The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

The sacred canopy is the universal world view that any religion proposes, thanks to human consciousness. This interpretation is mostly of the historic religions of the West and the secularization of these since the Enlightenment. All canopies alienate people from others, so all religions embark on separate marketing campaigns, like New Orthodoxy or Liberal Catholicism. The 'sociological theory of religion' is as follows.Consciousness externalizes or seeks to make inner experiences concrete in the outer experiences of the surrounding world. Religion constructs a sacred canopy, or all-embracing world order (Chapter 1).Producing sacred order is 'part of the same activity that produces society,' a result of consciousness that externalizes ideas (Chapter 2).The 'sacred canopy' is an all-embracing order that maintains society against chaos (Chapter 3).But there is chaos; and the suffering of the innocent, threatens the maintenance of institutional order, and poses the 'problem of theodicy.' People must accept or reject one or more aspects of social order. Religious experience is fundamentally alienating because it 'projects human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe '– a projection...which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers' (100). This is 'religion and alienation' (Chapter 4).Experiences remove sectors of society from the domination of religious definitions and symbols. This is the 'process of secularization' (Chapter 5).No competent authority imposes religious traditions any longer, so religions have to market their traditions. This poses them the 'problem of plausibility' (Chapter 6: 138).Since the surrounding social milieu no longer takes any orthodoxy's definitions of reality for granted, each religion organizes as a minority against a hostile, at least non-believing, milieu The poses the 'problem of legitimation' (Chapter 7).Alienation, or commitment to one view devalues other views, is endemic to religion. Any experience that casts doubt on the alienating view, however, threatens anomy, or 'bad faith' in the rightness of the particular view. For instance, the Jewish Covenant chose a minority and so alienated the 'Chosen People' from humanity in general. And Christian 'other-worldliness' completely disenfranchised the world, alienating people from this world. Again, the classic Moslem view alienates Islam from both, Judaism and Christianity, because they fell from true monotheism by adopting hullul, the doctrine of incarnation, as if anyone or anything could stand beside God or act as the mediator between God and humanity (121).Superb scholarship, complete indexing, readable academic prose, if somewhat dense in page-long paragraphs.

If professor Berger was trying to impress me with his vocabulary he certainly succeeded. Unfortunately my need to look up the meaning of so many words and untranslated Latin phrases made it difficult to concentrate on the content of his sentences, some of which I had to read 3 times to comprehend.However, once comprehended, the book is brilliant and I will certainly reread it frequently.

Berger's book, whether you agree with his likely personal beliefs or not, takes a person through religion and how religion functions within society to the secularization and pluralism of America. Well-written and a must-read to understand culture and religion.

I bought this book for a graduate seminar on the sociology of religion, and it's an excellent jumping off point. Berger does an excellent job of taking you from the very beginning (his epistemology) to "empirical" evidence supporting his theory. I use quotation marks because it's a topic for debate (whether or not the argument is truly empirical let alone a solid support system for his claims).Berger writes in a much more approachable way than, let's say, Max Weber but isn't as abrasive as Karl Marx. But, his writing is provocative. I'm unsure how a religiously devout person would swallow some of his imagery, but it makes for a good read.

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.

I doubt that very few people will be reading this book for pleasure, because I had to read it for class. If you are thinking about reading for pleasure make sure you want the challenge. The wording is elaborate and sentences can become difficult and long winded. It does provide an interesting perspective on the social construction of the world but sometimes this is blurred and not easily understood because, as I stated earlier, it is very complex. If you can decipher the wording and understand it the points are enjoyable to read about.

Although Berger has since renounced some of his secularization theses, this is one of the most influential 20th century works in the study of religion. His considerations of bureaucracy and cosmology remain relevant and are not utilized enough. Anyone drawing on Casanova's work should pay attention to how much he retains from this classic work.

Peter Berger's book was composed nearly 50 years ago yet the reality of the circumstances of religion in modernity that it describes, and arguably remain somewhat the same in what some have called 'post modernity', are still important and yet still wilfully ignored by many contemporary church people. As a Christian minister in an ancient institution I see around me a great deal of collective denial, but as the book shows the role of religion in the maintenance of human reality and sanity is such that the undermining of its traditionally super-naturalist orientation was always going to be powerfully resisted by some. Berger's beautifully, clearly written book describes the dialectical process of human reality creation, a collective, subjective reality that is expressed and made objective, which subsequently becomes intuited as a reality in itself apart from human creativity, and then is re-subjectified, internalised by socially participating human beings along with their social roles as the shape of reality itself. This reality is maintained and honed by people through an ongoing conversation with other people and things in the business of life. Human beings reaffirm as well as innovate on this reality in the course of their conversational interactions. The reality upon which they depend to make sense of their selves and their world, therefore, depends upon the continued presence especially of certain key interlocutors, key institutions. But what if such key people die, institutions collapse? There is a basic instability about human reality which is potentially extremely disturbing, in which self and world might always loose their stable, lawful aspect and both poles collapse into chaos and even madness. The aspect of human culture that projects eternal verities therefore, that is religious culture, has the vital role of providing a stable underpinning to that more mundane reality that is always subject to potential, radical alteration, thereby allowing individuals to continue to orientate themselves in their world through the contingencies that spatial temporal reality is actually subject to. But Berger makes the important point that with the onset of industrial capitalist and scientific disenchantment of the objective realms the capacity of religious people to rely upon the credibility of a transcendent, objective reality to perform this function has become profoundly undermined. He asserts that western Christianity has retreated into a collective subjectivity where the objective, public realm has been spiritually evacuated, and that despite the re-assertions of something like neo-orthodoxy, the capacity of most people to credibly intuit transcendent objectivity has never recovered. Secularisation has become effectively the subjectivisation of religion and in its most radical forms has reduced a once considered supernaturally objective reality to symbols of various forms of existential and psychological reality. It is this that allows religion to tenuously hold onto to some credibility, but when one of the Church's greatest theologians and martyrs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, could envisage the future of Christianity in religionless terms - a theme taken up in English Christianity with the publication of Honest to God - then perhaps it is time that the attempt to continue to reassert Christian religiosity in its more traditional forms, in the present era, be supplanted by something much more radical. I would definitely recommend Berger's book long after its original publication as a convincing analysis of the situation of western Christian religiosity even now.

I read this in the English version, the Social Construction of Religion, I think it was titled. It cleared my head and heart and helped me to see the wood from the trees.

Not for the general reader, classic material on Sociology of Religion not too dated, but interesting to revisit the thesis now I am retired from the Anglican Ministry

To the average layperson this book is quite unintelligible. Many of the words and phrases he uses are ones neither I nor the dictionary has seen before. On numerous occasions I tried to plough my way though hoping things would change but eventually I had to give up. I've concluded this book was written for sociologists who like many intellectual elites have their own ' in ' language. Too bad, because I believe the subject remains an interesting one for us lay religionists.

Must-read book for any sociologist of religion, until the last two chapters, which have essentially been revisited by Berger, due to their irrelevant-ness in current society.