The Coming Contestation of Religions

In his 1978 book The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger made a startling proposal: in light of the increasing level of religious pluralism in Western societies (including popular interest in Asian religions and the resurgence of Islam), Berger argued that the time had arrived for a new kind of religious conversation to begin to take place--one that would move beyond disinterested scholarship or even "the sort of dialogue that could be described as reciprocal antidefamation...Both of these two kinds of attention are certainly valid, even praiseworthy, but they are not contestation" in the sense he intended (Berger, THI, 151-152). Nor did he intend the "missionizing" of the adherents of one sect by another--a mode that he felt was "happily on the wane" in the late 1970's. Instead, for Berger, "Contestation means an open-ended encounter with other religious possibilities on the level of their truth claims. Put differently, one seriously engages another religion if one is open, at least hypothetically, to the proposition that this other religion is true. Put differently again, to enter into interreligious contestation is to be prepared to change one's own view of reality. Anything short of this, however valuable it may be (for scholarship, say, or for joint sociopolitical concerns, or just for an enlargement of cultural horizons), is less than the contestation called for by the present situation. It is this kind of contestation that is as yet in an embryonic phase" (152).

Notice that Berger did not stipulate that those who would engage in this type of conversation would do so prepared to change their religious affiliations or practices--although, I think it reasonable to assume that he would allow for such a possibility. But any such change would be wholly within a given individual's discretion, and would not be the objective of those who participate in the conversation. One can even imagine a scenario where one party, convinced of the "truth" of another party's religious tradition, would announce her decision to leave her own tradition for the other's--only to find herself in the odd position of having the other party attempt to dissuade her from making any such change! Most peculiar, but not out of the realm of possibility.

What Berger appears to have imagined the new religious pluralism in Western societies portended was a new relationship of religious individuals towards truth claims--that, mirabile dictu, religious individuals in the West had reached a new stage of intellectual maturity: one in which they would be willing to entertain the possibility that they embrace religious dogmas uncritically and, therefore, another religious tradition might prove to be more credible with respect to particular truth claims.

It is an interesting idea and one that merits further consideration; but it is also one that ignores the fact that, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine that, three and a half decades on, this kind of "contestation" is anywhere near the "embryonic" phase that Berger believed it to have been in the 1970's--much less a fully developed being waiting to be born.

I will explore these propositions further in future posts.

The Experiential Turn

The hero of Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative is the late 18th/early 19th century German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Berger favors Schleiermacher because of his emphasis upon religious experience (a reflection of his pietistic background) and his insistence that such experience involves a "consciousness of something beyond itself--indeed, so much beyond itself that the human subject feels himself to be utterly dependent on that other reality or being at the center of the experience" (THI, 122). Reading these passages can be frustrating insofar as they often appear to contain Berger's endorsement of what is, in essence, a theological claim, dressed up as scientific "induction." This is not to say, of course, that Schleiermacher ought not to have made this particular claim or that Berger, as a social scientist, is not permitted a theology. But the book is written in such a way that one must be very careful to distinguish Berger the sociologist from Berger the theologian.

On page 128, when Berger admits that inductive reasoning cannot "prove the truth claim of an alleged revelation in the way a natural science proves or validates its hypotheses. In that final sense, religious affirmations always entail faith," the reader breathes a sigh of relief. But the added qualification of "that final sense" suggests that there are other senses, penultimate ones perhaps, in which religious affirmations based upon an "inductive model" somehow escape the criticisms leveled against it by the proponents of what Berger had earlier termed the "reductive possibility" (pp. 87-113). That latter position (represented in THI by Rudolf Bultmann), is resisted in the book because it does not allow religious experience a sui generis ontological validity--a religious sine qua non for Berger. The author's theological pre-commitments in this regard somewhat undermine his credibility--which is a shame--because the reader may become discouraged and neglect to contemplate Berger's most interesting notion: that of a "coming contestation of religions."

I will return to this notion in a future post.

The Worm In Berger's Heretical Apple

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is THI to which I repeatedly return.

That said, THI is not without its problems. The deepest and most troubling from my perspective is a persistent inconsistency with Berger's earlier work with Thomas Luckmann on the sociology of knowledge. Their co-authored book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), presents a compelling case for the proposition contained in its title: that what we take to be the true state of things is not an unmediated given but, rather, the product of tacit (and rarely conscious) agreements with the socio-cultural context in which we are embedded. In other words, "reality" is, in fact, a social construction.

