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The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

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"The Sacred Canopy" is an excellent introduction to Peter Berger, as well as a good way to gain a new perspective on how we construct a sacred reality for ourselves. Berger's goal in this book is not to get us to abandon our religious faith, but to examine it as at least partially social projection which we then accept as objective and subsequently internalize. He then goes on in the second half to examine the phenomenon of secularization and its impact on the power which religious traditions hold over their adherents. This is a scholarly book, but it is not by any means esoteric-- due mainly to Berger's exceptional writing style. This would be a good one to keep on the shelf for multiple readings.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the study or experience of religion in the modern world. Part one highlights the human need for meaning and order that is rooted in something less transient than human existence, and the way religion functions as a "shield" against various existential terrors. Although somewhat dated, the analysis of modern religion presented in part two is valuable for its discussions of how secularization has roots within religion itself, and how the relationships between religious denominations and the rest of society can be profitably described in terms borrowed from market economics. The book is highly readable, frequently funny, and provides a lucid introduction to a particular sociology of knowledge as well as a useful perspective on religion.

There are few books that lift the veil surrounding religion--Berger's book is one of them. Religion is not simply a spiritual phenomenon, it is a social one as well. Berger zeros in on this social aspect and allows us to see one of the reasons that every society has, and undoubtedly will continue to have, religion. Berger argues that human beings live in a peculiar world; it is a cultural world, a world of meaning, and religion plays a specific role in creating and maintaining this world. Is the book difficult to read as some commentators have said? Yes. Is it worth the effort? Undoubtedly. After reading this book, the reader will never view their world or religion in quite the same way.

A seminal work in sociological theory. Berger's argument that the process of being religious comes from a deep seated biological need for humans to structure their environments is both empirically demonstrable as it is important for theologians in order to understand the assumptions that govern doctrine.

The process is a dialectic from externalizing structures of understanding reality that create order. These are then apprehended as objects by others and internalized. From this internalization new structures will then emerge as the process continues. Epistemologically, this process is then regulated in terms of plausibility and legitimation. As structures of order are created, different ways of knowing and understanding the world are made plausible and thus different forms of knowledge are seen as legitimate ways of understanding and maintaining order in the world. The end of this process is to make the world a habitable place by mitigating the effects of disorder or "anomy".

The last piece on secularization traces the division of the numinous reality of God and the spiritual things of God and the physical structures of experience. This begins in the radical division between Yahweh and Israel, is re-united in medieval Catholicism, and then re-divided in Protestantism. Rationalism in the Nineteenth century then creates a challenge where theology is forced to define itself against a more plural environment where the plausibility of religious dogma is challenged by other equally plausible structures of reality. Maintaining these religious plausibility structures is legitimated in terms of marketing their respective value rather than assuming that one's dogma must be true in itself.

Berger closes with the state of this process in the late 1960's where theology was in the process of coming out of the neo-orthodox reassertion of the otherness of God and primacy of Scripture and investing itself with psychological and existential legitimation. He uses Tillich as an example of this.

It is important for theologians to understand that in the process of doctrinal analysis and synthesis, that theology is relative to social constructions that shape doctrine by virtue of being human. The tendency is to mask theology as some discipline which is beyond the reproach of answering the challenge of what we can observe empirically. This is not the case is theology is a discipline that can develop and progress as do other disciplines in the field of what humans can know and understand about the world and themselves.

Ha ha. Good old Peter Berger and his sacred canopy. Years ago, when I took comparative religion classes, this book was required reading already at the very first course, which included students fresh out of senior high.

Don't worry. None of us understood it either. The poor professor (a competent Indologist, by the way) had to spend an entire lecture explaining Berger's opus.

But no, the book isn't incomprehensible. Not really. However, unless you are pretty grounded in Hegel, Weber, Durkheim, Luckmann or Marx (not necessarily in that order), you might find this a hard read. When I re-read parts of the book this week, I thought it was easier than average scholarly literature. But then, that's me. I also noticed Berger's uncanny humour, which I didn't ten years ago. As when the author writes: "My communication with denizens of the realm of theology has, much to my regret, shrunk in recent years. But I would like to mention James Gustafson and Siegfried von Kortzfleisch as two theologians in whom I have always found an unusual openness to sociological thinking for which I have been grateful on more than one occasion".

