The Invisible Religion Thomas Luckmann
Overview
| Publisher | MacMillan |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 0025767003 |
| Year | 1967 |
| Pages | 125 |
| Publisher | MacMillan |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 0025767003 |
| Year | 1967 |
| Pages | 125 |
In The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (1967), sociologist Thomas Luckmann presents a groundbreaking analysis of how religious phenomena evolve within modern industrial society. Luckmann challenges the prevailing secularization thesis, arguing that the decline of traditional church attendance does not signify the death of religion itself, but rather its profound transformation.
As modern society undergoes structural differentiation, institutions such as the economy, state, and science become increasingly autonomous. Consequently, traditional, institutionalized churches lose their overarching authority to enforce universal moral codes and collective doctrines. However, rather than disappearing, religiosity shifts into the private sphere. Individuals are liberated from traditional dogmas and instead choose from an open market of meaning, assembling personalized, subjective systems of belief, self-realization, and values.
Luckmann terms these privatized, non-institutionalized forms of personal meaning “invisible religion.” By locating the ultimate function of religion in the human capacity to transcend biological nature through social meaning, Luckmann demonstrates that modern secularization is not the end of faith. Instead, it represents a shift where religion moves away from formal institutions, turning spirituality into an individual, fluid, and highly customized pursuit of personal identity and purpose.
This essay was originally motivated by my dissatisfaction with the limitations of various empirical studies in the sociology of religion—my own included. The problems developed in the present essay were first touched upon in my review of some publications in the sociology of religion, published in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (12:2, 1960, pp. 315–326). Later I wrote a first draft of the present essay under the title “Notes on the Case of the Missing Religion” which, if for no other reason, remained unpublished because of its title. Arnold Bergstraesser, late professor of political science and sociology at the University of Freiburg, encouraged me to rewrite the draft and publish it in German in the Sociological Series edited by him for Rombach Freiburg. The volume was published in 1963 under the title Das Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft.
In 1962 I read a paper on the problem of religion in modern society to the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The paper was published in the Society's Journal (2:12, 1963, pp. 147–162). Having undertaken to translate—or retranslate—the volume published by Rombach for American publication, I found myself rewriting it. Some sections were expanded, others reformulated, still others shortened.
In addition to the late Arnold Bergstraesser I am indebted to my teacher in the sociology of religion, Carl Mayer of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York, Peter Berger of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Friedrich Tenbruck of the University of Frankfurt for many fruitful discussions of the problems treated in the present volume.
Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016) was a prominent Slovenian-Austrian sociologist. A student of Alfred Schutz, he shaped phenomenological sociology, co-authored The Social Construction of Reality, and revolutionized the sociology of modern religion.
| Title | The Invisible Religion |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | The Problem of Religion in Modern Society |
| Author | Thomas Luckmann |
| Publisher | MacMillan |
| Year | 1967 |
| Pages | 125 |
| Country | United States of America |
| ISBN | 0025767003 |
| Format | |
| URL | Thomas Luckmann The Invisible Religion PDF |
