ABSTRACT
Berger's interest in pluralism and his insistence on its importance are emphatically tied to his interests as a sociologist of religion. Secularization theory is a conceptually simple perspective. In traditional societies a multiplicity of life worlds was not known. In modernized societies, a unitary life world provided with social solidarity due to something like Durkheim's collective consciousness has been replaced by a diversity of domains, each with its own set of rules for getting by and making sense of participants' experiences. Berger attributes the pluralization of both the public and private spheres of our world fundamentally to urbanization and mass communications. Berger takes the position that wherever increases in technology-intensive productivity occur, the incidence of social mobility increases, most of it upward. It is easy to see why Berger has concluded that the encroachment of pluralism is significantly forestalled and its consequences are largely deflected.