Siegfried...who?

:D

The book itself is difficult to summarize, but here goes.

(SECTION ONE)

The first part is a theoretical exposition of Berger's sociological theory of religion. Berger believes that humans are biologically fated to "exteriorize" and fill their world with meaning, i.e. create a culture, which is then "interiorized" by a process of socialization. Often, this leads to "alienation", since humans start to regard products of their own activity as natural, unchanging and eternal objects "out there". Humans suffer the constant dread of anomie, a terror of meaninglessness. Religion is a potent weapon against anomie, ironically precisely because it alienates man from his real existence. Religion functions as a protective canopy, bestowing meaning on the world, including the meaning of suffering or even death. Often, religion has a conservative function in society, giving a sacred character to the rulers or dominant institutions. Thus, to be against the system means that you are both insane and evil. Berger admits, however, that religion in some instances also functions as a de-alienating force, precisely by *refusing* to grant a sacred status to certain institutions, against whom it thus becomes right to rebel. However, Berger doesn't believe in a complete abolition of alienation, nor does he think that alienation is a product of class society. Rather, alienation is rooted in our anthropology. Berger also attacks something he calls "the masochistic attitude", which he believes is a innate human tendency and plays a central role in religion, especially mystic religion and monotheism.

Since I haven't read Berger's magnum opus "The social construction of reality" (co-written with Thomas Luckmann), it might be risky to criticize this, but Berger sounds too "constructivist" for my tastes. He does admit that humans are biologically fated to produce a culture through exteriorization, but he seems to think that the concrete products of exteriorization are all sui generis. This is unconvincing. While human cultures are indeed very different from each other (just compare the Aztecs and the Indus Valley civilization, or a penal colony with a sociology class), there is still an underlying unity more fundamental than simply the rather trivial observation that all humans have a culture. Indeed, Berger himself seems to believe that "the masochistic attitude", fear of death and meaninglessness, and mystic experiences are universal human traits. But surely these are rooted in our shared nature?

Berger mentions language as an example of a human construct that moulds our thinking, while implying that each language is unique. But all languages have categories such as subject, verb and object, or present and past tenses, and all (as far as I know) can be translated to any other language, once again showing an underlying unity. Language does indeed expand or inhibit our thinking (yes, really!), but it also creates a certain shared conception of the world. Humans aren't exteriorizing tabulae rasae, but share a kind of common nature (let's call it "creative and co-operative") which directs the exteriorizations. Some of these are common, others rare and some non-existent.

Berger does point out that human products can start to "live their own life" and subordinate humans to their wishes, so to speak, as when humans become dependent on certain tools or technologies they have invented themselves. However, he doesn't emphasize this enough, creating the strange impression that human cultures can somehow take any shape at any time, since they are human-created rather than natural.

(SECTION TWO)

The next section deals with the process of secularization in the West, and here Berger does mention salient material factors, such as industrialization, bureaucratization, and so on. He extends Weber's classical analysis of the secularizing function of Protestantism to include Old Testament Judaism as well. (This is unconvincing.) The rest of his analysis of American religion was probably correct in 1967, when the book was originally published. Thus, Berger describes how Christianity has lost its monopoly on truth, how Christian groups compete as if on a marketplace, how religion becomes more private and psychological, and how American churches have survived by adapting to the trends of secularization. Parts of this analysis still holds, but it needs to be heavily amended, due to the rise of Christian fundamentalism and various religious cults or near-cults after 1967. Also, Berger's analysis feels too "local" in today's globalized reality. What about Muslim fundamentalism? What about a nation such as Japan, which combines Buddhism and Shintoism with modernity? Can China's secularization be explained by the character of Chinese religion, or is it all due to Communism?

