy is a ‘hinge’ book in the field’s history. It is either the last ‘classic’ in the sociology of religion – joining works such as the essays compiled into Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s On Religion ([1957] 2008), Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995), Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904–5] 2001) and The Sociology of Religion ([1920] 1991), H.  Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) and Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches ([1912] 1960) – or the first ‘classic’ in the modern period of the sociology of religion as it synthesizes the work that preceded it and sets the stage for the study of religion in an age that is characterized by an increasing acknowledgement of religious diversity, pluralistic contexts, secularizing government (and later societies) and evolutionary arguments for religion’s existence and ongoing purpose in society. The Sacred Canopy’s first four chapters deal with questions which

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remain relevant and, taken together, show us how the struggle to define reality in a way that is meaningful will continue to be relevant. The contemporary sociology of religion continues to grapple with the question of how religion creates and reflects ideas about human significance and how the collectively constructed worlds interact with each other as the barriers which separated us in the past such as language and geographical distance continue dissipating. So what do the first four chapters contain and why are they significant? What is in them worth taking fifty years after their publication and using them as foundational for a research agenda? A brief review to answer such questions is worth our time. Chapter 1, ‘Religion and World-Construction’ is all too often overlooked in the sociology of religion, although to be fair, it is largely a synopsis of the key ideas in The Social Construction of Reality synthesized for Berger’s argument in The Sacred Canopy. Asking the question of how religion is a natural outcome of the human capacity for symbolic communication and the fact that ‘society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer’ (1967: 1), the first chapter puts the sociology of religion squarely into discussion with the anthropology of religion. All human societies are by-products of the basic human actions of externalization, objectivation and internalization (1967: 4–19, see Hjelm, Chapter 1, in this book). For those who teach a ‘World Religions’ class, this is the only way that something like a chapter on ‘Christianity’ makes sense. That chapter will detail a thing that authors frequently argue is a tradition that has spread over the entire globe, has over 2 billion adherents, and countless subtraditions in the form of denominations, sectarian movements, devotional variations and ethnic practices (among other things). Instead of discussing multiple Christianities as what people in particular contexts call ‘Christianity’ (and one could also argue for Islams, Hinduisms, Buddhisms and so forth), this thing ‘Christianity’ is objectivated through generations of study and eras of humans doing ‘Christian’ things. An objectivated reality such as Christianity is staggering, but that is the power of objectivated human realities. They are big because they outlast the individuals who create them, are expanded and changed by bringing in subsequently more people who are socialized by parents and significant others into the institution, and because objectivated institutions have consolidated hard and soft power

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over time we face them as the objective realities of everyday life. Socialization ensures that we learn the rules and roles of the society around us and that we can reflect upon their influence, externalizing new thoughts and possibly changing the objectivated realities which will confront subsequent generations as reality. We need these externalized realities because human beings have to live in worlds of significance (1967: 19–28), which Berger calls a nomos or meaningful order (1967: 19). Without a way of explaining what we are supposed to do and why we should do it, human beings lose their ability to cope with the world. We should not read this as somebody struggling over the question of ‘what am I to do today’ or ‘what career should I choose?’ Instead, without a framework for even answering those kinds of questions, and significant others with whom we answer the questions, Berger argues that human beings cannot survive, and that suicide may even seem preferential to living a life without a broader sense of cosmic direction. This is where institutions and especially religions become important. ‘Whatever the historical variations, the tendency is for the meanings of the humanly constructed order to be projected into the universe as such’ (1967: 25). Religions are the institutions that take a social construction and imbue them with a sense of cosmic significance so that human beings know they are living purposeful lives. For example, Christians who read the Bible literally will take a pragmatic human injunction found in the eighth commandment (do not steal) and give it cosmic consequences. The text implies that God spoke those words and, as such, stealing from another person not only upsets interpersonal and social relationships; it also violates the moral fabric God implemented for all humans. Stealing is thus not only a crime against others, but a crime against God – a sin. Other examples such as this abound, but it speaks to the way that religion becomes, in Berger’s words, ‘the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant’ (1967: 28). Once a religion is in place, however, its ongoing existence needs justification. If the processes of externalization, objectivation and internalization are the first major theoretical contribution to the sociology of religion in The Sacred Canopy, the four levels of legitimation in Chapter 2 are the second. Whenever studying people it is helpful to keep Chapter 2’s first two sentences handy: ‘All socially constructed worlds are inherently precarious. Supported by human

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activity, they are constantly threatened by the human facts of self-interest and stupidity’ (1967: 29). Yet, religious claims can seem particularly ridiculous even while they are given unprecedented power by people. As a teacher in the American South, I am frequently confronted by evangelical Christians in my classrooms who always ask why somebody would believe the Bhagavad Gita’s teachings on dharma or in Islam. I then remind them that there are thousands of people in our city who believe that a Jew who died a criminal’s death rose from the dead, ascended into an immaterial plane which we have never proven exists, and if you pray to him, he will come and ‘live’ in your heart and save an immaterial part of you (which we have also never proven exists) and save that part of you which is more valuable than everything else from eternal torment in another plane of existence with a questionable existence. Those religious people also expect my students to act in certain ways, hold certain beliefs and do certain things. Responding to their tilted heads and sceptical looks I ask, with mock innocence, ‘What have I said that is factually incorrect?’ This exercise gets students to see the power of legitimations that they have had repeated over their entire lives. The only way an objectivated reality can stand against inquiries such as the ones I have posed is to have a series of explanations ready that justify its ongoing existence and a group of people who have internalized those explanations and are ready to deploy them in defence of that reality. Legitimations are ‘socially objectivated “knowledge” that serves to explain and justify the social order’ (1967: 29). Or, simply, legitimations are explanations for why something is legitimate. There are four levels of legitimations, pretheoretical (‘this is how things are done’), incipiently theoretical (proverbs and moral maxims), theoretical (extended, logical arguments like this article), and a series of total legitimations into a spirit of the age (1967: 31–2). For the scholar of religion, anything that enables people to ‘[put] themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the universe’ (1967: 33) is a legitimation. We should see these ideas as things people do, think and say (and, of course, thinking and saying are things people do). Plausibility structures, the ‘social ‘base’ for [a world’s] continuing existence as a world that is real to actual human beings’ (1967: 45), arise from the institutional arrangements that are legitimated throughout society. For Berger, religion is the institution that holds the web of society together. These bonds are, to build upon the metaphor, stronger than steel, flexible as silk and

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entangle anybody who gets caught in them. Religion weaves itself into every other institution, justifying its existence in cosmic terms to the people who live within a shared plausibility structure. It is possible to escape one plausibility structure for another, but it is impossible to live without one (1967: 49–51). This leads us to Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3 Berger deals with the problem of theodicy, the ability to make ‘experiences, no matter how painful they may be, at least make sense now in terms that are both socially and subjectively convincing’ (1967: 58). People will suffer and they will die. They will live in worlds which are sometimes overwhelmingly unequal. The need to live a life that has some meaning beyond passing on our genes is overwhelming and social constructions enable us to suffer, endure and ultimately die with dignity. Enduring such pain is central to the ongoing relevance of plausibility structures. Chapter 4 ties together the previous three chapters under the theme of alienation (1967: 81–101). In Berger’s hands alienation is not, as it is in Marx’s classic use of the term, just an alienation from the products of paid labour ([1961] 2007: 70), but all humanly constructed productions with an emphasis on social roles as externalized, objectivated legitimations to which humans bend their wills. Socialization, since it is never so total that a person loses a sense of their individuality apart from others in society, always leaves us confronting social roles as something to be internalized as standards towards which we shape our behaviour. Even if we choose not to follow social standards, they still confront us as realities and should we choose to deviate from the norm then social sanctions will likely follow. Berger is particularly concerned with the roles we fulfil in society confronting us as realities to which we bend. He is especially concerned with ‘bad faith’, a term which appears in some of his previous works (1961a, 1963). Bad faith ‘replaces choice with fictitious necessities. In other words, the individual, who in fact has a choice between different courses of action, posits one of these courses as necessary’ (1967: 93). Bad faith occurs when socialization is so complete that we bend our choices to the demands of a role, refusing to act with integrity towards our inclinations. One of Berger’s favourite examples in this case is of an executioner who decides he has to carry out the execution. He could walk away, but instead takes a life because it is his job (1967: 93). Bad faith helps us to explain why good people do bad things and then justify them in light of an overarching social order.

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Alienation enables us to see the limits of social constructionism in Berger’s thought as the social order is never complete. The executioner can walk away and face the penalty for desertion, but in doing so he sets a new path for others to take. Indeed, a traitor with integrity may die in the moment, but live forever as a hero changing the course of history. Alienation is never total, but the social order is powerful and compelling and the sociologist of religion would do well to understand this reality. Berger’s ideas thankfully avoid some of the sloppier thinking in the broader field of social constructionist thought. As intellectual adherents of cultural relativism and postmodernism continue their march towards total relativism, Berger’s conception of social reality is much more stable. Our understanding of reality may not have an ontology separate from our social constructions, but that does not deny the imperative that we live in humanly constructed worlds that are imbued with significance. Indeed, for Berger social construction enables us to answer that most classic of questions: ‘How then should we live?’ Religion is the master narrative in this discussion, tying all other institutions into a conceivable whole. Rather than review the entire field of social constructionism, I leave it to others (e.g., Hacking 1999, Smith 2010, 119–206)1 to review the problems, but the most important element of Berger’s constructionism to consider as a foundation for future research is that a Bergerian analysis leads us to see social constructions as ‘weak’ in Christian Smith’s terminology. An approach that emphasizes ‘weak’ social constructions stresses that the reality that is socially constructed is one of ‘institutional facts, that is, those aspects of the real that humans think, speak, and interact into existence’ (2010: 122). A strong approach would say that all reality is socially constructed and that we can never know the material world, only our symbolic systems and even then that knowledge is incomplete. Weak social constructions, however, can be incredibly powerful, especially when they are used to justify defending an institutional and ideological order that is already in place. A legitimation that enables people to act violently is helpful to a social structure – those violent people can kill others who are considered threats. Those threats could have changed the course of social development and left the current order in shambles. The people who benefit from existing social arrangements can then act in accordance with social legitimations and reinforce their own power and legitimacy. Of course, they do this not

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just through brute force, but also through social constructions of power. Externalization, objectivation, integration. The cycle continues and constantly confronts people as an objective reality that must be dealt with. If I could point to any element of Berger’s constructionism that we could more helpfully use in sociological writing and thinking about religion it would be the way that legitimations – especially first-level legitimations which consist of ‘because I said so’ arguments and second-level legitimations which include moral maxims and proverbs – engage us in the cycle of externalization, objectivation and internalization towards an ongoing maintenance of a plausibility structure (see Ammerman in this book). It is one of the great ironies of contemporary sociological thought that constructionism is almost taken for granted (cf. Hjelm, Chapter 1, in this book). All institutions have histories. Those histories could have gone in different directions. There is no reason for our institutions to have developed in the first place, let alone evolved as they did. The historian’s eye and the sociologist’s imagination make this abundantly clear, but we cannot forget that our academic tools are also constructions. The social construction of reality affects all human realities – including our own. It is an invitation to self-reflection and criticism as much as it is a foundation for criticisms of other arguments. This is where bad faith becomes important in our analyses. If we do not acknowledge that our own defences of certain institutions and moral positions are themselves acts of legitimation and that we are complicit in the social construction process, then we can obscure the grounds upon which our moral positions stand. Scholarship and argumentation are third-level legitimations. That does not mean that they are baseless, merely that we need to understand the justifications for making the choices we do and admit that there are times when we run the risk of acting in bad faith. Indeed, one of the great challenges of academic life is to try and strike out against the entire academic enterprise when you think it is wrong, but not to do so would be to act in bad faith.

A lesson from Durkheim scholarship: Ideas are contagious If the previous section outlined the tools that are useful in The Sacred Canopy, it behoves us now to ask why we would want to use them. After all, there are

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a variety of academic tools available to us, why use Berger’s? I am no advocate of slavishly following a great scholar to the letter, replicating their work with different data and saying that you have done new and original scholarship. There is, however, a good example of what we could do in the sociology of religion to keep The Sacred Canopy’s foundational insights alive if we look to the ways that Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life continues to find new life a century after his death. In this article I am only focusing on three studies that utilize Durkheim’s theories to explain sacredness’ persistence in the modern world, but I do so because they are useful, not because they are the only research available. Indeed, Durkheim’s two great contributions from The Elementary Forms are his conceptualization of sacred and profane as binary oppositions that structure human life and the concept of ‘collective effervescence’, the shared emotional energy that binds human beings together ([1912] 1995). Scholars continue to find a wide variety of environments in which these two concepts are useful – often beyond the bounds of what are popularly considered religious. It is a classic because it continues to inspire a range of scholarship. That said, each analysis could have also benefitted from integrating more of Berger’s work. Let us first consider Gordon Lynch’s The Sacred in the Modern World (2012). Inspired by the Durkheimian analysis of the Yale School of Cultural Sociology and its leading interpreter Jeffrey Alexander (2003, 2006; see also Alexander, Jacobs and Smith 2012), Lynch considers the way that different cultural contexts have shifted their interpretations of what is sacred over time. Using the sacred/ profane binary as his dominant analytical framework Lynch argues that The sacred is defined by what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities which present normative claims over the meanings and conduct of social life. Sacred forms are specific, historically contingent, instances of the sacred. Sacred forms are constituted by constellations of specific symbols, thought/discourse, emotions and actions grounded in the body. These constellations of embodied thought, feeling and action recursively reproduce the sacrality of the sacred form and constitute groups who share these discourses, sentiments and practices. The normative reality represented by a sacred form simultaneously constructs the evil which might profane it, and the pollution of this sacred reality is experienced by its adherents as a painful wound for which some form of restitution is necessary. (2012: 29)

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From this framework, Lynch argues for four points to guide analysis: 1. As a social phenomenon, the sacred is morally ambiguous. 2. Sacred forms are historically contingent. 3. Modern society is characterized by the emergence of multiple sacred forms. 4. The presence of the sacred in social life needs to be contextualized in relation to the mundane logics, practices, emotions and aesthetics of everyday life. (47–9). Each of these four points draws our attention to the fact that the sacred/profane binary that Durkheim proposed in The Elementary Forms is contingent upon the social groups who interact with the particularities of ‘the sacred’ in a given social context. In modern societies, multiple sacred forms interact and compete with each other for dominance in a process that Lynch describes as establishing hierarchies of sacred forms: ‘When multiple sacred forms are present in a given social context, one possible form of relationship between them is one in which a particular sacred form dominates another, making it difficult through various operations of power for that subordinated sacred form to become an intense focus of public thought, feeling, and action’ (65). Lynch’s work then goes on to demonstrate how different sacred forms can move from subjugated to dominant sacred forms over time in a given society. These concepts are useful, linking the Durkheimian framework that sees sacredness as something ascribed by different groups arising from collective practices and binding people together emotionally and directing their energy towards social action ([1912] 1995). Yet, in his conclusion, Lynch argues that ‘the sacred is not generated by society, as Durkheim suggested, but rather the sacred constructs the idea of human society as a meaningful, moral collective’ (2012, 133). This is where Berger is needed. In Lynch’s hands ‘the sacred’s’ objective status remains unquestioned. While sacred forms change and their influence in society waxes and wanes, the sacred remains an unquestioned social norm. The problem is, ‘the sacred’ is a constructed category for comparison. Consider Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous definition of religion: ‘There is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his [sic] imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has

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no independent existence apart from the academy’ (1982, xi). Now, replace ‘religion’ with ‘the sacred’ and the same problem arises. Berger’s incorporation not only of Durkheim and a focus around sacred things, but also of Marx’s emphasis on the dialectic of society (which is helpfully read through George Herbert Mead and Alfred Schutz), enables us to reconstruct the development of sacred forms diachronically or understand their power arrangements synchronically. Either way, ‘the sacred’ remains a problem for social analysis if we do not acknowledge its constructed nature. Everything that Lynch aspires to is founded upon Durkheim’s work and cultural sociology’s interpretations, but Berger’s classic endeavours put the social construction of sacredness front and centre. We cannot escape the realities of externalization, objectivation and internalization, and in focusing on the way that sacredness is externalized and objectivated into particular forms, the processes of integration become more apparent and comprehensible. Lynch’s reconfiguring of Durkheim for modern pluralistic societies is an excellent first step and The Sacred in the Modern World is well worth reading and thinking about, but Lynch’s project of the cultural sociology of the sacred is incomplete without the foundational work that Berger lays out in The Sacred Canopy. Indeed, if modern societies are characterized by pluralism (as Lynch argues), that pluralism is sustained and transformed by multiple sacred canopies competing with each other to legitimate themselves and delegitimate others. Sacredness is a key cultural and ideological tool in that competition.2 Second, Gary Laderman’s Sacred Matters (2009) is a useful contribution to the contemporary use of Durkheim within a religious studies paradigm because he gives us a way of seeing how sacredness is infused throughout popular culture. Religion and popular culture remains an understudied area in the sociology of religion proper, which is a shame since the major questions of method, theory and data are all at question in the field. Indeed, I am convinced that the study of religion and popular culture is actually at the heart of the study of religion rather than the margins if you consider that each project in this field has to justify its use of the term ‘religion’, defend why its subject matter should be considered data that enters into the wider comparative enterprise of studying religion, and validate the methodologies used to turn the social world into valid data for analysis. Sacred Matters focuses on the first question, but the need to critically engage these major questions means that assumptions which

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seem obvious in other studies (‘We’re studying Muslims, of course this fits the sociology of religion!’) have to be justified by the scholar. When categories are under such scrutiny, creative scholarship and mastery of the tools have to be sharper than when they can slide by because scholars recognize something as acceptable. Laderman’s topics – film, music, sports, celebrity, science, medicine, violence, sexuality and death – cover a wide range of issues, but while there are research areas that combine these topics with religion, they are often treated as distinct analytical categories. The Durkheimian framework which sees sacredness as a quality that binds communities together gives Laderman justification for arguing that communities that gather around specific examples that fall into these categories (e.g. Trekkies and Deadheads) participate in ‘robust, thriving forms of religious life, experience, and community that are less about theology and more about anthropology … focused on the sacred as the defining mark of gods and religious life generally, but also as a fundamental and fundamentally human characteristic of social life; less constrained by religious traditions as the only source of access to the sacred and more attentive to the flexibility, fluidity and, indeed, the true messiness of religious life’ (2009: xv). From this position, he argues that ‘religion can no longer be understood as a separate sphere of social life, neatly compartmentalized and privatized. … Religious sensibilities seep deeply into and permeate everything about who we are and how we live, driving personal, community, and national attempts to create order out of disorder, meaning in the face of suffering, and hope when all seems lost’ (xvi). Laderman’s analysis is valuable because he puts sacredness back into communities and around events when people gather for specific reasons. Whether it is Elvis veneration and Deadhead culture (37–42), Rudolph Valentino’s funeral and the celebration of his celebrity (65–71), or American gun culture (132–5) emotions are raised, sacredness is identified and subcultures arise to preserve that which is found sacred. The problem with taking a purely Durkheimian analysis in Laderman’s book is that the intermediary stages – the messiness of everyday life in which sacredness is contested and challenged and the hierarchies of sacred forms are forged – are missing because the Durkheimian framework does not contain the conceptual tools for establishing how those social forms arise. Durkheim focused on origins, but not on the mechanisms to answer the persistent question of ‘why

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this form and not another?’ The social constructionist, with a good historical eye and Berger’s toolkit can provide answers to such a question. Finally, I consider Christopher Partridge’s The Lyre of Orpheus (2014) because he combines Durkheimian scholarship with the study of the sacred elements of popular music. A long overdue topic, Partridge handles it well by linking both lyrical and sonic elements to their culturally intertextual contexts, demonstrating that popular music helps move us because of its powerful emotional resonances that are tied into social transgression and a romantic sentimentality. Building on Lynch and Durkheim, Partridge argues that popular music engages social binaries about the sacred and the profane, challenging socially established sacred norms (e.g. norms of acceptable sexuality) and creating new sites of sacredness in society (e.g. the veneration of musicians such as Elvis and Jim Morrison of the Doors). Unfortunately, he continues the tradition of interpreting Durkheim according to a strict binary between sacred and profane, writing ‘the sacred-profane polarity and the emotional power of the transgressive lie at the heart of popular music culture’ (63). Seeing popular music subcultures and music as a way of transgressing boundaries and creating liminal communities, Partridge goes on to argue that popular music can be ‘edgework’ – a risky, excessive, transgressive activity located at the boundaries of chaos. It disturbs and challenges the ordered sanitized worlds of modernity. Destructive, dangerous and irrational though it can be, transgression is socially important. Hierarchies and ‘common sense’ organized around sacred forms need to be challenged. This is, of course, because sacred forms are not themselves stable and fixed. They are socially and culturally constructed. Consequently, transgressive discourses represent a necessary search for boundaries, an important challenge to hegemonic constructions of the sacred. (112)

According to Partridge, popular music subcultures challenge the modern world’s boundaries through romantic leanings and by challenging the dominant religious structures of Western culture. Like Laderman and Lynch, Partridge puts the sacred/profane dichotomy to good use to further our understanding of popular culture in expanding the discussion about what constitutes ‘religion’ in Western culture. However, like Lynch, he becomes too enamoured with the idea that there is a dominant hierarchy of sacred forms already in use. There is the ever-present question

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of how the religious subcultures that develop around certain popular music acts or genres coalesce into something like an institution and how stable those institutions are. Partridge is also challenged by the question of how those ‘religious’ cultures compete with other religious cultures in a much more dynamic environment than the one he suggests. Indeed, Partridge has done a good deal of useful work in expanding the paradigm of what can be considered religious under Durkheim’s framework. Where he falls short is in expanding his argument to seriously consider all the different competing religious conceptions within any given social system. It is not just a subculture versus a dominant culture, it is a wide variety of subcultures competing for dominance. Berger’s work, especially in the second part of The Sacred Canopy, which argues for competing plausibility structures that cannot take on the status of a nomos for the whole of society is useful for showing how the Durkheimian paradigm of formulating the emergence of religious communities around things labelled as sacred works in a variety of modern settings. Berger’s work is still necessary though because it gives us the framework for explaining the systematic development that people do around sacred things to keep the sense of sacredness intact and its social construction obscured behind its objectivation. For this reason, while Durkheim’s work is indisputably a classic, The Sacred Canopy has all the tools to make Durkheim’s thought even more accessible and take it in a wide variety of useful ranges when it comes to explaining religion’s ongoing role in social life.

A wide range of applications: Notes from a young Bergerian It would be curious if somebody claiming that a scholarly work is a classic that continues to inspire scholarship did not use that classic to further their own research. I am no exception. The Sacred Canopy remains foundational for my work and has had a profound influence on my research on religion and humour. Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy (Feltmate 2017) would have been impossible without the combination of Berger and Durkheim outlined in this article. My major challenge in originally formulating the argument in that book was dealing with the question ‘What do you have to believe about religion to find the jokes

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in these three programs funny?’ As I started studying the relationship between religion and humour, including Berger’s own work on the subject (1970; 1997; see also Feltmate 2013), I found that too many scholars only considered humour religious if it served religious purposes. That is, if the humour furthered the goals of a religious organization, then it was considered legitimately religious. My data, however, posed a different problem. The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy contain literally thousands of jokes about religious organizations or ideas, but they are typically irreverent, if not sacrilegious. Each programme has a particular world view and I found that the humour across each programme revealed insights into that perspective. When I realized this, I was able to see that the concepts of plausibility structures and legitimations are important for understanding humour. Jokes are ways of disseminating ideological information in quick bursts to an audience. Yet, they are not theoretical arguments, they are pretheoretical. While this material can also be found in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), they became useful to my research when I considered them in light of The Sacred Canopy. Berger’s ability to demonstrate how the religious institutions of a society are sacralizing hubs that grant cosmic legitimacy to all other institutions is what makes The Sacred Canopy the completion of The Social Construction of Reality. The latter book is able to see how interactions within institutional spheres leads to the development of a society as a whole, but the difficulty of creating a sense of a unified whole is not possible with the many institutions of secondary socialization that exist. This is Durkheim’s problem that he tried to solve throughout his career, starting in The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1984) and extending to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. While concepts like ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity have been learnt by generations of sociology students for various tests, the question of ‘how are we going to hold this thing called society together’ is a classic concern of sociological theory. Religion is, for Berger, the answer and I found it particularly useful to see the construction of a nomos built upon multiple streams of legitimations within subcultural groups as the best explanation for how societies maintain their integration. Berger’s later recantation of secularization theory and his argument that he had predicted pluralism in The Sacred Canopy was the final piece of the puzzle (1998). Christian Smith and his associates’ work in American Evangelicalism (1998) in reformulating the sacred

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canopy into a ‘sacred umbrella’ over American evangelical subculture, but not the whole of American society, could be usefully extended to different groups. I was able to see each programme as the end product of a group of people (writers, producers, voice actors, directors, animators) who were projecting their ideas in the wider world, but still firmly rooted in their own networks. Meanwhile, they also interacted with American culture at large. Understanding these connections enabled me to see their humour as the end product of a nomos particular to each programme. This link between subculture and wider culture, a tension between different nomoii and competition between different groups to define reality for each other, and the imperative within each nomos to preserve itself against outside threats makes little sense if not for the legitimation of society on a cosmic level that religion provides. To complete a social construction of reality such that a nomos is treated as taken for granted is, in Berger’s hands, a religious construction of reality. If we move away from a ‘world religions’ model of religion and more towards a sense of ‘sacredness’ as the foundational unit of analysis when we examine religion, then the ways that religious worlds are created and integrate human life into a meaningful whole is wide-ranging and helps to understand the power socially constructed worlds have over us. Minimizing the religious imperative, that ‘audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant’ (Berger 1967: 28) is what constructionists miss when they read The Social Construction of Reality and not The Sacred Canopy. Just as Durkheim’s ideas about sacredness and collective effervescence gained new analytical life when they were taken out of the typical ‘religious’ contexts and extended into every facet of society, Berger’s framework helps to explain how social structures arise and survive around those actions. The processes of externalization, objectivation and internalization are also why I do not use the term ‘the sacred’, but instead emphasize ‘sacredness’ as an ascribed quality and ‘sacralization’ as the processes of externalizing and objectivating that sacredness collectively before internalizing that objectivated status as proving that something that is sacred. Berger’s ideas gave Durkheim’s ideas structure, which enables both thinkers to push our thought forward. Classics remain classic because the ideas within them facilitate further research. Berger’s work helps us to explain not only how people come to hold the ideas they hold, but also how those ideas lead to actions which maintain a meaningful world.

