That evangelicals may not be aware of the cultural habits that drive their religious practices is not their fault; this is exactly how culture works. In his 1967 classic The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger wrote that society is a product of human beings and that they cannot exist apart from it. All humans are social humans, as he put it, so “it is within society, and as a result of social processes, that the individual becomes a person, that he attains and holds onto an identity, and that he carries out the various projects that constitute his life.”5 There is thus no personhood apart from society and no individual apart from culture. At some point in human development, culture and its assumptions about the world become “second nature.”
For Berger, religion is one kind of “world-building” that human beings naturally undertake. The sacred real exists to reinforce the culture that people have constructed, serving to found it and vest it with meaning. For this reason, religion is a historical product, “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.”6 This view is not unique to Berger; Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber make similar observations about what kind of reality religion is, though their projects are admittedly less impartial than Berger’s attempts to be. Berger does not intend to suggest, nor would I, that religion is only this. His claims are much more modest: He seeks to track how human beings build culture and to identify how that culture and its features are historically contingent.
One important feature of this contingency is secularization, which Berger defines as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.” For Berger, not only does the modern Western tradition carry within itself the seeds of secularization, but religion itself also participates in and even energizes this process. Protestantism is an important case for many sociologists who study how sacred reality “shrank” in the early modern world: Over time Reformers reduced the number of sacraments, shunned prayers for the dead, and made prayers for the intercession of the saints less central. This process of erosion left Protestantism bereft of what Berger calls the three most powerful and ancient “concomitants” of the sacred: mystery, miracle, and magic.9 Nevertheless, Protestants retained one solitary, though powerful, channel for encountering God—the Bible, whose access and meaning could be privately interpreted.
In these terms, the disenchantment of the world is a distinctly Protestant phenomenon. So says Berger: “The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces” but in a world “bereft of numinosity.” By relegating religion from the public sphere of transcendental truths to the private one of voluntary associations, this process of disenchantment transformed religion into a private choice. What this meant practically speaking was that religion was no longer “second nature” and part of man’s assumed culture. Rather, it became just another option: something to choose, or not. The necessity of religious choice, then, meant that the “the pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation.”
Berger’s is a stunning claim, and it’s worth pausing to consider its implications. The process of secularization transforms religious institutions into what he calls “marketing agencies” and religious traditions into “consumer commodities.” If what Berger argues is true, it’s impossible to study American evangelicalism without interpreting it through the logic of market economics. Evacuated of a central teaching office or a shared liturgy, with a phenomenology void of the supernatural, evangelicalism is a religious consciousness that needed to market itself to private individuals who were no longer constrained to participate in religious activities.