Berger does not exactly abandon this position in THI, but throughout the later book he makes statements such as the following: "...truth is always its own warrant...consequently, that which has imposed itself as truth by its own force will not be voided by subsequent discoveries of truth" (Berger, 170, emphasis added). By endowing "truth" with agency in this manner, Berger implies that human beings are the passive recipients of "truth" and not its active co-authors. Given his Eliadean assertions throughout THI that sui generis religious experience is a coherent category, one can understand why Berger might have wished to distance himself from his earlier social constructivism; but if he did wish to do so, he should have come clean and admitted as much. The implication that we can genuinely experience "the sacred" as a sui generis phenomenon may lend Berger's argument greater persuasive force with some readers, but it is an argument that has very little purchase with anyone today in the academic study of religion. It is the worm in Berger's heretical apple and is probably the most compelling reason that THI is not accorded the prominence that I (for one) think it deserves within the field. I will elaborate on why I think that Berger's book deserves to be regarded as a religious studies classic with "legs" (i.e., with continuing relevance to the academic study of religion) in future posts.

The Heretical Imperative Revisited

Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative, though somewhat dated, remains, for me, an important meditation upon modernity and the effect it has had upon "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation."

Berger defines the "heretical imperative" as a response to modernity, one of the most salient features of which is the bewildering array of choices (including religious choices) that confront human beings in the post-medieval period:

"In premodern situations there is a world of religious certainty, occasionally ruptured by heretical deviations. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty, occasionally staved off by more or less precarious constructions of religious affirmation. Indeed, one could put this change even more sharply: For premodern man, heresy is a possibility--usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative" (Berger, THI, 25).

I was more persuaded by this argument when I first read the book over a decade ago than I am now. I think it an accurate depiction of the state of modernity as it existed in the United States in the mid-to-late 1970's when Berger wrote the book. I sense, however, that the window of religious choice that the sociologist of religion found himself confronting has, since then, narrowed considerably.

I don't believe that this narrowing of choice is unique to human religiosity either. Instead, it strikes me that all choices--insofar as they represent genuine alternatives to the existing status quo--have become less and less prevalent. Indeed, I am beginning to think that we inhabit a stage of modernity (some may wish to name it "postmodernity") in which the freedoms enjoyed by previous generations of moderns are being relinquished by a generation that is desperate for security and, as such, desires a world that promises greater certainty. Religious certainty provides a kind of security (illusory, I would argue) that an economy founded upon war-without-end and an environment stressed by massive climactic changes simply cannot deliver. Consequently, religious fundamentalisms prosper and traditionalism (which is not the same as fundamentalism) experiences a resurgence. The big loser in this new religious environment is precisely what Berger had so confidently posited but 35 years ago: "the heretical imperative."

I will have more to say about this subject in future posts.

The Academic Study of Religion as the Fashioning of Counter-Narratives

The evolution of the academic study of religion is a fascinating one for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the manner in which religious studies has developed a genealogy of its own development as a modern intellectual project. In the process, the very notion of "religion" itself has come under intense scrutiny and historical contextualization. The result is that much of the work product of scholars of religion consists in the construction of counter-narratives: to prevailing prejudices, dogmatism (a sophisticated form of prejudice), and what is generally termed "common knowledge" (typically a witches brew of unexamined assumptions, hearsay, intuition, and speculation).

Religion is a subject concerning which most people hold opinions--often very strong opinions--to which they have arrived, however, without having engaged in the kind of thoughtful investigation that they would ordinarily apply to other important aspects of their lives: say, for example, the purchase of a new car or flat-screen T.V.

If scholars of religion can be faulted for anything, it is that we tend to "over-think" our subject--stumbling over minutia that the average, reasonably educated individual either fails to see or fails to find worthy of a moment's consideration. In that way, perhaps, we offer some compensation for the general lack of appropriate attention accorded to our subject. What would be far better, however, is the incorporation of religious studies as an integral part of a "general education"--that it would assume its rightful place among the intellectual tools available to any (and every) citizen of a functioning democracy.

Of course, the first problem in the opening decades of the 21st century has been to locate and identify functioning democracies...