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It is this why element of his social constructionism that is pivotal for us to think about and criticize in our own studies because The Sacred Canopy tells us why we need to construct social worlds in the first place. We need to live lives that are meaningful, in which our actions have value and significance, our existence is not futile, and the reaffirmations we get from the social world validates our existence. Those explanations also have to be legitimated beyond the arguments that other people put forth. They need a cosmic level of significance that religious systems have traditionally provided. Anybody looking to explain the actions people take with a fervour that is justified in terms of cosmic significance is missing how that motivation gets created without considering The Sacred Canopy in more depth.

Conclusion: A legacy half-achieved The Sacred Canopy remains essential reading in the sociology of religion, but its potential has yet to be unlocked. Indeed, it is an interpretive framework that works exceptionally well to explain how religions arise, why they continue to exist, and why people continue to find solace within them. It also extends well beyond just the dominant traditions in the ‘World Religions’ paradigm and even though Berger might not have made the moves I have suggested in this chapter, The Sacred Canopy provides a framework for explaining why musical experience can inspire a sacred community or why parents pass their sports fandom down to their children. Part I remains the most interesting, if underutilized, part of the book because it never becomes irrelevant. Regardless of one’s research agenda within the field, one of the great challenges of the sociology of religion is always to explain why people in socio-historically contextualized places do the things they do. Before we can get to academic questions we always need to ask why is this group manifesting these qualities at this time? Without doing so we cannot understand our data and answer our questions. As such, good sociological research is always built upon trying to understand why people in certain times and places are doing the things they do. Secularization, pluralism, ethnic identities, regional variations, seeing apparitions, waiting for spaceships, evangelizing – these phenomena can only be studied as ‘fields’ by understanding people in context.

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Every academic work has to do two things: It has to answer a ‘so what?’ question and explain why its answer matters. Part 1 of The Sacred Canopy’s ‘so what?’ angle is that human worlds are precarious, meaningful and necessary and that religion is the unifying force holding together this thing we call social life. It matters because without that unifying force we become atomized and anomic. We start living in pluralistic societies in which we share some commonalities, but can still live parallel lives from our neighbours. Yet, before we turn modern pluralism into a problem that has to be solved, we should also consider that one of Berger’s greatest gifts in all of his scholarship is that he encourages us to seek first to understand people in context before using their experiences to address larger issues that are shared within the academic tribe. We sometimes forget that understanding religious people is a deeply political act, one that is enthralling and could even be dangerous. The Sacred Canopy remains a classic because it gives us the framework to think in large theoretical terms about the everyday qualities of the depth of religious lives on the ground or across a society as a whole. It also reminds us that understanding religious life is part of understanding why people live and that should not be undermined. Tucked away in 100 pages at the start of this little book is a foundational framework for understanding people. That it remains essential reading for sociologists of religion, but is not treated as a text to fundamentally reference in our research design and analytical discussions speaks to a legacy only half-achieved. The second half of The Sacred Canopy has developed a legacy that secularization scholars have to deal with, but Part 1’s constructionism still awaits a full integration into the everyday theoretical vocabulary and analytical framework of everyday sociologists. When that happens, then The Sacred Canopy’s potential can be fully realized.

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Sacred Canopies and Invisible Religions: The Dialectical Construction of Religion in Berger and Luckmann Hubert Knoblauch and Silke Steets

Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy and Thomas Luckmann’s The Invisible Religion were both published in 1967. Both also went on to become classics in the sociology of religion. We consider this ‘parallelaktion’, as Robert Musil – one of Berger’s favourite authors – would call it, quite significant. The authors had, just a year before, published The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), which became a classic resonating far beyond the sociological study of religion. The basis for the close connection between the sociology of religion and this book had been laid out even earlier in the co-authored article ‘Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge’ (1963). As impressive as this collaboration is, the ‘parallelaktion’ of both books, however, also marks the beginning of the divergence between the authors, which led to an end of their cooperation for decades. Despite (or because of) their continuing personal friendship, their views on religion developed almost diametrically in opposite directions. Berger himself first expresses this in the appendix of The Sacred Canopy and then even more explicitly in the article ‘Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion’ (1974), in which he distinguishes between his (substantive) and Luckmann’s (functional) understanding of religion. This divergence also concerns their views on secularization, transcendence and, finally, the methodology of the sociology of religion. As we focus here on Berger, we will start with some biographical notes that we consider crucial for understanding his lifelong involvement with religion and then briefly sketch his earlier writings on the matter. As both The Sacred

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Canopy and The Invisible Religion can be read as follow-ups to The Social Construction of Reality, we will briefly outline this book’s basic arguments and the role religion plays in it (see Hjelm, Chapter 1 of this book). We then turn to Luckmann’s Invisible Religion and to Berger’s Sacred Canopy. Our aim is to show that, despite the fact that Berger changed his understanding of secularization, The Sacred Canopy sets the frame for his understanding of religion through to his late writings, including his last book, The Many Altars of Modernity (2014). In comparing Berger and Luckmann’s differing takes on religion, it becomes clear that both positions may be seen as contributing to each other in a dialectical way.

Religion and Berger’s biography Peter L. Berger was born in 1929 into a bourgeois family in Vienna. Both family strands were Jewish by origin but assimilated to the German–Austrian culture, including northern Italy, where his mother came from. Berger’s largely happy childhood ended abruptly with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. The family migrated to Haifa, Palestine, which was then under British rule. For strategic rather than religious reasons, they had been baptized as Anglican before leaving Vienna. As religious practice did not play a role in the family, Berger’s first personal experiences with religion originated from a Swiss school for Missionaries of Pietist Protestant background, which he attended for two years on Mount Karmel. His interest in religion grew even stronger when he met Fritz [Frederick] Neumann, a philosopher who had come to Palestine as a Protestant missionary, and through the self-study of philosophical and theological books in an abandoned library of the German Lutheran Church in Haifa. When the Berger family moved to the United States in 1946, seventeenyear-old Peter was determined to become a Lutheran minister (Berger 2008). Upon his arrival in New York, Berger immediately got in contact with the United Lutheran Church in America, celebrated his confirmation and received a scholarship to Wagner Memorial Lutheran College on Staten Island, where he passed his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. In order to learn more about American society, he decided to postpone his degree in theology and to first study sociology. As he had to work during daytime, Berger turned to the

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Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, where all classes were offered between 4 pm and 10 pm. Originally designed as a school for adult education, after 1933 the New School had been extended by the ‘University in Exile’, where many excellent refugee scholars from Nazi Europe taught in the social sciences and humanities. Next to Albert Salomon to whom Berger owed his knowledge on French thinking, his most important teachers were Alfred Schutz, who developed a phenomenological approach to sociology, and Carl Mayer, an expert on Max Weber and the sociology of religion. Berger was so fascinated by the kind of sociology taught at the New School that he decided to drop his initial plan to become a Lutheran minister and to rather stick with sociology (cf. Berger 2011). In 1950, he wrote his Master’s Thesis, a Chicago School-style ethnography of a Puerto-Rican Pentecostal congregation in East Harlem, followed by his PhD dissertation with Carl Mayer in 1954 on the ‘Routinization of Charisma’ in Bahái religion. Berger first met Thomas Luckmann on philosopher Karl Löwith’s course at the New School. Luckmann had come to America in 1951, joining his wife Benita to study at the New School (Schnettler 2006). Already during his PhD, Berger was involved in a research project led by Carl Mayer on religion and politics in post-war Germany. As Berger had to serve in the US army in 1954–5, Luckmann instead conducted the empirical parts of the research – and thus laid the ground for his own writings in the sociology of religion. After his army time, Berger too came to Germany as head of a research project on church participation that was associated with the Protestant Academy in Bad Boll. After returning to the United States in 1956 Berger became assistant professor at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina and, in 1958, associate professor for social ethics at Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut. As one can see from his life course so far, religion had not just been a major theme of Berger’s sociological endeavours, but also a personal issue. Describing himself theologically as a neo-orthodox Lutheran in his early days and a liberal Lutheran later, he started balancing his intellectual activities between theology and sociology – an exercise he would never give up. More precisely, he developed a pattern of argumentation that was to become typical for much of his work on religion and that is already reflected in his first book The Precarious Vision (Berger 1961b). The book starts with a sociological

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argument, which is intended to be theologically ‘value-free’: Berger describes society as a ‘structure of fiction’ becoming real through the roles it assigns to individuals. If socialization is successful, fictions start to work as moral alibies for human actions, which can (as the extreme example of the hangman shows) even lead to killing another person. In the second part of the book, Berger puts on a different hat and makes his theological points. He argues that Christian faith can be similarly debunking as sociology namely because it makes people think about the individual’s moral responsibility for his or her actions, that is beyond society’s assigned roles. His second book The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (Berger 1961a) follows the same pattern of sociological description followed by theological reflection. With the call to join the Sociology Department of the New School for Social Research in 1963, Berger’s probably most productive phase of sociological writing sets in. Starting with the Invitation to Sociology (1963) – still written in Hartford and intended as an attempt to ‘being invited’ to a sociological faculty (Berger 2011: 76) – he extended his sociological topics to the sociology of occupations, mobility and theories of institutions. This turn towards sociology was further boosted by his collaboration with a series of friends and colleagues from within and around the New School. Together with his wife Brigitte (who was to finish her doctoral dissertation on Vilfredo Pareto at the New School, and who would later become a specialist in the sociology of families and youth), Brigitte’s brother Hansfried Kellner, Maurice Natanson, Stanley Pullberg, and Benita and Thomas Luckmann, Berger formed a most productive working circle that resulted in numerous individual and collaborative articles. The bestknown product of this intellectual environment is The Social Construction of Reality with Thomas Luckmann, published in 1966. The book has since then been translated into more than 20 languages and is commonly considered the founding text of what came to be called ‘Social Constructivism’ or ‘Social Constructionism’ (Knoblauch and Wilke 2016). This was followed by The Sacred Canopy (1967), Berger’s major book in the sociology of religion, and A Rumor of Angels (1969), a theological commentary to The Sacred Canopy. After a dispute about the future of the New School Sociology Department Berger moved, in 1971, to Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1979, Brigitte got appointed to Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and the whole family resettled to Boston. Peter first took a position at Boston College before, in

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1981, he finally switched to Boston University where he was to teach until a few years ago.

The Social Construction of Reality and religion At the time The Social Construction of Reality appeared in 1966 it could hardly have captured the zeitgeist better. It not only contributed to the search for fresh sociological ideas (beyond the dominating strands of structural functionalism and quantitative methodology), but also delivered a message that was understood as both optimistic and humane (Steets 2016a). Its main thesis consists of a threefold dialectics between the fact that (in Durkheimian terms) the objective world is constructed through (in Weberian terms) social actions and that actors themselves are (in Meadian terms) products of the social world (see Chapter 1 of this book). This process is fundamentally guided by subjective meaning as it has been analysed by Alfred Schutz in his phenomenology. Interestingly, religion does not figure prominently in the book. In fact, The Social Construction of Reality rarely refers to religion in a specific sense. Religion is one example of a ‘symbolic universe’, that is an overarching system of legitimation that ‘explains’ the institutional order of a society. The connection between religion and the sociology of knowledge had been elaborated in an essay co-authored by Berger and Luckmann already in 1963, which not only foreshadows the book but also implies a new take on religion. Religion, they argue, is one specific form of knowledge orienting actors in the world. Knowledge, here, does not refer only to the ‘higher forms of meaning’ which had been the subject of the sociology of knowledge and culture before. Following the phenomenological approach developed by Schutz, Berger and Luckmann rather define knowledge as any meaning constituted by consciousness, accessible in the subjective stock of knowledge or transmitted by the social stock of knowledge (which is their equivalent of Durkheim’s ‘Conscience Collective’). Meaning does not remain passive. As meaning guides action, it also becomes objectified in the world. As opposed to radical or psychological ‘constructivism’, objectivations are formed socially in interaction through institutionalization (which Berger and Luckmann

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conceptualize with reference to Arnold Gehlen’s theory; see Turner in this book). While institutions exert the ‘objective’ power of normativity, coercion and social control for those who were directly involved in their formation, they need an additional level of meaning for the generations to follow. This is what Berger and Luckmann call legitimation. Here, religion plays a key role as it symbolically legitimates the social order as a whole. However, other symbolic universes may take over this function as well. But where their ideas converged in the context of broader social theory, their views on religion soon diverged. We argue that Berger’s development was partially a reaction to Luckmann’s ideas on religion and, hence, it is necessary to sketch Luckmann’s approach to the sociology of religion first.

Luckmann’s Invisible Religion Luckmann’s theory of the Invisible Religion (1967) draws on an earlier book written in German (Luckmann 1963) though it differs from this in various ways. Most importantly, this later book builds on Schutz’s phenomenological analysis of meaning. It is this theory, which provided a background for Luckmann’s definition of religion, particularly his ideas on transcendence. Luckmann was so much devoted to Schutz’s theory that he later finished Schutz’s manuscript on the Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann 1984, 1989). Before we can turn to the role of phenomenology, we must mention, at least in passing, philosophical anthropology, which made great inroads into the theory of both Berger and Luckmann. Based on the comparative findings of various anthropological disciplines, philosophical anthropology tried to identify the general features of the human species, the conditio humana, and its differences from other life forms. Berger and Luckmann used basic insights of philosophical anthropology (particularly those of Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner) in their theory of institutions. Interestingly, anthropological influences can also be discerned in Luckmann’s definition of religion (but not so much in Berger’s). In the first versions of his Invisible Religion Luckmann defines religion as being based on transcendence (cf. Luckmann 1988; Schutz and Luckmann 1989). Transcendence, he claims, is not a separate realm

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opposed to the immanence of worldly actions. Rather, transcendence is what turns organisms into meaning-bestowing humans. It is that faculty, which enables humans to distance themselves from the actual processes performed by their organs, from instincts and mere behavioural learning. Transcendence means that the organism relates to something else which is not organic, such as future events or memories. It is only by way of this relation that human organisms are able to experience themselves as bodies.1 By integrating Schutz’s phenomenology into The Invisible Religion, Luckmann further elaborated his notion of transcendence. Transcendence here denotes the levels of what experiences refer to. Experiences are always experiences of something. That is, what is experienced is different from the experience itself. Even more, in many experiences, what we experience is not given (i.e. perceived, sensed, conceived of directly) but only indicated. Thus, we never see the backside of a book but still know almost automatically that it is there. It is this ‘appresentation’ of something that is here and absent simultaneously, which is the basis of transcendence in consciousness. On this basis, Schutz and Luckmann distinguish three such levels of transcendences. Temporal or spatial references can be understood as ‘small transcendences’. The ‘small transcendences’ of time and space mean that we do not only experience something at a specific moment but also add a temporal meaning of past experience or future expectations to it. Similarly and with regard to space, we automatically anticipate, for example, that things have backsides without seeing them. ‘Mediate transcendences’ refer to the inaccessible aspects of other subjects, such as their feelings and thoughts. Finally, ‘great transcendences’ are experiences referring to a reality not accessible in the everyday life in which we alter the common environment and communicate with others, such as the workings of spirits, gods or ‘world history’. Religion may be defined a great transcendence, yet Luckmann also assumed that mediate and even small transcendences can be religious.2 It is important to note that ‘transcendence’ is not synonymous with religion. Although Luckmann stresses that transcendence catches a basic layer of what religion means, religion sensu strictu is defined by the ‘world view’ (Weltansicht), which is expressed in a ‘cosmion’, the universe of meaning which appears to be independent, not only of one’s present experiences, but also of person, time and situation which are expressed in terms of legitimations.3

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While the concept of transcendence appears in different modes in Luckmann’s theory of religion, it is important to note that for Luckmann, transcendence is not dependent on historical forms of religion; it is rather a conditio humana. As a basic feature of all human beings, it is omnipresent to such a degree that Luckmann ends with one of the broadest definitions of religion, since – as some argue – in his view everything meaningful can be considered religious. Berger challenges this notion of religion for its lack of specificity (Berger [1967] 1969: 175–7; cf. Steets 2016b: 19).

From The Sacred Canopy to The Many Altars of Modernity Berger (2011: 97) himself refers to The Sacred Canopy as an application of the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon of religion in general and to the religious situation in modern societies in particular. As in his very early writings, the book is divided into two sections, in this case, however, into two strictly sociological sections, accompanied only by a short theological commentary in the appendix. Following the line of argument, co-developed with Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality, the first section analysis religion as a crucial factor in the construction and maintenance of the social world. Berger argues that religion has a legitimating function for the institutional order of a society as it provides a ‘sacred cosmos’, that is, a specific kind of symbolic universe, able to integrate all institutions of a society into one meaningful whole. While symbolic integration is a general feature of all legitimations (see Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1967: 80–5), the very function of a religious symbolic universe lies in the fact that religion can ‘powerfully reinforce the “reality” of institutions by anchoring them cosmologically’ (Berger 2011: 98). That is, although all institutions of a society are precarious and contingent in character (as we know from The Social Construction of Reality), religion makes believers ‘forget’ about that fact and the man-made social reality appears as a god-given necessity, a process Berger describes as ‘alienation’ (Berger [1967] 1969: 81–101). There is another aspect of the dialectic between institutional order and religion, which is important for the reality-maintaining task of the latter. Berger argues that both subjective and objective definitions of reality are based

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on ‘plausibility structures’ (Berger 1969 [1967]: 45–51). On the level of the individual, plausibility structures are social relations with ‘significant others’, in which people develop and maintain their world view as well as their identity. As Berger shows in an early article, co-authored with Hansfried Kellner on ‘Marriage and the Construction of Reality’ (Berger and Kellner 1964), it is through an ‘ongoing conversation’ with spouses, family members, friends and other ‘truly significant others’ that individuals constantly validate their world, including their identity and accordingly their social position within society. On the level of the social world, the concept of plausibility structures remains rather abstract in Berger’s writings and has only been elaborated later, for example by Nancy Ammerman (see Ammerman in this book). He refers to the term when he talks about the ‘social infrastructure’ of world views, including the cultural differentiation of a society and its stage of economic development. Plausibility structures – and this is what Berger was interested in empirically – can either provide cognitive validation of the world’s condition (for both, the individual and the society as a whole), or – let’s say in case it changes significantly – cause situations of crisis and doubt. In the second section of the Sacred Canopy, Berger diagnoses the decline of religion in society and in the consciousness of individuals. Here Berger again draws on the sociology of knowledge: as modernization leads, according to him, to a multiplicity of world views in society, it weakens the consensus about collective beliefs and values, and with this the plausibility structures of religious definitions of reality. Whereas religion was something taken for granted in premodern times, it now can no longer be regarded as a ‘sacred canopy’ that completely overarches a particular society. Rather, in modern times – to continue with the same metaphor – people stand under (larger or smaller) ‘umbrellas’ of symbolic worlds, which give their behaviour meaning. With reference to Luckmann, Berger (1969 [1967]: 127–53) speaks of ‘individualization’ and the ‘privatization’ of religion as an effect of modernity. Religious believers become a ‘cognitive minority’ (ibid.: 153). Following what he has called ‘methodological atheism’ (ibid.: 180), Berger’s arguments remain strictly within the cognitive framework of sociology: basically, religion is understood as a ‘secondary objectivation’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 110–46), that is a human projection, able to legitimate (and thereby stabilize and maintain) the institutional order of a society. However,

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Berger conceptualizes religion as a very specific ‘secondary objectivation’ as it is – and that makes it specific – able to root the institutional order cosmically. In order to form this argument, Berger has to differentiate between religious and other objectivations. He does this by filling the term positively as he understands religion as ‘the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established’ (Berger 1969 [1967]: 25). Put differently, it is exactly those objectivations that count as religion that individuals ascribe ‘a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man’ (ibid.: 25) (cf. Otto 2013 [1917]). Whereas Luckmann develops a much broader definition of religion, one can say that for Berger religion only starts with the projection of a social order (nomos) into a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. In the appendix of Sacred Canopy, Berger adds a short theological commentary to his sociological analysis, which can be understood as a reading aid for theologians. He, again, emphasizes that his ‘methodological atheism’ must not be confused with ‘atheism’ as such. Reflecting on what a theologian can learn from sociology, he suggests a ‘liberal’ position that takes seriously the historicity of religion as well as its character as a human projection. This, of course, will initially lead to an epistemological relativism against which – in a second step – a modern theologian may be able to speak of ‘discoveries’, that is, of discoveries of the real (or the true) within the set of projections. To use Berger’s own words: ‘And only after he [the theologian] has really grasped what it means to say that religion is a human product or projection can he begin to search, within this array of projections, for what may turn out to be signals of transcendence’ (Berger 1969 [1967]: 185, original emphasis). Two years later, Berger himself, now under the hat of the theologian, started this search for signals of transcendence in the empirical modern society – and called it A Rumor of Angels (Berger 1970[1969]). We think it is fair to say that Berger’s dramatic recantation of secularization theory in the introduction to the edited book The Desecularization of the World (Berger 1999) is an expression of his intellectual integrity. His reorientation was the result of a long process of thinking, inspired by a number of crosscultural empirical case studies on religious movements and their interplay with economic and political developments, undertaken at Boston University’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture (ISEC), the later Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA), founded in 1985 and directed by

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Berger until 2007. While the above-mentioned book mainly became famous for its combination of editor (Peter Berger) and title (desecularization), in the years to come, Berger focused on developing sociological explanations for the empirical findings that led him to the conviction that the world is ‘as furiously religious as it ever was’ (Berger 1999: 2). His last book, The Many Altars of Modernity (Berger 2014) can be read as a summary of these reflections and, again, as a knowledge-sociological foundation of his analysis of religion in the modern world. Unlike in The Sacred Canopy, Berger now assumes that modernity does not necessarily lead to secularization, but rather to pluralization. He actually speaks of ‘two pluralisms’ by which he means a double competitive relationship between divergent understandings of the world: between, first, differing religious world views and value systems (inter-religious pluralism) and, secondly, between religious and secular bodies of knowledge (which he interprets as a characteristic of modernity). These two pluralisms manifest themselves – and here he is very much in line with his early social theory – at the level of the individual mind (subjective reality) and at the level of society (objective reality). Both levels are integrated through core mechanisms derived from the sociology of knowledge. A key focus is again on plausibility structures (Berger 2014: 31). Whereas in Sacred Canopy Berger assumed that with ongoing processes of secularization believers would in the long run become an ever-shrinking ‘cognitive minority’ which makes it more difficult for the individual believer to stick with his or her religious world views, he now argues that an increase in doubt, induced by a pluralist modernity, does not necessarily mean the end of religious believing. It rather calls for a different or, as Berger names it, a modern form of believing, based on the ‘heretical imperative’ (cf. Berger 1979), that is, the necessity to make a decision – either for or against God. On the level of society Berger is most interested in the political management of the two pluralisms and the conditions under which a peaceful co-existence of different religious as well as religious and secular world views in one society can be formed. He calls these institutional arrangements, involving the relationship between state and religion, ‘formulas of peace’ (Berger 2014: 80–93). To sum up: although Berger’s stance on secularization changed dramatically (basically from a necessity to one of many paths), his definition of religion is still

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the same as in The Sacred Canopy. In his own words: ‘I think we can continue to use something close to the commonsensical understanding of religion – a belief that there is a reality beyond the reality of ordinary experience, and that this reality is of great significance for human life’ (Berger 2014: 17).

The dialectics of Berger and Luckmann Taking into account their smooth cooperation before, it is striking to see that Berger and Luckmann’s sociological takes on religion moved into quite contradictory directions. What is more, this divergence seems to sharpen dialectically as the two positions formed through a mutual friction with the other viewpoint. The relationship can be characterized as dialectical, less in a Hegelian, but more in a Platonian sense of contradictory positions in discussion. However, it is also dialectical in the way that these contradictions affected the prior positions of the authors quite radically. In what follows, we will briefly sketch four topics of contradiction: the definition of religion, secularization, the idea of transcendence and the methodology of religion.

On the definition of religion In 1974, Berger published an article entitled ‘Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion’ (Berger 1974), in which he clearly differentiates between his understanding (i.e. substantive) and Luckmann’s (i.e. functional) understanding of religion. The article can be read as picking up a discussion started in the Appendix I of Sacred Canopy, where Berger briefly sketches out different sociological definitions of religion. The tone of the ‘Second Thoughts’ article, however, is much more strident: Berger not only questions the scientific use of functionalist definitions, which – according to him – lose sight of the very phenomenon of religion. Moreover, he also accuses the functional position of subscribing to the zeitgeist and serving ideological uses as it supports those, who welcome a decline of (traditional forms of) religion. Against this functional understanding, Berger campaigns for a substantive definition, which is based on a specific kind of experience, namely the experience of the ‘numinous’ (Otto 2013 [1917]), of a supernatural,

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awe-inspiring power. That is, while Berger’s take on religion is not necessarily limited to its traditional forms it certainly excludes ‘such meaning-complexes as nationalism, or revolutionary faiths, or the mobility ethos, or any number of new ‘life-styles’ with their appropriate cognitive and normative legitimations’ (Berger 1974: 128). Luckmann, however, maintained his functional definition of religion as anything that allows humans to cope with the transcendence of experiences. The task of coping therewith can be taken over by religious institutions, but it may also be taken over by other kinds of institutions. And even in his late writings he maintained that coping with any of the three levels of transcendence can be considered religious, such as the cult of the bodily ‘small transcendences’ having emerged in the last decades (Luckmann 1990a), of which various forms of spirituality, meditation, yoga, etc. would be examples.

