MODERNISATIONAND

RELIGION

P. L. BERGER

¯ Fourteenth Geary Lecture, i98x

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Peter Ludwig Berger is Professor of sociology at BostonCollege, Massachusetts, USA. This paper has been accepted forpublication by ESRI which is not responsible for either thecontent or the views expressed therein.

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Tile. terms "modern man," "modern age," "modernconsciousness," and "modernity" in general, in recentChristian theology at any rate, have almost become amyth. Modern man seems to be a mythical creature whoseems to be haunting the imagination of Christiantheologians, and I think one could make a case, certainlyin the case of Protestantism for the last ~oo years or so, fbrtile major mental partner of Christian theologians’thinking as being this mythical figure of modern man. Ithink Catholics, for a long time, were not so muchinterested in talking to this mythical creature as keepinghim Outside the house, but since Vatican II, Catholics, atleast in the United States and in a number of othercountries I know, seem to have been desperately trying tofollow the Protestant experience as rapidly as theypossibly can, with some interesting consequences that arenot my subject this afternoon. In any case, modern manhas been a very important figure in recent theologicalthought. What I find interesting is that so many peoplewho are theologians or who are interested in religion donot seem to be aware at all of the enormous problem thateven such a phrase as "modern man" raises. What asociologist has to do by virtue of, I suppose, professionalobligation is to look at to what extent this phenomenon of’modern man - modern consciousness is the term I wouldprefer - is at all empirically accessible, and what morespecifically one may be able to say about this creature, hisalleged consciousness, and then his alleged relationship toreligion.

Let me say a few words in very general terms about thekind of approach that I think sociology must take toinvestigate, these issues. Many people who are not insociology, and even some people who are, shrink backfrom any discussion of phenomena of consciousness inconnection with social-scientific analysis as if humanbehaviour were a very inaccessible thing; we can watchpeople, we can observe them, but anything that takes placewithin the mind is supposedly some sort of subjectivemystery to which perhaps only poets may have access butwhich is not the. subject matter for a social-scientific

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’investigation. I think that is a methodologically very fMseidea. I cannot develop in detailwhy I think this is false; insome way, it seems to me, consciousness is more readilyaccessible than behaviour, because behaviour does notinterpret itself, while consciousness does. In other words,human beings can be asked what they have in mind and,while there are always .problems in interpreting theiranswers, there is an access, a systematic access, to l~umanconsciousness. The sociologist, obviously, is not the onlyperson who looks at phenomena of consciousness. Apsychologist does. In many ways every Social science does- even the economist asks questions of motive andexpectation and so forth, which are things which have todo with the consciousness of the individual. What I thinkis peculiarly sociological is that one looks at any particularstructui~e of consciousness in relation to specificinstitutional processes, and this is precisely what it seemsto me the sociologist must do when he deals with thephenomena of modernity and modern consciousness.

Modernity, I would suggest to you, is an aggregate ofinstitutional processes and processes of consciousness.Take a very simple example, an example that does not dealwith religion specifically. Take the situation in this room-as good an example as any- it is always good to beginwhere you are. I am literally dropped into this situationfrom the air; I have never been iri Dublin before; I did notknow, I regret to say, the existence of this Institute before Iwas invited to speak here. Yet it is no effort whatsoever forme to immediately get up here and do my performance asif I were back home in Boston. Now why is this ? Forgetabout the fact that this is an English-speaking country andI do not have any language difficulties. If I were in adifferent country, there would be a slight technicalproblem of translation and so forth, but I could do thesame thing and I have done the saroe, thing. I have beendropped out of the air into places like Tokyo andlalthough I do not speak a word of Japanese, with atranslator I could immediately do the same thing. Why?How can one accomplish this extraordinary feat of’travelling all across the planet and talk in such situations ?

Well, of course, the institutional structure is very much thesame. To use an economist’s term, Fritz Machlup’s term,this is an institution of the knowledge industry. That iswhat we make our living on. (Some of the younger peoplehere are aspiring to be employed by the knowledgeindustry.) Now, the knowledge industry is a veryinteresting phenomenon, an international phenomenon.It is rooted in very specific institutional structures thateconomists, political scientists, and so.ciologists can spellout. I will not do it here. It has to do with, it seems to me,certain basic structural requirements of advancedindustrial societies of a certain type, and theserequirements are the same in many countries. It is notsurprising, therefore, that people in this industry tend tottfink alike. There are structures of consciousness whichcorrelate very easily from one national branch of thisinternational industry to another, and once one is in thisbusiness, one has very little difficulty in establishingcontact.

