[German] Luckmann: “The Invisible Religion”

[German] Luckmann: The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society, translated by Qinfang Ming, China Renmin University Press, October 2003

This book was published in 1967, and we can see that even after forty years, its insights still feel strikingly up to date. For me, this was an inspiring read; I did not study it especially carefully, but read it through in one breath while standing up (though I still did read every word from beginning to end).

I have always felt that all the predicaments faced by modern society can ultimately be traced back to two topics—science and religion—and, in particular, when examining Western society and Western culture, one must consider religious factors not only when dealing with ancient questions, but also when facing any question today, for the influence of religion is still everywhere.

However, as Luckmann points out, if we narrowly identify religion with the church, then our observations will give us the illusion that “the influence of religion in modern society is steadily weakening,” when in fact the opposite is true: “religion,” as the bearer of life’s ultimate meaning, is of unprecedented importance for analyzing the various phenomena of modern society. As the church’s influence wanes, the influence manifested in new forms—religious traditions, religious habits, religious complexes, religious concerns, and so on—becomes increasingly prominent. As Luckmann notes, these new changes are what the sociology of religion should most seriously study, rather than narrowly, and out of some gloating motive, displaying the church’s decline.

Luckmann in fact reduces the question of the “values” we discuss here to a religious question. Although such a treatment may seem to stretch the definition of religion rather too far, it is indeed defensible. “Meaning” exists at different depths. For example, we say the meaning of eating is to fill one’s stomach, but we can further ask what the meaning of filling one’s stomach is; we say the meaning of filling one’s stomach is to absorb nutrition, the meaning of absorbing nutrition is to maintain health, the meaning of maintaining health is to sustain life—so what is the meaning of sustaining life? We can answer that sustaining life is for the sake of continuing the family line, but then what is the meaning of continuing the family line? We might also answer that the meaning of sustaining life is for the family, for one’s beloved, for “serving the people,” for the communist ideal, and so on, but I can still ask: what is the meaning of “serving the people”? … Obviously, a rational person will not allow this line of questioning to continue without end. There is always a point at which, when we reduce meaning to it, we stop asking further. Whether this “endpoint” is life itself, descendants, sex, “serving the people,” the satisfaction of desire, self-realization, truth, the highest good, immortality, or God, in short, for any intellectually mature person, this chain of asking about “meaning” must have a focal point, and the ultimate meaning to which it leads must certainly bear a quality of “sacredness.” This in turn makes the question of meaning inevitably rise from a secular topic to a “religious” one.

Of course, we can abolish this entire “chain of questioning meaning” altogether—when eating, one eats in order to be full and to eat well; who has the leisure to worry about such long-range matters? But while such an attitude is excellent in practice, it is rather lacking in depth in theory. Those who can truly live with ease and naturalness, untouched by the torment of the question of ultimate meaning, and yet not become captives of greed and bestial desire, are after all only a minority. For most ordinary people, losing the answer to “ultimate meaning” means falling into a state of muddled confusion, of living death. The question of ultimate meaning is not something one can simply choose not to ask; rather, once a person’s rational maturity has reached a certain stage, it becomes something one must ask. Everyone hopes to find a sacred object beyond the secular as their ultimate support, and this need cannot be blocked. That is precisely a “religious” need, except that when this need cannot be satisfied, it often compromises by temporarily relying on some secondary things that are half-secular and half-sacred (which must mean they are unstable)—for example, attachment to some ideology, some institution and set of rules, some person, some cause, and so on—but this is still a religious topic.

Moreover, this religious need for ultimate meaning cannot possibly be fulfilled by the individual alone. As Luckmann says, a single individual cannot even attain the “self”; the “self” and an individual’s worldview are both affected by the objectivity of society, history, and culture. Therefore, the topic of religion is at the same time a sociological topic.

