Peter Berger on six decades of studying worldwide religion

Let me first take a matter where I very much changed my mind, and in fact, it’s the major area where as a sociologist I changed my mind, and that is the question of the relationship of religion to modernity. When I started out my work in sociology of religion, almost everyone in the field believed in what generally was called secularization theory, which when you take apart some of the pretentious verbiage of sociologists really is a very simple thesis. It’s a thesis that modernity leads to decline of religion. The more modernity, the less religion.

And almost everyone thought that at the time. This was—when did I start? Well, in the ’60s when I started writing things and doing things beyond being a student, and it was not completely crazy. There were some reasons for saying this. If I had more time, I would talk about where we were right, where we’re wrong, but my first publications on religion were very much based on that assumption, which I didn’t argue, which I assumed as being one of the common understandings of the field.

I changed my mind not because of any religious or philosophical changes on my own, but simply because I concluded that the evidence simply did not support this thesis. And I was not the only one. Almost everyone in the field came to the same conclusion, many of them about the same time, and there are reasons why this happened particularly very strongly in the ’70s.

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