Building Religions 25: Peter Berger

This isn't the post on asceticism that I promised; that will have to wait until I can do a little more reading and dig up some good sources. In the meantime, I'd like to present another sociological interpretation of religion, namely that found in Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy.

Berger is the scholar who (along with Thomas Luckmann) gave us the term "social construction," and with it, the idea that the world as we experience it is not simply a given, but perceived according to the rules and structures of society. In The Sacred Canopy, he focuses on examining the religious components of that idea, but before getting into those, it's best to go through some of his basic assumptions about how humans experience their world.


One thing that separates humanity from other animals, he argues, is that humans have no natural environment or role in an ecosystem. In the absence of a natural role, we become "world-building" creatures, striving to find a meaningful place for ourselves through the creation of society and its institutions. He calls this effort "externalization," the imposition of human ideas onto the world. Through externalization, we establish roles for ourselves as well as categories for understanding our experiences. We organize ourselves and our world in ways that allow us to find a meaningful place within it.

Externalization is followed by "objectivation," the process of treating that socially-created order as a natural part of the world instead of something fashioned by humans. Categories like race and gender, for example, are no longer seen as arbitrary distinctions created by the consensus of society, but intrinsic parts of the world. Once this happens, human products confront their creators as objects with their own reality, and can thereby force their creators to change their own behaviour to adapt.

The third and final step in world-building is "internalization," which is connected to this confrontation between people and their creations. Through internalization, individuals see themselves in terms of the roles that society has created, and use those roles as models for their own behaviour. To use an example that Berger brings up repeatedly: the socially-constructed role of "father" becomes the concept of "fatherhood," which an individual internalizes in order to shape his own performance. Whether he sees himself as a good father or a bad father depends on the model of fatherhood that he has absorbed.

Now, here's the religious side.

The meaningful order (nomos, to use Berger's term) that society creates is, being a human construction, fragile. In the life of a person and of a community, there will be disruptive events that challenge that order: plague, conquest, famine, death, and so on. Furthermore, human beings are forgetful, so without constant reminders, it's possible for elements of the nomos to crumble away even without outside forces attacking it. Religion, especially religious ritual, acts as a reinforcing reminder, a protection against forgetfulness. Even more importantly, it has a role in the objectivation process by presenting the nomos as something that is grounded in a sacred cosmos. In this way, society's rules become divine mandates. Social structures become reflections of celestial hierarchies, eternal and unquestionable.

One side-effect of this is that even disruptive (anomic) events can be incorporated into the religious nomos. Berger dwells for some time on the issue of theodicy, the justification of divine order, and argues that ideas of fate, karma, or "God's will" can serve to protect people from the anxiety that these events produce. In the face of anomy, the risk that life will become meaningless, these religious ideas offer some comfort. They're socially advantageous because they can justify inequalities of all kinds: if the poor and disenfranchised internalize the belief that they are meant to be so, revolution is much less likely.

This basic formulation of the role of religion in society only makes up part of The Sacred Canopy. The rest is taken up with the issue of the modern breakdown of religion's legitimizing aspects through secularization, but I'm going to leave that for a separate post. Right now, let's turn to how you can use these ideas in worldbuilding.

If religion's main purpose is to support and legitimize the social order, then you should start with that order and ask yourself how the religion you create could do so. Rituals can serve as reminders, as I mentioned above. Myths and scriptures can provide the divine authority to justify the nomos, and may include some element of theodicy to take into account anomic events. (At the very least, they should address major issues like death and suffering.) Think about whether society's powerful have a different perspective on the nomos than the weak, and ask how religion can act to keep each group in its place.

Finally, it's worth noting that Berger believes these theories apply whether or not there's any actual reality or truth to religious claims. They're derived from the human drive to find meaning; they're a part of human nature. That means that even in a fantasy world in which you've decided that the gods are real beings, the structures of religion and the ways they interact with society would still turn out the same.