On secularization As we have shown above, Berger went through quite an ‘alternation’ concerning his attitude towards secularization. Interestingly, Luckmann was one of the very few sociologists who had contradicted the secularization thesis long before Berger’s own reversal. Already in 1969, that is shortly after both their books on religion had been published, Luckmann wrote an article entitled (in English) ‘The Myth of Secularization’ (Luckmann 1969).4 In this text, Luckmann concedes that churches and other religious institutions indeed lose their dominant position in legitimating the social order of Western societies. However, while by virtue of these processes institutionalized religion becomes only one (increasingly independent) institution among others (such as the economy, politics, science, art etc.), religious institutions decreasingly define individual religiosity. Luckmann calls this phenomenon the ‘privatization of religion’. This means that religion becomes increasingly ‘invisible’: it is less a specialized belief system carried by experts than a world view fabricated by the individuals themselves. However, this does not mean that ‘privatized’ religion is not ‘public’, as Casanova (1994) argued against Luckmann. Instead, Luckmann himself stresses that ‘invisible religion’ is increasingly communicated in the new forms of mass-mediated communication, that is, it is adapting to the requirements

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of the ‘religious market’ (Luckmann 1990a). In line with Berger, Luckmann emphasizes the relevance of competition on the ‘religious market’; beyond that, however, his wide notion of religion allows for the analysis of late modern and postmodern forms of religion and religious movements focusing on psychology, spirituality and the body. Moreover, Luckmann’s theory allows addressing the transformation of popular religion by the new media (Knoblauch 2014a,b). With Luckmann’s definition of religion, it does not make sense to speak of a general decline of religion in the modern world, but rather of changing forms of religiosity – a conclusion that the early Berger (who must have known Luckmann’s article) could hardly follow.

On transcendence Berger’s substantive definition of religion is first and foremost phenomenological, assuming that human consciousness demands a kind of orientation specific to religion. In this sense, he follows Schutz’s adaptation of William James’s ‘sub-universes’ as ‘finite provinces of meaning’. Thus, in Berger’s reading, religion is not just a socially constructed symbolic universe (as argued in The Social Construction of Reality), but also a finite province of meaning in human consciousness, as is music, literature, science or play (Schutz 1945). The religious finite province of meaning is characterized (and so to say ‘filled’ substantively) by Berger using the phenomenology of Rudolf Otto who describes the subworld of religious experience as one marked by a ‘totally other’ reality (totaliter aliter). According to Otto, this totally other reality is at the same time a most fascinating and a most terrifying one. For Berger, the more or less direct encounter with this other reality (be it in a mystic ecstasy or in everyday encounters with ‘signals of transcendence’) is at the very heart of any religious experiences. Conceptually, one may summarize, Berger married Schutz with Otto in order to define religion. This substantialist reading of Schutz, again, contradicts Luckmann’s interpretation of Schutz that becomes most explicit in The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann 1984, 1989), a work Luckmann finished after Schutz’s death on the basis of the latter’s notes. Here, Luckmann moved towards a phenomenological notion of transcendence. In a way, this idea of transcendence is the opposite of substantial as it refers to those aspects

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of experiences which are manifestly absent or, to use a notion of Husserl, ‘appresent’ (Husserl 1973[1939]). Appresentation means, in short, that consciousness produces an association with something that is not given to actual experience. It may be one of the results of the implicit debate with Berger that Luckmann later refined his theory of transcendence, building on (but not identical with) the ideas proposed by Schutz in the Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann 1989): hence, one can consider Luckmann’s differentiation between ‘small’, ‘mediate’ and ‘great transcendences’ of experiences, not as a denial of the anthropological notion of religion, but certainly as a minimal ‘rapprochement’ to its substantivist defintion – as it does not reduce transcendence to a mere relation, but implies certain qualities.

On the methodology of the sociology of religion We can discern a similarly divergent development with respect to the methodology of the sociology of religion. Berger’s early position was characterized by his ‘methodological atheism’ (Berger 1969 [1967]: 100; 180). That is, the sociological study of religion must be limited to what is empirically available: that is the actions, experiences and beliefs of people. At the same time, sociology has to abstain from any ontological statements about the existence of the objects of religious belief systems, experiences and actions. Berger’s methodological atheism follows the path of Weber’s famous methodological suggestion of a ‘value-free’ social science (Weber 2003 [1923]). In its specific Bergerian way, it resembles even more one of Husserl’s central steps in ‘phenomenological reduction’: to ‘bracket’ the intentional objects of our experiences in order to study the process of experiencing (which, Husserl believed, is performed solely by consciousness, cf. Husserl 1973 [1939]). Although the label ‘atheism’ appeared inadequate to Luckmann, he definitely shared the view that the sociological study of religion should differ in a radical way from theology, not only because of their specific theoretical problems, but also methodologically. Following the paths of Social Construction, Luckmann considered theology as a subject matter to the sociology of religion as sociology of knowledge, that is, as a social institution representing expert’s world views. As a fond pupil of Karl Löwith at the New School (who influenced Berger

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much less), he did not only consider religion but also science as one world view among others – a perspective that anticipated the social studies of science by decades. Berger’s position is a different one. As Pfadenhauer (2013: 47) states: ‘As a sociologist, Berger deals with religion; as a lay theologian he deals with current problems of churches; and as a confessed Christian he asks himself whether modern man can still believe.’ That is not to say that Berger propagated a ‘cryptotheological’ sociology, that is religion in the disguise of sociology. As we have seen above, he clearly distinguished between social analysis, theological commentary and his personal convictions as a devoted Lutheran. However, as he kept balancing his intellectual activity between these three compartments of his life-world, ‘jumping’ from one to the other with – no question – unique brilliance, he always took something with him. Put differently: his interest in sociological theory (especially the sociology of knowledge) was not just incidentally inspired by his struggle with theological questions. Vice versa, his theological reflections were very much grounded in insights from social analysis. Interestingly, what remained constant in all three different provinces of meaning (sociology, theology, being a Christian) was his substantive concept of religion as something that is centred on the very specific experience of a supernatural power.

Conclusion Noting the divergent paths that Berger and Luckmann took in their approaches to religion after The Social Construction of Reality, we have argued that both authors developed their respective position in a dialectical interplay. By ‘dialectic’, we refer to the classic sense of the word, that is, to a discourse between two divergent positions forming each other mutually over time. As we have shown, there are basically four areas of conflict: (1) While Berger defines religion substantively, based on the experience of the ‘numinous’, Luckmann follows a much broader functional definition, allowing for anything that helps humans to cope with the experience of small, mediate and great transcendences. (2) Moreover, both authors draw different conclusions about the role of religion in modern societies. While Berger saw modernization at

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first intertwined with an overall decline of religion and later with an increasing pluralization of world views (causing a variety of effects), Luckmann argues from the beginning that religious forms and practices keep transforming throughout history without ever disappearing. (3) Both, their definitions of religion as well as their views of secularization can be traced back to different interpretations of Schutz’s phenomenology. Berger focuses on Schutz’s concept of ‘finite provinces of meaning’, that is, of the experience of a ‘totally other’ reality as the realm of religion, whereas Luckmann works with all three levels of transcendence as sources of religion. (4) And, finally, there are different positions on the methodology of the social study of religion: while for Luckmann theology and its connected world of experts is a mere object of study, Berger in his books keeps jumping between the different realms of sociology, theology and his private life as a Christian. As Berger pursued related ideas in all these three areas, it may be that it was this ‘compartmentalization’ in different provinces of meaning which was at the origin of his irony: as a religious practitioner, he always knew better theologically what to believe; as a theologian, he always looked at a distance to himself as a sociologist, who again was facing him in the two other roles. This biographical situation may have been the reason for his theoretical fascination with a novel in which the relationship between the sense of reality and the sense of possibility is a key topic, namely with Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities (cf. Berger 1970): as he lived by bridging the gaps between these provinces of meaning, he was, however, in practice rather a man with many qualities.

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Secularization: From Sacred Canopies to Golf Umbrellas Steve Bruce

In his intellectual biography, Peter Berger tells of being lauded at an official ceremony in China as ‘the author of the Sacred Canopy and thus as one of the greatest proponents of the secularization theory’ (2011: 99). Had that occurred in 1968, it would have been accurate. But the event occurred forty years later and by then Berger had famously recanted. I will explain Berger’s original conclusion, note the grounds for his subsequent change of mind, consider what Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality teaches us about the grounds for belief, and argue that the changes in the religious climate of the West postrecantation show Berger’s change of mind to have been quite unnecessary.

Secularization in The Sacred Canopy The Sacred Canopy is a work of two distinct and analytically separable halves. In the first, Berger offers a theory of religion, in the sense of an explanation of the origin or continuation of religion. Although Berger was never a postmodern relativist who reduced social realities to insubstantial fantasies, the phrase ‘social construction of reality’, which he and Thomas Luckmann did much to popularize, pointed to an essential difference between the worlds inhabited by most non-human animals and by humans (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Exactly how many animal species other than the human possess what degree and sort of consciousness is a fascinating question but it need not concern us here: we do not need to posit an absolute distinction to appreciate that much non-human animal behaviour results from the interaction of a framework

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of detailed biologically given instincts with environments which can be little altered. In contrast, human instincts are at best only weak guides to action: ‘the will to live’ can be trumped by suicide and the instinct to reproduce can be overruled by a conscious decision to remain childless. In place of instincts that manage individual desires and coordinate joint action, humans construct cultures. Social institutions allow the possibility of contentment and provide a framework for mutual intelligibility and interaction. Precisely because such institutions are in principle changeable (and do actually change), it is common for them to be bolstered and reinforced by being given divine origins and approval: ‘There exists an important relationship between [legitimation and religion]. It can be described simply by saying that religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation’ (1967: 32). Religion legitimates social institutions ‘by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference’ (1967: 33). Religion also performs the function of making otherwise inexplicable features of our world intelligible and thus bearable. In particular, it provides theodicies: explanations of, and justifications for, human suffering. The second half of the book is concerned with secularization. In brief, the modern context of religious pluralism relativizes any body of religious beliefs by preventing them from becoming ‘taken for granted’ and thus making believers aware that they are a cognitive minority. This does not necessarily prevent belief but, unless the believers can isolate themselves so that, within their sub-society, their beliefs are hegemonic and authoritative, there will be a strong tendency towards either or both of (a) the faith being liberalized and (b) the faith being confined to a compartment of the lifeworld. In the first case, the apparent clash of competing ideas is resolved by them being made ever vaguer so that at some high level of abstraction they can be viewed as variants on a common theme (as in ‘there are many ways to God’). In the second case, the reach of religion is reduced to the private and domestic spheres: what in religiously homogenous societies can be regarded as compulsory and central must, if conflict is to be avoided, become voluntary and peripheral. Either strategy invites religious indifference. In the first case, we lose interest because the lack of specific requirements makes it easy to think ‘so what?’. In the second, the absence of social pressure to conform allows us to pursue our own interests. In the modern situation of various subpopulations having different

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interests that leads inevitably to even further diversity. The end result is a world in which most people care little for any religion. Note that the expected ‘secular’ in the secularization thesis is not, as caricatures assert, widespread self-conscious atheism; it is the severe attenuation of the social significance of religion. Most of us do not care and even religious people are rarely much so. A well-evidenced concrete example of the effects of religious pluralism can be found in the consequences of mixed marriages for the successful transmission of religion across generations. Over the twentieth century in the West some religion couples had only a 50 per cent chance of successfully passing their faith to their children. For mixed-religion families (even when the mix is as slight as Protestant–Catholic or Methodist–Anglican) the odds were halved again (Voas 2003).1 There is little mystery about why this should be the case. It is very hard to socialize children into serious commitment to a particular religion when their parents demonstrate that faith is optional and when neither can claim that his or her faith is markedly more virtuous than any other without undermining the children’s trust in the other parent. Of course, the debilitating effects of pluralism are far more of a problem for the dogmatic monotheism of Christianity (or Judaism and Islam) than for the ‘theological nonchalance’ of Eastern religious cultures. The Japanese, for example, comfortably make offerings at Buddhist, Shinto and Daoist shrines without feeling any great need to reconcile the competing beliefs of these three systems. But then it is precisely the changes in the religious culture of the formerly Christian Western world that the secularization thesis is trying to explain so this limitation is not a problem for my concerns here.

Berger’s recantation Berger explains his change of mind as follows: I later realised that I had been quite right that modernity produces pluralism, but pluralism does not necessarily produce secularity. What it does produce, pretty much necessarily, is a situation in which no world view is any longer taken-for-granted so that individuals have to choose among the different world views on offer. But some of those choices may well be religious – and, in fact, in most of the contemporary world they are. (2011: 99)

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No one will disagree with the possibility that some choices may well be religious. What is at issue is the likelihood of that. And here Berger makes two mistakes.

The wrong remit The most curious error is his forgetting the remit of the secularization thesis. As I have argued at length elsewhere (Bruce 2011), it was never intended by modern sociologists (Auguste Comte is another matter) as a prediction of the future of religion in non-modern, underdeveloped, developing, Third World or Global South societies; as is obvious from the causes it posits, the secularization thesis is an attempt to explain the recent past of Western industrial societies. For the social scientist, modernity is not defined by chronology but by specific technological, economic, political and social changes. That religion is as powerful and popular as ever it was in non-modern societies is neither here nor there. The first reaction of most societies to the presence of religious innovations (which may arise from invention, from migration, or from the expansion of a people’s territory) is not the shift to liberalism and compartmentalization described above: it is to expel, kill, forcibly convert or ghettoize the nonconformists. That is the case in Afghanistan today; it was the case in premodern Europe. Diversity only delegitimates religion when it occurs in democracies or in societies where (a precursor of political democracy) it is supposed that all people are in some sense much-of-a-muchness. There are many causes of that foundational egalitarianism but modernity gives it an important boost by increasing the complexity, diversity and narrowness of social roles. In small-scale and only slowly changing societies, where people frequently interact with their fellows on the basis of only a few roles (e.g. farmer, father, husband), the self is closely bound with those roles. When people interact with large numbers of other in a wide variety of tightly constrained social roles – especially when those interactions are based on narrow and time-limited contracts rather than on enduring and reciprocal obligations – it becomes possible to separate the ‘real me’ from the parts we play. That, in turn, makes it possible to reconcile great disparities of power and wealth with a degree of egalitarianism: I recognize my boss’s right to manage my work life but permit him no say in my private life and he does not own my body or soul. Because

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some egalitarianism can be permitted without the social order collapsing the ruling elites find it easier to accept (albeit slowly, grudgingly and piecemeal) the extension of basic human rights. In this explanation, the shift from using coercion to restore a religious monoculture to an acceptance of diversity (with the subsequent secularizing consequences) requires both diversity and a number of particular social, economic and political conditions. In brief, diversity only secularizes in particular circumstances that were found in the West in the early modern period and are still absent from many other places.2 There are other reasons why the rest of the world cannot be expected to simply follow the example of the West (Bruce 2011). The primary one is that secularity now exists. When the West secularized it was pursuing a novel course. Largely secular societies and their operating principles are now extant and loom large. For good or ill, the rest of the world has to respond to that. The society that Kemal Atatürk created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire self-consciously imitated the West; the Iranian Revolution of 1979 equally selfconsciously rejected it. There are many possible combinations of emulation and rejection (and often social classes and regional sub-populations attempt to build their own positions between those extremes) but once the modern West existed, other societies could not simply change in the same way. The above is a long way of saying that the continued importance of religion in Afghanistan or Azerbaijan is not of itself much help in judging the delegitimating effects of religious diversity in the modern world (or the secularization thesis in general). Much more relevant is Berger’s other reason for his recantation.

Misreading the portents Berger was wrong to believe that religion was not declining much in the West. He offers different examples of the resilience of religion in different publications but his list includes the enduring religiosity of the United States (one of the most technologically advanced and affluent societies), signs of Christian resurgence in European societies and the growth of contemporary or New Age spirituality. None of these cases is compelling. For reasons too complicated to explain here (but the importance of immigration, both as a source of above-averagely religious people and as a

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stimulus to a religious nativist reaction, is one and the freedom of Americans to form effective sub-societies is another), the United States was late to secularize but as the evidence Voas and Chaves present makes clear ‘American religiosity has been declining for decades’ (2016: 1517). According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014, 23 per cent of Americans did not identify with a religion, a finding confirmed by the 2014 General Social Survey (Hout and Smith 2015). Furthermore, trends within conservative Protestantism have seen once stolid, doctrinaire and dogmatic sectarianism replaced by a more individualistic and therapeutic ethos (Shibley 1998). Behavioural distinctiveness has been reduced – for example, self-defining fundamentalists are now as likely as other Americans to divorce – and such changes make positive social interaction with liberals and unbelievers more likely. Some commentators have been distracted by the political clout of the Christian Right: far from representing any growth in the popularity or power of Christianity, it represents conservative Christianity’s loss of social influence. People do not protest when they are winning or when their domination is unchallenged. But even within conservative Republican politics, the reverends have been losing influence. Republicans may feel obliged to pay lip service to anti-abortion and anti-gay positions (though an embarrassing number turn out to themselves be gay or to have requested their mistresses have abortions) but secular nativism, racism, sexism and gun-worship now seem to exert more pressure than the Jesus lobby on the GOP. The claims for religious revival in Europe proved to be wishful thinking. Although there have been innovations (e.g. the rise of the UK charismatic movement), these turn out to be shifts of preference within a steadily declining market. Far from attracting the ungodly, such innovations recruited from the already-churched and in many cases represented a halfway house from conservative Protestantism to religious indifference. Taken overall, all measures of religious interest in all Western European societies show continued decline (Bruce 2016). It is worth adding that the decline rates have, for naturally occurring phenomena, been remarkably regular. Insufficient credit has been given to the extensive work of David Voas that shows that indices such as church membership and attendance have been declining at a rate very close to a half-life: each generation is only half as religious as the one before it (Voas 2003; Voas and Chaves 2016). More than that, although the date

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at which measures of religious interest start to show decline varies between societies, the subsequent decline lines are similar in slope and near-identical in showing no significant reversal. Those observations provide the warrant for a sociological explanation because they are incompatible with local or specific explanations of secularization. Whatever is causing the change, it is something widespread, general, and to-date-beyond-amelioration by the best efforts of religious organizations that have spent well over a century trying to reverse the trend. Just as the US Christian Right has distracted attention from the decline of American religiosity, so recent conflict over Islam in Europe has misled those who mistake controversy for popularity. Whether what is at issue is jihadi violence or the more mundane wish of Muslims to change Western social institutions and patterns of behaviour to better suit their religiously inspired preferences, the publics of such countries as Britain, Holland and France have not showed their hostility to Islam by returning to the Christian churches; rather they have concluded that all religion when taken too seriously is a bad thing. Religious conflict in religious societies (e.g. Victorian Scotland) may well stimulate religious interest and produce an increase in formal affiliation as people feel obliged to take sides; that case could be made for the 1843 ‘Disruption’ that saw one-third of the Church of Scotland leave to form the Free Church and then spend three decades fundraising to build new churches, manses and schools. But in a largely secular society, that has no knowledge of religion, a tiny religious minority insisting on the right either to change social arrangements or to withdraw from them is seen as proof that religion is more trouble than it is worth (Bruce 2016). Awkward religion does not provoke a religious reaction in a largely secular society because a coherent secular critique is readily available. Furthermore, those offended by the desire for gender segregation or the homophobia displayed by many Muslims and West African Pentecostalists are hardly likely to respond by joining Christian churches which have themselves, until very recently, espoused the same conservative mores. The hopes of a nativist Christian revival in the West are further damned by the growing association of religiosity and the alien. Because immigrants to Western European countries (Catholic Poles, Pentecostal West Africans, Muslim Pakistanis and Turks) are generally more religious than the settled population, it is easy for Westerners to suppose that religion is what

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foreigners do. In sum, not only is conflict over religion not the same as religion becoming more popular; it is likely the former prevents the latter. The hopes of religious revival in the former communist states of Europe have also been disappointed. The former hegemonic churches have regained their buildings and the bones of their saintly dead but the living have not returned. Some national churches, have institutionally profited from the rhetoric of resurgent nationalism: Russian politicians now show their respect for the Orthodox Church, and Polish and Hungarian conservatives use the Christian heritage of their countries as justification for refusing to admit Muslim refugees. But contrary to many expectations (mine included) the initially institutional secularity imposed by fifty years of communism seems to have created real secularization: there has been no religious revival. Where, as in Poland, organized religion had acquired additional popularity by forming an unofficial opposition to communism, the end of the Soviet Union was followed, not by any great resurgence of religious sentiment, but by growing hostility to religion. What had once been seen as the guarantor of national identity against an alien oppressor came to be seen as just one interest group among others. In a repeat of what happened in the Republic of Ireland, the goodwill that the Catholic Church had gained from its cautious opposition to communism has been replaced, especially among the young, by dislike for its social conservatism. Berger’s third example of supposed religious resilience or revival – contemporary or New Age spirituality – has proved to be a damp squib. It is true that Eastern religious themes and interests – yoga, meditation, karma and reincarnation – have proved superficially popular (or at least they have taken a large bite out of the formerly hegemonic Christian alternatives) but serious social research shows that less than 2 per cent of the UK’s population is in any sense involved in holistic spirituality and half of them are so involved for secular purposes (Heelas and Woodhead 2004; Bruce 2017). At least half of the very small proportion of the population that engages in yoga or meditation does so for self-consciously secular purposes: they seek physical and psychological well-being, not spiritual development and enlightenment. We should pause and consider the import of the numbers. Heelas and Woodhead call their book The Spiritual Revolution while reporting that less than 2 per cent show any evidence of that revolution. Had they said 98 per cent of the population show

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no interest in holistic spirituality it would be obvious that such new expressions of religious interest fall not just percentages but orders of magnitude short of what would be required to refute secularization. Furthermore, detailed study shows that the most successful Eastern imports have been the most secular and those that have survived for more than a few years have done so by becoming more, not less, secular. Having failed to recruit well as a late 1960s world-rejecting new religious movement, Transcendental Meditation took to denying it was a religion and marketed its TM technique as a scientifically validated, this-worldly, health-improving secular therapy and Buddhism now markets itself as secular mindfulness (Bruce 2017). This may seem like flogging a dead horse, but it is important to appreciate not only the extent of decline of religiosity in the West but also the length of the time period during which it has proceeded unreversed. Dating the decline obviously depends on exactly which indices of religious interest we choose for comparison but, given that all Christian bodies either require or very strongly recommend that the faithful gather together to educate themselves, to encourage each other and to worship God, church attendance seems a reasonable index and in the UK it has been declining steadily since at least 1851.3 That is a trend enduring over 166 years. To put it simply, religion in the West was once plausible, popular and powerful; it is now eccentric, unpopular and impotent. All in all, there is no reason to change the assessment Bryan Wilson presented fifty years ago in his Religion in Secular Society (Wilson 2016) and nothing in the evidence to require Berger to change his mind.

The importance of authority and numbers That secularization shows no sign of being arrested or reversed is my primary reason for thinking Berger was right the first time. My theoretical difficulty is that Berger’s recantation cannot be easily reconciled with the view of the relationship between people and social institutions outlined in The Social Construction of Reality. It is not enough to suggest, as he did in his recantation, that people may choose to be religious. Every part of his theoretical sociology rejects the lay notion that individuals can simply choose to believe one thing

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rather than another. Culture is social. The self is social. It is worth quoting at length from the summary Berger presented in The Sacred Canopy: The fundamental dialectic process of society consists of three moments, or steps. These are externalization, objectivation, and internalization.  ... Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and mental activity of men. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity ... of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation by men of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness. (1967: 4)

In each of those three ‘moments’, consensus is central. The externalization must be a joint activity. As Berger says, ‘The world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise. ... Men together shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on’ (1967: 7). Indeed. A private language is pointless and an institution devised, carried and promoted by just a handful of people is a hobby, not a social institution. Of course, there are sources of social influence other than the weight of numbers. Language, for example, may change with popular usage: in English, for example, the impersonal third person ‘one’ is now rare and seems pedantic and snobbish. Most English speakers have given it up in favour of the seemingly more egalitarian ‘you’. But language can also be altered by particular individuals (e.g. a popular television character) or by state-backed official agencies. Nonetheless, Berger’s assertion of the importance of the collective and consensual seems right. Certainly popular language usually defies the best efforts of official language guardians (witness official French frustration at the intrusion of Anglicisms). If we take seriously the collective nature of human cultures and social institutions, we can consider where religion would lie on an axis describing the extent to which any particular sort of social construction requires consensus. Even the most extreme social constructivists (whom Berger sensibly repudiates) would have to accept the obdurate reality of the material world (or suffer the consequences). Gravity is not a collective fantasy that can be imagined away. At the other end of the axis we would place cultural preferences. Depending on one’s social class and aspirations, liking opera in Vienna, Truffaut films

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in Paris, and pedal steel guitars in Nashville may seem de rigueur, but we can easily reject classical music or arthouse cinema or country-and-western music. Religion has an unusual character in this respect: it claims to express material realities. Just as gravity is a fact, so for the Christian believer there is a God, Jesus Christ is his Son, the Bible is his revealed Holy Word, and we must worship God or suffer the consequences. And yet the truth of any religion is truly knowable only after death. In this life, it must be taken on faith. It is because religion makes unusually large claims while offering unusually little opportunity for pragmatic testing and thus being unusually malleable that it is unusually dependent on consensus. Consensus is clearly essential for taken-for-grantedness. It is equally important for repairs to ruptures in that state. What any number of detailed comparisons show is that minority world views are best maintained when the physical environment and the social structure allow people to monitor each other and coerce conformity. This is why the Gaelic-speaking and remote Hebridean island of Lewis is the most religious part of Scotland and the Welshspeaking and remote north-western parishes are the most religious parts of Wales. Community coercion is even more important for religious innovations. One very good reason that contemporary or holistic spirituality is relatively undemanding and causes few people involved to make any great change to their lives is that sacrifice by one’s self is difficult. Left to our own devices, most of us take the easy road, which is why all those gym memberships enthusiastically purchased at New Year have lapsed by Easter. People who wish to make dramatic changes find it easier in group formats such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Weightwatchers because the audience can both support them in their best efforts and shame them in their lapses. The individualistic nature of modern spirituality (and the same applies to liberal Christianity) means that there is no authoritative position from which any individual can be judged to be failing to come up to snuff. One of the most important features of the sociological, as distinct from the popular, explanation of secularization is that it concentrates on subtle background changes rather than on the apparent clash between religious beliefs and scientific discoveries. That is one way of describing Berger’s general contribution. He asks us to consider what features of the social environment

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make any beliefs more or less plausible. He also leads us to appreciate that gradual disaffiliation and growing indifference are more common than abrupt conversion from a religious to a self-consciously secular world view. One important consideration in that growing indifference is an inability to act with any useful effect. We can think of the marginalization of religion in those terms. The technology produced by science gives us better solutions to many of life’s problems than does religion. Farmers gradually replaced prayer, holy water and religious rituals with chemical weedkillers, antibiotics and anti-worm drenches, not because the former was exposed as being based on false ontology but because the latter worked better. Until the second half of the twentieth century, clergy (especially in rural areas and poor towns) often dispensed medical advice. John Wesley actually wrote a medical textbook. As scientific medicine produced better cures so the religious remedies became less popular. It is not a matter of the secular forcing the religious to the margins but people gradually having less and less recourse to religion as better alternatives were developed. And if people do not do things with beliefs, those beliefs will fade. There is a very clear example of this in Britain in the eighteenth century. Thomas Pennant, in his travelogue A Tour of Scotland in 1769 (2000: 68) says: In this part of the country the notion of witchcraft is quite lost: it was observed to cease almost immediately on the repeal of the Witch Act: a proof of what a dangerous instrument it is in the hands of the vindictive or the credulous.