The major shortcoming of "The Sacred Canopy", however, is that it never seems to face up to the consequences of its own theory. If humans need to exteriorize and interiorize, if they fear anomie and if religion (be it alienating or de-alienating) is the most potent weapon against it, shouldn't we expect a resurgence of religion? Whence and wither secularism? At the very least, we should expect the rise of substitute "religions". It can hardly be denied that science plays such a role to many people, including scientists. (This is not to suggest, by the way, that science isn't sound. Such ontological claims must be rigorously bracketed in any sociological analysis.) The frantic and obviously megalomaniacal search for a "theory of everything", Consilience, Artificial Intelligence or whatever, is clearly connected to the idea of the scientist as hierophant. To other people, the substitute might be some obscure political philosophy, hedonistic pleasure-seeking, body building or what not. Personally, I get my kicks by writing reviews on Amazon...

That being said, Peter Berger's "The Sacred Canopy" is still an essential read for everyone interested in the whys and whats of religion. My personal copy of the book is filled with marginal notes, often just as hilariously funny as the iconoclastic humour of the author (as when I exclaim: "yawn", "oh my god, what on earth is the point", or "MAKE UP YOUR MIND, BLOODY IDIOT"). And yes, I got a straight A at that course!

Recommended. Sort of. ;-)

Peter Berger uses pluralism as a key part of his discussion of how religion has changed from its previous roles in human culture, but the "modern" society he describes is actually quite old. His oversight is not even a Western bias: the example I am thinking of predates the medieval, Catholic society that he uses as its precursor. In pre-Christian Europe, there was an extraordinary variety of religions all being tolerated under the cultural banner of the Roman Empire. Most of these religions were local and focused on specific rituals and practices. There was no real overlap between the cults of Athena, Odin, and the Jewish God. Yet religion played a central role in Roman society; it was rare for a Greek or Roman to make a speech without acknowledging all the gods in a pluralistic gesture.

Berger's key statement about the effect of secular society on religion is that it "represents a severe rupture of the traditional task of religion, which was precisely the establishment of an integrated set of definitions of reality that could serve as a common universe of meaning for the members of society". (p.134) This statement simply does not stand up very well when measured up to pre-Christian European history. Certainly, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religion has the task of "placing the experiences of ... society in the context of a history ... that transcends them all". (41) They stress universality over locality. In the Abrahamic traditions, too, religion has a monopolistic nature; acknowledgement of the God of any of these religions is also a denouncement of the animist pantheon. But even in today's Sri Lanka, Burma, and Japan, not to mention some regions of Africa, animism is a locally defined entity that is not threatened by the humanist claims of modern society and has no real need to refocus its energy on maintaining "relevance" (147) or "results". (138) As for a de-emphasis on issues affecting all society, the religious leaders of these traditions had no interest in politics or economics in the first place; why start now?

To be fair, a majority of the world's population today subscribes to one of the Abrahamic religions. But Berger is making a bolder claim: he is saying that his model applies to all religions. Even if we narrow his statement about "a severe rupture" of a "traditional task" to the category of major world religions, we still find it is problematic: historically speaking, Buddhism has almost always coexisted with other beliefs in areas it is dominant, be they animist, secularist or nationalist. The attitude of nearly all Buddhist monastic communities has been to not tell the laity what to do. They do not see the enforcement of a "common universe" as a "task" on their checklist for right living.
Some statements of Berger's have broader applications. Regardless of whether any given religion is monopolistic in nature, it is still probable that "the same human activity that produces society also produces religion". (47) But it is only when a religion is bound up with a need to have a single way of life for all society that secularism becomes an issue. This monopolistic instinct is not inherent to all of the social traditions that we commonly categorize as religious.

