ABSTRACT
In traditional societies, religiously based normative institutions have been instrumental in governing and regulating the social system. Law was typically seen as instituted by the gods and so were the rules of social hierarchy and political power as well as morality and ethics. Right and wrong, and good and bad, were “givens” by and from the superhuman realms of the “other world”. It is in the very de nition of traditional society that this is so: the “Sacred Canopy” is (or was) suspended over all of life’s
domains, as the sociologist Peter Berger has described it ([1967] 1990). Post-traditional, or modern society is when and where the legitimacy of the “other world” wanes or altogether disappears as ultimate reference. It is also where and when religion emerges as a separate sphere of society that acquires a separate name. In religiously governed traditional societies there would mostly be no speci c term equal to “religion”. What we might call “religion” is simply “the way things are” in traditional society. Not so in modern society where the authority of religion fades. How and why did these changes from traditional to modern happen?