Now, modernity as a whole is stich an aggregation of’institutional processes and structures o’fconsciousness.One very interesting question which is raised, to which Iwill come back in a moment, is to what extent theseaggregates can be disassembled. Now, as to what theseinstitutional processes are which are the carriers ofmodernity, the carriers of modern consciousness,, thereis some debate about this and different answers havebeen given. It seems to me that the major structuresare the technologised economy and the bureaucratisedstate. Technology and bureaucracy, I think, are twoof t.he major institutional forces that bring aboutmodernisation, and both technology and bureaucracy, Ithink, can be shown to have features which recur indifferent national or cultural settings. In other words, theyare international phenomena and the structures ofconsciousness that relate to bureaucracy and technologyare also international structures in a very real sense. Thatthis is true of technology is fairly obvious - an engineercan move around the different societies, and if they haveattained a certain degree of technological development,

he can function very effectively in these societies. Thebureaucrat may have a little bit .more difficulty, forreasons ! cannot go into now- bureaucracy has morevariability than technology- but he can also manage; hehas to learn a few tricks. People who, for example, workfor international organisations can dQ this very easily,even, interestingly enough, across the capitalist/socialistdivide. (In some cases this divide makes much lessdifference than one might think on ideological grounds:)Tile term "carrier," as derived from Max Weber, suggests,I suppose, a disease. But one does not have to think of it inperjorative terms. Just as there are carriers of certainbiological conditions, thereare carriers of consciousness,and there are carriers of modem consciousness. What Ihave suggested a moment ago is that primary carriers of

modern consciousness are technology and bureaucracy.But there are also secondary carriers; for example, newforms of urban life which are highly institutionalised andwhich carry with them certain ~structures of consciousness.There are new structures of mass communication whichbring with them certain structures of consciousness, and

again these are diffused around the world in differentfrequencies, but there are ve~ few places left in this worldwhere they cannot be found at all.

Let me introduce two, actually three, concepts which Ifind useful in talking about this: one is the concept of’"package," and the other is the notion of"intrinsic" and"extrinsic" packages. What is a package? The term wascoined by Ivan Illich, but I am using it in a more preciseway than he’ did. A package is a particular empiricallyavailable constellation of institutional and consciousnessphenomena. That is, a particular institutional process anda particular form of consciousness empirically gotogether; when this can be established, we talk about apackage. What is an extrinsic or an intrinsic package?Very Simply, ah intrinsic package is One ~vhere we havereason to think .that the relationship between ’theinstitutional processes and the particular phenomenon ofconsciousness could not be different. An extrinsic one iswhere the relationship is a more accidental matter.

Take the example of aviation. It is apparently not a veryeasy thing to fly a modern aeroplane; you have to be verycarefully trained. You have to be trained in certain skills.You also have to be’ trained in certain structures ofconsciousness. That is, a person who pilots a modern jetplane has to operate both behaviourally and mentally in avery particular way. I will not go into the details - it wouldbe interesting to go into the details of it, for example, toinquire what notions of time and space are involved - butlet us agree on one simple word. The person who isinvolved in this operation has to be very precise in terms ofhis mental operations, and training in precision, isextremely important. There he sits with all these gadgetsor measurements ; he has to think in a certain way. I wouldsuggest to you that this is an intrinsic package, that is, itcould not be imagined any differently. Let me tell you alittle episode to bring this point off. A few years ago, whenI was in Africa, I took a plane very early in the morning onan African airline to a rather far away place. I was verysleepy. I got on the plane and they had fitted out the cabinto look like an African village. It was rather attractive andthere were airline hostesses in very colourful garb and theywere serving exotic food and on the P.A. system they wereplaying African music. It was very early in the morning, Iwas very sleepy and I was nervous, and as I walked intothis "African Village", the thought that.was in my mindwas: My God, who is flying this aeroplane? Now, pleasedo not interpret my remark as being some sort of racistremark, it had nothing to do with race. I could not careless what the skin colour was of the person who was flyingthe aeroplane - I wanted the person who was flying theaeroplane to be like a TWA pilot, to think like a TWApilot, and not to operate with the mental structures of anAfrican village which operate in very different ways fromthe precise, quantifiable mathematical mindset of a pilot.Well, what happened was we took off and the pilot got onthe P.A. system and spoke in a very clipped British voiceagainst the background of this African music, and I wasreassured that this individual either was British or, if not,had been trained in Britain. That is he probably had the

mindset of a TWA pilot or British Airways ]gilot orwhatever - at least as long as he was flying the plane (I didnot care what he did when he went home and got off theplane).