I have never written a bad review...ever, but this book was SOOOO useless. It was a required read for a higher level religion class I was taking and this book almost forced me to change my major (and I'm NOT even a religion major!). The language was COMPLETELY over my head, over the head of the TA, over the head of every person I asked to help me decipher the language. I understand that this doesn't make a "bad book" but it is the perfect example of useless academia; the author wrote this book for the sake of sounding intelligent to his contemporaries. We get it...you're smart and you want to alienate those who aren't as smart as you! Lesson learned. I was almost in tears every time I had to pick it up. I started to develop anxiety as a direct result of HAVING to read this book. If you are still having/ wanting to buy this book, pop on over and buy yourself a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a BIBLE. Trust me-you will need them.

Berger is anything but readable. To start with, any given sentence in the book contains anywhere from one to five neologisms the author himself has spawned (most likely in a laughable attempt at clarity). Sentences like "the nominizing act intends a comprehensive order of all items that may be linguistically objectivated, that is, intends a totalizing nomos", is among one of thousands of obscure artifacts of Berger's logic-gears that serve to make this book, in three simple words, *anything* but readable. I award it five stars for containing excellent ideas, and subtract four for managing to render them virtually indecipherable.

This work is mostly a protraction of the ideas expressed in Berger's previous co-written book THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY. Those who are familiar with that work will most likely not be surprised by the arguments put forward here. Much of the same methodology and argumentation are employed once again. As for those who are not familiar with the previous work, I believe they will find that this book stands well enough on its own merits.

Berger's sociological approach to religion, although incomplete, is insightful. He attempts and, I believe, somewhat succeeds to find a middle ground between ideational and materialistic approaches to the sociology of religion. His focus remains consistently throughout the human agency in the construction of their social reality and how this reality becomes objectified and subsequently becomes reified as an immovable, impenetrable `thing' which is perceived as superhuman-and more specifically, the role of religion in facilitating and sustaining this very process. From here, he moves on to the nature of this dynamic in modern societies, secularism and pluralism being shorthand for this, and the problems of social legitimation this entails.

Overall, this work is too cursory and pithy to be too satisfying for those who desire a robust sociology of religion. As Berger states, it was not his intention to provide this. Rather, one finds an exploration of how his prior work could be applied to the sociological study of religion.

The book is obviously written by a master of the English language. It is a lucid application of some generally obscure and hard-to-grasp concepts taken from the mind of thinkers like Hegel or Marx, alone a "leftist" Hegelian line of analysis. Sadly, however, it is lacking in two rather critical areas.

First, as a sociological theory it strikes one as hardly supported by any evidence, let alone being at all empirically verifiable. Coming from a philosophical background, I can appreciate a mode of argument which is phenomenological, such as is found in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty. However, Berger's theory of religion makes no arguments of any sort, but is a series of "posits" based on sets of presuppositions which - I imagine - he probably attempted to defend in his magnum opus, The Social Construction of Reality. As such a set of assertions, I find the text practically useless to engage with on a critical level. It might be useful to those who already uncritically accept his ideas as a sort-of guidebook to study of religion as a social construction, but would probably be crippled even there by the lack of supporting argumentation; an attempt to formulate the fundamental rationale of Berger would be rather difficult from this text alone. Further, along the same lines, it strikes me a philosophical argument about the nature of knowledge - at least in part - but it never really employs a critical philosophical method. Rather, it asserts. So, if you want to get a better version of this "sociological theory" of religion, read Camus, Hegel, or Marx.

Second, Berger is certainly not unbiased. His agenda is fairly clear at points in his attack on what he believes to be fundamental alienation from reality which comprises religious tendencies, as well as other areas such as "masochism" as the motivational drive behind religious worship. Using this in a comparative religion class would be quite foolish, as it would significantly bias the discussion from the get-go - in such a way that you probably would have a hard time understanding the very religious positions you seek to explain. It would certainly be ridiculous, in my mind, to use this theory in support of even a very post-modern theology, as some try to do; it remains fundamentally and theoretically opposed to any such project. It comes across, in the end, like Berger has hardly or little real critical engagement with religious thought; the attitude of the book is fundamentally dismissive.

I would personally advise you to read some nicer atheist philosopher who makes a cogent argument and engages in a more substantial engagement with religion rather than Berger.