Peter Berger and the Study of Religion Peter Berger is the most influential and the most cited contemporary sociologist of religion, who has been writing on this subject for over forty years. Yet until now there has been no in-depth study of Berger’s contribution to the study of religion. A collection of essays by leading scholars in the study of religion and theology, Peter Berger and the Study of Religion is a comprehensive introduction to both the work of Peter Berger and to current thought on the central issues and ideas in the study of religion. The themes and subjects addressed in this volume include: • Berger on religion and theology • Religion, spirituality and the discontents of modernity • Secularization and sacralization • Signals of transcendence. A postscript by Peter Berger himself, responding to the essays, completes this definitive overview of a major figure’s work in a diverse and complex discipline. Linda Woodhead is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lancaster University. She is the editor of Routledge’s forthcoming Religion in the Modern World and editor (with Paul Heelas) of Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretive Anthology (2000). Paul Heelas is Professor in Religion and Modernity at Lancaster University. David Martin is a Visiting Professor at Lancaster University and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Peter Berger and the Study of Religion Edited by Linda Woodhead with Paul Heelas and David Martin London and New York First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 2001 Linda Woodhead, Paul Heelas and David Martin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0–415–21532–3 (pbk) ISBN 0–415–21531–5 (hbk) ISBN 0-203-20680-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20683-5 (Glassbook Format) Contents Notes on contributors vii Introduction 1 LINDA WOODHEAD PART I Berger on religion and theology 9 1 Berger: an appreciation 11 DAVID MARTIN 2 Berger and his collaborator(s) 17 THOMAS LUCKMANN 3 Berger: theology and sociology 26 GARY DORRIEN PART II Religion, spirituality and the discontents of modernity 41 4 Homeless minds today? 43 PAUL HEELAS AND LINDA WOODHEAD 5 A New Age theodicy for a new age 73 COLIN CAMPBELL vi Contents PART III Secularization and sacralization 85 6 The curious case of the unnecessary recantation: Berger and secularization 87 STEVE BRUCE 7 The persistence of institutional religion in modern Europe 101 GRACE DAVIE 8 The twofold limit of the notion of secularization 112 DANIÈLE HERVIEU-LÉGER PART IV Signals of transcendence 127 9 Berger’s vision in retrospect 129 RICHARD K. FENN 10 Berger and New Testament Studies 142 DAVID G. HORRELL 11 Berger’s anthropological theology 154 BERNICE MARTIN Postscript 189 PETER BERGER References 199 Index 209 Notes on contributors Steve Bruce is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He was previously lecturer, reader and professor at The Queen’s University of Belfast. His works include Conservative Protestant Politics (1998), Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory (1999), and Fundamentalism (2001). Colin Campbell is Professor of Sociology at the University of York. He has written on irreligion, the cult and the cultic milieu, and superstition, while his books include The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) and The Myth of Social Action (1996). Grace Davie is Reader in the Sociology of Religion, University of Exeter. Recent publications include Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (1994) and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (2000). Gary Dorrien is Ann V. and Donald R. Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, Michigan. His most recent book is The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology without Weapons (1999). Parts of his essay in this volume are adapted from Dorrien (1993), with permission. Richard K. Fenn is Maxwell Upson Professor of Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. Recent publications include The Persistence of Purgatory (1996), The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (edited, 2000) and Time Exposure: The Personal Experience of Time in Secular Societies (2001). Paul Heelas is Professor in Religion and Modernity at the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University. Recent publications include The New Age Movement (1996) and, with Linda Woodhead, Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretive Anthology (2000). viii Notes on contributors Danièle Hervieu-Léger is Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and director of the Centre d’Études Interdisciplinaires des Faits Religieux (CEIFR, EHESS/CNRS). Recent publications include La Religion pour Mémoire (1993) (translated in English as Religion as a Chain of Memory, 1999), Identités religieuses en Europe (edited with G. Davie) (1996), and Le Pèlerin et le Converti. La Religion en Mouvement (1999). David G. Horrell is Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies in the Department of Theology, University of Exeter. Recent publications include The Social Ethos of the Corinthian Correspondence (1996), An Introduction to the Study of Paul (2000) and an edited collection entitled Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (1999). Thomas Luckmann is Professor Emeritus at the University of Constance, Honorary Professor at the University of Salzburg, formerly Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Universities of Wollongong and Vienna. Recent publications include Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning (1995) (with Peter Berger) Morals in Everyday Life (1980) and The Communicative Construction of Morals (1999) (with Jörg Bergmann and others) (in German). Bernice Martin is Reader Emeritus in Sociology at the University of London (Royal Holloway College). Her best known publication is A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (1981). David Martin is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics, University of London, and Honorary Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University. Recent publications include Does Christianity Cause War? (1997) and Reflections on Theology and Sociology (1997). Linda Woodhead is Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University. Recent publications include Diana: The Making of a Media Saint (edited with Jeffrey Richards and Scott Wilson, 1999), Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-century Contexts (edited, 2001) and, with Paul Heelas, Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretative Anthology (2000). Introduction Linda Woodhead Here I want to see those men of hard voice. Those that break horses and dominate rivers; those men of sonorous skeleton who sing with a mouth full of sun and flint Federico Garcia Lorca Used as the epigraph of The Homeless Mind (Berger and Kellner, 1973) When Paul Heelas and I recently put together a reader on Religion in Modern Times there were a handful of authors whose work we found ourselves using again and again. Try as we might to find alternatives, there was no getting away from the fact that these were the writers responsible for a disproportionate number of the key formulations in the study of religion. If we take the Second World War as a watershed, the prewar authors we used the most were Weber, Troeltsch, Durkheim, Marx and Simmel. No big surprises there – our work merely confirmed an informal canon which is already widely accepted. But a canon in the postwar study of religion is not yet as clearly defined, and it was therefore with genuine interest that we discovered that the authors from whom we had extracted the most were David Martin, Robert Bellah, Robert Wuthnow – and Peter Berger. In varying degrees and in different ways, all four of these authors combine high-level theorizing with close attention to empirical evidence. Arguably, it is Berger who has contributed the most to the study of religion at the level of what might be called ‘meta-theory’. The essentials of Berger’s theoretical framework were laid down early in his career, particularly through his collaboration with Thomas Luckmann on The Social Construction of Reality (1966). This foundational text in the sociology of knowledge explored and exposed the linkages between conviction, commitment, and social reality. Berger applied the arguments of this book to the religious realm in The Sacred Canopy (1967). His unique insight – 2 Linda Woodhead which he now modestly refers to as his one truly original idea – was that pluralism undermines stable belief. Under the pressure of the pluralizing forces of modernity the ‘sacred canopy’ becomes the ‘precarious vision’. A central conclusion was that pluralism leads inevitably to secularization. Berger’s version of secularization theory endorsed the view that there is an intrinsic link between modernization and secularization, but found in pluralism the missing link which made the connection clear. The power of this early theoretical framework is proven by the way in which it yielded rich insights in the many different spheres to which Peter Berger applied it in subsequent work. To ‘the modern condition’ in The Homeless Mind (1973) and Facing up to Modernity (1979); to the family in The War over the Family (1983); to economic cultures and development in books such as Pyramids of Sacrifice (1974a) and The Capitalist Revolution (1987). The history of its continuing application to religion is particularly interesting and revealing. Berger’s interest in religion has continued throughout his career.