Faith & Spirit Quote by Peter L. Berger

An unusually candid act of disciplinary self-sabotage, Berger is doing more than issuing a correction. He’s puncturing a mid-century confidence that history had a single, tidy direction: as societies modernize, religion naturally withers. In the 1960s, that idea didn’t just feel plausible; it felt like the social-science version of gravity. Europe’s church attendance was dropping, welfare states were expanding, technocratic rationality was ascendant, and the Cold War framed “modernity” as a package deal. The secularization thesis fit the mood of the era: progress as disenchantment.

The intent is strategic humility. Berger positions himself and his peers as authors of an elegant, overgeneralized story, then publicly downgrades it. That move buys credibility, but it also redraws the map: the real mistake wasn’t bad data so much as a bad metaphor. “Modernity goes hand in hand” implies a coupled pair, two dancers moving in lockstep. Berger is admitting the coupling broke. Modernity can generate pluralism, choice, and institutional differentiation without automatically producing unbelief.

The subtext is a warning about sociology’s temptation to turn current trends into laws. He’s also quietly acknowledging global evidence that embarrassed the old model: American religiosity persisting amid affluence, Pentecostalism’s boom in the Global South, political Islam, Hindu nationalism. Modernization didn’t drain religion; it often repackaged it, politicized it, or made it compete harder. Berger’s correction lands as an indictment of linear “end of history” thinking, and a reminder that modern life doesn’t eliminate meaning-making, it multiplies the arenas where it fights for attention.