Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Sacred Canopy
Religion as the most far-reaching attempt to give the socially built world a cosmic order – and why pluralism erodes it.
Introduction
Peter Berger published The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion in 1967, applying the theory of the social construction of reality to religion. Human beings need a meaningful order, a nomos, and religion grounds this order in a sacred cosmos, giving it the strongest possible legitimation and helping people to face suffering and death. The second part argues that secularisation arose from forces within the Judaeo-Christian tradition itself, especially Protestantism, and that pluralism turns religion into a matter of choice on a market, eroding the social “plausibility structures” that once kept it self-evident. In the 1990s Berger revised this view, arguing that most of the world had remained as religious as ever.
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