Page 1 (Introduction to the Chinese translation)      
The Invisible Religion is a work recognized in Western academia as an authoritative study of the problem of religion and modern society. Its main argument is that in modern society, religion has shifted from “visible religion,” that is, a faith system institutionally based on the church, to “invisible religion” based on individual piety.

Page 5 (Introduction)
It can be said that both Weber and Durkheim recognized the presupposition of this book: the problem of the individual’s existence in society is a religious problem. Therefore, we believe that the relevance of sociology to contemporary people comes mainly from sociology’s exploration of the fate of the individual in modern social structures. Today, sociologists need not look further than the “classical” tradition of this discipline to be inspired by this exploration, because, as we think, the reflections of Durkheim and Weber are concentrated on the key points discussed above; for contemporary sociology, these reflections are a more important legacy than methodological and theoretical debates about “historical determinism,” “functionalism,” “understanding,” and the ontological status of social facts, and they deserve to be seriously inherited. ////—Respect for the founding masters ensures that the author’s sociological theory develops in a healthy direction.

Page 2
The main content of the new sociology of religion is limited to describing, from a narrow perspective, the decline of the Christian church as an institution. The questions studied and the procedures employed are generally always determined by the institutional forms of traditional church organization. The new sociology of religion has seriously neglected its most theoretically meaningful task: analyzing the changing social basis of religion in modern society—not necessarily its institutional basis.

Page 12
Once sociology of religion uncritically takes for granted the view that equates church with religion, it will ignore most of the questions relevant to it. It has already presupposed the answer to the following question: in contemporary society, apart from traditional, sterilized religious dogma, is there any socially objectified structure of meaning that can perform the functions of confirming everyday routine and rationalizing everyday crises? Therefore, sociology of religion has failed to devote itself fully to the most important, essentially religious dimension of the individual’s position in society.

Page 13
On the whole, it would be foolish to ignore the rich materials recently gathered by sociology of religion in its studies of church-oriented religion in contemporary industrial society. If one is to theorize about religion in modern society, one cannot lightly discard these painstakingly collected materials; we cannot afford such a luxury—even if, as we have said, these materials have failed to tell a complete story. ////—Luckmann’s criticism of “recent sociology of religion” is still polite.

Page 23
No matter how important the religious idea originally was in shaping the American Dream, today the secular conception of the American Dream has permeated church religion, and the cultural, social, and psychological functions that the church performs for American society as a whole, as well as for its social groups, classes, and individuals, are from the standpoint of the church’s traditional self-examination already “secular” rather than “religious.” ////—The United States is a special case. When the influence of traditional churches in European countries is declining day by day, America seems to show the opposite tendency: the church’s influence seems to be growing increasingly important in modern times. This was true not only in the 1960s when Luckmann was writing, but it still appears true today. Luckmann’s explanation is that this is not because American society is insufficiently secularized, but precisely because the American church is secularized.

Page 34 … In short, a human organism cannot spontaneously create meaning. In other words, it cannot develop into an individual self.

Page 37
… These considerations can be summarized as follows: the detachment from immediate experience, when faced with others in face-to-face situations, leads to the individuation of consciousness and allows interpretive schemes to be finally constructed into systems of meaning. This detachment from immediate experience is supplemented by the integration of past, present, and future into socially defined, morally relevant personal experience; this integration develops in continuous social relations and leads to the formation of conscience. The individuation of the two complementary aspects of the self takes place in social processes. The organism—when isolated, no more than an independent pole of “meaningless” subjective processes—becomes a self precisely through engaging with others in the construction of “objective” and moral systems of meaning. Thus the organism transcends its biological nature.
To make the human organism’s transcendence of biological nature into a religious phenomenon is consistent with one of the basic meanings of the concept of religion. As we have tried to show, this phenomenon depends on the functional relationship between self and society. Therefore, we shall regard the social process that leads to the formation of the self as fundamentally a religious process.

