Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, and Theorizing the African Religious Context

When The Sacred Canopy was published fifty years ago, the author hardly envisaged that what he framed as “the final sociological consequence [of] an understanding of religion as a historical product” (Berger 1967, vi) was only a few bricks in the foundation of a vibrant debate about the future of religion and pathways to understanding and studying socio-religious transformation in contemporary society. From its publication until the 1980s—that is, the beginning of the radical questioning of the secularization thesis by proponents of the religious market paradigm—The Sacred Canopy achieved a near-canonical status in the training of graduate students in sociological theory in many departments of sociology and religious studies. Perhaps The Sacred Canopy is better known—though unfairly, it may be argued—for the secularization thesis and debates surrounding its effects in modern society. Recognized as the antonym of the sacred, secularization was the pillar of an argument about the increasing vanishing of the sacred and an expansion of chaos. Many African graduate students of sociology encountering this in Berger’s early writings and his emphasis on the “terror of anomie” or “the nightmare threats of chaos” (Berger 1967, 27) were themselves terrorized by a contrary possibility. This supposed “chaos” contradicted their own lived experience of African ontology: an unsecular universe where the sacred and the profane are bedfellows, constantly impinging on each other. Africa is a deeply religious continent and there is no evidence to support the receding of the sacred rather than its ubiquitous irruptions. This has had an enormous impact on how Berger has been read and reflected upon in Africa.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Secularization · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of religion · History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion and Sociopolitical Dynamics in Nigeria · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

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