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Chapter 7 - Peter L. Berger’s Three Religions
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- By Titus Hjelm
- Edited by Jonathan B. Imber, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to Peter Berger
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 17 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2023, pp 75-86
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Summary
Peter L. Berger needs few introductions. Although adopted by sociologists of religion as one of our own, Berger’s influence is much broader. As the chapters in this volume and a plethora of commentary attest, his name is often treated as synonymous with the emergence of “social construction” as a key term in the social sciences. Berger’s main work in the sociology of religion The Sacred Canopy is, in turn, in the author’s own words (1967, vi), “a direct application of the same theoretical perspective in the sociology of knowledge,” which he and Luckmann introduced in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967), “to the phenomenon of religion.”
Yet, for all his constructionism, Berger’s sociology of religion is curiously disconnected from the broader framework introduced in The Social Construction of Reality. While the “systematic elements” in The Sacred Canopy (worldconstruction, theodicy, alienation) indeed follow the sociology of knowledge framework, they are much less evidently present in the “historical elements” (secularization, legitimation) of the book. Although Berger later said that “I found the sociology-of-knowledge framework of my early work very useful and have not been motivated to exchange it for another,” there is not a lot of evidence of it in his subsequent writings, even less so in the work inspired by him (Hjelm 2018).
I argue here that Berger’s writings on religion represent a missed opportunity for a genuinely constructionist approach. I use Berger’s definition of religion in The Sacred Canopy as a prism through which it becomes possible to understand the rather more traditional paths that Berger himself and sociology of religion inspired by his work has taken. “Three religions” is, then, not a reference to Berger’s biography—although that is also a story of religious switching (Berger 2008)—but rather to the substantive, functional, and constructionist approaches that the definition of religion in The Sacred Canopy enables. I discuss each approach and their role in the work of Berger and his followers in detail below.
A Reluctant Definition
In the preface to The Sacred Canopy, Berger emphasizes that “this book is not “a sociology of religion” ‘ (Berger 1967, vi). He is not interested in providing an overview of different sociological approaches to religion, including discussion of the different definitions of religion, which, Berger later wrote, he considered “sublimely uninteresting” (Berger 2014, 17)
6 - The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion
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- By Titus Hjelm
- Edited by Erin Johnston, Stanford University, California, Vikash Singh
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- Book:
- Interpreting Religion
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 May 2022, pp 131-150
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Summary
Peter L. Berger, the now-departed prickly doyen of the sociology of religion, was characteristically upfront when discussing the debates over different definitions of religion: “I must confess that I find this question sublimely uninteresting” (Berger, 2014: p. 17). On the one hand, I heartily agree. There is no shortage of academic work that takes a definition of religion and uses it as a template for assessing whether something counts as “religion.” Lužný (2020), for example, argues that Czech Jediism and the Czech Church of Beer do not count as religions using a choice of (mostly functional) definitions. While he makes the valuable point that academic definitions may function to legitimate state decisions, it is less clear how the attempt to fit a religious group into a definitional box contributes to knowledge. Finding yet another case study to challenge a familiar definition is not a sign of sociological imagination, but rather of misunderstanding the function of definition. Consequently, it is only a small step to the other prevalent practice in the field, namely the infinite loop of metatheoretical discussion over the scholarly uses of “religion” (Saler, 1993; McCutcheon, 1997). Indeed, an expanded definition of religion is what Lužný recommends as a way out of the problem of accounting for “invented religions” like Jediism and the Church of Beer. Why I find both endeavors, with Berger, “sublimely uninteresting,” is simple: While we need working definitions of religion for many types of research, these definitions are – and should be – given as pragmatic ways to demarcate the field of vision rather than more or less accurate depictions of reality. The question, then, is not about truthfulness, but usefulness.
However, on the other hand, definitions are the most interesting question in the sociology of religion – just not in the way the field has traditionally considered it. To give you an example: my PhD student Helmi Halonen analyzes the ways in which the Finnish immigration authority (Migri) decides whether an asylum seeker's conversion to Christianity is genuine enough to warrant asylum based on religious discrimination in the country of origin. These can be literally life and death decisions.
Chapter 6 - Celluloid Vampires, Scientization, and the Decline of Religion
- from Part II - Film
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- By Titus Hjelm, University College London
- Edited by Christopher Partridge, Lancaster University, Eric Christianson, University of Chester
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- Book:
- The Lure of the Dark Side
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 May 2014
- Print publication:
- 29 October 2009, pp 105-121
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Summary
Ever since the first silver screen adaptations in the early twentieth century, the vampire has been a recurrent villain—and sometimes the tragic hero—of feature films. Count Dracula, the archetypal vampire, has been the main character in over 200 movies since the genre-defining Dracula from 1931. This makes him second only to Sherlock Holmes in appearances on the big screen (Melton, 1999: xxviii). Few characters can claim similar persistent success as popular cultural icons. With the screen adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1994), starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, vampires hit the mainstream and have stayed there ever since. Hence, as a commercial venture, mainstream vampire films have been a considerable success. On the week of its release Blade (1998) went to number one at the box office, replacing Steven Spielberg's highly acclaimed Saving Private Ryan (Jordan, 1999: 15).
Concurrent with the mainstream success of vampire films and TV series (especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the last ten to fifteen years have witnessed a definite upsurge in the amount of scholarly interest in vampires, both mythological and fictional. Religious studies scholars and anthropologists have studied the vampire as a part of a wider “monster culture” which reflects the dark side of the world's cultures and religions (e.g. Beal, 2002; Gilmore, 2003). Literary scholars have a long history of studying the vampire as part of cultural history (e.g. Auerbach, 1995; Rickels, 1999; Mäyrä, 1999).