Page 39
An organism becomes a self by constructing, together with others, an “objective, moral system of meaning.” We say that the organism transcends its biological nature by developing into a self, and we are justified in calling this process fundamentally religious. ////—The term “fundamentally religious” always sounds awkward to me; I wonder if that is a translation issue…

Page 41
We mentioned earlier that the human organism’s transcendence of biological nature is essentially a religious process. Now we must continue by saying that socialization, as the concrete process by which such transcendence is achieved, is essentially religious. It depends on the ordinary anthropological conditions of religion, on the individuation of consciousness and conscience in social processes, and is realized in the process of internalizing the meaning structure behind the historical social order. We shall call this meaning structure a worldview.

Page 42
The individual does not construct a minimally sufficient system of meaning; rather, he makes use of a treasury of meaning. As the result of the activity of generations building systems of meaning, a worldview is incomparably richer and more diverse than interpretive schemes developed by an individual from scratch. As a socially objectified reality, its stability is inexpressibly greater than the stability of the stream of individual consciousness. As a transcendent moral system, the worldview has an obligatory character that cannot be approached within the immediate context of social relations.

Page 42
In short, the historical appearance of worldviews provides an empirical basis for the human organism’s “successful” transcendence of biological nature. It also frees the human organism from the immediate context of life and integrates it as a person into the context of a tradition of meaning. Thus, we reach the following conclusion: as an “objective” and historical social reality, the worldview performs an essentially religious function, and we define it as the basic social form of religion. This social form is universal in human society.

Page 44
The worldview stands in a dialectical relation with social structure. It arises from human activity that is at least partly institutionalized, and it is transmitted from generation to generation in processes that are likewise at least partly dependent on institutions. Conversely, behavior and institutions depend on the continual internalization of the worldview.

Page 44 The most important objectification of the worldview appears in language; a language contains the most comprehensive and at the same time the most differentiated system of interpretation.

Page 49
The “reality” of the world of everyday life is concrete, beyond question, and, as we have said, “secular.” Yet the level of meaning to which everyday life ultimately belongs is neither concrete nor beyond question. The “reality” of these levels reveals itself through various pathways, and ordinary people’s insights can only partially reach this reality. This “reality” cannot be dealt with habitually. Indeed, it lies beyond the control of ordinary people. This realm transcends the world of everyday life. It is “different” and mysterious in people’s experience. If the characteristic of everyday life is its “secularity,” then the distinctive quality of the transcendent realm is its “sacredness.”

Page 66
The fact that individual religious piety is shaped by highly specialized social institutions has several important consequences. The relation that links the individual to the sacred world is defined by the institution, which requires exclusive power over the interpretation of matters of “ultimate” meaning while simultaneously pursuing various “secular” goals—goals determined by the institution’s organizational structure, its relations of conflict or accommodation with other specialized institutions, the vested interests of its expert groups, and so on. It was noted earlier that the individual internalizes the structure of religious representations as a subjective system relevant to “ultimate” concerns. In a society characterized by the institutional specialization of religion, this concretely means that the individual is socialized into an “official” religious model with a definite goal: this model will constitute his system of “ultimate” meaning. Yet to realize this goal successfully requires that the “official” model be traversed in a subjectively credible way. …

Pages 97~98

The institutional division of social structure and the dissolution of the traditional, coherent sacred world affect not only religion as a specialized institution, but also the relation between traditional concrete religious representations and the values of other specialized institutional domains. In the various institutional domains, especially in the economic and political spheres, prevailing norms are increasingly legitimized in terms of functional rationality. The more autonomous and rational the specialized institutional domains become, the more distant their relation to the transcendent sacred world grows. Traditional legitimations from “above” (for example, the ethic of a profession and the sacred rights of kings) are replaced by legitimations from “within” (for example, productivity and independence). In this sense, the norms of institutional domains do indeed become more “secular.” However, this does not mean that institutional domains are stripped of “values.” The early stage of “secularization” is not a process of the simple decline of traditional sacred values, but rather a process in which autonomous institutional “ideologies” replace, within their own domains, an all-pervading system of transcendent norms.