That is an intrinsic package in the sense that if you wantto take that package apart, that is institutional behaviourand consciousness, you are not going to have an airline.Let me spin this out for just a moment. I mentioned thestructures of time which are extremely important inanalysing consciousness. I think time is one of the basiccategories; modernisation among other ways can bedefined rather nicely as a revolution in the humanexperience of time. It can also, be argued that ,thespecifically modern structure of time that goes with flyingan aeroplane is inimical to many human cultures,certainly to traditional African cultures, and indeed if youtalk tO African writers, people who try to express an.African consciousness, they will tell you that this is a veryalien type of consciousness and one that in many ways theyregard as a violation of their culture. Well, what can onesay when one talks about aeroplanes? As a sociologist, !would say to such an African poet: "You may be perfectly

right, I think what you say about the Way Westerners haveorganised time is very accurate. I may even agree with youthat it is a rather debatable way of living; it is verynervous-making, for example. But unless you have it, youare not going to have an airline, or if you have an airline,your planes are going to crash." There is no optionhere;it is an intrinsic package, you want an airline, you have gotto have people who feel this way, at least while they fly theaeroplane. The interesting question is, how can you stopthem from thinking this way all the time? But that again isa different problem.

Now, what is an extrinsic package? Let us remain withthe aeroplane example. At least .in the non-Sovietdominated part of the world, I think in parts even there,the language of International Civil Aviation is English(very much to the annoyance of the French). So if you havean African national train to be a pilot of,, an Africaninternational airline, not only does this person have to

learn how to think mathematically and technically in acertain way, but he has to learn English. For example, if hecomes from a Francophone African countr7, he has tolearn English or he cannot communicate with the controltowers. That is clearly an e~/trinsic package. It is the resultof an historical accident. I suppose the domination ofearly international aviation by the United States, as far as Iknow, is the main reason for this. English has become thelinguafranca of international aviation. It could have beendifferent; it could become different in the future; it couldbe French, or Russian, or Chinese, or even Swahili. Anextrinsic package, it could be taken apart.

Why did I go into all of this longer than I had intended ?It is rather simple. Modernity has come, in most parts of theworld, in a package with secularisation. Let its use the termsecularity or secularisation in as simple a form as possible.By secularisation we mean the process by which religiousinstitutions and religious symbols have lost in importance.(Believe me, I could make this infinitely more precise,infinitely more complex, but I will not. I think "loss inimportance" is good enough.) Modernity and secularityhave been a package. I think one can show thishistorically. Why has there been this package? Why hasmodernisation meant secularisation? Is this packageinevitable? Or is it possible to have modernisationwithout secularisation ? The last seems to me the bottom-line question of social-scientific and historical analysis.Why modernity has been secularising has been a topic ofdebate for quite a while. Very few people have denied thefact. There are a few people, one whom some of youprobably know, the American Catholic sociologist,Andrew Greeley. He argues that the degree of religionamonghuman beings has not changed appreciably sincethe Stone Age. Very few people would agree with this; Icertainly would not agree. Not only has the amount ofreligion, the importance of religion in the world, changeda lot since the Stone Age, but even since lOO years ago inmost countries of the world. There has been generalagreement that modernity has meant an increase ofsecularisation. There has been much less agreement as to

why this should be so. I am very much convinced that anycomplex historical phenomenon is not going to have asatisfactory monocausal explanation. I am sure there aredifferent reasons for this. And in this case, very much inthe tradition of Max Weber, I think that what happened inthe West, whe/-e modernity began and modern secularitybegan, there was a specific confluence of historical factors.The institutional differentiation of Western s0c~ety ~ssomething that Weber. put a lot of attention to. TheChurch has been a very peculiar religious institution inhuman history, separate from other social institutions.And then, of course, there has been the peculiar form ofWestern rationality.