Precisely so. As is still sadly the case in rural Pakistan with the charge of blasphemy, people of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries used the accusation of witchcraft as a way of harming those they disliked. Clearly, many of the accusations were cynical and the fact that so few accusations were actually pursued by the courts shows that many sheriffs, magistrates and judges saw them as such. But irrespective of whether they believed that this or that accused person was actually a witch, there is no doubt that many people did seriously believe in witchcraft. And one may suppose they went to their graves still believing in it. But once the state had ended the possibility of doing anything useful with the accusations, they ended. And subsequent generations lost interest. Now belief in witchcraft is rare, even among conservative Christians. In the 1990s the UK saw a number of claims for Satanic child abuse but most of those who claimed to know of examples

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usually supposed the abusers were only pretending to be able to harness the power of the Devil. Diversity is usually discussed in terms of the need to be civil. If the state respects all people as being in some foundational sense of equal worth, then it stops coercing conformity to one particular religion. Believers learn to bite their tongues in the presence of dissenters. Uncertainty about the religious preferences of those with whom we interact creates that reticence enshrined in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century principle that the two things one does not talk about in public are money and religion. But diversity also reinforces the marginalization of religion because there is far more consensus and authority around secular beliefs and remedies. That is, diversity subtly impacts on judgements of alternatives. Of course, doctors differ but conventional science and medicine are based on a vast consensus and a great deal of shared confirming knowledge. Compare that to the vast and bewildering array of alternatives to be found in the world of alternative science and medicine. Where one could find officials of thirty different churches offering different religious remedies, doctors appeared to speak with a single voice. To summarize: if we accept the case made by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality for the importance of consensus, it becomes difficult to see how any religion can remain powerful and persuasive in a situation of religious pluralism.

From sacred canopy to golf umbrellas Provided they are willing to incur the often high costs of separating themselves from the mainstream, it is always possible for cognitive minorities to sustain their world view by creating sub-societies to maintain subcultures. Provided interaction with unbelievers can be kept to the bare minimum and the ambient culture kept at bay by rejecting radios, televisions and the internet, it is possible for bodies such as the Old Order Amish to keep a majority of their children within the fold and to maintain a world in which their religious precepts are still taken for granted. There is a variant on that. As I have argued in my explanation of the survival of conservative Protestantism in the United States, if the circumstances permit,

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people can pick their way through the social world in ways that sustain much of the supportive environment of the ghetto without undue physical separation and isolation (Bruce 2011: 157–76). It is often said that the contemporary internet is an important part of the increasing incivility of modern American politics: it allows people to receive information only or primarily from others who share their views (Stephens-Davidowitz 2017: 141–5). It thus insulates people from the positive interaction with others who differ from them. So the single society-wide sacred canopy is replaced by a large number of smaller canopies: golf umbrellas perhaps. However, there is a limit to the insulation such self-selection provides. The United States is unusual in the extent to which its political structure and system of public administration permit sub-society formation. It is possible for a young fundamentalist to attend an independent Christian school and proceed all the way to professional postgraduate qualifications without every being taught by anyone who is not a fundamentalist. Very few European societies permit such cultural isolation. Conservative Presbyterianism may still be strong on the Hebridean island of Lewis (where church attendance is probably still double the Scottish average) but Lewis does not have a university. Indeed there is no religious university in the UK. And to follow the example of the very few members of the Exclusive Brethren (and this explains why they are very few) and reject all formal institutional involvement with unbelievers means sacrificing very many opportunities for rewarding professional work. The price of isolation is too high for most people. One final thought on consensus. As well as its primary purpose of mediating God (or Gods) and humanity, religion serves a variety of mundane social functions and successfully so doing in part explains its popularity. Ascetic religions which promise that the meek shall inherit the earth may make the meek feel better about their privations. A millennialist religion which promises destruction and chaos may appeal to the dispossessed who wish, but are unable, to revolt. A socially conservative ‘church’ type of religion that aims to persuade the peasantry and the urban poor that their unfortunate lot is divinely ordained may appeal to those who feel threatened by the said peasantry and urban poor. A familiar faith may allow immigrants to feel more at home in their new world and provide resources which ease the transitions. A shared faith may allow one group of people to feel superior to another with

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whom it wars and thus legitimate conflict. While some therapeutic benefits may be enjoyed severally rather than jointly, most of the secondary functions of religion are necessarily social. Golf umbrella religions will have fewer and less attractive secondary functions than those which function as sacred canopies.

Conclusion To conclude on a personal note: it is never comfortable to fault one’s heroes. I became a sociologist for two reasons: one hormonal, the other intellectual. As an impressionable undergraduate failing to find his feet in English literature, I fell heavily for a glamourous older student who was studying sociology. She gave me a copy of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. Our affair lasted less than a year; my devotion to phenomenological sociology lasted a lifetime. Apostasy is always more challenging than ignorance and, when Berger recanted his commitment to secularization, I had enough respect for his earlier work to consider carefully the grounds on which he made it. I was not persuaded. That might be explained by his being, and my not being, Christian. More likely, Berger’s deviation is – at least in part – explained by some combination of his being American at a time when America seemed the great exception to secularization, his interest in the role of religion in cultures of economic development and his relish for the collapse of communism. It is impossible to establish causal direction but it may well also be significant that the British scholars with whom Berger was most closely associated were from the small minority which was unduly impressed by signs of religious resilience.4 However, while the reasons why people make mistakes may be interesting, that they have made a mistake is a conclusion that must rest on the evidence and not on any speculative attribution of bias or partisanship. The evidence for the secularization of the West is now more, not less, convincing than it was when Berger recanted. That he most clearly articulated the reasons why pluralism weakened religion should cause us to take seriously his reasons for a change of mind but there is nothing in indices of religious interest and involvement in modern societies to cause us to follow him.

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Islamic Revivalism and Europe’s Secular ‘Sacred Canopy’: Exploring the Debunking Capacity of Public Religion Riyaz Timol

Since its publication in 1967, Peter L. Berger’s The Sacred Canopy has widely been regarded as a classic in the sociology of religion. Deploying the theoretical framework of the sociology of knowledge advanced in his earlier collaboration with Thomas Luckmann (1966), Berger presents human societies as teetering on the brink of an existential precipice, perpetually threatened by a plunge into chaos and anomy. The activity of nomic world-construction, which has historically found its most potent expression in religion, functions as a shield to keep the forces of anomic chaos at bay by rendering as ultimately meaningful the event of human existence. Two concepts emerge as central to Berger’s theorizing in the book: theodicy and alienation. Religion’s twin abilities to make sense of suffering and to project its perspectives into the core of subjective consciousness are essential to understanding its historical pervasiveness. Yet the unique conditions of industrial modernity, of which pluralism is identified as key, thrust religion into a crisis of plausibility by fatally undermining its taken-for-granted aura. As such, Berger, in his early career, became a key exponent of what is commonly termed the ‘secularization thesis’. Yet, in The Desecularization of the World (1999), he loudly retracted his earlier conclusions declaring them untenable in the face of global empirical evidence – except in two specific cases. The first, termed ‘Eurosecularity’, refers to the geographic region of Western Europe, the crucible in which the secularization thesis was first forged, and where an umbilical nexus between modernization and secularization remains plausible (see also Berger et al. 2008; Davie 2002). The second is a global intelligentsia who have imbibed the epistemological

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protocols of a Western-style education and thus function as secular elites, even in countries where populist upsurges of religion remain in vogue. While the hegemony of the secularization thesis has been challenged in sociological theory for some time now (Casanova 1994; Stark 2000; cf. Bruce in this book), it was not until 2014 that Berger presented his first systematic attempt to formulate an alternative theoretical paradigm. Here he argued that modernity results not in secularization, but rather pluralism defined in the twin sense of the coexistence of multiple religions as well as the coexistence of religion with a pervasive secular discourse. This secular discourse, for Berger, is typified in the phrase attributed to Hugo Grotius, a seventeenth-century founder of international law, who proposed an operational modality which functions etsi Deus non daretur (as if God did not exist); it also approximates in several important ways to what Ernest Gellner (1992: 84) has termed ‘the Kantian or Enlightenment ethic of cognition’. As a result, while maintaining some of the key insights from his earlier theorizing – notably that pluralism relativizes by undermining the taken-for-granted certainty of an inherited world view – Berger simultaneously softened his earlier volte-face to argue that modernity is characterized by the coexistence of secular and religious discourses both in society and in consciousness: Most religious people, even very fervent ones, operate within a secular discourse in important areas of their lives. Put differently, for most believers there is not a stark either/or dichotomy between faith and secularity but rather a fluid construction of both/and. (Berger 2014: x)

In this chapter, I bring into conversation Berger’s theorizing with the contributions of several other scholars to propose that, in the context of Europe’s contemporary religious landscape, secularity functions as a socially constructed nomos that assumes the status of taken-for-granted facticity for those nurtured under its sheltering canopy. Drawing upon recent fieldwork with British-born members of the transnational Islamic movement the Tablighi Jama’at, I further argue – utilizing classical Bergerian (1961a) concepts – that the phenomenon commonly termed ‘Islamic Revivalism’, when juxtaposed to Eurosecularity, is intrinsically imbued with a disconcerting ‘debunking’ potential by exposing the ‘precariousness’ of the ‘social fictions’ that together conspire to construct the social reality of contemporary secular actors.

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Theodicy, alienation and the weaving of a sacred canopy of secularity Berger’s (2014) proposals about the intertwining of the sacred and the secular are not new and may be extended, as I argue here, to sacralize the secular when the secular discourse religious believers are obliged to navigate itself assumes a sacred character. Back in 1985, Hammond decoupled the concept of the sacred from religion by analogizing the distinction between love and marriage: ‘Love  … is routinely understood as a quality that may be reflected in the institution of marriage and child-production, but it may also be independent therefrom’ (Hammond 1985: 4–5). Ammerman’s edited collection (2007) illustrates how the sacred, when unshackled from its institutional anchors by processes of modernization, is often refracted into the interstices of everyday life in unexpected ways. In theorizing the debate around same-sex marriages, Knott (2013) analytically unpicks the popular conflation of religion with the sacred by proposing the concept of the ‘secular sacred’ to demonstrate the extent to which secularity has its own sacred cows: a configuration of inviolable values that provide non-negotiable touchstones and assume transcendental significance for their purveyors. Woodhead (2009) too, in her nuanced consideration of the controversy provoked by the niqab in contemporary Europe, cogently argues for the unfolding of a ‘sacred narrative’ of European secularism against which public manifestations of religion, such as the niqab, militate – often provoking visceral reactions. Religion, then, is not the only generator of Berger’s ’sacred canopy’. Secularity too weaves webs of meaning within which contemporary life is enmeshed and which, taken together, attempt to serve the important social function of providing an ‘ultimate shield against the terror of anomy’ (Berger 1967: 26) (although Berger [1967: 124–5] appears sceptical about the ability of ‘a variety of secularized soteriologies’ to deliver an equivalent calibre of existential comfort as religion.) It is useful to consider here Weber’s engagement with the question of theodicy, which, in its broadest terms, can be construed simply as the attempt to make sense of existence. Though rightfully belonging to the discipline of theology, Weber’s preoccupation perennially fixed upon it the gaze of the sociologist of religion; indeed, Berger (1967) draws extensively on Weber for his arguments. In developing his theodicies of suffering and good fortune, Weber posited

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the essential role of religion as being to reconcile the discrepancy between an idealized world view and the actual experience of lived reality (Gerth and Mills 1946: 270–80). Put differently, the efficacy of religion lies in its ability to explain why good people suffer and evil ones prosper; in this, theodicy appears the diametric inverse of anomy. Yet Colin Campbell, in his careful attempt to trace the contours of a ‘New Age theodicy’, pertinently observes: Now there has been a tendency historically, in keeping with the origin of the word, to restrict the term ‘theodicy’ to religious systems of meaning, and even then to apply it simply to those attempts to provide an answer to the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with an omnipotent and good god. However, there seems to be no very good reason for restricting the usage of the term in this way since the need to have answers to the fundamental questions of existence would appear to be a cultural universal, as apparent among the non-religious as among the religious, while among the latter it is as apparent among non-theists as among theists. It is also important to recognize that theodical systems do not simply deal with issues of justice or morality – even though this may be their focus – but necessarily also deal with meaning-puzzles more generally. (Campbell 2001: 75)

Put differently, just as Hammond proposed that the concept of the sacred could be decoupled from religion, Campbell proposes that the concept of theodicy may alternatively be anchored in the secular. This is significant when triangulated with Knott’s concept of the ‘secular sacred’: secular theodicies, developed etsi Deus non daretur, still need to assuage the very real and apparently congenital ‘human craving for meaning that appears to have the force of instinct’ (Berger 1967: 22). Campbell goes on to suggest that any meaningful theodicy must simultaneously confront three dimensions of human experience: the cognitive, emotional and moral. The role of the first is to explain the brute fact of existence; in classical theodicies it therefore developed unsurprisingly in relation to a creation myth. The second is designed to channel emotional responses to the content of the first along prefigured, legitimated routes. The last, invoking the most common usage of the term, vindicates pain and suffering by situating it within a cosmic framework of meaning. Even – or perhaps especially – ‘in the context of the largely nontheistic (if not actually atheistic) cultures of modernity’ (Campbell 2001: 76), secular theodicies must provide adequate responses to each of these

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perennial and endemic features of the human condition if they are to sustain a credible canopy of meaning over the tempestuous activities of contemporary disenchanted hominids (Gray 2002). A core argument of The Sacred Canopy is that, by projecting a humanly constructed nomos from subjective consciousness into the cosmos, religion functions to keep omnipresent forces of chaos at bay by enveloping human life within a precarious yet comforting web of meanings – a theodicy. This results in alienation when the socialized actor is unable to distinguish within subjective consciousness between world-as-is and world-as-socially-construed. While Berger upholds that throughout the bulk of human history, religion has been the vehicle both of nomos-generation and alienation par excellence (probably due to its intrinsic theodical capacity), he simultaneously acknowledges that socially objectivated nomoi do not necessarily have to be religious in character: ‘Particularly in modern times there have been thoroughly secular attempts at cosmization, among which modern science is by far the most important’ (Berger 1967: 27). While it is beyond the remit of my concerns here to elaborate upon the ways in which a thoroughly secular theodicy might be said to operate in contemporary consciousness, the key point I wish to assert is that the mechanisms through which a secular ‘sacred canopy’ is externalized and objectivated as taken-for-granted social facticity then internalized into subjective consciousness operate in exactly the same way as they did for their religious forebears. Put differently, irrespective of the actual content of the nomos, the processes through which it is given social legitimation, and through which the potential of alienation is actualized, remain entirely unchanged. As a result, though the parameters and definitions of what constitutes ‘cognitive deviance’ may shift, its sociological impact remains the same.

Looking, acting and thinking differently: The Tablighi Jama’at in modern Britain Having sketched the outlines of a theoretical framework, I introduce here some of the findings from my fieldwork with the British branch of the transnational Islamic movement the Tablighi Jama’at (TJ). Widely regarded as the largest movement of Islamic revival in the world (Robinson 2004;

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Ali 2012), TJ originated in British India through the activities of a charismatic Sufi teacher called Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi. He devised a method through which small groups of lay Muslims tour the mosques of farflung villages, towns and cities for weeks or even months at a time. During an outing, TJ activists engage in a series of scriptural and spiritual rituals aimed at ‘self-rectification’ (islah) but their main energy is channelled towards mission  (da’wa). The  remit  of TJ, however, is entirely internal; they do not proselytize non-Muslims but instead focus on strengthening the faith of existing believers. TJ was internationalized in the years following Ilyas’ death and today operates in both Muslim-majority and minority contexts (Masud 2000). The history of TJ in Britain is intertwined with post-Second World War mass economic migration from former colonial territories; transplanted into the diaspora, it quickly established a base among South Asian migrants struggling to manage the transition into a very different culture (Sikand 1998). Over subsequent decades it developed a robust infrastructure that today includes the European headquarters based in Dewsbury and five regional headquarters in London, Birmingham, Blackburn, Leicester and Glasgow. Rooting their activities in hundreds of mosques around the country, young itinerant TJ preachers – the British-born offspring of early immigrants – have today become a ubiquitous sight within British Muslim communities yet, paradoxically, the movement remains severely under-researched. British TJ did, however, attract international attention with its recent plans to construct a mammoth headquarters in London (Birt and Gilliat-Ray 2010). While the controversy surrounding this proposal led to a dedicated study (Pieri 2015), my own fieldwork – consisting of fifty-nine qualitative interviews and intensive participant observation over eighteen months – examined the everyday lived experiences of ordinary TJ activists based largely in the north-west of England. Most significantly, I sought to understand the appeal of the movement in a predominantly secular society. Despite its avowedly apolitical stance, there is some credibility to the claim that TJ has been an implicit international driver of the global phenomenon termed ‘Islamic Revivalism’ (Ali 2012; Balci 2015). This umbrella term is supported by a considerable scholarly consensus which has detected, most visibly since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a global reawakening of Islamic faith and identity among a geographically diverse spectrum of Muslim societies

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(Gellner 1992; Robinson 2004; Mahmood 2005). For Berger (1999: 7–9), this Revival, along with the upsurge of Pentecostalism in Latin America and Africa, was a key reason for his recantation of the secularization thesis. Samuel Huntington, in his controversial yet massively influential Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, describes it thus: This Islamic Resurgence in its extent and profundity … is a broad intellectual, cultural, social, and political movement prevalent throughout the Islamic world. … It refers to an extremely important historical event affecting one-fifth or more of humanity, that is at least as significant as the American Revolution, French Revolution, or Russian Revolution … and … is similar to and comparable to the Protestant Reformation in Western society. (Huntington 1996: 109)

While the internal dynamics and trajectories of this Revival have been diffuse and diverse (Ortega and Peter 2014) – and despite obverse evidence of secularization in Western Muslim communities (Cottee 2015; Orenstein and Weismann 2016) – my study has arguably captured a micro-level detailing of its impact in the lives of some second- and third-generation British-born Muslims. A recurrent motif of my interviews, for example, hinged around an intra-religious conversion experience which described a transition from nominal or superficial attachments to religion, rooted principally in the ‘primary socialization’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 149–57) of childhood, to lifestyles of voluntary devotion. While the conversion journey was often intensely private and premised upon an internal wrangling in subjective consciousness, it nevertheless had embodied manifestations freighted with social repercussions. Here, for example, is Yahya describing his conversion to TJ almost twenty years ago: First of all I didn’t have a beard at all. Then I went for three days [on a TJ outing] and I grew a goatee. Then I sat in i’itikaaf [ritual seclusion at the mosque during the last 10 days of Ramadan] and I came back with, my manager called it the Full Monty [laughs]. Oh my god it’s a Full Monty now! And it was just a small beard, but full. And then I came back from four months [on a TJ outing] and it was a very full beard with all the regalia as well [laughs]. It was quite frightening to walk into the office like that, actually. It was nerve-wracking because I thought, oh my god, what are they going to say?1

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Conversion to TJ impacts not just the external appearance of the neophyte though, but also his bodily deportment. While conducting fieldwork in 2013 I participated in an extended 42-day road trip to Bulgaria – staying at mosques in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Romania en route – with a young entirely British-born TJ group (Timol 2015). During this trip, I noticed how the daily habits of group members were moulded according to the model of the Prophet Muhammad – what Gugler (2013) terms the imitatio Muhammadi. Food, for example, was consumed only while sitting on the floor and strictly by hand, water was carefully drunk in three sips and teeth brushed with a herbal tooth-stick known as miswaak. Individual identities were thus reconstituted with reference to a transcendent and transcultural religious ideal having its roots outside the taken-for-granted suppositions of a modern society. While peaks and troughs in commitment were common, I found that dedicated TJ activists frequently inhabited an interpretive frame in which ‘all events, thoughts, and experience are transformed into significant events, meaningful thoughts, and special religious experiences’ (McGuire 1987: 77). Yusuf, for example, recounted the following incident while giving da’wa one evening: As I was driving home from work today this guy went past on this beautiful racer bike. … And I got distracted and started checking the bike out just for a few seconds man … and nearly crashed the car! … And I thought that’s a sign from Allah that on the road to Jannah [Paradise] if we get distracted and fall into ghaflat [heedlessness], even for a moment, we can mess up big time.

What becomes clear from these brief excerpts is that committed TJ activists look, act and think differently to the taken-for-granted suppositions of a largely disenchanted continent which exhibits only a ‘fuzzy fidelity’ (Voas 2009) to supernatural propositions. Yet, when conducting five months of dedicated fieldwork in a single Lancashire mosque, I simultaneously found that, when not on tour, contemporary activists live fairly ‘ordinary’ lives enjoying holidays with their families, posting on Facebook through their smartphones or working as professionals in a plethora of occupational fields.2 More prosaically, I also observed how toothbrushes jostled alongside miswaaks in their toiletry bags. Supporting Berger’s (2014) most recent theorizing then, these findings indicate

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the intertwining of the sacred and secular in contemporary consciousness or, to use Alfred Schutz’s term, an ability to navigate multiple ‘relevance structures’ with ease. But, given the extent to which a strong religious impulse continues to animate their existential horizons, it is simultaneously clear that, particularly in the broader social context of Eurosecularity, committed British TJ activists constitute what Berger has termed a ‘cognitive minority’: By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society … the plausibility of ‘knowledge’ that is not socially shared, that is challenged by our fellow men, is imperilled, not just in our dealings with others, but much more importantly in our own minds. The status of a cognitive minority is thus invariably an uncomfortable one. (Berger 1971: 18–19)

While commitment to an alternative, or ‘deviant’ (Becker 1963), view of reality in the midst of pervasive psycho-social disconfirmation presents its own challenges, I focus in the remainder of this chapter on the ‘debunking’ capacity of TJ ‘deviance’ in exposing the essentially contingent and precarious nature of the secular nomos that, as with any nomos, is usually taken entirely for granted by those nurtured under its sheltering canopy.

Strange bedfellows: Islamic Revivalism and Eurosecularity Those perceived as cognitive deviants, by virtue of the fact they intrinsically exist as a numerical minority and lack widespread social support for their beliefs, are obliged to confront an ever-present threat of liquidation or assimilation into the taken-for-granted structures of predefinition that constitute the collective Weltanschauung. As such, their existence is inherently precarious. This situation only changes with the combination of two factors (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 183–93). First, the society in which they live must permit the existence of individuals who dissent from the normative and cognitive presuppositions of the established status quo. Here the institutionalization of religious freedom in modern democracies is crucial as it ensures certain basic, inalienable rights that minority religions rely upon for survival. Secondly, the cognitive deviant must be able to establish a durable social base, with like-minded deviants, in which the machinery of ‘plausibility

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structure’ generation is activated so as to maintain as credible to subjective consciousness the particular configurations of reality posited by the group (Berger 1967: 45–51); TJ is able to achieve this in contemporary Britain through the ensemble of activities it habitually conducts in mosques. As such, its particular perspectives on reality receive essential social confirmation and become substantiated as a realistic mode of human living for those exposed and predisposed to them. According to Dobbelaere (2009: 600), secularization operates simultaneously on three levels – the societal or macro level, the organizational or meso level and the individual or micro level – to cumulatively diminish the significance of religion. While indigenous processes of secularization within Europe have transformed the experience of lived reality into a largely disenchanted one that operates etsi Deus non daretur (Casanova 1994: 11–39), the ongoing influx of immigrant groups from various non-European locales has considerably impacted the continent’s religious landscape: Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Britain in the year 2000 is the recent growth of ethnic diversity, largely through immigration, and the rise of a multifaith society in which Christianity has been joined by Islam, Hinduism and the Sikh religion, amongst others. However, what has been noticeable to all observers is that the strength of attachment to other religions in Britain has not, in the main, suffered the collapse that has afflicted the bulk of the Christian churches. In the black and Asian communities of Britain, nonChristian religions are in general thriving. (Brown 2001: 2)

However, for Bruce (2002: 243–4), non-Christian religion ‘is not yet central to the argument about the secularity or otherwise of Britain’ for four reasons. First, these religions are still numerically quite small. Secondly, they are bound up largely with ethnic identities and hold only minimal appeal for indigenous peoples. Thirdly, through their recent immigration, the minority religions have been immune to the corrosive effects of secularization that have been operative in Britain for some centuries. And lastly, Bruce contends that the offspring of migrants will probably secularize over time. Elsewhere, Bruce (2011: 49) asserts that cultural defence – a phenomenon particularly germane to the experiences of migrant groups whose religious identities often enmesh with ethnicity – functions to retard the efficacy of secularization where ‘religion finds or retains work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural’.

