Public Religions in the Modern World, Jose Casanova
Coleman, John A.
THE SECOND COMING OF RELIGION PUBLIC RELIGIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD Jose Casanova University of Chicago Press, $49.95, 320 pp. John A. Colemcm erhaps only once in a decade is a book published...
...It challenges the popular belief that the privatization of modern religion is the only form consistent with modernity...
...Modernity derives from four different sources: the Reformation, the formation of the modern state, the rise of secular science, and capitalism...
...O 22...
...The other two are empirical possibilities but, in no sense, inevitable...
...The second theory sees the forms as a kind of way-station adjustment to secularism...
...John A. Colemcm erhaps only once in a decade is a book published in the sociology of religion that brings about a fundamental rejection or revision of revered theoretical paradigms...
...and (3) when religion enters the public sphere to protect traditional social patterns and loyalties from administrative or juridical state penetration...
...Roman Catholicism, and Evangelical Christianity using "utilitarian secularist explanations which reduce the phenomenon either to an instrumental mobilization of religious resources for nonreligious purposes or to an instrumental adaptation of religious institutions to the new secular environment...
...Thomas Luckmann's The Invisible Religion did that in the 1960s by rejecting Emile Durkheim's thesis that all societies would manifest a national public religious dimension...
...Consequently, we should expect different historical patterns of secularization to be evident in Protestant and Catholic nations and to be dependent on differing patterns of modern state formation, for example, in France, England, Germany, and the United States...
...Moreover, he shows that the entire modern sociological enterprise depends on some version of this flawed secularization thesis...
...Wuthnow claimed that America was ceasing to be a society whose religious forms were mainly shaped by denominationalism...
...Appealing to the democratic discourse theory of the German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, as well as to earlier critiques of the Enlightenment, Casanova makes a stunning claim...
...Only the second theory is unambiguously valid...
...Perhaps professional face can be saved, as Casanova notes, by explaining the new visibility of Islam...
...the religious sphere now becomes a less central sphere within the new secular realm...
...And in a more academic vein, it locks horns with Habermas's systematic theoretical blindness toward religion...
...An associate professor of sociology at the New School of Social Research, Casanova wants to explain the worldwide emergence of new forms of public religion since the 1970s...
...But the first theory makes the new forms of public religion a very dependent (perhaps manipulated) variable...
...Casanova's study is likely to be the paradigm iconoclast of the '90s...
...3) secular modernity necessarily entails the privatization of religion...
...He demonstrates how after Vatican II, Catholicism, the paradigmatic form of antimodern public religion, "rcfusefdj to become a private religion...
...Casanova anchors his theoretical claims about public religion in five case studies: Catholicism in modern Spain, Brazil, and Poland, and Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism in the United States...
...Casanova sets out to dispute this standard account by turning to two different theoretical enterprises...
...He argues that the traditional secularization paradigm conflates three quite different, and independent, theories: (1) sec21 ular modernity causes a religious decline (unproven as a master trend...
...He criticizes secularization theory for relegating religious commitment or faith to the realm of pure myth...
...Robert Wuthnow's The Restructuring of American Religion was the paradigm reshaperof the 1980s...
...Such a revitalization of religion was not what the widely accepted secularization thesis in sociology would, or even could, have predicted...
...2) secular modernity involves a radical differentiation of societal spheres in which religion ceases to define the all-encompassing reality within which the secular realm finds its proper place...
...Casanova's second theoretical enterprise is the more innovative and daring...
...This is a remarkable book, one certain to change and shape sociological thinking and research...
...Casanova contends that the religious defense of "normative traditions constitute the very condition of possibility for ethical discourse...without normative traditions neither rational public debate nor discourse is likely to take place...
...In any event, in most sociological accounts, the continuing vitality of public religion in modernity remains, still, an irrational outbreak of the premodern...
...Casanova notes that, with modernity, "the secular sphere will be the all-encompassing reality to which the religious sphere will have to adapt...
...After all the beatings it has received from modernity," he writes, religion "could somehow unintentionally help modernity save itself...
...On the other hand, the fundamentalist style of the Religious Right exemplifies the more common perception that public religion is incompatible with modernity and cannot contribute to open discourse...
...By grounding theory in a dynamic and changing Catholicism, Public Religions reverses the Protestantcentered biases of the modern sociology of religion...
...It wants to be both modern and public...
...That would prove a profound irony, to say the least...
...In doing all three of these things, religion brings the issue of normative values into the public realm for the self-reflection of modern discursive ethics...
...2) when religion enters the public sphere to question the absolute autonomy of the secular spheres and their claims to be free from any extraneous ethical or moral considerations...
...In the 1970s Robert Bellah's Beyond Belief used an alternative hermeneutical approach to introduce the power of "symbolic realism" to challenge the positivistic presuppositions of sociology...
...It seems self-evident that religious normative traditions should have the same rights as any other normative tradition to enter the public sphere as long as they play by the rules of open public debate...
...Finally, as in the classic sociological paradigms of Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, Casanova's study is as much about the status and discontents of modern society as it is about religion...
...But according to Casanova, public religion furthers the project of modernity in three ways: (1) When religion enters the public sphere to protect not only its own freedoms but all modern freedoms and rights and especially the right of a democratic civil society to exist against an absolutist, authoritarian state...
Vol. 121 • September 1994 • No. 16