I suppose most people, whom you would ask, "whythere is less religion today than there used to be", wouldanswer in terms of science. I think this is almost certainlya mistake, for the simple reason that most people donot know a thing about, science, even in the mosttechnologically sophisticated Societies there is an en-ormous ignorance of science. What it is is not Science but aparticular kind of what Max Weber called functionalrationality which is vaguely related to science but is notscience. The notions that most human problems can besolved by the application of rational measures, that theworld is to be controlled by rational means, and beliefs ofthis sort, are not science but are operating assumptions ofmodernity. The spread of the highly rational structures of’technology and bureaucracy, which ! mentioned before,have, I think, had an important secularising effect. Inother words, the man in the Street was not all that wrong.

Secularisation has meant that religious institutions havelost some of the predominance they used to have in somecountries and radically lost some of the social positionthat they had. Religion has become a specialised activity inthe privatelives of individuals but has been driven out ofthe public sphere, this is very much the case in countriessuch as France, for example, the Scandinavian countries,and in a somewhat different way the UnitedStates. Interms of structures of consciousness, secularisation is not

just an institutional process, it is also a process within

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human consciousness, which one can describe, I thir/k, bysaying that religious definitions of reality have lost in theirsubjective plausibility. That is, religious explanations oftile world are less convincing to many people, religioussymbols have lost their power to inspire or to orderhuman life. What I am saying here is that many of thecommon-sense assumptions about the relationship ofmodernity and secularity are more or less correct. But onefactor ifi this relationship, one factor that has producedthis package of modernity and secularity, which has beenmuch overlooked and that I have been particularlyinterested in, is the factor of pluralism~ or moreaccurately, as I would prefer to call it, pluralisation. Whatdoes that mean and why is it important?

Pluralism, as far as I know, is a term that originated inthe United States, and refers to the empirically obvioussituation that American society has been the product of agreat plurality of ethnic, racial and also religious groups.That is not the whole story, however, and I would.suggestto you that pluralisation takes place in countries, evenpluralisation in terms of religion, which do not at all havethe kind of heterogeneity that American society has.Minimally, what pluralisation means is that people beginto have the choice as to their religious affiliation, and th’ishappens even in countries with, on the surface, a veryhigher degree of religious homogeneity, Sweden forexample. You have to decide whether this is true of theRepublic of Ireland. Generally speaking, modernisationmeans that options are multiplied in human life. But toput it differently, modernisatidn in terms of the basicstructures of human existence means a movement from fate to

¯ choice. This is so in terms of the elementary materialstructures of life. In a Stone Age society; if you will, theremay be five tools that that particular society has. If thereare anthropologists here, I am sure they could give a list-a certain type of hammer, a certain kind of axe, plough,cooking utensil, whatever. Those are the tools available. Ifyou want to cook, you have to use this utensil, if you wantto kill somebody, you have to use the axe, and there is nochoice beyond that. Similarly, there are firm institutional

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programmes for the main activities of human lifi~:nutrition, sexuality, child-rearing, hunting, war, whatevertile case may be. This is the way things are done; there isvery little choice. Now, as modernisatiola proceeds, theareas, of choice open up. They open up on the materiallevel. Think of the incredible, amount of gadgets andmachines and technological tools which we have available.Am I going by caror by train? Am I going to take a plane,am I going to take aboat? AmIgoing to use this kitchenutensil or that? On the more sophisticated, or at least themore complex level, the engineer chooses the difti~rentprocesses that can be employed for a particular kind ofproduction. The same is true of institutionalarrangements which begin to vary greatly from case tocase, and both individuals and human groups have newoptions. Precisely because, as a sociologist would have toinsist, human consciousness is related to institutions, thisopening up of choices also takes place on the level ofhuman consciousness. And what used to be fate ordestiny, now becomes increasingly a matter of choice.

I read somewhere that in Homeric Greece, if twostrangers met, one asked the other: "What gods do youworship ?", which was not a religious question but was aninquiry about the person’s address - where do you live?Where you lived, that is where particular kinds of godswere worshipped, and if you were .a Corinthian, youworshipped the gods of Corinth, if you were an Athenian,you worshipped the gods of Athens, and the idea that youmight be an Atheriian and not worship the gods of Athenswas an inconceivable one - at least until Socrates, and theygot rid of him in the most expeditious and logical manner.This kind of choice-making would upset the entire system.Through most of human history, religion was part of thetaken-for-granted unavoidable destiny of a human being,and he or She had as little choice about the gods that onewas to worship as about a hundred other areas of human4ire. For people in a modern society, there is this enormousexpansion of choice. I could make a list, incidentally, ofvery important things that people like. What kind ofoccupation am I going to follow? Whom am I going to

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marry? How am I going to raise my children? And lots ofother questions where through most of human historythere was no choice at all. We have enormous ranges ofchoice. We do not all have the same. There are classdifferences. But still, even the poorest person ina modernsociety has choices which through most of human historywould have been unthinkable. And we now increasinglyhave the choice as to which gods we worship, including thechoice not to worship any of them, which is perhaps themost significant choice of all.