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While each of these assertions merits careful analysis, it appears Bruce underplays the increasing impact of immigration in thrusting religion back into mainstream public consciousness. This creates a paradox, highlighted by Davie (2015), in which while general indices of religious practice continue to show decline, public debate about religion conversely has mushroomed. Islam has played a key role here with any number of issues from the Rushdie affair to the Danish cartoon controversy or l'affaire du foulard (and its more recent ‘burkini’ permutation) providing striking illustrations (Göle 2016). In fact, according to both Warner (2010) and McGrath (2011), the vociferous ‘New Atheism’ of recent years emerged as a direct reaction to 9/11. Implicated here is a blurring of the boundaries between public and private so essential to classical secularization theory: It is for this reason that the presence of some, if not all, religious minorities becomes so problematic for many Europeans. Simply by being there, they bring to the attention of Europeans a series of unresolved issues which – for decades, if not centuries – have been placed in the realm of the private. To the consternation of many, these are back in the public sphere. (Berger et al. 2008: 104–5)

As a movement of grassroots Islamic Revival, a commitment to TJ religiosity provokes this tension in several ways. The ritual enactment of the five daily prayers for example – normative to any classical reading of Islam yet alien to the contemporary European collective conscience – when demanded as an expression of religious agency in the functionally differentiated sphere of the secular workplace may be cited as an instance of the ‘deprivatization’ of religion noted by Casanova (1994). While most of my respondents were able to negotiate dedicated prayer spaces in their workplaces with relative ease, Umar faced some resistance – ‘When I told my boss my Creator has rights over me, he just laughed. “What the hell are you on about your Creator has rights over you?! You’re free to do what you like, pal!”’ – indicating a somewhat visceral unease at the trespassing of religion outside its rightful domain. The beards of my respondents too, as embodied symbols of religious commitment, continually impinge on the religiously neutral public sphere as best expressed by Hanzalah, a highly dedicated TJ activist from Leicester who has worked as a chartered accountant for twenty-five years:

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I’ve represented my firm in meetings all over the world. I go in a suit because I’m traveling on company business, so I don’t have an issue. The company’s very relaxed, I’m not too keen on wearing ties so they don’t have an issue with that whatsoever. But, obviously, I can’t take my beard off and put it away for four or five days while I go on business.

Beyond the workplace, specific TJ activities further inveigle religion from its normative province of the private. Whenever groups went out for da’wa, I noted consistently during my participant observation, they would begin by supplicating God collectively on the street outside the mosque. More explicitly, before embarking on the forty-two-day road trip to Bulgaria, our group was instructed by leaders at TJ’s European headquarters to always make the adhan (call to prayer) and offer prayers in congregation while travelling (‘Of course, be sensible about it, don’t disturb people or cause a nuisance, but do make the adhan. It’s one of the ash’aar [symbols] of Islam.’). Accordingly, the adhan was called and congregational prayers offered at service stations, on roadsides, in fields and on ferries across Europe, usually to the surprise or consternation of passers-by. It is useful to recall at this point that Berger, in his treatment of religion in The Sacred Canopy, acknowledges its Janus-faced potential to act both as a force of alienation and de-alienation. While he contends that, throughout the bulk of human history, religion has been the alienating force par excellence through its ability to construct constellations of meaning that are entirely taken for granted by its adherents, he simultaneously posits that religion – particularly when wedded to Weber’s concept of charisma – has been a force of radical relativization and revolution: Such a ‘debunking’ motif may be traced all through the Biblical tradition, directly related to its radical transcendentalization of God, finding its classic expression in Israelite prophecy but continuing in a variety of expressions in the history of the three great religions of the Biblical orbit. … False consciousness and bad faith, widely legitimated by means of religion, may thus also be revealed as such by means of religion. … One may say, therefore, that religion appears in history both as a world-maintaining and as a worldshaking force. (Berger 1967: 99–100)

Despite claims of ‘vicarious religion’ (Davie 2000) or ‘fuzzy fidelity’ (Voas 2009) persisting among Europe’s indigenous populations, it is clear that significant sectors of contemporary European life unfold under a sacred

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canopy of secularity deriving its existential moorings from a theodicy that operates etsi Deus non daretur. The pervasiveness of the assumptions which uphold this canopy emanates from a series of well-developed plausibility structures deeply rooted in societal infrastructures. Islamic Revivalism, when juxtaposed to this broader sociality, is intrinsically imbued with debunking potential as cognitive deviancy (serious commitment to a private religious Weltanschauung), when translated into social deviancy (public manifestations of such private beliefs), ineluctably impacts the status quo: ‘On a more fundamental level, the deviant’s conduct challenges the societal reality as such, putting in question its taken-for-granted cognitive … and normative … operating procedures’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 131). Berger’s lifelong theorizing on the sociological impact of pluralism equally applies here to secularity: pluralism relativizes. Put differently: given the social dominance of Eurosecularity, committed expressions of faith that impinge upon the public sphere undermine the taken-for-granted presuppositions of a secular nomos whose theodical perspectives (cognitive, emotional and moral) bleed into the fabric of the cosmos and which, when uncritically imbibed by socialized actors as objective facticity, result in a state of subjective alienation. Arnold Gehlen’s theory of institutions, Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’ and Martin Heidegger’s notion of das Man – all crucial to Berger’s theorizing of the 1960s – are relevant here: ‘Society provides us with taken-for-granted structures … within which, as long as we follow the rules, we are shielded from the naked terror of our condition’ (Berger 1963: 168–9). If, as was asserted earlier, theodicy is the inverse of anomy, then undermining its core propositions (whether anchored in a religious or secular nomos) threatens to unleash the forces of chaos that Berger’s sacred canopy was designed to keep at bay. This may help explain the intrinsically disconcerting nature of deviance and thus its perpetual tendency to attract strategies of either therapy or ‘nihilation’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 130–2).

Conclusion This chapter has sought to deploy several interpretive frames derived largely from the work of Peter L. Berger to analyse findings from my fieldwork with

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British TJ in the context of the broader intersection of Islamic Revivalism with Eurosecularity. In doing so it has argued that the social mechanics through which the alienating potential of religion was actualized in The Sacred Canopy can equally be discerned in the functioning of a secular nomos in contemporary Europe. In such a situation, faith shifts from the taken-for-granted sphere of public structure to the volitional sphere of private agency that requires the careful cultivation of sub-societies of meaning – umbrellas of religiosity under the larger canvas of the secular sacred canopy – for survival. This is the inverse of the historical reality: in bygone eras, it was freethinkers, sceptics or atheists who constituted the cognitive minorities obliged to consciously sustain their deviant view of reality under pressure from the taken-forgranted sacred canopy of religion (Spencer 2013).3 Central to my argument here is the assertion that despite the differing content of the respective nomoi, the brute sociological facts remain constant: reality is socially produced, externalized, objectivated and then internalized into subjective consciousness as taken-for-granted facticity by social actors who exist for the most part in a state of ‘alienation’. The debunking potential of a non-indigenous religiosity, particularly when it impinges on the functionally differentiated public sphere, has also been highlighted along with its usually disconcerting nature. Islam in Western Europe is ensconced largely within experiences of immigration, which complicates processes of indigenization and acculturation. Put differently, committed European Muslims today are not just cognitive minorities but usually also ethnic minorities. This is significant when considering the reactions of indigenous populations to the Islamic Other. In her examination of the new cultural majority that self-identifies as ‘no religion’ in modern Britain, Woodhead (2016: 250) maintains that its constituents cannot facilely be categorized as the ‘phalanx of doughty secularists which some versions of secularization theory expected’. Rather, she finds they are characterized by an inchoate farrago of residual Christian culture, an ambivalent affirmation of some form of transcendence and a liberal impulse to experiment with new modes of spirituality. Nonetheless, she also describes the primacy of a ‘New Norm’ that operates etsi Deus non daretur: ‘Many aspects of a non-religious worldview, not just its ethics, have now become taken-for-granted in the way Christian teaching used to be’ (Woodhead 2016: 259). Davie (2000) and Voas (2009), arguably, discern comparable sentiments

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across the wider European collective conscience. Importing Islam onto this landscape has generated some of the most pressing cultural and political issues of our time. Beyond the exacerbating outrages of violent jihadism, basic questions concerning the processes and parameters of acculturation and notions of ‘belonging’ still loom large. If, as Berger and Zijderveld (2009: 164) assert, ‘every “we” implies a “they”’ then this begs the question: ‘Who are “we” and who are “they”?’ In grappling with this, it is quite possible that the phenomenon of Islamic Revivalism, as it plays out on a historically Christian post-Enlightenment continent, may provoke tensions that reveal an ambiguity deep within Europe’s own soul (Mavelli 2014; Murad 2011).

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Religious American and Secular European Courts, or vice versa? A Study of Institutional Cross-Pollination1 Effie Fokas

In his 2005 National Interest article on ‘Religion and the West’, Peter Berger (2005) suggested that one of the variables distinguishing between a religious America and a secular Europe is the function of certain institutions, such as the educational system, political parties and labour unions. In Religious America, Secular Europe? (Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008) we explored, among these, the role of the judiciary and, specifically, the critical differences between the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. This chapter examines a phenomenon which has developed more rapidly in the period since the publication of that book: namely, the cross-pollination of courts in the two contexts, achieved by religiously motivated legal actors seeking to influence the handling of certain religion-related matters in jurisdictions other than their own. The article draws on empirical research conducted with a number of such engaged US- and Europe-based legal actors.

Law and religious mobilization in the United States and Europe: Setting the stage In October 2008 the pastor of a Pentecostal church in the small Swedish town of Borgholm found himself in California, rallying behind Proposition 8 which called for an overturning of the California Supreme Court ruling giving same-sex couples permission to marry. Pastor Ake Green had risen

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to the status of global hero among religious conservatives opposed to samesex marriage after being sentenced to a month in prison for denouncing homosexuality in a sermon. His sentence was overturned, not least due to the massive transnational mobilization which took place in the aftermath of the sentencing: the Swedish affiliate of Virginia-based Christian lawyers’ group Advocates International alerted the global conservative media via internet; the Washington D.C.-based Religious Freedom Coalition picked up on the case by bringing several of Green’s supporters to the United States to share the story more broadly there; and the Alliance Defense Fund responded by providing the ultimately successful legal aid (Bob 2012: 72–83). To ‘repay the favour’, Green rallied behind the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign with a ninety-minute testimony which was simulcast in 170 churches throughout California (Bob 2012, 2014; Goodstein 2008). In October 2017, Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who spent five days in prison for refusing to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples, spent nine days on a speaking tour in Romania. Here she campaigned ahead of a referendum to take place calling for constitutional amendment which would rule out the possibility of legalizing same-sex marriages. Davis, too, has been hailed a hero by Christian conservatives for her defiance in the US context. Thus, the president of the Romanian Coalition for Family invited Davis ‘to share with us her fight for freedom, her strong faith and her experience in prison, which was the price she paid for standing up for her faith’; meanwhile, the representative of the Romanian LGBT group MozaiQ said, ‘It is extremely worrying that a person who broke the law in the United States is being brought to Romania and presented as some sort of hero of Christianity’ (Stack and Gillet 2017). Davis was accompanied on her Romanian trip by a representative of the US-based Liberty Counsel which supported her case and which filed an amicus brief with the Romanian Constitutional Court in support of the proposed constitutional amendment (Stack and Gillet 2017; see also Henley and Redden 2017). These vignettes suggest two things in particular. First, the world of religious mobilization is small and, as will be demonstrated here, increasingly so. Second, and related to the latter, the ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ distinction between the judiciaries on either side of the Atlantic is increasingly blurred. While generalized assumptions would lead us to speak in terms of a religious

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American public contending with a judiciary strictly upholding secularism (as in religion–state separation), on the one hand, and of a relatively secular European public contending with a European-level judiciary expressly not requiring strict separation of religion and state, on the other (Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008), reality has always been far more nuanced, for several reasons. The present chapter explores one such, relatively more recent, factor: namely, the cross-pollination of courts in the United States and in Europe achieved by religiously motivated legal actors seeking to influence the handling of certain religion-related matters in jurisdictions other than their own. In the pages that follow, historical context to the development of this cross-pollination will be presented. This process is rather conspicuously unidirectional at first glance, with the vast majority of examples on offer entailing US-to-Europe influence. But, as will become clear, the process is more dynamic than meets the eye. Far less conspicuous (and less studied) is the influence – potential and real – from the European context onto the American one. Today issues that may give rise to litigation, on the one hand, and legal aid that may be offered, on the other, circulate so swiftly and frequently that this initial unidirectional state of affairs is significantly undermined. As Clifford Bob explains, ‘The relationships are two-way. “Receivers” gain from support, but “senders” reap reciprocal benefits. They use overseas clashes to bolster their own side in analogous domestic dustups.’ (2012: 73). There are several potential forms of support offered in transnational advocacy, including financial aid, guidance in legal strategy, and submission of third-party interventions (or amicus briefs). This chapter focuses in particular on the latter, thus in a second section attention will be paid to this central means of transatlantic influence: namely, the submission of third-party interventions to European national courts and the active participation via interventions to European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law. Here some background information about the place of third-party interventions within the ECtHR context will be presented. In a third section, the voices of a number of third-party interveners will be deployed to offer insight into such questions as how it was they came to intervene in particular ECtHR cases, though from a US base, how they chose the particular cases in which they intervened, and why they choose to intervene in

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ECtHR cases in general. These questions give rise to new normative questions regarding the somewhat intricate and barely visible web behind some of the transatlantic mobilizations.

Legal activism from the United States to Europe The historical and contemporary role of courts and especially of the US Supreme Court in deciding issues related to religion, social ethics and bioethics is substantial (e.g. on matters such as abortion, same-sex marriage and religious exemptions from providing contraception coverage to employees, to name a few). As Jeremy Rabkin argues, the US Supreme Court has long been the central player in the American culture wars: For it is a fact that the United States has both the most permissive abortion law and the most visible, energetic, and broad-based right-to-life movement of any Western country. As the Supreme Court is the proximate cause of the first, it is hard to escape the inference that it is also the ultimate cause of this second element of American exceptionalism. (Rabkin 1996: 24)

The argument can be expanded to other areas of religion-related jurisprudence well beyond the issue of abortion.2 Also conspicuous and well documented is the breadth and intensity of religious legal activism in the United States (Ivers 1992; Krishnan and den Dulk 2002; Hoover and den Dulk 2004; den Dulk 2006). Indeed, the United States provides one of the best-developed examples of NGO and civil society engagement in religious litigation and of litigation specifically by religious groups. Scholars date the start of Christian conservative legal activism around the 1980s (see especially Ivers 1992; Krishnan and den Dulk 2002). Expressions of a spiritual calling to law were published in Christianity Today in 1981: ‘Encourage Christian young people … to consider a calling to a ministry in law’ (cited by den Dulk 2006: 207). Among the earlier establishments of religious litigation powerhouses are the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ, founded in 1990), the Alliance Defense Fund (later renamed Alliance Defending Freedom, 1994), and the Becket Fund (1994). The ‘spiritual’ call to legal activism remains as active as ever, as

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reflected in the description of the relatively recent Hobby Lobby (2014) case on religious exemption from mandatory provision of health care coverage of contraception as a ‘mandate for evangelization’ (Nejaime and Siegel 2015: 2552). As Andrew Lewis (2017) explains, long gone are the days when rights activism was exclusively the domain of liberals while Christian conservatives focused on morality; today the language of rights serves as an equally powerful weapon in political and legal battles waged by Christian conservatives, and in ever-expanding political arenas from health care to capital punishment. The internationalization of this phenomenon is more recent and less documented (cf Livezey 1989; Bob 2012; McCrudden 2015), and the three aforementioned groups (ACLJ, ADF and the Becket Fund) have been central to this development. One of the most prominent examples of this is the establishment of a European wing of the American Center for Law and Justice – the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) – in Strasbourg (notably, also home to the European Court of Human Rights); another is the establishment by the Alliance Defending Freedom or ADF International, now with offices in Europe, Latin America and at the UN, and activities also in Africa and Asia. The internationalization of such groups, specifically in terms of their engagements with litigation abroad, may seem ironic given their histories of resisting foreign influences in the American judiciary. ADL, for example, claimed to be training ‘an army of allied attorneys to defend America’s sovereignty’ and resist ‘importation of foreign case law’ (Bob 2012: 83). These concerns have been echoed by conservative US Supreme Court judges. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court ‘should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans’; Justice Antonin Scalia declared irrelevant ‘the so-called “world community”, “whose notions of justice are (thankfully) not always those of our people”’ (cited in Goldhaber 2009: 183). And on the whole this perspective has won out. As Clifford Bob (2012: 75) notes, until the 2000s, it was unusual for the Supreme Court even to cite foreign law as supportive of a decision. However, there was a critical moment in the US Supreme Court case law which could be considered a turning point: Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Here, in a case of high concern to religiously conservative groups, a challenge to sodomy laws, the Supreme Court overturned its earlier decision on

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sodomy in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) with a prominent reference to ECtHR jurisprudence. That reference is worth citing at length here: … almost five years before Bowers was decided the European Court of Human Rights considered a case with parallels to Bowers and to today's case. [In Dudgeon v. United Kingdom (1981)] the court held that the laws proscribing [homosexual] conduct were invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights. … Authoritative in all countries that are members of the Council of Europe (21 nations then, 45 nations now), the decision is at odds with the premise in Bowers that the claim put forward was insubstantial in our Western civilization. … In the United States, criticism of Bowers has been substantial and continuing, disapproving of its reasoning in all respects, not just as to its historical assumptions. And, to the extent Bowers relied on values shared with a wider civilization, the case’s reasoning and holding have been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights, and that other nations have taken action consistent with an affirmation of the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct. (Lawrence v. Texas 2003)

And it is here especially that religiously conservative groups woke to a potential threat coming from Europe (Goldhaber 2009; Bob 2012). By the same token, as Michael Goldhaber (2009: 182) explains, American progressives often gaze at European law with envy. … Europe was twenty years ahead in legalizing gay sex. On gays in the military, Europe is still a generation ahead. In Europe, there’s a constitutional right to a healthy environment; and there are constitutional limits on deportation. Europe bans judicial corporeal punishment while placing sharp limits on educational beatings and loose limits on parental beatings. Europe imposes positive obligations on the state to protect the vulnerable against private violence. Europe has eliminated the death penalty and, where possible, refuses to enable American executions. Perhaps most importantly, Europe brooks no exception to the ban on torture.

Thus both the attention to foreign case law in Lawrence and the fact that it was specifically European case law, representing an interventionism and social values antithetical to religiously conservative groups’ own values, served as cause for concern for such groups. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of Lawrence, Supreme Court justices were cited making statements promoting a more open court: ‘No institution of government can afford to ignore the rest of the world’ (Sandra Day O’Connor);

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‘Our “island” or “lone ranger” mentality is beginning to change’ (Ruth Bader Ginsburg); ‘It’s time the U.S. courts began looking to the decisions of other constitutional courts’ (Chief Justice William Rehnquist who, notably, dissented in Lawrence v. Texas) (cited in Goldhaber 2009: 183–4). As Bob notes, the use of foreign law in this and subsequent Supreme Court decisions was welcomed by civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in particular, and supported in this by the Ford Foundation, developed programmes under the banner of ‘bringing human rights home’ to the United States. All of the above served as a rallying call to Christian conservative groups who feared that, as expressed in an Alliance Defending Freedom press release, ‘if the ACLU and its radical activist allies have their way, the laws of Europe will soon be the laws of America’ (Bob 2012: 84). Thus, ADL opted to ‘strategically litigate key religious liberty cases abroad’ in order to ‘prevent the creation of harmful foreign case law that might otherwise be imported by the ACLU into American courts’ (Bob 2012: 83). And thus the globalization of the culture wars, ‘whereby US actors losing the war at home export their battles to the wider world’ (Anderson 2013: 309). In this context, the possibility of third-party intervention in the ECtHR was described by the president and general counsel of ADF as ‘a remarkable opportunity … to stand in defense of religious freedom … in cases that – if they are decided the wrong way – could have a negative impact on your religious liberty here in the United States’ (Cited in McCrudden 2015: 450; see also Fokas 2016). Or, in the words of ADF chief counsel Benjamin Bull, ‘We’re forced to do it, because if we don’t, we’re going to lose according to rules of a game we never created’ (Bob 2012: 84). There are in fact many nuanced reasons for US-based lawyers and organizations to engage in ECtHR case law, as we shall see below. First, however, it is useful to consider some more general information about such interventions, particularly in the European context.

Europe as fertile ground The term ‘amicus curiae’ refers to a written intervention to a court, with possible origin in Roman law (Kochevar 2013), and embedded in English law in the fifteenth century (Burli 2017: 19). In their historical context amicus curiae

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were submitted by a ‘neutral friend of the court who provided it with impartial information and had no interest in the subject-matter nor outcome of the case’, but incorporated into American law the amicus curiae intervener changed from being a neutral friend to an advocate for a party or an issue before the court (Burli 2017: 19). Early and frequent interveners in the US context were the ACLU and the NAACP, among other secular (and sometimes secularist) groups but, as demonstrated by Livezey (1989), religious organizations soon became active in this field. Describing the ‘rising tide’ of amicus curiae briefs before the US Supreme Court, Kearney and Merrill (2000) indicate that while at the start of the twentieth century amicus curiae were filed in only 10 per cent of the cases before the US Supreme Court, by the end of the century the situation was nearly reversed, so that only approximately 15 per cent of cases did not attract amicus brief submissions. Thus the tradition is well-entrenched. Today, amicus briefs ‘reflect a form of interest group lobbying directed at the Court’ (Kearney and Merrill 2000: 747), and it is a powerful form indeed. Further, Kearney and Merrill note that experience in the process is a predictor of success: ‘It appears that amicus briefs filed by institutional litigants and by experienced lawyers … are generally more successful than are briefs filed by irregular litigants and less experienced lawyers’ (2000: 150). Besides being a far younger court (established in 1959), the European Court of Human Rights has a relatively short history of engaging amicus curiae because the right to third-party intervention was not originally foreseen by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the ECtHR protects. Cichowski (2013) notes that initially the Convention system was geared towards preservation of national sovereignty, privileging the role of national governments, since it was not until after 1998 that both the individual right to bring direct claims against states, and the jurisdiction of the court as final arbiter, became compulsory for the signatories of the Convention. But as the court increasingly developed into a formidable international court able and willing to challenge domestic legislation and domestic constitutional provisions, and to face the potential wrath of national governments in the process, the court also increasingly became an interesting prospect and fruitful aim for NGOS and individual legal activists. The first request by a third party was rejected, and in the case of the second, an indirect intervention was accepted: the United Kingdom was granted leave to

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submit a brief to the delegates of a commission which would then share the brief with the court. NGOs soon took notice and quickly followed suit and the court responded to this development with an amendment to the Rules of the Court in 1983 in order to allow third-party participation both by states or any other person. Cichowski notes that between 1984 and 1998 the court authorized fortyone requests for third-party interventions (Cichowski 2013: 86). Laura Van den Eynde offers more up-to-date data revealing a striking growth in the number of third-party interventions: in 2010 alone there were more interventions than over the entire period of 1985–96; of the 307 total judgements delivered by the ECtHR Grand Chamber by 2013, it accepted NGO interventions in 65 of them (21 per cent) (Van den Eynde 2013: 280). Still, the numbers are very low by American standards, as noted above, with 85 per cent of US Supreme Court cases attracting amicus curiae (Kearney and Merrill 2000). Though the number of ECtHR cases with (accepted) third-party interventions tends to be small compared with the case law as a whole, those cases also tend to be particularly significant ones: most of these groups are very strategic about choosing to participate in cases which they believe will lead to significant changes in European law. They see it as an opportunity to participate in the development of international human rights law, which would not only be used by the ECtHR in the future, but domestic courts and international courts throughout the world. (Cichowski 2013: 88)

Such was the case in S.A.S. v. France, on the French ban of the burqa in public spaces. The intervention by the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University in favour of the claimant was heavily cited, though the court decided in favour of the French state. In case of MC v. Bulgaria (2003), the judgement featured a 22-paragraph summary of the intervention by Interights. In devoting so much space to the summary of the intervention, the court dedicated more space to the arguments of the intervener than to those of both parties in the case (Burli 2017: 12). By far the best example of the potential cogency of third-party intervention in the ECtHR context is to be found in the case of Lautsi v. Italy (2011), regarding whether the display of the crucifix on Italian public school walls entails a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. A 2009 chamber judgement

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by the court, contested by the Italian state in the Grand Chamber hearing of 2011, attracted an unprecedented number of third-party interventions: ten national governments, ten NGOs, and thirty-three members of the European Parliament intervened in the case, in large majority in favour of the Italian state (six of the NGOs intervened in the claimant’s favour). Notably it was a US-based lawyer who represented eight of the ten intervening governments before the Grand Chamber in 2011. The interventions relied heavily on the doctrine of the ‘margin of appreciation’, calling for deference to the states on matters of such a highly sensitive nature. So too the Grand Chamber decision, which referenced the margin of appreciation twenty-seven times in total, and eight times in the final paragraphs of assessment, which is indicative of the importance the margin is imparted in the court’s overall reasoning. (Notably, in the original 2009 judgement, the margin of appreciation is mentioned only on three occasions, each time by the Italian government.) (Ronchi 2011). The Grand Chamber judgement reversed the chamber’s original 2009 unanimous 7-0 judgement in a 15-2 decision. The ECtHR may be considered a fertile ground for US-based religiously conservative groups’ intervention in its case law from a number of perspectives. First, it is a court responsible to forty-seven member states, and thus dealing with forty-seven different cultural and national identities. Furthermore, in most of these cultural contexts, strong religion–state relations prevail, often rooted in close connections between religion and national identity. All of the above bode well for groups seeking to support non-interventionist rulings and a generally restrained judicial approach which respects national (or, in the case of the US, federal) sovereignty, as do such religiously conservative groups in the United States. Second, being a relatively young court and relatively new to amicus curiae, it offers through third-party interventions a comparative advantage to US-based groups because of their relative experience in the field of amicus briefs. In the most comprehensive study of third-party interventions to the ECtHR to date, Nicole Burli (2017: 1–2) introduces the topic by noting that as the [ECtHR] increasingly decides highly debated and contentious issues, such as the legality of abortion, gay marriage or assisted suicide [notably, all of which issues strongly mobilise religious groups], more and more organizations, individuals and governments are potentially affected by the Court’s judgment and thus seek to intervene in proceedings.

