Once upon a time, as a favor to a friend, Peter Berger welcomed us into his home to discuss our career goals. Nothing in terms of jobs came of that meeting. But we left with the impression that Berger was extraordinarily modest for such a brilliant and prolific academic. Modesty and brilliance – if you haven’t spent much time in academe – are rarely found together!
Even Berger’s Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity turns out, despite its title, to be formidable but still rather modest, even traditional (though he might quibble with that description).
All this is meant to set the stage for Peter Berger’s latest essay entitled “The Falsification of Secularization.” His thesis: “Modernity is not intrinsically secularizing, though it has been so in particular cases.”
With a couple notable exceptions, modernity has not undermined religion in the world, nor has it even weakened religion. Religions of all kinds are flourishing in nearly every part of the globe.
Berger asserts that religion isn’t the same as fundamentalism. Rather fundamentalism is a particular kind of mentality found alike among religious and anti-religious people:
there are secularist as well as religious fundamentalists—both unwilling to question their assumptions, militant, aggressive, contemptuous of anyone who differs from them.All fundamentalists, however, are fanatics, and as such, they are “bad for democracy” because fundamentalism at either end of the spectrum “hinders the moderation and willingness to compromise that make democracy possible.”
What’s the answer to fundamentalism? Militant moderation:
In plain language, fundamentalists are fanatics. And fanatics have a built-in advantage over more moderate people: Fanatics have nothing else to do—they have no life beyond their cause. The rest of us have other interests: family, work, hobbies, vices. Yet we too must be militant in defense of certain core values of our civilization and our political system. It seems to me that a very important task in our time (and probably in any time) is to be militant in defense of moderation—a difficult task but not an impossible one.
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