Peter L. Berger’s sociology of religion is one of the most studied and quoted in the contemporary social science of religions. Nevertheless, it is also one of the most discussed, notably because of the changes of position by the author with regard to his thought on the secularization of the modern world, and on the relationship between his theses of a sociological nature and his reflections on Protestant theology. The present article questions his global epistemological framework by placing that problematic within the framework of the criticisms which have been directed at ‘absolute functionalism,’ notably by the structuralists or moderate functionalists. By linking it with the prospect of going beyond the opposition between methodological holism and methodological individualism and between substantivism and functionalism, we propose a multidimensional approach to the religious, which seems to lead to a better understanding of the latter in its transformations and metamorphoses into modernity.
Book Review: Peter L. Berger and the Sociology of Religion: 50 Years after the Sacred Canopy