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Burli distinguishes between restraint and activist interveners. Restraint interveners call on judges to interpret the Convention narrowly and in deference to national authorities. Thus they tend to promote the interests of the state over those of the individuals. Restraint intervention is the main domain for interventions representing religiously conservative groups, and they have been exclusively submitted in cases dealing with religion, the beginning or ending of life, and have been made by faith-based NGOs and churches. Burli charts a slight increase in restraint amicus curiae interventions in recent years, first and foremost from organizations from the United States (2017: 33). She also notes that judges in religion-related cases are particularly open to third-party interventions, because the court refrains from addressing pure religious arguments. The court, she explains, has relinquished religious arguments to interveners by providing long summaries of their submissions, and it has done so for three reasons. First, to maintain a stance of neutrality as regards religion; second, to signal that it is aware of religious arguments and to lend them a certain authorization; and third because in doing so ‘the Court acknowledges that churches and members of civil society are more competent than the Court to address religious arguments’ (2017: 45). The second largest group of NGOs active before the ECtHR comes from the United States (15 per cent), and a significant proportion of the latter is made up of religious conservative groups (McCrudden 2015: 449–50). The largest group is UK-based (30 per cent), the United Kingdom arguably being the European country with the strongest connection to the United States (Van den Eynde 2013). The United Kingdom is both home to the largest number of NGOs systematically involved with applications before the ECtHR, and the sending country of a large proportion of the key litigators before the ECtHR over the last thirty years (Cichowski 2013: 93). Notably, 82 per cent of NGOs active before the ECtHR are ‘repeat players’, which of course gives them a significant advantage in the field; ten of the eighteen ‘repeat players’ are based in the UK. Contrary to popular belief, which may be less informed about the distinctions between the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe, there is no reason to expect that the UK presence in the field of interventions will decrease because of Brexit: although current UK prime minister Theresa

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May had voiced a preference for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (‘If we want to reform human rights law in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court’ [Asthana and Mason 2016]), it is the membership in the European Union which the results of the June 2016 UK referendum affected and not that of the ECHR system. In terms of changes over time and projections for the future, research suggests that the number of NGOs active before the ECtHR is gradually increasing, with non-British NGOs achieving a more conspicuous presence as well as new ‘less traditional’ actors, especially religiously conservative groups (Van den Eynde 2013; Burli 2017). The two most prominent religion-related NGOs acting before the court are either American NGOs or their counterparts: The ECLJ is by far the most influential religious NGO on the European legal scene; the organization made fifteen interventions and ADF seven interventions by 2013 (Van den Eynde 2013: 287). The 2017 publication by ADF International of a book entitled The ‘Conscience of Europe?’ Navigating Shifting Tides at the European Court of Human Rights (Clarke 2017) is suggestive of an active investment in the ECtHR; so too the chapter entitled ‘Strategic Litigation at the ECtHR’ which, among other things, provides a guide to effective interventions before the court (Clarke and Wilkinson 2017). According to McCrudden (2015: 442), NGO involvement in their own jurisdictions is beginning to change, in two ways. First, NGOs which are based in one jurisdiction and self-identify as primarily interested in issues within that jurisdiction, are nevertheless increasingly intervening in jurisdictions other than their own. Second, many more organizations have been established that consider themselves to have global scope and interests, even though they may have a seat in one jurisdiction or another. The increased interventions of both these categories of NGOs in religious litigation may be explained by several factors, including a universalist and cosmopolitan understanding of human rights which suggests a rights violation anywhere in the world is equally worthy of their time and effort; an awareness that globalization means that what happens in another country may well directly or indirectly affect developments in the NGOs’ own jurisdiction; and that interventions abroad on issues of concern to their own jurisdictions might win more favour with their domestic audience (and funders). Further, as elaborated above regarding the mission-like ‘calling’ to religion-related

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litigation, intervention arises somewhat organically from religious NGOs’ religious ideas: once human rights lingo was appropriated for religion too (Krishnan and den Dulk 2002; den Dulk 2006; Lewis 2017), then there was no going back on the need to engage the law in issues of concern, wherever those might arise geographically.

Interveners in their own voices Discussion with interveners themselves provides much-needed nuance to the reasons behind such transatlantic interventions;3 the reasons presented are varied and worthy of careful consideration. Accordingly, several paragraphs below are devoted to this topic. Second, this empirical research also makes us privy to information about how they choose the cases in which they intervene. Third, such discussions offer critical insight into one aspect of these interventions not attainable otherwise: how they got involved in the particular case. Together, these three perspectives push the boundaries of our understanding of transatlantic third-party interventions. The question of why the choice to intervene in ECtHR case law yields several different, though interconnected, motives, presented here with no suggestion of order of importance. Less prevalent than one might expect is a pure expression of personal interest in the subject at hand: an intervener in a case on religious autonomy explains, ‘I think religious autonomy is an important thing.’ One respondent treats such intervention as a necessary evil in order to bring balance to the field: I’m still very unhappy that I read that some cases in the European Court which are really re-writing pro-abortion movement sentences [in other words, importing US pro-abortion rhetoric into ECtHR case law]. So my point was, if pro-abortion [advocates] are proposing some analysis, why not support pro-life cases? … I am understanding that it’s not so clear how the discussion is involving these two kinds of interventions. When you see interventions by groups that are pro-life and pro-choice, it’s strange for me how they can influence the Court, can be quoted by the Court. I don’t think it’s so good.

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More prevalent however is the notion that ECtHR third-party interventions on religion-related issues are genuinely helpful to a court in need of such help: Something we’ve learned is that the ECtHR is hungry for comparative information. You get cases from one country and have 47 countries to worry about. … They are flying blind! … Sindicatul case was one [such case], obviously, Lautsi, where you had a case coming up in one country but had the whole Orthodox wing of the Council of Europe saying we feel something different!

This relates to a point made repeatedly by the US-based lawyers consulted for this study: namely, that they have valuable experience to offer. Some of the disputes happening in Europe now, one respondent claims, have been previously dealt with in the United States ‘so there’s a natural curiosity on part of European judges, how did the US deal with this issue? [The intervention] could be persuasive or provide some additional insight.’ According to this legal actor, Europe is facing situations that the US Supreme Court faced in the 1920s and 1930s, in terms of certain issues that are arising. Meanwhile, one interviewee explains, because many US-based lawyers will have already prepared amicus briefs on similar topics in the US context, submitting an intervention to the ECtHR is a fairly low-cost endeavour: much of the research and writing is already in place. This point might be supported by the fact that two of the four respondents could not recall clearly in which cases they had intervened: ‘I did submit in Eweida and Lautsi. In Lautsi I tried … I’m not sure about Eweida’; and ‘I think [x] is the only case in which I intervened.’ Related to the latter is an acute self-awareness as having a comparative advantage in the field. ‘American lawyers’, one respondent explains, ‘have become used to strategic litigation and people have become more and more conscious of the ECtHR … and have sought to be helpful.’ And because many of the religious groups to which they belong are large international churches with a very hierarchical structure, their respective headquarters are ‘very conscious of what’s going on, so we will pick up on things rapidly’. The same does not apply to smaller religious and other interest groups, so such interventions can have a disproportionate influence: ‘The larger institutions will have more resources to actually do the litigation and at a higher level. They know how to do it and, because of the quality of the work, they will be more persuasive than someone sending essentially a postcard to the ECtHR.’

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According to one respondent, ‘The interest is that it is one of the major courts in the world dealing with these issues in a forum that’s responsive to good arguments.’ The response includes two distinct explanations: a recognition of the ECtHR as an important standard-setter in the field of religion – a point to which we will return below, and an appraisal of the court as receptive to ‘good arguments’. Here, there is an indirect suggestion of comparison with the US Supreme Court, judged to be less open to ‘good arguments’, and this relates to the point above regarding the ECtHR as ‘fertile ground’ and to the notion cited above regarding US actors ‘losing the war at home export their battles to the wider world’ (Anderson 2013: 309). ‘Another thing that drives the interest in [the ECtHR],’ explains one US-based lawyer representing one of the more active religiously conservative organizations in both the US and European contexts, ‘is that there’s been globalization in many areas, including, human rights. There’s a kind of interaction, traffic of ideas going between different courts, the Supreme Court in the United States or in Canada and the ECtHR on the other side of the Atlantic and I think the influence goes both ways, to varying degrees. And if we really want to promote [religious freedom], it makes sense to get involved.’ Similarly, another respondent explains, My sense is that the two systems are talking to each other. And so what goes on in Europe matters. … Insofar as there is a conversation and mutual influence, it’s therefore good to enter into it and try to affect the conversation. And since it goes back and forth, we don’t want Europe to go too out of whack.

This response serves as a useful lead-in to the question of the extent to which interventions are driven by a hope to set favourable precedence in the ECtHR for potential influence on case law ‘back home’. The above-cited fear of Europe ‘going too out of whack’ suggests some element of such a motivation. The response of another US-based lawyer reveals more than a little such motivation: ‘The liberal wing of the [US Supreme Court] is much more receptive [to foreign precedence]. And Kennedy is very receptive. So in both cases [in which I contributed to an intervention], part of the strategy of doing an international brief was simply to give comparative information that might sway Kennedy. It probably didn’t but …’ the same respondent continues: ‘So, as the [Supreme] Court changes, that may change … but I don’t aim to get cases

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that you can cite in the Supreme Court, that would be a bit overly simplistic. It will be a side issue, especially when half the court is principally opposed to citing other cases.’ Overall, respondents claim to have fairly low expectations that their interventions in Europe might influence case law in the United States, with the general feeling that the court selectively imports liberal arguments: They [at the US Supreme Court] look to other jurisdictions very opportunistically. By and large it’s the liberals in the Court who do it, primarily in cases to do with capital punishment. Never with respect to things where Europe is on the conservative side, e.g., establishment of religion. We are the outliers when it comes to public funds going to religiously affiliated schools. We are the only western democracy that does that. But you don’t see Ginsburg citing European jurisprudence on that.

The question of how they choose the cases in which they seek to intervene also yields thought-provoking results. For one respondent the main criterion is whether the American experience with the topic at hand can be instructive for the ECtHR. He explained that he did not choose to intervene in Lautsi because ‘I don’t think Americans really have anything to say about it. … We have an Establishment Clause and that makes us totally different.’ Whereas the cases in which he did intervene ‘fit’ because of relevant law in the US context. This explanation applies to ECtHR cases such as Fernandez Martinez v. Spain, because of the American ministerial exemption law, and Sindicatul Pastorul cel Bun v. Romania, because of the Hosanna Tabor case in the US Supreme Court on religious autonomy. A further selection criterion, less connected to the American experience and more focused on the other arguments present before the ECtHR, is ‘where we can say something meaningful, something new’. A third cited basis for the selection of cases in which an intervention may be made is on matters of principle, where it is expected that the cases ‘are going to be really important to Freedom of Religion or Belief and religious liberty for all groups over the long term’. Finally, and related to the latter, one respondent claims to engage only or at least primarily with high-level, highprofile cases. Also worthy of careful consideration are responses to the question of how each respondent became engaged in the particular ECtHR case intervention.

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One common denominator across three of four responses is having been approached by someone else: ‘We tend to get involved mainly when requested to do so by others’ (and, he continues, ‘and where we may have some special comparative law expertise’). He goes on later to say, in relation to a European national-level case in which he was involved in an amicus brief submission, ‘Usually [I am approached by] people I know very well … and in that case … it was natural for them to ask for our input or help. … It’s a very small circle … one of my best friends in life, so it was quite natural to be asked to do input.’ The respondent based in Europe but submitting with US-based lawyers explains, ‘I have been involved in discussions of Lautsi, Fernandez Martinez and Sindicatul.’ When prodded to explain what he meant by ‘discussions’, he said, ‘I was invited to a workshop in Strasbourg organised by the ECLJ. And I also met a Becket Fund representative. … I was approached by Americans [and he lists three friends and colleagues]. … I think these names are creating the interaction.’ He also emphasizes that he has no habit of cooperating with this type of intervention and that he is not an activist. A third respondent explains: ‘It’s pretty random. I don’t comprehensively follow what they [at the ECtHR] are doing. So someone will call and say “do you know what they’re doing” and I’ll say “no, what are they doing?”, and sometimes I get interested enough to do something, and sometimes I don’t.’ In the particular case in which he intervened, ‘somebody called, and then his buddy, comrade-in-arms, is [xxx], so I’m very close to both of them. [That initial “somebody”] and I actually go to the same church.’ From the above responses, a great deal can be inferred (though of course not confirmed as relevant beyond these examples). First, interpersonal connections seem to be key. Second, the engagement in the intervention seems to have come about in a very haphazard way – ‘I was approached by’, ‘Someone will call’, ‘I was invited to a workshop.’ One might assume that a great deal of planning may go behind what comes across as haphazard, but still the interviewees’ self-awareness (or at least, self-presentation) in this process as rather tangential is noteworthy. Yet when asked, ‘So it was kind of by chance that you got involved?’ one responded, ‘It wasn’t chance in the sense that it’s an issue I’ve been following and interested in for a long time.’ Indeed, one can reasonably assume that the recipients of the calls and the invitations to contribute to submissions have been carefully chosen based on their positions

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and their experience with a given topic, and that there is little or nothing haphazard about it all. Unprovoked by a related question, two of the respondents raised the issue of whether their interventions might be limited in their potential impact by the fact that they are American in origin: There is also another issue, there’s an interesting question about how should these foreigners, Americans, be involved with the ECtHR. How can we come in and say ‘do it this way’ or ‘another way’. I think the Court may be dubious of having Americans come in and say this is what we think. … I think they should be more open to it, and adopt the US policy, have the filters within the chambers and not at the doorstep.

The second explains that ‘as a matter of strategic litigation strategy, you have to think, will judges welcome this [foreign intervention] or find it to be an irritant?’ Thus he speaks of ‘two main’ cases in which he has contributed to an ECtHR intervention and ‘others’ in which he was involved ‘more behind the scenes’. The responses suggest that a great deal of US legal involvement in ECtHR interventions may be taking place ‘behind the scenes’, for fear that European judges may look less favourably on an intervention by US lawyers.

Questions to take forward In his 2015 article on Transnational Culture Wars, Christopher McCrudden explores the normative implications of transnational legal interventions. He concludes that the interventions he studies are likely to affect developments in the field of human rights ‘only at the margins’, and especially at the level of institutional power relations. Whether shifts in these power relations are desirable is debatable. And the fact that they arise from outside of Europe (from the United States, in this case) ‘does bring a new element into that debate’. But it is unlikely to generate much angst, he argues, ‘because the external interventions fall clearly within the parameters of internal domestic debates on these issues’. Thus, in response to the greater normative question as to whether foreign ‘lobbying’ in the judicial process ought to remain unrestricted, he draws an analogy with free speech and reaches the ‘normative conclusion

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that encourages more speech rather than restricting existing speech … and ensuring that an equally well-funded voice is present on each occasion that can respond with sophistication and authority to such interventions’ (McCrudden 2015: 461–2). The narrow focus on third-party interventions in this chapter precludes us from seeking to respond substantially to this broad normative question. However, the issues and perspectives examined here do help generate new questions that bring us closer to such an aim. For example, to what extent is a level playing field, as the one McCrudden hopes for, a realistic possibility? Limited to the domain of third-party interventions before the ECtHR, the most systematic study we have is that of Nicole Burli (2017). But nor there do we have a clear sense of comparative advantages among different third-party interveners in terms of funding, networks, etc. What is clear from the analysis presented in this chapter is that we have moved far beyond the situation that provoked ADF Benjamin Bull’s claim that ‘we’re forced to do it, because if we don’t, we’re going to lose according to the rules of a game we never created’. Today, and increasingly so, US-based groups choose to play in the European game, and with a strategy in which they have a substantial comparative advantage: amicus briefs. Ιn fact, we find that, at least in the domain of religion-related interventions to the ECtHR, the game is looking a lot more like that in the United States, with the numbers of interventions on the rise and with a great deal of networking behind the preparation of each. Less clear is the reason behind the lack of clarity in the transatlantic intervention process itself: is the rather non-transparent way the interventions come together necessary? Do European judges frown on US actors’ influence in ECtHR case law? We lack insight into this question. And is that lack of transparency acceptable? Here too further research is required to understand the relative advantage this lack of transparency affords certain interventions and, over time, the results of this comparative advantage in terms of rates of success in influencing ECtHR case law. Thus the US-to-Europe influence is not only one of content (in terms of the arguments put forth in the interventions) but also of form (in terms of the planning and negotiating of these). In 1996 Jeremy Rabkin wrote ‘the religious right may be increasingly important, as it learns how to build alliances and coalitions, broadening its agenda to issues that appeal to much

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larger constituencies’. We know this to be the case in the United States, and we have seen here strong suggestions this is the case also for the American religious right operating at the European level. What of the reciprocal dimension? What influence flows from Europe to the United States? First, the extent to which intervention in the ECtHR may yield favourable precedence for the group in question, precedence which will be relied on by the US Supreme Court, is a question requiring ongoing attention. As noted by one interviewee, this will change over time with the make-up of the Supreme Court. Second, the mobilizing potential that comes from issues arising in a European context and supported by US-based religiously conservative groups should not be underestimated. Today’s ADL international web page features the following as one of two quotes illustrating their work: ‘“Because of ADF, I am a free man.”-Ake Green, Swedish pastor’. In fact, Pastor Green’s story is mentioned three times on the same page. In the second mention, the text indicates that ‘the church around the world is suffering’, and one of the three examples that follows pertains to Green’s case: a pastor in Sweden was sentenced to prison for simply quoting what the Bible says about marriage.4 And third, with the Green case appearing top of a three-point list: ‘These victories are just the beginning. Thanks be to God, our international efforts have helped secure more than 300 victories for religious freedom, including 17 at the highly influential European Court of Human Rights. Among them Overturning ‘hate speech’ convictions for pastors in Sweden and Canada who were teaching from Scripture on homosexual behavior’ (ADF International). And a final question to take forward beyond this chapter: to what extent is legal activism contingent on the status quo? Crudely speaking, do we have religious activism in the United States more because of church–state separation (i.e. a religious public working in a secular legal environment, struggling to defend a place for religion in the public sphere), and in Europe less so because, until fairly recently, religious groups in religiously homogenous countries (with strong links between church and state, and often between religion and national identity – i.e. the majority of states) saw fewer threats in the status quo? (France, as is often the case, is the exception in this diagram). In Europe we have instead had a longer history of more robust activism among secular and secularist groups, seeking to free the public sphere from religion. In the extent to which these crude distinctions are found to be tenable, what can

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we expect as a result of the institutional cross-pollination described above? Given the increasing frequency with which both the courts contend with issues related to religion, social ethics and bioethics, it seems careful attention to such transnational interventions and influences is critical to understanding secular versus religious trends on both sides of the Atlantic. This conclusion takes us a step beyond those reached in Religious America, Secular Europe? (2008), where the myth of a European secularization spreading outward was undermined (together with other myths); we did not go so far in that text as to anticipate American religiosity impacting on European developments in the way that has been described here. Peter Berger has long been in the business of undermining accepted truths, including those he himself promulgated in The Sacred Canopy. With intellectual honesty he explained in his ‘Secularism in retreat’ (1996–7; 2000) that ‘there were good reasons for holding these views [secularization theory] at the time … but the premise does not stand’. Likewise, there were good reasons to expect when he was writing in the early-to-mid 2000s that the ‘exceptional’ European secularization would spread eastwards towards Orthodox Europe with the expansion of the European Union. Yet the case of Romania does not bear out this prediction; as we saw above, in some areas there may be a more direct line of influence from the United States (e.g. rebel Kentucky registrar Kim Davis campaigning against same-sex marriage in Romania) than from Europe. Berger once wrote that ‘one learns as a social scientist that predictions are dangerous business’ (2010). This is all the more so today, in the age of unpredictability marked by Brexit, Trump’s electoral victory and, I dare say, the changes to the American judiciary resulting from the latter. Peter did not follow his own advice and continued making predictions; I will take the same risk here in suggesting those changes to the judiciary just might make ECtHR precedence on matters of religion, where US-based legal actors may have intervened, that bit more relevant to the US context.

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Assessing the Influence of The Sacred Canopy: A Missed Opportunity for Social Constructionism?1 Titus Hjelm

In the Introduction I claimed that Berger was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. Let me now try to back that claim. Looking at some figures, Berger’s reach is undeniable: In a 1997 poll titled ‘Books of the Century’, the members of the International Sociological Association (ISA) voted Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality ([1966] 1967) the fifth most influential book. Male members voted the book sixth most influential, while among female members the book finished in third place. In a poll of ‘most influential authors’ Berger finished in the top ten among both men (#8) and women (#5).2 If Berger’s status among academic peers is not enough to convince, sales figures certainly tell something about the reach of his work. Writing in 1986, Hunter and Ainlay (1986: 2) state that Berger’s books have sold 1.5 million copies, with Invitation to Sociology (1963) alone reaching the 1 million mark in 1981 (Berger 2011: 75). No current figures are available, but counting the 30+ books, their different editions and translations, it is probably safe to say that the number is closer to 2 million. Although Berger’s later work has been less prominent in terms of sales, his classic works Invitation to Sociology (1963), The Social Construction of Reality ([1966] 1967) and The Sacred Canopy (1967) have never been out of print. In a profession where books selling 1,000 copies are considered bestsellers, the figure truly boggles the mind. Citation figures tell the same story (see below). Today, twenty years after the ISA poll, it would be interesting to know whether Berger’s work remains important among new cohorts of sociologists.

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Whatever the case, it is no exaggeration to call Berger a living sociological classic (see Knoblauch and Wilke 2016). We know much less about Berger’s influence in the sociology of religion, the subfield he has contributed to for sixty years: all the way from his unpublished PhD thesis on the Bahái (submitted in 1954) and his first published book, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961), up until the recent The Many Altars of Modernity (2014). At a quick glance, it would be entirely reasonable to say that there are few publications discussing secularization that do not refer to Berger’s work. Secularization, even if not the only paradigm in contemporary sociology of religion, has been the most discussed one, and The Sacred Canopy is rightly considered a classic in the field. This chapter examines the influence of The Sacred Canopy on the sociology of religion. It does so on three levels: First, by analysing the earliest academic reviews of the book. Second, by looking at publication and citation data and constructing a broad picture of the reception of the work. Third, by looking at particular ideas and arguments in The Sacred Canopy that have generated further research. These are divided into three themes: (1) secularization, (2) plausibility structures and (3) constructionism as an approach in the sociology of religion. The chapter asserts that The Sacred Canopy has had a disproportionate influence on discussions on (1) and (2) at the expense of (3). The reason for this, the chapter argues, is Berger’s own inconsistent application of his own constructionist ideas to his work on religion.

The aim of The Sacred Canopy and early reactions The preface to The Sacred Canopy opens with these words: ‘The following argument is intended to be an exercise in sociological theory. Specifically, it seeks to apply a general theoretical perspective derived from the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon of religion’ (Berger 1967: v). Further, Berger goes on to say that ‘it should be stressed that this book is not “a sociology of religion”’ (Berger 1967: vi). Although conceived as a narrower endeavour – applying ‘the theoretical perspective of The Social Construction of Reality to religion in general and to the contemporary religious situation in particular’ (Berger 2011: 97) – the narrowness of the

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approach is questionable. The Social Construction of Reality itself ends up being much more than ‘a treatise in the sociology of knowledge’: ‘Starting from a modest-sounding sociology of knowledge perspective, Berger and Luckmann’s approach in fact becomes a fully-fledged theory of society and a reformulation of the core questions in sociology’ (Hjelm 2014a: 18). Similarly, The Sacred Canopy presents a sociological theory of religion (a rare thing in itself) and a theory of religious change. The Sacred Canopy received good initial coverage in academic journals. It was reviewed in the three top US sociology journals – The American Journal of Sociology (Nottingham 1968), American Sociological Review (Wilson 1968) and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Klausner 1968) – and some of the key sociology of religion journals, such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (Knudten 1968) and Sociological Analysis (later Sociology of Religion) (Dixon 1968), in addition to other social science and theological journals (Goode 1969; Thomasson 1969). The reviews were largely favourable, with Bryan R. Wilson (1968: 843–4) – himself famous for a slightly different formulation of secularization theory – calling it ‘one of the most important theoretical studies of the sociology of religion to appear in several decades’, and James W. Thomasson (1969: 166) titling it ‘a jewel of a book’. Although all of the reviewers found the book interesting, there were criticisms as well. These included lack of empirical validation (Knudten 1968: 294; Klausner 1968: 194), and too broad concepts (Klausner 1968: 195; Dixon 1968: 41–2). Rather surprisingly, and opposite to the other reviews, Elizabeth K. Nottingham (1968: 103) bemoaned the lack of originality in Berger’s work. Memorably, Erich Goode (1969: 353) was put off by the book’s ‘tone of pompous self-importance’. Reflecting the contemporary (and, one could argue, ongoing) provincialism of American sociology, Dixon (1968: 42) predicted that Berger’s ‘challenge … to the sociological enterprise as it is conducted in America today … will very likely remain marginal to American sociology’. More bizarrely, Klausner (1968: 194) characterized the book as follows: ‘It is German sociology rendered in excellent English. Foreign citations outnumber American ones by roughly three to one – a formidable feat for a New Yorker writing in an age when the lion’s share of sociological literature is American.’ I think the reviewer meant this as a compliment.