Indeed, this constitutes the key problem in the relation between the “modern” individual and the social order. In the long run, isolated institutional “ideologies” cannot provide socially preformed and subjectively meaningful systems of “ultimate” meaning. As we have already seen, the reason for this impossibility is related to the social-psychological consequences of institutional division and institutional specialization—in fact, it is also related to the very process that made isolated institutional “ideologies” possible in the first place. The fate of totalitarianism in modern industrial society shows that attempts to transform “institutional” ideologies into universal worldviews have not met with notable success. Even communism—which articulated something like an “official” model and successfully carried out the programmatic socialization of “everyone” into the Soviet model—seems to have failed in creating the “new man.” Overall, the post-revolutionary generations seem to have internalized the “official” model as a system of rhetoric rather than seriously and earnestly. The “retreat into the private sphere,” though not as conspicuous as in “capitalist” countries, is still clearly visible. Attempts to formulate a coherent, subjectively compelling worldview with sacred qualities on the basis of elements drawn from “institutional” ideologies (such as the “free world”)—such as the attempt made in the United States under the pressures of the Cold War and the Korean War—are doomed to fail, because even hypocritical internalization cannot be universally enforced. Moreover, this proves that it is impossible to create, out of thin air, the inner logic linking the mutually separate elements of ideology.

////—These two paragraphs are quite interesting. In fact, institutional concepts such as socialism and liberal democracy are often making some effort to imitate and replace religion, but this coercive sacralization is bound to be unstable.

Page 99
The sacred world of the traditional social order contains clearly articulated themes that compose, according to their own logic, a rationally coherent system of “ultimate” meaning. The modern sacred world also contains themes that can legitimately be defined as religious, and these themes can likewise be internalized by potential consumers as “ultimate” meaning. Yet these themes do not form a coherent system. The accumulation of religious representations—or the sacred world, only in the broader sense of the term—cannot be internalized as a whole by any potential consumer. The “autonomous” consumer will instead select certain religious themes from the available accumulation and insert them into a more or less unstable private system of “ultimate” meaning. Thus, individual religious piety is no longer a copy or approximation of the “official” model.

Page 102
In the absence of an “official” model, individuals can choose from all manner of “ultimate” meaning themes. Choice is based on consumer preference, and that preference in turn depends on the individual’s social experiences, so similar social experiences will lead to similar choices. If a stockpile of religious representations can be made available to potential consumers and there is no “official” model, then the “autonomous” individual, in principle, can not only select certain themes but also use them to construct a clearly articulated private system of “ultimate” meaning. Insofar as certain themes in the stockpile of “ultimate” meaning are combined into something that seems like a coherent model, such as “positive Christianity” and psychoanalysis, some individuals will internalize such models as wholes. But unless we assume that people engage in a high degree of reflection and conscious deliberation, individuals will more likely legitimize the situational priorities that arise in their “private sphere” (mainly emotional priorities, or priorities caused by emotion) by selectively finding, more or less pertinently, verbal elements from the sacred world. Therefore, popular individual systems of “ultimate” meaning will include a loose, less stable structural order of “views,” which legitimizes the emotionally determined priorities of “private” life. ////——This metaphor of likening ultimate meaning themes to a market in which consumers “choose” is quite interesting. In a multicultural society, “ultimate meaning themes” should not be hegemonic or coercive, but nor should the authority of “official” themes be broken by abolishing all ultimate meaning themes; after the dissolution of official authority, various religions, ideologies, and other things that can healthily sustain ultimate meaning should all be preserved so that people may make choices according to their personal experiences and preferences. And if the “attraction” of those preserved “themes” is not great enough, then it will be difficult for people to accept them as wholes, and they will instead pick out a few scattered phrases from among them, blending them with personal feelings and thereby building a private, flexible, but unstable structure of meaning. And while involving private feelings in one’s private choice of ultimate meaning is not a bad thing, if private life is overly determined by emotion, then it will cause individual confusion and social disorder. Therefore, it remains meaningful to maintain and build religious belief systems that are positive and healthy for individuals and society, and that are more attractive and seductive (including political systems and other ideal models). The continued existence of existing religions in the form of churches is also beneficial, but religious churches should not “force” people to accept everything wholesale; rather, they too should be placed into the “market,” “seducing” people into choosing.

