A Critical Review of Peter L. Berger’s Approach to Religion

Abstract

This article presents a critical and integrative review of Peter L. Berger’s approach to religion across his sociological and theological corpus. It reconstructs Berger’s central conceptual framework, grounded in Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge, and demonstrates how it mediates the classic Weber–Durkheim divide through the dialectic of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. The analysis then turns to Berger’s substantive definition of religion as cosmos construction in a sacred mode, his account of the anthropological foundations of religion in the lifeworld and in human biological “incompleteness,” and his distinctive thesis that religion operates as a plausibility-conferring “sacred canopy.” The second part of the article traces Berger’s evolving interpretation of modernization: from his early endorsement of the secularization thesis, through his decisive turn toward the theory of desecularization, to his later emphasis on pluralism as the inescapable religious condition of modernity. The discussion further evaluates Berger’s proposed theological strategies, i.e. deductive, reductive, and inductive, emphasizing his preference for an inductive, experience-centered method in plural contexts, while critically addressing unresolved issues such as the criteria for authentic religious experience, the risks of relativism, and the tensions between experiential theology and confessional exclusivism. The article concludes that Berger’s thought remains indispensable for understanding the dynamics of religion under modern conditions: secularization appears as a contingent rather than universal process, pluralism emerges as a structural feature of modernity, and belief increasingly assumes the form of reflexive choice rather than inherited certainty.