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More importantly, reading the reviews in their context, an interesting tension emerges. Most of them make the connection between The Sacred Canopy and The Social Construction of Reality – as they should, considering that Berger flags the point in the preface (Berger 1967: vi). However, it is the language of functionalism, reigning unchallenged at the time, that the reviewers associate The Sacred Canopy with. Although Berger and Luckmann sought to distance themselves from the Parsonsian hegemony by developing the idea of society as a process of social construction, the focus on legitimation in Berger’s theory of religion enabled the reviewers to read it as an example of the reigning paradigm. All mention the centrality of legitimation, with Goode (1969: 352) going as far as to say that ‘religion is seen in basically Durkheimian terms: religion faces the twin problems of legitimation and protection’. One could argue that in the context of The Social Construction of Reality, as one ‘symbolic universe’ among others (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 95–104), religion did not stand out as solely ‘functional’, but – fairly or not – became reduced to that in the readings of reviewers of The Sacred Canopy. The tension between the constructedness of the social world, and order as ‘the fundamental social category’ (Berger and Neuhaus 1970: 24. Emphasis in the original) in Berger’s work is real, however, and not just a prejudice of the reviewers writing in their time. For the sociology of religion this meant that despite the potential, The Sacred Canopy did not launch a recognizably ‘constructionist’ school or approach (see below). Perhaps surprisingly, secularization did not feature as a major theme in the earliest reviews, and when it was mentioned, the focus was more on the impact of social change on theology than social differentiation itself. Berger’s discussion was even said to be conducted ‘in terms somewhat reminiscent of Harvey Cox’ (Nottingham 1968: 103), whose bestselling The Secular City was published in 1965. Berger’s later status as one of the foundational secularization theorists is hardly evident in the earliest reviews.

The Influence of The Sacred Canopy: Numbers In the following, I will try to demonstrate the diffusion and influence of The Sacred Canopy by looking at publication data. The analysis is modelled after

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Knoblauch and Wilke’s (2016) similar analysis of the dissemination of ‘social construction’, the key idea of The Social Construction of Reality. The results of such an endeavour are necessarily indicative rather than conclusive, pending gaps in databases and search methodology, but the analysis provides some general outlines regarding the dissemination of the key ideas of The Sacred Canopy. I will examine data provided by Google’s book corpus search engine Ngram, and citation data from Google Scholar and The Web of Science indices. Google Ngram measures the ratio between the classified word and instances of the word in its English language book and journal corpus (currently around 5.2 million entries between 1500 and 2008). I have limited the search to years between 1800 and 2008. With specialist vocabulary the ratio figure is less important than the trends the visualization shows. Several interesting observations can be made, however. First, looking at Figure 10.1, the occurrence of the bigram ‘sacred canopy’, although not appearing for the first time, is clearly associated with the publication of Berger’s book. Twenty-four of the sixty citations refer to the idea of a ‘sacred canopy’, often directly citing Berger, the rest are citations of the book. It is interesting to note that the concept and citations (in the Google corpus) increase until the mid-1990s when they plateau. For comparison, Berger’s other main topic, ‘secularization’, features much more frequently in the corpus. This is partly explained by the fact that Ngram does not differentiate between popular and academic publications, and secularization, of course, is an example of social science jargon that has ‘trickled down’ to everyday usage. Notably, however, the occurrence peaks around the publication of The Sacred Canopy. More importantly, where Berger’s other concepts (sacred canopy, desecularization) and the recently faddish ‘postsecular’ might be familiar enough in the sociology of religion literature, they show little penetration beyond the specialist field ( Figure 10.2). Finally, I examined whether what Berger considers his most lasting contribution (Berger 2001a: 194), making the connection between pluralism and secularization, shows in any way in the corpus. ‘Pluralism’, of course, has a much wider coverage than ‘secularization’ as shown in Figure 10.3. But when the two are combined, the influence of The Sacred Canopy seems clear with the combination taking off at the time of publication (Figure 10.4), even as the ratio number plummets.

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Figure 10.1 Google Ngram results for ‘sacred canopy’.

Figure 10.2 Google Ngram results for ‘secularization’, ‘sacred canopy’, ‘post-secular’ and ‘desecularization’.

A slightly different picture is gained from looking at citation data. Google Scholar’s search for ‘sacred canopy Berger’ comes up with 8,525 results (as of April 2017), which, as a rough indicator, is impressive enough. However, Google is weaker the further from the current date the search extends, and it lists rather random entries from the medical sciences, for example. Although Google’s coverage of non-academic literature can be an advantage for someone with resources to sift through the massive index, a more accurate picture of the book’s relevance can be gained with a Web of Science (WoS) search (cf. Knoblauch and Wilke 2016: 56–7). Two indicators can be gleaned from this more curated data. First, a look at citation trends: Although references to The Sacred Canopy took off from the start, the peak decade for the book was 1988–97 (see Figure 10.5). Tracing the reasons for this is difficult, but a plausible suggestion would be the interest generated by R. Stephen Warner’s (1993) hugely influential article

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Figure 10.3 Google Ngram results for ‘pluralism’ and ‘secularization’.

Figure 10.4 Google Ngram results for ‘secularization and pluralism’.

on the ‘new paradigm’ in the sociology of religion, and consequent discussions on ‘rational choice theory’. Interestingly, these debates pitted Berger against himself by referring to The Sacred Canopy as the old paradigm in terms of its theory of secularization on the one hand, but took from Berger the idea of religious markets on the other (e.g. Finke and Stark 1988; Warner 1993). Also interestingly, the publication of Berger’s own The Desecularization of the World in 1999 did not generate a comparable surge in citations contrasting his divergent position on secularization in The Sacred Canopy and the latter work. The rise in citations in the last decade shows that The Sacred Canopy is far from a forgotten classic, even if the context in which the book is referred to cannot be deduced from the numbers alone. Second, the WoS shows that in contrast to The Social Construction of Reality (Knoblauch and Wilke 2016: 57–8), The Sacred Canopy’s disciplinary spread is much narrower. This is rather unsurprising, of course, considering the much narrower topic. Sociology (49 per cent of N = 1,021)

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Figure 10.5 Citations of The Sacred Canopy in the Web of Science 1967–2017, including SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED, IC (N = 1,021).

and ‘religion’ (45 per cent) share the bulk of citations, with the next most popular disciplines, psychology (7 per cent) and ‘other social science topics’ (6 per cent), trailing far behind.3 A word search of hundreds of journal articles provides only limited information, of course. Ritualistic citation of an established classic comes up as a hit as much as a thorough operationalization and empirical testing of theory. One indicator that I was interested in was the proportion of articles that focus on Berger’s theory of secularization. Rather surprisingly, of the 1,021 works citing The Sacred Canopy in WoS, only 168 include secular* with its various endings. The bulk of these are empirical analyses, with the rational choice debate of the 1990s and early 2000s taking up a significant portion. The interesting question, however, is what the non-secularization references are. A quick glance shows various empirical tests of religious commitment and the impact of religion on various other variables, with theoretical and historical studies adding to the variety. A comprehensive analysis is not possible here, but it seems that describing Berger as a ‘secularization theorist’ is not justified in light of the impact of The Sacred Canopy. The task for the following sections, then, is to try to offer suggestions as to why secularization nevertheless seems to be the first point of reference to Berger’s work.

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Secularization Looking at the influence of The Sacred Canopy from a more qualitative perspective, secularization stands out as a central theme. It has provided scholars both a foundation and a foil – not least because it has done so for Berger himself. Not too long after the publication of The Sacred Canopy he started doubting his own ideas regarding secularization – ‘In the last few years I have come to believe that many observers of the religious scene (I among them) have overestimated both the degree and the irreversibility of secularization’ (Berger 1974: 14) – and of course later reversed his position entirely with the introduction of the term ‘desecularization’. Here I have reduced the references to the original secularization theory presented in The Sacred Canopy into four ideal types, if you will: (1) exemplar, (2) theory-building, (3) theory testing and (4) ritual refutations. First, many studies refer to The Sacred Canopy as a classic or influential example of secularization theory – a paradigm-influencing exemplar in the Kuhnian sense. This is especially so in textbook accounts of the sociology of religion (e.g. Hamilton 2002: ch. 15; Furseth and Repstad 2006: 84–5; Davie 2007: 52–4). More analytically, Tschannen’s (1991) often-quoted systematization of secularization theories and Warner’s (1993) above-mentioned article on the paradigm shift in American sociology of religion are instances where The Sacred Canopy functions as a key source for typifying or critiquing Berger’s argument that pluralization and secularization go hand in hand. Second, The Sacred Canopy has been engaged in more thorough ways, as part of theory-building attempts. Dobbelaere’s (1981, 2002) restatement of secularization theory is an example of this type of reference. Many of these theory-building endeavours take a particular aspect of Berger’s work and incorporate that into the emerging theoretical construction (Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007; cf. Zondervan 2005). For example, Beyer’s influential Religion and Globalization (1994), although ultimately espousing a Luhmannian view, engages with Berger’s ideas on the private–public distinction in order to develop a fuller theory. The difference, hence, between exemplar and theory-building uses is to actually engage with the arguments instead of simply offering them as cases to support or oppose. Interestingly, even this kind of deeper engagement with the secularization theory presented in

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The Sacred Canopy rarely positions it within the broader view of religion presented in the first part of the book (but see Riesebrodt 2010; Smith 2017). Instead, it is a specific dynamic (the pluralism–secularization connection) that is cherry-picked. As I argue below, this trend has had particular consequences for the reception of The Sacred Canopy and Berger’s work more broadly. Third, to a much lesser degree, Berger’s version of secularization theory has been subjected to empirical testing. Notably, the pluralization– secularization link so prominent in The Sacred Canopy has been subjected to empirical analyses with large datasets by scholars in what later became known as the rational choice theory (RCT) approach, and even later, the economics of religion (Iannaccone 1998). Their argument, summarized in one of the foundational publications of the approach (Finke and Stark 1988: 42), is that ‘we agree with Berger that pluralism forces religions to compete for adherents. Unlike Berger, however, we view competition as a stimulus for religious growth and not an avenue for its demise.’ As is often the case in the social sciences, the RCT reversal of Berger’s claim has in turn been refuted by Chaves and Gorski’s (2001) review of large-N studies. They argue that in light of many studies suggesting no link between pluralism and secularization there is reason to suggest that Berger’s original formulation needs to be rethought. However, in light of Chaves and Gorski’s study, the evidence for the RCT claim is even weaker. Bruce’s (2011) eloquent defence of secularization theory does not foreground the pluralization–secularization link. Finally, the theory of secularization presented in The Sacred Canopy is referred to in what I call ritual refutations. What makes this type of reference interesting is that Berger himself set the scene for it with the publication of The Desecularization of the World (1999). Despite being a disappointment for many sociologists of religion (e.g. Williams 2001; Bruce 2001), the impact of the book has been considerable. Questions of academic rigour notwithstanding, it has become the rallying point for scholars and religious practitioners celebrating the demise of the secularization thesis. Indeed, talk of ‘desecularization’ has legitimated – in genuinely Bergerian terms – a hostility towards the secularization thesis even in cases where it is not at all clear from the data that this is justified. Neither is the use of ‘desecularization’

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very sophisticated in cases where the debunking of secularization does not properly address theoretical issues originally presented in The Sacred Canopy – hence the ritual, rather than analytical, nature of these references. As Pollack (2015: 60) quite correctly states, ‘Criticizing the secularization theory has become a new master narrative itself.’ Whatever intentions Berger originally had, ‘desecularization’ has in many cases done a disservice to the analytical study of religion (Hjelm 2014b). Hadden’s (1987) scathing critique of the secularization thesis – ‘a taken-for-granted ideology rather than a systematic set of interrelated propositions’ – now applies equally well to claims about desecularization. As said above, part of the disappointment with The Desecularization of the World had to do with the fact that it did not engage with the original ideas presented in The Sacred Canopy. Fortunately, fifteen years later, Berger did just that in The Many Altars of Modernity (2014). He concedes that secularization on the objective level is an empirical fact. Almost anywhere you look in the world, religion has evacuated from the many of the key functions it used to have. Yet, many individuals remain religious. How is this possible? If pluralism begets institutional secularization, it should beget secularization on the level of consciousness as well. As mentioned in the Introduction, Berger adopts Eisenstadt’s concept of ‘multiple modernities’ for his explanation of the continuing vitality of religion on the individual level. The multiple spheres of the structural level are replicated in consciousness. ‘Secular discourse’, is an undeniable characteristic of the modern world, but it is just one discourse among others. There are as many manifestations of modernity on the level of consciousness as there are on the institutional level: ‘Ours is not so much an age of unbelief as an age of doubt’ (Berger 2014: 68). There are valid reasons to doubt whether even this conceptual reformulation of desecularization will manage to convince those who consider Berger’s reversal regarding secularization a mistake (Bruce 2001; see Bruce in this book; Pollack 2014; 2015), and whether The Many Altars of Modernity will become the ‘new paradigm’ for the sociology of religion that it purports to be. The jury is still out on whether ‘desecularization’ is a useful concept to begin

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with, but it can be safely said that it has desecularized the sociology of religion by decisively breaking the previous hegemony of the secularization thesis.

Plausibility structures Berger’s notion of ‘plausibility structures’ has been an important source for sociologists of religion (see Ammerman’s chapter in this book). The reality of social (including religious) ‘worlds’ is dependent on a social ‘base’ that Berger calls plausibility structure (1967: 45). These are the recurrent social interactions that legitimate the religious world (beliefs and practices) and make it plausible for the individual. The concept has enabled research into the social factors influencing religious belief and participation. For Berger and the people who have operationalized the concept, one of the main questions has been how religious plausibility can be maintained in plural societies. Well-known studies from the late 1970s and early 1980s by Roof (1976, 1978), and Hunter (1983) applied the idea of plausibility structures to data on American mainline churches and evangelicals, respectively (Wuthnow 1986: 134–5). Roof ’s early ‘theory of local-cosmopolitan plausibility’ (1976: 198) argues for expanding the traditional factors for assessing religious commitment towards a sensitivity to ‘local community attachments and interactive networks as a plausibility structure’. Using survey data Roof argues that ‘for patterns of church religion it is evident that local social bonds do constitute an important plausibility structure in contemporary America’ (1976: 206). Similarly, Bainbridge and Stark (1981: 2) argue – in response to Wuthnow’s influential The Consciousness Reformation (1976) – that ‘meaning systems exist only as they have social meaning. All culture must be created, sustained, and transmitted’ (emphasis in the original). Without using the concept itself, Bainbridge and Stark might as well be talking about plausibility structures (cf. Wuthnow 1986: 134). Despite the seeming and argued influence of the concept, there have been few attempts to refine the concept itself. More often than not – possibly because of the example set by the studies by Roof and others mentioned above – the quantitative studies employing the concept use it as a rather grand

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term for social factors influencing religious commitment. The dynamics of the interaction in which the plausibility structure is constructed have received much less attention. McMillan’s (1988) study on the rhetoric of plausibility maintenance and alignment in an American mainline denomination is an interesting exception, but suffers from an ‘idealistic’ bias, in which plausibility is defined as ‘common ideological commitment’ and ‘unifying tenet’, instead of actual social interaction (1988: 326, fn.1). Interestingly for someone whose work on religion has been considered nuanced by even those who like to see religion as sui generis (see McCutcheon 1997), the concept of plausibility structures potentially ‘opens the door for a type of sociological reductionism which explains away the reality of religion by attributing it to social conditions’ (Wuthnow 1986: 136). In addition, Berger does not explain where plausibility structures come from or how they change – if change they must (Berger 1967: 138) – which could be interpreted as Durkheimian foundationalism, where society itself is prior to and the source of other phenomena (Wuthnow 1986: 136; McMillan 1988: 327). Although the idea of plausibility structures remains an important one – especially so, one could argue, in an age of ‘alternative facts’ – it did not take off after initial interest, and conceptual development in the appropriate constructionist and/or interactionist context has been limited, with the important exception of Ammerman’s work (2013; see Ammerman in this book).

Constructionist sociology of religion Speaking of the genesis of The Social Construction of Reality, Berger tells a story how he and some of his colleagues at the New School were dreaming of an ‘academic empire’ that would systematize ideas put forth by Alfred Schutz, and ‘change the character of sociology’ (Berger 2011: 81–1). When he and Thomas Luckmann sat down to write The Social Construction of Reality, their aims were perhaps more modest, yet despite the book’s subtitle and narrow categorization as sociology of knowledge, they were engaging in just the kind of ‘basic reformulation of sociological theory’ that they envisaged the original multi-author project to be (Berger 2011: 81, 89).

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Now, if the sociology of religion ‘should be understood as belonging under the sociology of knowledge’ (Berger 2011), what are the implications for the sociology of religion? In The Social Construction of Reality Berger and Luckmann stated that ‘the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for “knowledge” in society’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 3). This was not intellectual history, but a ‘democratization’ of the concept of knowledge, initially suggested by Schutz (Berger 2011: 81). Logically, when translated to concern religion, the sociology of religion must concern itself with whatever passes for ‘religion’ in society. Yet, this was not what readers took home from The Sacred Canopy, and certainly not something that created an ‘academic empire’. Why? I would like to offer three suggestions for an answer; two having to do with The Sacred Canopy itself and its reception, the third more diffuse. First, there is nothing particularly ‘constructionist’ in the way religion in general or secularization in particular has been conceptualized and empirically studied in the vast majority of the corpus of research citing the book. It is only more recently that we have witnessed the emergence of approaches taking the idea of social construction, and especially the role of language, seriously (see below). Second, as also briefly mentioned above, the book itself and Berger’s work in general after 1968 took a turn not amenable to a creation of a constructionist sociology of religion. Berger’s disdain for the Marxism – although not Marx, whose concepts play a key role in his own theories – launched in the 1968 movements is legendary; there is hardly a publication where he doesn’t mention it. The relevance of this for a constructionist sociology of religion is that Berger felt that the ideas of The Social Construction of Reality were ‘incorporated into the ascendant ideology’, which he described as ‘an orgy of ideology and utopianism’ (Berger 2011: 92). Consequently, two things happened: as Knoblauch and Wilke (2016) show, both Berger and Luckmann abandoned ‘social construction’ and have continued to insist that they are not ‘constructivists’ (Berger 2011: 95, 2001b: 454). Further, as Turner (2008: 496) argues, Berger’s trajectory has been to emphasize order at the expense of construction and its contingencies. ‘Was this, at least partly, a result of my recoiling from the destructive disorder of the late 1960s,’ Berger (2001a: 191) asks himself (note the word choice). My answer would be yes and no:

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Yes, because the focus did shift from construction to order – already in The Sacred Canopy, one could argue, and definitely after that. No, because order, especially in the form Gehlen presented it as an anthropological necessity, was present in Berger’s writings since the early 1960s (Berger and Kellner 1965; see Turner’s chapter in this book). Finally, and here we enter fuzzier terrain, there was perhaps no need for an explicitly constructionist sociology of religion because constructionism became for many an implicit premise of social research (Hjelm 2014a: 2). Many probably identify with Eileen Barker (2013: 41) when she says: ‘I was also greatly influenced by Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality, and would still, if pushed, call myself a social constructionist.’ Even when used explicitly, the different – and differing – connotations of ‘(social) construction’ were often left unexplored (Hjelm 2014a: 2; Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 1). Despite the putative diffusion of the idea of social construction, there have been few attempts to systematize or operationalize a constructionist sociology of religion – something that one might perhaps expect from a field so thoroughly influenced by Berger. There are, of course, some scholars who have been rather more explicit about their stance. I will only mention three examples, although there are probably more. I have deliberately omitted cases which would qualify as constructionist, but clearly in a different, often Foucauldian sense (e.g. Brown 2009), and cases – especially in religious studies – which are more about metatheory and the construction of the discipline of religious studies rather than an approach to empirical research (see Moberg 2013). Although perhaps better known for his sweeping surveys of American religion, Robert Wuthnow’s earlier work, especially, took the idea of social construction and its operationalization as discourse and discourse analysis seriously in a way few other sociologists of religion did at the time (e.g. Wuthnow 1989, 1992). He has also discussed Berger’s work directly in several publications (Wuthnow 1986, 1992; Wuthnow et al. 1984), and has lately returned to the theme of discourse as an analytical lens in the sociology of religion (Wuthnow 2011). As Wuthnow (2011: 1) puts it: ‘A close reading of the social science literature prior to the 1980s would suggest that religious people rarely spoke and probably were completely mute.’ This is unsatisfactory, because ‘religion, after all, is not primarily a matter of moods and motivations; it comes to us as

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we interact with others and it is reinforced by that interaction. And much of that interaction consists of discourse’ (Wuthnow 1992: 5). (It could be added that much of the later literature Wuthnow reviews does use talk as a resource, but does not necessarily conceptualize it in a constructionist/discursive way). The echoes of Berger’s work are evident in Wuthnow’s argument (plausibility structures as interaction that reinforces religious belief), but he takes the important step of moving beyond meaning as something that we can credibly postulate inside the heads of individuals, as Berger – Wuthnow argues  – is wont to do. Instead, a focus on ‘symbolism and discourse offers a way of identifying observable, objective materials for analysis’ (Wuthnow 1992: 32). In a way, Wuthnow is more faithful to Berger and Luckmann’s (1967: 22, 34–41) emphasis on language as the primary vehicle of world-making and world-maintenance than Berger himself. The second well-known name in the sociology of religion who has explicated the constructionist approach to religion is James A. Beckford. In his early work on the conversion of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Beckford (1978) uses terms such as ‘accounts’ and ‘talk’ to describe his empirical material. The ‘actors’ talk about conversion ceases to be an objective resource for the sociologist and becomes, instead, an interesting topic in own right’ (Beckford 1978: 250). Although this early work does not identify explicitly as ‘constructionist’, the seeds of Beckford’s later approach are apparent already here. The study of New Religious Movements (in which Beckford is a major contributor) has also utilized the idea of social construction widely, although the influence in that field can be traced more to constructionist sociology of social problems than Berger (Hjelm 2014a). Beckford’s constructionist ‘manifesto’ is of later vintage, and can be found in Social Theory and Religion (2003), especially its opening chapter ‘Religion: A Social Constructionist Approach’. Here Beckford takes issue mainly with sociological definitions of religion: From a social scientific point of view, it would be better to abandon the search for, and the assumption that there are, generic qualities of religion and, instead, to analyse the various situations in which religious meaning or significance is constructed, attributed or challenged. (Beckford 2003: 16).

This is a direct continuation of the strategy for analysis in his earlier work on conversion, but now expanded to include the endeavour of social scientific analysis of religion as a whole. Beckford does not, however, outline a method

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for investigating meaning. Based on his work on conversion accounts and some later remarks, it is safe to say that like for Wuthnow, ‘meaning’ for Beckford manifests in empirically accessible talk and discourse. Indeed, Beckford makes an important caveat regarding his constructionism and that usually associated with Berger and Luckmann: My approach differs markedly from the approach of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Their work rests on assumptions about the ‘anthropological necessity’ for human beings to fend off chaos by socially constructing sacred frames of meaning. It posits a phenomenology of mental categories that are supposedly constitutive of all human meaning. These issues fall outside the scope of this book. (Beckford 2003: 16).

Finally, an approach (if you will) is emerging in the sociology of religion and religious studies, which draws from Berger’s work but develops it and aims to operationalize it even further than Wuthnow and Beckford do. This critical discursive study of religion (CDSR) takes seriously Berger’s (2011: 91) assertion that language is ‘the most fundamental human institution’ and combines the theoretical language of construction with methodological tools from (critical) discourse analysis (Hjelm 2014c, 2016). Importantly, the discursive analysis of text and talk does not stop at metatheory (‘what is this or that scholar’s definition of religion’), but provides tools for empirical analyses of what passes for ‘religion’ in society – the Bergerian objective of the sociology of religion offered above. Although differing from Berger’s overall orientation – especially in its employment of ideology critique, a pet abomination in Berger’s view of sociology – CDSR avoids loose talk of ‘construction’ by explicating its theoretical and methodological premises.

Conclusion There is no question that The Sacred Canopy has been influential: the citation data shows numbers that most scholars only dream of. Berger’s impact on discussions on pluralism, secularization and religious plausibility is undeniable, even if some of the citations are rather ritualistic references. The case is much more ambiguous for the theoretical approach Berger claims to have been espousing since his early work.

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Some of Berger’s more recent works, The Many Altars of Modernity especially, attest to a continuing interest in the same theoretical questions originally formulated more than fifty years ago and crystallized in The Sacred Canopy. However, the analysis in this chapter suggests that, in the sociology of religion at least, the ‘sociology-of-knowledge paradigm’ is the least influential aspect of Berger’s otherwise canonical work (cf. Feltmate in this book). ‘Constructionism’ as an epistemological position has been massively influential, of course, but it is not possible to trace the emergence of a particular constructionist sociology of religion to Berger from the numerical citation data or the key thematic references. Scholarly legacies are tricky things, and few scholars are entirely happy with the use of their ideas. Berger’s disownment of ‘constructivism’ is a prime example of this. We also cannot decide which aspects of our work get picked up and which do not. But in Berger’s case, some of the reasons why an identifiable constructionist approach to the sociology of religion failed to emerge spring from his own work. Not only did Berger’s ideas on secularization and the later 180-degree turn to desecularization draw attention away from questions of basic orientation in the sub-discipline. In addition, Berger seemed to lose interest in developing his (and Luckmann’s) constructionism further. Finally – and maybe this is a qualified triumph for Berger – constructionism did emerge as an implicit framework in the sociology of religion, but its theoretical refinement has been waiting in the wings for a surprisingly long time. Perhaps now, fifty years after The Sacred Canopy, the sociology of religion can be refocused to ask ‘what passes for religion in society’ – especially since this is a question that scholars, in addition to religious and secular people around the world increasingly confront in their lives.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Parts of this chapter are adapted from Hjelm (2018).