Now, when religion ceases to be a matter of fate andbecomes a matter of choice, there are some fundamentalchanges in the manner in which religion is maintained intile consciousness of individuals. The United States, forhistorical reasons that are well known, has a certain climaxof pluralism, and the American language reflects it, in avery nice way.. I came to America as a young man, a veryyoung man, and one of the first things I did was to registerfor college, and on one of the forms I had to fill out wasthe question "What is your religious preference?" MyEnglish was fairly good at that point, but I did notunderstand the word - religious preference. It is a consumerterm: I prefer this kind of toothpaste as against that. Iprefer Presbyterianism to Methodism. Another peculiarlyAmerican phrase: "I happen to be a Catholic," whichmeans I could be something else, I just happen to be aCatholic. Or a more recent phrase, coined, as many of ourbest phrases in recent years in California - I am intoBuddhism. Which implies that sooner or later I will be outof it. Now these are linguistic terms which are veryrevealing of an underlying reality which I am sure isdifferent, at least in some ways in Irel/md. But I would saythat Ireland is different from the United States on somecontinuum of pluralism, and people in Ireland are muchcloser to the United States in this matter than they wouldbe to people anywhere in the western world, say, ~oo yearsago, where there were very different kinds of destinyinvolved in religion (very obviously Northern Ireland is aspecial case, but I am not competent to discuss it).

The change can be summed up quite simply: Religion

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becomes a less certain matter. As long as the gods are taken fbrgranted, they aremy destiny, just as it is my destiny to be aman rather than a woman, or to live in one place ratherthan another, or to be the son Of a nobleman instead ofthe son of a serf, or the other way round. As long as mygods are destinyqn this sense, they have about them a highdegree of objectivity. That is, it is very unlikely that I willdoubt their existence, or for that matter, their nature, thenature of the gods, as the tradition tells me. When thegods become a matter of choice, they become a much lessobjective reality, they become more of a subjective matter,they become a matter of ta’ste, of opinion, of change: Toput the same thing in different terms, religious certaintybecomes a much harder-to-get commodity. I think thatthe crisis that modernity has plunged religion into, thechallenge of modernity to religion, is in a very direct wayrelated to this transition from destiny to options, from fateto choice. Let me come back to the question which I askeda little bit before:~ Is this particular package, the packageof modernity and secularity, is it intrinsic or is it extrinsic?Can we have modernity without secularisation? Or mustwe assume that, .as modernisation proceeds, so willsecularisation? We.have a body of writings in the socialsciences which, perhaps, somewhat optimistically havebeen called secularisation theory, optimistically becausethe theory is not all that impressive and all that cohesive,but at least there is a body of writing which suggests thatthe relationship between’modernity and secularisation isindeed intrinsic. For some of the reasons I have given, andsome others, the two would then act together inevitably,and, therefore, one must make a certain prognosis as tothe future of religion which is a negative prognosis.(Incidentally, this prognosis has nothing to do whetherone is oneself religious or not. If one is religious, thiswould be a depressing prognosis; if one is an atheist, itwouldbe a cheering one. But still, the prognosis would bethe same.)

When I started work in sociology in the 196os I was verymuch part of this consensus. In my case it was a depressingprognosis since I am (or should I say I happen to be, no, I

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am) a Christian and I did not like the idea that the worldwould become progressively secularistic. But,nevertheless, as a sociologist, I shared this consensus ofsecularisation theory. There have been a number ofcriticisms of secularisation theory which I do not think Iwant to go into, but let me tell you my own view as it isnow, and it has changed somewhat since the 196os. Ithink, contrary to critics like Andrew Greeley; thatsecularisation has indeed been a concomitant ofmodernity; it’s not an invention of some historians orsocial scientists. But I am less and less inclined to seesecularisation as intrinsically linked with modernity. I thinkthere are historical reasons, particularly in the West, inEurope and the European dependences around the world,as to why that linkage was established, and it isincreasingly becoming possible, it seems to me, to seesituations in which the package might be taken apart ordisaggregated. My own change of mind, for whatever it isworth, was mainly brought about by three sets of data, two

¯ of which were in my own experience and one was not, butwhich one can read about to some extent.

