The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age Hardcover – 19 Aug 2014

In his new book sociologist Peter Berger’s recants half of his original single factor theory that societal modernization inevitably leads to secularization. Berger writes we don’t live in an age of unbelief but of doubt that often leads to extremes of moral relativism and fundamentalism of both secular and religious varieties. However, Berger believes most people live in the “pragmatic middle” between fanaticism and nihilism.

To Berger it “doesn’t make sense to talk about pluralism if people don’t talk to each other”. Wherever they do this talking pluralism “cognitively contaminates” their worldview.

Reversing the modernist notion that religion is a form false consciousness Berger says: “what is needed is a theory of secular false consciousness (‘why you are an a___hole’) and of cognitive privilege (‘why I am not’)”. He says some of the secular attempts at such theories are “quite funny”.

Berger describes those non-pragmatic secularists as: “deracinated, individuated, sophisticated, BUT very nervous” and ipso facto threatened by religious persons. Secularists seem to want pluralism less than those who are religious and are surrounded by secularism everywhere.

To Berger, “fundamentalism Balkanizes a society” but “relativism undermines the moral consensus without which no society can survive”. Although Berger doesn’t say this, it may be surmised from his book that in a modern pluralistic society religious institutions are often more secular and secular institutions more religious like.

Sociologist Detlef Pollack (Germany) writes that Berger’s theory is “unconvincing” because secularization still “undermines” religious belief and thus isn’t much different than conventional secularization theory. Contra Berger, Pollack says:

1) “in a widely secularized society many do not make a religious choice at all;
2) Berger’s “Compatibility Theory”of the co-existence of religious and secular discourse is like a married couple who refuse to talk politics because they have different political party allegiancs; and 3) in modern countries religious beliefs are “vague, diffuse and indetermined” rather than falling into the “fundamentalist” or “relativist” camps.

But Pollack’s criticisms seem to support rather than refute Berger’s theory. Contra Pollack, one may not need religion but one can choose it especially at times of life when an “other reality” invades one’s everyday reality, such as love or death. Married couples that are politically incompatible may nonetheless complement each other. Berger says that most people live in the pragmatic middle of the vagueness of civil religion.

Purdue sociologist Fenggang Yang says Berger’s new pluralization theory was already in place 20 years ago in the work of sociologist R. Stephen Warner who wrote that religion in the U.S. is “an open market system” (“Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the U.S.” – 1993). However, over 50 years ago Berger wrote a prescient article “A Market Model for the Analysis of Ecumenicity” in the journal of Social Research (1963, Vol. 30, Issue 2). Berger has been the lead proponent that religious pluralism and institutional market-like competition augments and mediates modernization and secularization long before 1993.

As usual great insights, though to some extent this is because they are the usual insights - if you have read In Praise of Doubt for example, it seems there is many repeats. But it is great Berger and clearly the drooling stage of his career is not yet evident!

Will someone one please comment as to why in Berger's works or reviews of such there is no mention of the quest for
"certitude" in religion and religious commentary.

Jack Mendohlson wrote of such many decades ago. Why is this seeking of certitude in a contingent world not seen as
essential and explanatory of something in characterizing religious views? Why do we ignore 'certitude' in offering ponderous
explanations of modernism and post modernism?

Yes, yes there is an abundance of discussion of relativism. But how can so many of the illuminati offer their condemnations...mostly...
of 'relativism' in the modern world without contrasting the 'certitude' we inherit from the ancient world? Is it easier to make a living by teaching and preaching about the one and not the other?