The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics

Berger is brilliant, funny and wise - an academic that thinks like a real person. His writing is insightful, flows with ease and engages the reader with mini-revelations. Though he writes only the first chapter, a few others are equally enthralling, especially those on Pope John Paul II's philosophy and that concerning Islam. Unfortunately a few others belong only to sociologists - lists, speculation and esoteric social theories, which often sound as though from an ivory tower on another planet, where social theorists debate whether their world is made all of one thing or all of another. In the John Paul chapter we find the Pope concretely defeating postmodern silliness in its rejection of universality. The chapter on Islam teaches much and provides reasoned, balanced direction toward Islamic change for the better, though some of that is perhaps a bit idyllic when it comes to fundamentalist Islam as one may as well preach peace to a charging grizzly. Berger's premise is this: To assume we are living in a secular world is wrong. The world today "is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more than ever". Though modernity has secularizing effects it has provoked powerful movements of counter-secularization. Which harkens back to the Brooks Adams 1896 classic, "The Law Of Civilization And Decay". In it Adams notes with no one left to defeat, ideas from round the Empire flooded Rome causing a near universal dis-ease among its population. Their response? Extreme religious eagerness, the sprouting of new mystery religions of which Christianity was but one of hundreds. Our upsurge today is primarily among conservative, traditionalist orthodox movements of Islam and in the Christian world among Pentecostals and other Evangelicals at the expense of Catholicism and mainline Protestantism like Lutheran, Episcopalian and Methodists. Why has modernity had this affect? Berger is clear, because modernity has removed all the old certainties and most people find it impossible to live with uncertainty. Any movement that "promises to provide or renew certainty has a ready market". Those "dripping with supernaturalism have widely succeeded".Berger does not note the 60's source of modern Liberal promoters of their paradox that "the truth is there is no truth", but he does say while thin on the ground in numbers they wield excess influence by their control of the media and university (of which he is a member - Boston U). This is the "culture elite" Berger notes that some fraction of the movements resent and battle in America's Culture Wars - and not necessarily for religious reasons. Without mention of lacking higher education among the masses, Berger clarifies the chasm between secular (of comparatively what little there is) and non-secular, "The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial feature of humanity. It would require something close to a mutation o

Second submittal (revised)Sociologist Peter L. Berger's 1974 book Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change foresaw what we now call "globalization." His 1983 book with sociologist Brigitte Berger The War Over The Family anticipated what has been dubbed as the "cultural wars." And his 1966 classic The Social Construction of Reality was way ahead of its time with regard to what is currently termed "postmodernism." But Berger admits in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999) that he was mistaken in some of his other earlier works that modernization inevitably leads to a decline in religion. As Berger states: "To say the least, the relation between religion and modernity is rather complicated." The Desecularization of the World was written two years before 9-11. One can only guess that Berger was not as surprised as most at such a world-changing event, ostensibly motivated by religious fundamentalism, but less apparently orchestrated by failed secular elites from a politically destabilizing Saudi Arabia. As Berger has written elsewhere: "upsurges of religion" in the modern era are, in most cases, politicized movements "that use religion as a convenient legitimation for political agendas based on non-religious interests" in contrast with "movements genuinely inspired by religion." (Berger, National Interest, Winter 1996-97:3). This more certainly was the case in the recent past Balkan Wars in the Yugoslav states (see V. Perica, Balkan Idols, Oxford, 2002). Berger points out that we have been misled to believe that modernization resulted in secularization mainly because the elite cultural carriers of secularization have been a minority of highly visible academics who have myopically led everyone to believe this is the case. But beyond the headline events, religion, especially "fundamentalist" religion is growing in every modernizing country, with the exception of already-modernized Europe. Berger has assembled some of the most eminent observers to report on this upsurge. George Weigel, scholar and official biographer of Pope John Paul II, provides a Catholic perspective on the phenomenon. Citing Pope John Paul II, Weigel perhaps presaged 9-11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the following question: "Is pre-emptive military action legitimate against rogue regimes threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction? How is the just-war tradition, which was designed to regulate international public life in a world of sovereign states, to address the serious moral problems for world politics posed by non-state actors - ranging from financial institutions to terrorist organizations - today?" Sociologist David Martin, sociologist emeritus at the London School of Economics, provides a masterful overview of the upsurge of "evangelical" Christian religion mainly in Africa and South America and its political implications. Martin reports that the political stance of evangelical

Sociologist Peter L. Berger's 1974 book Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change foresaw what we now call "globalization." His 1983 book with sociologist Brigitte Berger The War Over The Family anticipated what has been dubbed as the "cultural wars." And his 1966 classic The Social Construction of Reality was way ahead of its time with regard to what is currently termed "postmodernism." But Berger admits in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999) that he was mistaken in some of his other earlier works that modernization inevitably leads to a decline in religion. As Berger states: "To say the least, the relation between religion and modernity is rather complicated." Nonetheless, The Desecularization of the World was written two years before 9-11. One can only guess that Berger was not as surprised as most at such a world-changing event, ostensibly motivated by religious fundamentalism but less apparently orchestrated by failed secular elites from a politically destabilizing Saudi Arabia. As Berger has written elsewhere: "upsurges of religion" in the modern era are, in most cases, politicized movements "that use religion as a convenient legitimation for political agendas based on non-religious interests" in contrast with "movements genuinely inspired by religion." (Berger, National Interest, Winter 1996-97:3). This more certainly was the case in the recent past Balkan Wars in the Yugoslav states (see V. Perica, Balkan Idols, Oxford, 2002). Berger points out that we have been misled to believe that modernization resulted in secularization mainly because the elite cultural carriers of secularization have been a minority of highly visible academics who have myopically led everyone to believe this was the case. But beyond the headline events, religion, especially "fundamentalist" religion is rapidly growing in every modernizing country, with the exception of already-modernized Europe. Berger has assembled some of the most eminent observers to report on this upsurge. George Weigel, scholar and official biographer of Pope John Paul II, provides a Catholic perspective on the phenomenon. Citing Pope John Paul II, Weigel perhaps presaged 9-11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the following question: "Is pre-emptive military action legitimate against rogue regimes threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction? How is the just-war tradition, which was designed to regulate international public life in a world of sovereign states, to address the serious moral problems for world politics posed by non-state actors - ranging from financial institutions to terrorist organizations - today?" Sociologist David Martin, sociologist emeritus at the London School of Economics, provides a masterful overview of the upsurge of "evangelical" Christian religion mainly in Africa and South America and its political implications. Martin reports that the political stance of evangelical Chri