One that was very much part of my own experience wasthe incredible religious resurgences in America, in theUnited States, .in the last fifteen years or so. In some waysthe most interesting was the one in the late ’sixties, whichwas very much part of the counter culture, where suddenlyin the most unexpected social milieus you began to havean enormous interest in religion and, generally, a ratherexotic kind of religion. Why that is so, I do not want to gointo. But in elite universities and places where one wouldimagine the most secularised people of the society to exist,(particularly in the natural sciences, by the way) there werepeople who became converted to various forms of Hindumysticism and the like. This eruption of religiosity in themost unlikely places - why ? Well, since then we have had amassive religious explosion in the United States in verydifferent milieus but of far greater significance for thesociety as a whole, and that is the new ProtestantEvangelicalism and its explosion - there is no other way todescribe it. This is an unreconstructed form of American

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Protestantism which is sweeping the country with socialand political consequences that are as yet unclear. In someof my early writings on th~ sociology of religion of’

.American Protestantism in the late ’fifties and early’sixties, when I started to publish things, it made muchmore sense than to talk about secularisation in the UnitedStates as progressive and inevitable (I mean progressive inthe sense of progressing, a progressing inexorable process)than it does today where we are assailed in the UnitedStates from every corner by masses of religious choruses ofone sort or another.

The second set of data, which I have not myselfexperienced but have read about and talked about topeople who have experienced it, is the Soviet case.Apparently there has been not a massive,.but at any rateinteresting, resurgence of religion in the Soviet Union,and again in very, unexpected places. In some ways, Isuppose, it is analogous to what happened in the UnitedStates and other western countries in the late ’sixties. I donot mean the survival of traditional religion in verytraditional, milieus in, say, far-away villages, but theupsurge of religion, to use a phrase, among the childrenof the commissars, the~ sudden attendance at Orthodoxservices by the most unlikely young people. The Komsomoland the Party being troubled by religious observancesamong young elite Party members, this kind of thing.Now, one has to be careful about this in a totalitariansociety. Sociological research is very difficult. Some of thismay be using religious symbols for what is more acultural, a political dissidence. Still, there is enoughmaterial there to make one interested, and, of course, thebasic interest here is that we have a societyin which forover half a century the regime has carried on an activelyanti-religious policy, at times coupled with very severerepression, and, nevertheless, in the very centre of thepower structure of that ’society, you will find thesereligious resurgents.

The third set of data, which again were part of my ownexperience ifi various places, are development in the ThirdWorld. And if one talks about secularisation being

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coupled with modernity, you have to fbrget about themajority of the human race. And if" you have anyexperience in Asia and Africa or in Latin America (almostanywhere, choose your Third World country), you willfind that some of’ the most dynamic and revolutionarydevelopments taking place are religious developments.Let us not now go into the question of how one cangeneralise about them, but you may talk about a massiveupsurge in Islam, not.just in Iran, but all over the Muslimworld and talk about religiously motivated movements inLatin America, the incredible upsurge of new Afi~icantypes of Christianity all over the African Continent.Certainly, whatever is happening in the Third World byway of modernisation does not seem to be associated withsecularisation for most people, except for a very smallhandful of intellectuals who, of course, were trained in theWest or by Westerners and confuse their ownconsciousness with the consciousness of their fellowcitizens.

In my work on modernisation, I was compelled (I thinkthere is no other way of putting it) to revise my views on a.number of things, and one thing that I think I can say Ilearned (among other people, by the way, from IvanIllich, who has influenced me quite a lot in some of mythinking about the Third World) is that modernisationcannnot be understood as a unilinear development. Thereis what I sometimes call the electric-toothbrush theory ofmodernisation, which an amazing number of socialscientists still seem to have. The theory can be describedlike this: Drop an electric toothbrush in an African villageand after 8o years you get Dusseldorf, or Stockholm or,Detroit (you name your modern city of choice). In otherwords, there is a kind of inexorable development once youintroduce one element ofmodernisation. They start to useelectric toothbrushes and, before you know it, they are alllike the Swedes, or other super-modern types. Well, this isnot true. There are obviously less simplistic ways oflooking at modernisation as a.unilinear way, but even theless simplistic ones, I think, are not true. What in fact youfind, I think, is that the historical reality i,s a dialectic .of

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modernisation and counter-modernisation. This hasalways been so, it is nothing new, andwhen you look.backto tile beginnings of modernity in Europe, yot/find thesame tiling. . " !

