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The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, by Peter L. Berger
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This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society. Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.
- Sales Rank: #59019 in Books
- Published on: 1990-10-01
- Released on: 1990-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.20" l, .45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
From the Publisher
This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society. Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.
From the Inside Flap
This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis that clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society. Berger is noted for his concise and lucid style.
About the Author
Peter L. Berger is university professor of religion and sociology and director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University.
Most helpful customer reviews
52 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Insightful and Readable
By ProgSociologist
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.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Good old Peter Berger
By Ashtar Command
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. ;-)
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Secularism-As-Anomie Critique of Religion
By A Certain Bibliophile
This book is an extension of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's earlier book, "The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge" written in 1966, in which the authors begin with basic sociological assumptions about mental representations and how human beings come to know the world and form impressions of it. "The Sacred Canopy," while heavily informed by the ideas in "The Social Construction of Reality," was written only by Berger himself. The book is a thoroughly Marxist critique of religion with a dash of Freud thrown in for good measure.
The Marxism comes from Berger's understanding of human consciousness. He emphasizes the dialectical nature of individual man and his relationship to culture and society. According to him, we can only "world-build" (or "cosmize," to use his argot) through a process of constant internalization and externalization of distinct mental representations. Berger defines religion as a sacred form of world-building, an "audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant" (p. 28). (Forget temporarily, as I had to, that to call religion a "sacred" form of world-building seems to very much beg the question.) He argues religion to be the oldest, most powerful legitimizing order which plays a central role in construing order and rationality in our lives, and therefore in maintaining reality because they are the only things that can provide sacred legitimation for this socially constructed reality. Thus religion makes permanent the temporary, transcendentalizes the immanent, sacralizes the profane, and ensures a nomological (that is, rational and law-based) rather than chaotic reality.
Evil, death, injustice, and suffering can threaten the nomological world that is shored up by religious legitimation. However, theodicies minimize the threat to "nomos" by bestowing meaning on these things and by making them understandable in a larger epistemological scheme. Berger claims that religion is ultimately alienating, as it enforces the idea that the socially constructed world is not a human product, but rather a permanent product of divine construction; religion is, in other words, a source of false consciousness that perpetuates the idea that human beings had nothing to do with creating their social world. He also claims that the world is gradually becoming more secular.
For exactly these reasons, secularization is paradoxically both de-alienating, while at the same time anomic and ridden with existential anxiety precisely because religion, according to Berger, has lost its legitimacy, having slowly been replaced in the industrial world with a materialistic-positivistic model for knowledge. In short, secularization allows people to realize that the world is their own, not that of a distant, supernatural God, and that our disconnection from this leaves us hanging, alone, in a world devoid of any meaning or order.
Berger claims to break down the book into two parts, the first being the theoretical portion and the second providing the concrete, historical, empirical facts that support the theory. However, I found almost no substantive distinction in the level of theory used in the two parts. Both are highly theoretical and abstract, which is not to say that the text is difficult if afforded a careful reading. But the entire book is maintained on such a level of abstraction that it would be difficult to take any "applied" ideas away from it. This might have something to do with the fact that Berger recanted the central thesis of "The Sacred Canopy" about twenty years ago in the face of evidence that directly suggested that the boundaries of secularization and modernization were not necessarily coterminal.
Also, for being published less than fifty years ago, the ideas here seem much, much older. Connecting the ideas of secularization, alienation, and social anomy - which seem to me to the fundamental concept here - go back to the nineteenth century, and Berger doesn't seem to work in any new ideas. This book is interesting for its historical value and arguments (it is still seen on sociology reading lists nearly everywhere), but it doesn't bring much "value added" to the contemporary sociology of knowledge or religion.
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