p 127 Berger cites secularization as the cause of a "crisis of credibility" in modern religious definitions of reality. How does this compare to other competing theory's on man's feelings of meaninglessness and hopelessness in regards to finding a stable definition of reality? Existentialism will have different roots from the process of secularization except that both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard reacted specifically against Christianity albeit in different directions. My sense is that French atheistic existentialism represented by Sartre and Camus came to have the dominate place in american's consciousness as defining existentialism. However, Rossinow shows how important christian existentialism was. So the question is: is existentialism an outgrowth of secularization? My sense is yes. The specific problems of existentialism were: "self-identity, free will, and the justification of values" (Solomon, From Rationalization to Existentialism, p 245). Secularization and loss of cosmological significance for humans lead to these problems as traditional religion no longer provided the answers. But there is also a political context: the emergence of Communism and Marxism as modes of organization of both politics and personality. Maslow had no such expertise with these doctrines. His thought concerned the psyche first, and society and culture second.
p 127 Berger continues on to say that the man in the street "is confronted with a wide-variety of religious and other reality-defining agencies that compete for his allegiance...in other words, the phenomenon called "pluralism" is a social-structural correlate of the secularization of consciousness". I anticipated this: Maslow's theory of Self-actualization is such a reality defining agency.
p 130 Berger makes the argument that there is a "tendency toward secularization of the political order that goes hand and hand with industrialization...and that there is the further global tendency toward the movement of the state away from religious institutions" My immediate reaction in the present is that this assertion is not quite adequate. There was a counter-revolution in Iran that brought religious fundamentalists to power in 1979, as well as the presidency of George W. Bush who rode a wave of evangelical fervor to office in 2000 and 2004. Religion seems to have remained active if not resurgent in the political sphere longer than many intellectuals of Berger's outlook assessed. What does this mean for the theory of secularization? One point of view is that these events represent only a temporary counter-reaction to the process of secularization, that in fact, secularization proceeds the way Berger describes, essentially pushing religion out of the sphere of politics. If a long enough timeline is assumed, religion will be phased out of political life. An alternative viewpoint is that the theory of secularization is fundamentally flawed in that it misapprehends the scope and nature of the problem of plausibility. Namely, plausibility has proved to be less of a impediment towards faith for large masses of people. At the time Berger and Rieff, were writing, the Christian West found itself in the midst of a great crisis of meaning, which found partial resolution in the widespread reassertion of traditional belief systems at least in America and Latin America. Europe, however, continued to moving toward a more secular orientation in terms of its political outlook with the except of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in England, Denmark, and France.
It remains to be seen which view turns into reality, if one allows usage of such a word. However, it is fair to say that intellectuals in the 1960 overestimated the decline of traditional belief systems in favor of alternative modes of organizing personality and reality. One suspects the fundamental issue turns on the dialectic theory of history as promulgated by Hegel and Marx and employed heavily by the 1960s generation of academics. To this point, the materialist theory holds that religion would cease to have an dominating effect on the masses once economic conditions brought about the rise of socialism and eventually communism. In other words, based on this theoretical point of view, the step toward the abolition of religion would seem a short one. Man's attachment to religion has perhaps remained more dispersed and interwoven within the cultural fabric of society. While industrialization moved forward the rationalization of the everyday world, including religion, it seems to not hold that this increasing rationalism lead to wudespread un-belief. Faith has a staying power that remains unaccounted for in man's need for meaning.
p 132 Berger describes the process of secularization as moving from the economic sphere to the political sphere. He highlights that the state ceases to perform religious legitimations under this new economic and political arrangement. He then makes the point again that the key to secularization is the process of rationalization that is unleashed by economic and cultural modernization. He then continues on to make the point that "private religiosity" is alive and well in sphere outside the economic and poltical, meaning limited social contexts and the family. His point is that religion no longer performs its classical function of binding everyone to a common reality. Can Maslow's appeal be traced to the emergence of such private religiosities?
p 134, Berger emphasizes again the tenuous nature of religion's plausibility structure in the modern world. I believe he goes too far.
p 145. Berger uses the analogy of religion as a company competing in the marketplace for believes. Interesting. He continues to elaborate on the ties between religious pluralism and its relationship to a market of competing religions.
P 152. "On the level of theorizing, this phenomenon srves to explain the current linkage of theology with the conceptual machineries of existentialism and psychologism. THese conceptual machineries are ,indeed, "empirically adequate" to teh extent that they accurately reflect the "location" of religion in contemporary consciousness, which they merely serves to legitimate theoretically" Interesting. Reread this page. He continues on to discuss how the Freudian unconscious may be analyzed in terms of sociological analysis
p 153 Great context quote: " These problems together constitute the "crisis of theology" and the " crisis of the church" in contemporary society"
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