The modernisation process produces very Specifictensions, conflicts and discontents, and from thebeginning thei-e are reactions against it. Some of thesehave to do with class struggles, some of them have to dowith the destruction of traditional forms of life, some ofthem are on the level of consciousness, and as

modernisation proceeds, the resistances to modernisationalso proceed, and you get a see-saw development ofmodernisation and counter-modernisation, withobviously one Or the other being more prominent at aparticular moment in time. Verymuch parallel to this, itseems to me, and relevant.to a whole range of problems oftile modern world, there is a dialecticofsecularisation andcounter-secularisation. Iwould now continueto say as Isaid ~o years ago, that modernisation is secularising, fbr.some of the reasons I, very hastily, sketched for you. Butthere are also counter-secular forces in the world whichsometimes attain enormous strength. In Western societies,many of these have to do with class dynamics. Forexample, the phenomenon ~I mentioned before, theupsurge of Evangelical Protestantism in America--I thinkmuch of this is, in fact, class conflict, in case there is anymisunderstanding, I amin no way a Marxist, and when Isay "class conflict", I do not mean a Marxist theory ofclass but a non-Marxist theory of class. But much of what i~going on, I think, in America under the banner of"EvangelicM Protestantism today has to do with classresentment and class cohflict.

From what I have said, I think you can see whymodernity poses a rather formidable challenge to anyform of traditional religion and to the institutions thatembody any form of traditional religion (the churches inWestern Christian terms certainly). There are differentways in which these institutions: ,.an respond to thatchallenge. Essentially, I would say, there is a three-foldtypology that one can use. Like all typologies this is

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arguable, but it helps to order the data. One obviously iscounter-modern resistance, the effort to keep thatdynamics out as far as possible. I think it is fair to say that,certainly in the nineteenth century and into the twentiethcentury, that was the predominant stance of the RomanCatholic Church. To me one of the most magnificentsymbols of this (I am not Roman Catholic, I have notheological admiration for this, neither do most Catholictheologians today) was in 187o, a few months after thetroops of Victor Emmanuel marched into Rome unitingRome to Italy, carrying on their bayonets all the modernvirtues of nineteenth century liberalism. Just a few monthsafter that, Vatican I pronounced the i’nfallibility of the’Pope, in the teeth of the modern world. There is a certainmagnificence in this even, if one does not believe that thePope is infallible, which I do not. It is a magnificentgesture. It is a gesture, of course, of resistance, of defiance,and less grandiose institutions than the Roman CatholicChurch have tried this. In the United States, a few yearsago, the Missouri Synod,. one of the largest Lutheranbodies in the United States, fired most of the theologicalfaculty of their seminary. They fired the Old Testamentprofessor because he taOght that Jonah was not literallyswallowed by the whale; this was about 1975. Now there issomething magnificent about this, for an Americanchurch body today to fire a professor because he does notbelieve in such miracles. But there are technical.problemswith this stance, largely of a sociological sort which I couldspell out. There ar,.e problems of social engineering. Inorder to make that kind of stance plausible you have tohave a certain kind of social structure, and that is verydifficult to maintain in a modern Western society.

"At the opposite end of’ttiis is what one can callsecularising adaptation, in which the tradition is adapted,as far as possible, to modern secularity. The terms of thetradition are translated into secular terms. Individualtheologians, of course, do this. Schools of theology and,to some extent, entire denominations have done it. As faras. possible they translate the traditional message intoterms that would be congenial to modern man. This, I

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think, is also a very difficult procedure, because essentiallyone does not know where to stop, and as you translate thetradition into modern terms, you find, sometimes veryrapidly, that there is nothing left of the tradition, and whatbegan as a way of making it survive, becomes a way of"liquidating it. The viable choices are in between these t,~,oextremes they are, if I may use a technical term of my own,options of "cognitive bargaining," in which the traditiontries to maintain itself as the tradition that it has been butin a kind of bargaining stance vis-d-vis modernity. My ownview is, as a sociologist, that only this third option has anychance of success, happily, this happens to agree with mytheological prejudices, so I am not distressed by thatconclusion. , ’