DIY Religion's tour of New School-connected thinkers on religion continued today with two heavy-weights from sociological debates about secularization, Peter Berger and Jose Casanova (with cameos by John Dewey and Alfred Schutz). Berger's the best known secularization theorist to have recanted in the face of evidence that religion seemed to be on the wane only in Europe. Casanova wrote one of the most famous books refuting and moving on from secularization theory, Public Religions in the Modern World. (They didn't overlap, though, Berger's two decades ending shortly before Casonova's three and change began.)
I gave the class the essay where Casanova first laid out the argument of his book, "Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective" (2003), and a piece Berger wrote for The Christian Century, "Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty" (1998) which uses the phrase "do it yourself"! Casanova's essay was a good text for explaining the rise and fall of secularization theses, but I'm not sure anyone in this generation can imagine a world without religion. But Berger's arguments - at least until he changed from his sociologist's hat to speaking as a Mainline Protestant - proved electric, and felt intensely relevant.
Berger's argument, in a nutshell, is that modernity leads not to a decline in religion but to a change in how people are religious. What effects this change is pluralism, which relativizes beliefs and practices earlier generations might have unquestioningly taken for granted. In this "age of uncertainty," we are free - or forced - to choose what we will believe. (His book The Heretical Imperative made this argument in 1979.) But uncertainty is unnerving, and if everyone has their own belief, it may seem that the only certainty is the unsatisfying virtue of tolerance. Relativism can slip into nihilism: there is no truth! And this can push people to seek the unquestioning certainty offered by various dangerous types, what Berger calls "fanaticism," until they realize its fundamental mendacity. He described a dispiriting dialectic of nihilism and fanaticism and back again which struck some of my students as perfectly describing what they encounter online every day.
Berger offers an antidote to this downward spiral: communities that sustain us in faith (knowingly not knowledge) in the context of uncertainty. Contrasting them with demanding fundamentalistic religious organizations, he calls them "weak" institutions - voluntary associations where "uncertainty-wallahs" can share their uncertain faith rather than pretending certainty.
Even apart from Berger's suddenly switching to theological mode to root all this in Paul Tillich's "Protestant principle," First Corinthians' God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong and the "kenotic," this was a harder sell. I made a passionate case that weak - participatory, democratic - institutions are what we need, now more than ever. I'll be curious what stays with students from all this, and if it offers them some resources to resist the present fanaticisms, whose appeal several of them clearly feel.
We didn't, alas, have time to see Berger hit the limits of his own tolerance for uncertainty, in a telling anecdote from a conference he'd attended on "epistemological modesty":
One of the participants from Israel recounted a story from Talmudic literature. It went something like this: A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"
God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so . . ."
I'm not altogether comfortable with this story. I'm inclined to think that, both from a Jewish and a Christian point of view, we should assume that God could indeed have given the right answer.
Sublimest weakness!!! But even without this, ours was a profound and wide-ranging discussion, I think.