Abstract
In this book, Peter Berger reports on how his perspective on the relation between modernity and religion has changed over the last decades, in the light of social-historical developments that have unfolded throughout the world. This change of perspective has led him to replace his previous theory of secularization with a theory of pluralism. While the former presupposed that modernity leads necessarily to a religious decline, both at the institutional order as well as within individual consciousness, the latter sustains that the fundamental transformation provoked by modernization is a multiform adaptation of religion to the modern plurality of discourses, worldviews and institutional spheres. Rather than the setting of a tendency towards the disappearance of religion, modernity would be marked by the coexistence between secular discourse and different religious discourses, which present themselves to individuals as options to be chosen, not as natural and self-evident presuppositions. Based on critiques of Berger’s text advanced by three other religion scholars, whose comments are included in the book, the review also explores some of the more problematic aspects of Berger’s arguments. Two of these aspects receive a special emphasis: the Austrian sociologist’s insufficient attention to the conflictual dimension of the cultural-political bargaining inherent in pluralism; the ill-resolved tension between his affirmation of the continuing vitality of religion in the modern world, on the one hand, and his acknowledgment that such beliefs have lost their status of self-evident certainties, on the other.
Keywords:
Peter Berger; Religion; Modernity; Secularization; Pluralism