Chapter 2 1 I am grateful to Samuel Heilman, Stephen Kalberg and Yuri Contreras-Vejar for their recollections of Peter Berger’s occasional acknowledgements of Arnold Gehlen in conversations at the New School and Boston University.

Chapter 3 1 It is perhaps worth noting how congruent this notion is to Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field’ (1990). Bourdieu more explicitly took institutions and power into account, but within a field of interaction, certain kinds of relationships and actions become habitually ingrained. Both theories take account of the way actual social interaction is cognitively reproduced in ways that normalize it. 2 Ironically, he notes this very issue in Durkheim’s theory. Berger (1967, fn 21, chapter 2) acknowledged that Durkheim’s notions of ritual and social cohesion are hard to translate past the smallest societies. 3 In his 2014 book on pluralism, for instance, he writes that we should not ‘overestimate the coherence of human consciousness. In the experience of most individuals, secularity and religion are not mutually contradictory’ (p. 53). The research I will draw on below certainly supports that statement, although Berger never cites it. 4 For a fuller exploration of these findings, see the concluding chapters of Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes (Ammerman 2013). In my simultaneously published response (Ammerman 2014) to Berger’s 2014 book, I drew on these findings

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to elaborate my assessment of what he had still not fully comprehended about pluralism. 5 My own exposition of the current state of the field can be found in Ammerman (2016). 6 See, for example scholarship emerging from the University of Virginia’s Project on Lived Theology (http://www.livedtheology.org/).

Chapter 5 1 Smith’s analysis is framed as a defence of building off classical social constructionist theory – namely Berger and Luckmann’s – towards a critical realist perspective of reality. That said, this is a thorough and useful criticism of ‘strong constructionism’ which is a theoretical position positing that social structures are all relative and relatively easily changed. Although this is not the place to engage Smith’s argument fully, he does have one extended footnote (2010: 174–5n) that argues against Berger’s use of existentialist philosophy in The Sacred Canopy. Smith finds that while Berger is fighting existential anomie, he would prefer we work towards understanding social structures as facilitating human flourishing in our analysis. 2 This point about developing a sacred canopy in a pluralistic society is developed by Christian Smith and his associates in American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998) in which they argue that instead of a sacred canopy, American evangelicals build ‘sacred umbrellas’ which cover them in their subcultures against the rest of society.

Chapter 6 1 The notion of transcendence is related to what Plessner (1975) since the 1920s considered to be the most specific feature of the human condition, the ‘excentric positioning’ towards one’s own body which gives rise to the distinction between ‘Körper’, that is, the objective body, and ‘Leib’, that is, the subjective body. 2 One finds indications of a third sense of ‘transcendence’ in Luckmann’s theory: transcendence is based neither on the human organism nor on an accomplishment of consciousness but is an essential feature of human social interactions. This aspect is further elaborated in Knoblauch 2014a.

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3 The notion of legitimation has been elaborated by Berger and Luckmann (1967[1966]) in great detail. Religion, in this theory, is one of the ‘symbolic universes’ which provide legitimation across different institutional fields. 4 It first came out in Italian, a language Berger spoke fluently, later in French (1972), German and finally in English.

Chapter 7 1 The 2017 British Social Attitudes survey data suggests that the rate of decline may have accelerated: only four in every ten adults who reported that their parents were religious described themselves as religious. 2 Ernest Gellner (1988) correctly argues that, far from being inevitable, the modernization of the Western world was the result of the coincidence of a number of rare circumstances. 3 We have to say ‘at least’ because we have no good national data on church attendance prior to the 1851 Census of Religious Worship. This counted the number of attendances at churches and chapels on 30 March. As we do not know how many people attended two services that day, we can only say that between 40 and 60 per cent of the population attended. 4 Berger sponsored the Latin American research of David Martin (1993), co-wrote with Grace Davie (2002) and was the subject of a conference organized by Linda Woodhead (Woodhead, Heelas and Martin 2001).

Chapter 8 1 The rationale for growing the beard is pre-eminently devotional as the Prophet Muhammad – as well as Jesus and all other biblical prophets, according to Islamic teaching – had beards. All my respondents, incidentally, were male as I was unable to access TJ’s female dimension (Inge and Timol 2017). 2 Of my twenty-five formal interviewees, seventeen had undergraduate degrees while ten had further postgraduate qualifications challenging Sikand’s (1998) assertion that British TJ is intrinsically inimical to secular education. 3 This situation subsists to some degree in contemporary America where theism, according to Smith (2011), is still a pervasive de facto cultural norm.

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Chapter 9 1 This chapter draws on research conducted in the context of the European Research Council (ERC)-funded Grassrootsmobilise research programme (Grant No. 228463), of which the author is principal investigator. It was drafted during the author’s research associateship with the London School of Economics Hellenic Observatory. I would like to extend my thanks to the interviewees who kindly gave of their time in order to contribute to this research, as well as to Grace Davie and Jim Richardson for their comments on an earlier draft. 2 For the purposes of this chapter, ‘religion-related’ includes not only matters involving religion directly but also matters of social ethics and bioethics which tend to mobilize religious publics. 3 This section is based on semi-structured interviews with four third-party interveners to the ECtHR on religion-related cases, conducted on the basis of anonymity in 2015 and 2016. Each interviewee was selected because of his or her accepted intervention to a particular ECtHR case, and because the intervention originated with US-based lawyers (regardless of whether the accepted intervention itself reflects this origin; one interviewee is based in Europe but the intervention was primarily planned and drafted by US-based lawyers). There is no snowball effect behind the selection of interviewees: the author met each in a different context and in different years. Yet there are remarkable interpersonal connections between all four interviewees, which is an interesting finding in and of itself. See also Fokas (2016). 4 The conviction of Green was for these statements: ‘Is homosexuality genetic or an evil force that plays mind games with people? … It is not a private matter or a right to live in a sexual manner other than what the Bible dictates. … [It is] a deep cancerous tumor in the entire society’ (Bob 2012: 72).

Chapter 10 1 Parts of this chapter are adapted from Hjelm (2018). 2 http://www.isa-sociology.org/books/ 16 per cent of the membership (n = 455) participated in the survey (M 72.3 per cent/F 27.7 per cent) (Accessed 9 May 2017). 3 WoS citation percentages add up to more than 100 per cent because of overlapping categories in the indexing of journals. ‘Religion’ includes some of the key journals also indexed under sociology, and religious studies and theology journals.

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Index action

25, 29, 31, 35, 40, 41, 65, 67, 69, 72, 75, 76, 82, 83, 88, 89, 91, 99, 104, 140 Afghanistan 106, 107 Africa 24, 109, 125, 139 ageing 19, 25 agency 2, 129, 132 Ainlay, Stephen C. x, 157 Alexander, Jeffrey 75 alienation 4, 5–6, 72–3, 92, 119, 121, 123, 130–2 America. See United States amicus curiae briefs 136–7, 141–5, 148, 151, 153 Amish 115 Ammerman, Nancy 62, 93, 121, 169 Anglicanism 86, 105 anomy 4–5, 28, 29, 48, 84, 119–21, 131 anthropology 5, 6, 16, 18, 38, 69, 78, 90, 99, 171, 173. See also philosophical anthropology anti-Semitism 55 art 97 Asia 23, 52, 124, 128, 139 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 107 Aune, Kristin 37 Austria 86, 126 authority 7, 19–20, 36, 51–2, 63, 104, 111–15, 143, 150 Azerbaijan 107 bad faith 72, 74, 130–1 Baha’i 87, 158 Barker, Eileen 171 Beckford, James A. 52, 172–3 Belgium 126 belief 6, 9, 10, 30, 36–8, 40, 43, 45, 49–54, 57, 60, 61–5, 71, 92–6, 97, 99–101, 103, 104–5, 111–15, 120, 121, 124, 127, 134, 143, 145, 150, 168, 172 Berger, Brigitte 14, 88 Beyer, Peter 165

Bible, the 50, 55, 70, 113, 130, 154 biology 15, 16, 18, 21, 29, 48 Bloom, Allan 19 Bob, Clifford 137, 139, 141 body 18, 21, 23, 37–9, 75, 91, 98, 106 Brexit 59, 145, 155 Britain. See United Kingdom Bruce, Steve 9, 128–9, 166 Buddha 22 Buddhism 69, 111 Burli, Nicole 144–5, 153 burqa 143 Cadge, Wendy 39 Calvinism 8 Campbell, Colin 122 capitalism 5, 8, 15, 24, 50, 58 Casanova, José 97, 129 Catholicism 17, 20, 22, 23, 51, 52, 55, 105, 109, 110 charisma 108, 124, 130 Chaves, Mark 108, 166 China 17, 24, 103 Christian Democracy 23 Christian Right, The 56, 108, 109 Christianity 5, 7, 8, 20, 21, 23, 45–6, 49, 52, 55, 56, 69–71, 88, 100, 101, 105, 107, 108–11, 113, 114, 116, 117, 128, 132–3, 136, 138–9, 141 civil religion 46, 56 cognition xi, 29, 30, 38, 40, 43–65, 93, 97, 115, 120, 122, 123, 127, 131 cognitive minority 93, 95, 104, 115, 127, 132 collective conscience 89, 129, 133 commodity 30 communication 59, 61, 62, 69, 91, 97 communism 17, 110, 117 community 6, 32–3, 36, 40, 50, 78–80, 83, 113, 124, 125, 128, 139, 168 Comte, Auguste 106 Confucius 22

Index congregations 31–33, 39, 87, 130 consciousness 2, 5–10, 27, 28–34, 36, 41, 43, 46, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 89, 91, 93, 98–9, 103, 112, 119, 120, 123, 125, 127–30, 167. See also false consciousness conservatism 15–17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 136, 138, 139–46, 149, 150, 154 constructionism/constructivism. See social construction conversation 30–41, 93, 149 conversion 114, 125–6, 172–3 Council of Europe 140, 145, 148 Cox, Harvey 160 critical discursive study of religion 173 cultural sociology 77, 89 culture 16–17, 31–6, 38, 39, 43, 44–9, 51–4, 56–65, 68, 71, 73, 75–82, 86, 93, 104, 105, 112, 115–17, 122–6, 128, 132, 133, 138, 141, 144, 168. See also material culture, popular culture Daoism 105 Davie, Grace 9, 129, 132 Davis, Kim 136, 155 Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 22–3 deinstitutionalization 14–15, 17 democracy 106, 127, 150 Denmark 129 desecularization 1, 6–10, 14, 95, 161, 165–8, 174. See also secularization deviance 52, 55, 57, 60, 123, 127, 131–2 dialectical materialism 27. See also materialism dialectics 2, 6, 7, 27, 46, 69, 77, 86, 89, 92, 96, 100, 112 disability 19, 21, 24 discourse 10, 22, 32, 33, 40, 43, 45, 48, 61, 62, 64, 75, 79, 100, 120–1, 167, 171–3 discourse analysis 171, 173 disorder 5, 78, 170. See order diversity 24, 47, 52, 54, 55, 61, 68, 105–7, 115, 124, 125, 128 Dixon, James M. 159 Dobbelaere, Karel 128, 165

203

Douglas, Mary 33 Durkheim, Émile xi, 4, 5, 68, 74–82, 89, 160, 169 economics of religion 166. See also rational choice theory economy 9, 10, 51, 56, 58–60, 62, 93, 94, 97, 106, 107, 117, 124, 167 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 10, 166 elective affinity 28 Elvis 78, 79 emotion xi, 14, 18, 32, 43–65, 75, 76, 78, 79, 122, 131 Engels, Friedrich 68 England 13, 59, 124, 141. See also United Kingdom Enlightenment 22, 110, 120, 133 Episcopalianism 20 epistemology 24, 94, 119, 174 ethnicity 51, 59, 69, 83, 128, 132 Europe 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24, 27, 38, 55, 58, 87, 106–10, 116, 119–33, 135–56 European Convention on Human Rights 140–6 European Court of Human Rights 135– 40, 142, 146, 154 European Parliament 144 European Union (EU) 145, 146, 155 eurosecularity 119, 120, 127, 131, 132 Evangelicalism 71, 82, 168 evil 5, 50, 75, 122 evolution 9, 48, 68 exceptionalism American 24, 138 European 14, 155 Exclusive Brethren, The 116 experience 3, 18, 27, 31, 37–41, 43, 45, 47–56, 59, 62, 72, 75, 78, 83, 84, 91, 96–101, 122–8, 132, 136 externalization 2, 27, 46, 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 82, 112, 123, 132 faith

7, 10, 35, 50, 54, 88, 97, 104, 105, 113, 116, 120, 124, 128, 131–3, 136, 145, false consciousness 130 feminism 34, 37 folk religion 17, 37

204

Index

Foucault, Michel 21 France 24, 87, 109, 112, 125 126, 143, 154 freedom of religion 52, 127, 141, 149, 150, 154 French Revolution (1789). See revolution Freyer, Hans 15 functionalism 3–5, 45, 46, 85, 89, 95–6, 100, 160 fuzzy fidelity 126, 130 Gehlen, Arnold 4, 13–25, 90, 131, 171 Gellner, Ernest 120 gender 17, 19, 38, 51, 109 Germany 13, 15, 86, 87, 126, 159 West Germany 23 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader 141, 150 globalization 44, 47, 58–60, 141, 146, 149 god(s) 3, 5, 34, 49, 50, 70, 78, 91, 92, 95, 104, 108, 111, 113, 116, 120, 130 Golden Rule 32 Goldhaber, Michael 140 Goode, Erich 159, 160 Google 161–3 Gorski, Philip 56, 166 Greece 16, 22 Green, Åke 135–6, 154 Grotius, Hugo 120 Gugler, Thomas K. 126 Habermas, Jürgen 61 habituation 16 Hall, David 37 Hammond, Phillip 121–2 Heelas, Paul x, 110 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 96 hegemony 10, 31, 79, 110, 120, 160, 168 Heidegger, Martin 131 heretical imperative 95 hijab 39 Hinduism 69, 128 Hitler, Adolf 15 Hobbes, Thomas 21 Holland (The Netherlands) 109 human rights 22–3, 58, 107, 135, 141, 143, 146, 147, 149, 152 Hungary 110, 126 Hunter, James Davison x, 157, 168 Husserl, Edmund 99

ideal types 47, 64, 165 identity 14, 17, 27, 39, 53, 57, 64, 93, 110, 124, 144, 154 national 110, 144, 154 religious 31, 39 ideology 14, 50, 59, 73, 77, 81, 96, 167, 169, 170, 173 immanence 91 individualism 14, 53, 56, 93, 108, 113 industrialization 17 institutionalization 17, 31–8, 89, 97, 127 interaction 4, 27, 29, 32–5, 40, 41, 43, 49, 65, 81, 89, 103, 104, 106, 108, 115, 116, 149, 151, 168–9, 172 internalization 2, 27, 29, 30, 46, 48, 59, 69–72, 74, 77, 82, 112, 123, 132 invisible religion 19, 90–2, 97 Iran 9, 107, 124 Ireland 23, 110 Islam 14, 38, 39, 55, 69, 71, 78, 105, 109, 110, 119–33 Islamic revivalism 120, 124, 127–33 Israel 130 Italy 23, 86, 143–4 James, William 98 Jaspers, Karl 22 Jehovah’s Witnesses 172 Jesus 108, 113 Judaism 52, 71, 86, 105 Kandhalawi, Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas 124 Kant, Immanuel 120 Kearney, Joseph D. 142 Kellner, Hansfried 13, 14, 88, 93 Klausner, Samuel Z. 159 Knoblauch, Hubert 161, 170 Knott, Kim 121–2 knowledge 14, 15, 17–20, 23, 24, 27, 30, 36, 49, 71, 73, 87, 89, 95, 109, 115, 127, 170 Laderman, Gary 78, 79 Lao-Tse 22 Latin America 24, 125, 139 law 19, 120, 135–55

Index legitimation 2–5, 29, 70–4, 77, 81–3, 89–93, 97, 104, 117, 122, 123, 130, 160, 166, 168 Lewis, Andrew 139 liberalism 20, 21, 55, 87, 94, 104, 106, 108, 113, 132, 139, 149, 150 lifeworld 56, 62, 104 lived religion 37–40, 62 Livezey, Lowell 142 Löwith, Karl 87, 99 Luckmann, Thomas xi, 1, 19, 27, 67, 85–101, 103, 119, 169 Lutheranism 86–7, 100 Lynch, Gordon 75–7, 79 McCrudden, Christopher 142, 143, 153 McGrath, Alistair 129 McGuire, Meredith 37, 62 McMillan, Jill J. 169 McRoberts, Omar 39 market, religious 2, 19, 30, 44, 51–4, 58, 98, 108, 163 marriage 17, 20–1, 93, 105, 121, 136, 154 same-sex marriage 20, 21, 121, 136, 138, 144, 155 Martin, David x Marx, Karl x, 3, 5, 10, 27, 28, 46, 68, 72, 77, 170 material culture 38, 39 material religion 37 materialism 27 May, Theresa 145–6 Mayer, Carl 87 Mead, George Herbert xi, 14, 27, 30, 77, 89 meaning 2–7, 20, 21, 31, 38, 40–1, 43–50, 57, 61, 64–5, 69–72, 75–8, 82–4, 89–93, 97–8, 100–1, 119, 121–3, 126, 130, 132, 150, 168, 172–3 meditation 97, 110, 111, 167 Merrill, Thomas 142 Methodism 105 methodological atheism 93–4, 99 modernity 7–10, 13–22, 28–39, 46–7, 51, 53, 55–6, 61, 64–5, 68, 75–80, 84, 86, 92–5, 98, 100, 104–7, 113, 116, 118–23, 126, 127, 132, 167 multiple modernities 10, 167 modernization 7–9, 14, 17, 18, 93, 100, 119, 121

205

monasticism 15, 51 monopoly, religious 7, 29–30, 33, 36, 51–4 morality 70, 74, 76, 88, 122, 131, 139 Morrison, Jim 79 multiple realities 34 Munson, Ziad 33 Musil, Robert 87, 101 Muslims. See Islam Natanson, Maurice 88 Nazis 15, 86–7 neo-institutionalism 34 Neumann, Fritz 86 New Age 107, 110, 122 New Atheism 129 Niebuhr, H. Richard 68 nomization 5 nomos 29, 70, 80–2, 94, 120, 123, 127, 131–2 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) 58, 138, 142–7 Nottingham, Elizabeth K. 159 objectivation 2, 7, 8, 69–74, 77, 80, 82, 89, 93–4, 112, 123, 132 O’Connor, Sandra Day 140 ontology 21, 31, 43, 73, 99, 104, 114 orientalism 24 Orsi, Robert 37, 40 Orthodox Church 110, 155 Otto, Rudolf 3, 98 Ottoman Empire 107 Pakistan 109, 114 Palestine 86 paradigm 2, 10, 53, 54, 68, 77, 80, 83, 120, 158, 160, 163, 165, 168, 174 Pareto, Vilfredo 88 Parsons, Talcott 4, 18, 45–6, 55, 160 Partridge, Christopher 79–80 Pentecostalism 14, 87, 109, 125, 135 personality 14, 17 Pfadenhauer, Michaela 100 phenomenology 4–5, 10, 16, 27–8, 43, 87, 89–91, 98–101, 117, 173 philosophical anthropology xi, 4, 13–21, 90 philosophy 3, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 86, 87

206

Index

Pius XII 23 Plato 22, 96 plausibility structure xi, 4, 6, 8, 17, 24, 27–41, 46, 54, 59, 64, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81, 93, 95, 131, 158, 168–9, 172 Plessner, Helmut 15, 90 pluralism 7–10, 14, 24, 29, 30, 39, 40, 44–7, 50, 51–7, 60, 61, 64–5, 68, 77, 81, 83–4, 95, 104–5, 115, 117, 119, 120, 131, 161, 166–7, 173 pluralization 9, 56, 95, 101, 165–6 Poland 110 politics 16, 23, 33, 34, 51, 52, 56, 58–63, 84, 87, 94, 95, 97, 106–8, 110, 116, 124, 125, 133, 135, 139 popular culture 40, 68, 77, 79 post-history 15 postmodernism 24, 73, 98, 103 power 3, 19, 22, 28, 30–6, 38, 69, 71, 73–7, 79, 82, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100, 106, 108, 111, 115, 152 practices 16, 17, 28, 36–7, 40, 41, 51, 54, 57, 60, 63, 67, 69, 75, 76, 86, 101, 129, 168 Presbyterianism 116 privatization 30, 37, 56, 78, 93, 97, 129 profane 5, 33, 75, 76, 79 Prosperity Gospel 54 Protestantism 8, 36, 39, 52, 55, 68, 86, 87, 105, 108, 115, 125 psychology 5, 7, 22, 23, 29, 38, 43–6, 54, 90, 98, 110, 164 psychotherapy 7 Pullberg, Stanley 88 Puritanism 8 Rabkin, Jeremy 138, 153 race 19, 24, 25, 51 radicalism 17–21, 24, 25, 89, 96, 99, 130, 141 rational choice theory 54, 163, 164, 166 rationalization 8, 58, 62 reductionism 16, 169 reference group 6 Reformation, Protestant 45, 52, 125 relativism 73, 94, 103 religion functional definition of 3–5, 85, 92, 96–7, 100, 104, 117, 119, 121, 123, 160

substantive definition of 3–5, 85, 96, 98–9, 100 religious studies 38, 77, 171, 173 Republicans 108 revolution 17, 97, 130 American 125 French 23, 125 Iranian 107, 124 Russian 125 rhetoric 24, 110, 147, 169 ritual 6, 32–3, 37–8, 40, 49, 50, 54, 63, 114, 124, 125, 129 Robertson, Roland 57, 60 Romania 126, 136, 150, 155 Russia 110, 125 sacred

3, 5, 6, 32–5, 38–40, 48, 50, 52, 61, 75–80, 82, 82, 92, 94, 104, 121–2, 127, 173 Salomon, Albert 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul 131 Scalia, Antonin 139 scepticism 132 Scheler, Max 15 Schutz, Alfred xi, 14, 27, 31, 43, 77, 87, 89–91, 98–9, 101, 127, 169, 170 science 3, 16, 34, 78, 97, 98, 100, 114, 115, 123 sectarianism 29, 36, 69, 108 secular sacred 121, 122, 132 secularism 61, 64, 121, 132, 137, 142, 154, 155 secularization xi, 1, 7–10, 14, 17, 23, 24, 30, 46–7, 55, 61, 64, 67–8, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 95, 96, 97–8, 101, 103–17, 119, 120, 121, 125, 128–9, 155, 158–9, 160–4, 165–8, 170, 173, 174 sex 24–5, 78 Shinto 105 Smith, Christian 73, 81 Smith, Jonathan Z. 76 social construction xi, 4, 11, 13, 19, 21, 24, 25, 29, 43, 47, 68–70, 72–4, 77, 79, 80, 81–4, 88, 92, 103, 112, 119, 158, 160, 161, 169–74 social structure 2, 14, 17, 19, 28, 29, 73, 82, 113 socialization 16, 18, 31, 43, 48, 68–73, 81, 88, 105, 123, 125, 131

Index sociology of knowledge xi, 1, 2, 9, 21, 43–5, 89, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 119, 158–9, 169, 170, 174 Socrates 22 solidarity 44, 57, 65, 81 Somers, Margaret R. 31 Soviet Union 110 Spain 28, 150 spirituality 9, 24, 31–9, 54, 62, 97, 98, 107, 110–11, 113, 124, 132, 138 subjectivity 8, 14, 17, 18, 43, 46, 52–4, 72, 89, 92, 95, 112, 119, 123, 125, 128, 131, 132 symbol 7, 33, 39, 69, 73, 75, 90, 129, 130, 172 symbolic interactionism 27, 29 symbolic universe 3, 5, 89–93, 98, 160 Tablighi Jama’at 120, 123–7 theodicy 4, 5, 29, 48, 72, 104, 119–23, 131 theology xi, 1, 23, 36, 40, 78, 86–8, 92, 94, 99, 100, 101, 105, 121, 159, 160 Thomas, Clarence 139 Tillich, Paul 15 transcendence 39, 40, 43, 63, 85, 90–2, 94, 96, 97, 98–9, 100, 101, 121, 126, 130, 132 Transcendental Meditation (TM) 111 Troeltsch, Ernst 68 Trump, Donald 59, 155 Tschannen, Olivier 165 Turkey 109 Turner, Bryan S. 170 United Kingdom 86, 109, 114, 117, 120, 123–8, 132, 140, 142, 145, 146 United Nations 58

207

United States, The 14, 18, 20, 53, 59, 86, 87, 107, 115, 116, 135–55 United States Supreme Court 135, 138–54 urbanization 17 Valentino, Rudolph 78 values 4, 17, 23, 45, 52, 55–65, 83, 88, 93, 95, 99, 112, 121, 140 van den Eynde, Laura 143 vicarious religion 130 Vietnam 17 Vietnam war 18 Voas, David 108, 132 Wallerstein, Immanuel 58 Warner, Rob 129 Warner, Stephen 53, 162, 165 Weber, Max xi, 5, 8, 10, 14, 15, 22, 24, 28, 33, 56, 68, 87, 89, 99, 121, 130 Web of Science 161–4 welfare 58, 60, 64 Weltanschauung 127, 131 Wikipedia 15 Wilke, René 161 Wilson, Bryan R. 111, 159 witchcraft 114 Woodhead, Linda x, 38, 110, 121, 131 world-building 2–3, 112 world religions 69, 82, 83, worldview 36, 43–6, 50, 58–64, 133 Wuthnow, Robert 40, 168, 171–3 yoga

97, 110

zeitgeist 89, 96 Zijderveld, Anton 133 Zoroaster 22