ABSTRACT
Until the 1970s, Peter L. Berger—like most sociologists of religion—supported the thesis that modernity necessarily leads to secularization. He considered that the presumed secularizing effect of modernity was rendered plausible by Max Weber's thesis of the "disenchantment of the world". In The Sacred Canopy, Berger agrees that Protestantism, which had divested itself of "the three most ancient and powerful concomitants of the sacred—mystery, miracle, and magic", was a major driving force behind the disenchantment of the Western world. However, he points out that the roots of the process can be traced back to the Old Testament. In The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics Berger also explicitly postulates the existence of a counter-trend, namely desecularization or counter-secularization. And in a paper entitled "Reflections on Sociology of Religion Today", he declares the interplay between secularizing and counter-secularizing forces to be one of the most important questions for contemporary sociology of religion.
