Politics & Power Quote by Peter L. Berger

Berger’s jab lands because it flips the usual accusation on its head. In American religious debates, “liberal Protestantism” is often scolded for watering down doctrine, as if the central crisis were heresy-by-committee. Berger, the sociologist, is less interested in policing beliefs than in diagnosing a thinner kind of faith: a tradition that kept the institutional shell while letting the inner density leak out.

The intent is diagnostic, not nostalgic. He’s not pleading for a return to creeds so much as pointing to a functional problem: when churches translate themselves too smoothly into the language of modern uplift - self-affirmation, vague moral progress, therapeutic reassurance - they may become culturally palatable but religiously weightless. “Not orthodox enough” is the wrong metric; the real issue is “substance,” a word that hints at ritual, metaphysical seriousness, moral demand, and a felt encounter with the sacred. Berger’s subtext is that people don’t join or stay for a slightly nicer version of what they can already get from politics, psychology, or NPR-grade ethics.

Context matters here: Berger wrote across the postwar decades when mainline Protestant denominations were losing members and cultural authority while evangelical and charismatic movements surged. His broader work on secularization and “plausibility structures” helps explain the line: faith survives when it offers a compelling world, reinforced by community practices, not just agreeable opinions. Liberal Protestantism, in trying to remain credible to modern elites, risks offering belief without friction - and then wondering why it can’t compete with either robust religiosity or robust secular alternatives.