Page 105 In short, the “ultimate” meaning systems of modern society are characterized by richness and variety in content; structurally, they are similar; they are relatively flexible yet unstable.

Page 103 Individual religious devotion has failed to receive abundant support and affirmation from basic public institutions, so it has begun to rely on the more temporary support of other “autonomous” individuals. (Such as familism.)

Page 109
There are many different ways in which the theme of individual “autonomy” is expressed. Because the “inner person” is in fact an undefinable entity, discovering it would require a lifetime of exploration. Those individuals who seek out the source of “ultimate” meaning in the subjective dimension of their own experience begin a process of self-realization and self-expression. This process may not be continuous—because he is caught in the enveloping routines of everyday life—but it is certainly endless. In the modern sacred world, self-expression and self-realization represent the most important manifestations of the dominant individualistic proposition of “autonomy.” Since individual behavior is controlled by basic public institutions, he soon comes to recognize the limits of his “autonomy” and learns to confine the quest for self-realization within the “private sphere.” Young people experience some difficulty in accepting this restriction; it is a restriction that people are hard-pressed to notice before they learn to appreciate the “harsh truth of life.” Content analysis of popular literature, radio and television, advice columns, and books of inspiration provides ample evidence that self-expression and self-realization are indeed prominent themes; self-expression and self-realization also occupy a central place in theories of education, if not always in the time of education. Furthermore, the innate difficulty individuals face in seeking their “inner self” explains why all manner of scientific and quasi-scientific psychology have met with great success in offering guidance for this quest. ////——What nowadays passes as guidance in “psychology” is even more manifest in the flood of “self-help” books; this flood precisely reveals the poverty of contemporary youth—the capacity to cope with the “harsh truth of life” is increasingly lacking.

Page 112 Around the central themes of individual “autonomy,” self-expression, self-realization, the spirit of a mobile society, and familism, there is a large cluster of less important topics, but these too demand a certain “sacred” status. Of course, these topics can likewise be found in the stockpile of religious representations available to the “autonomous” individual. ………… To give just a brief illustration, we will merely list those topics that arise from the dialectic of the egalitarian democratic tradition and mobile ethos of secular Americans: “getting along with others,” “adjustment,” “treating everyone fairly,” and “sociability.” It must be admitted that it is very difficult to determine the importance of these themes. At the very least, one can imagine that they are often nothing more than things that sound nice in words, and it is precisely the function of such nice-sounding words that makes the dominant theme of “individual” autonomy easier to accept—especially in its least “private” form, namely as the “social ethos” of social mobility.

Page 112~113
It is interesting that we note death, even as a secondary topic, does not appear in the sacred world of modern industrial society. Aging and old age are no longer endowed with “sacred” meaning either. The “autonomous” individual is in the bloom of youth and immortal. ////——Avoidance of the question of death is a characteristic of modern culture; of course, evasion of the question of death was originally a common human trait. But the predicament of modern society lies in the fact that it strips away all hope tied to death. I remember Yang Zi’s discussion of the Confucian view of “elaborate funerals,” which he put very well: “elaborate funerals” allow people, even right before death, to retain “hope.” In the Confucian tradition, only the elderly are entitled to wear silk and eat meat; this too means allowing people to retain hope even in old age. Modern society is the reverse: the good things are all to be left for children, hope belongs only to the young, while the situation of the elderly is painful—they must, as a matter of course, save the good things for the children, and the status that in ancient times belonged only to the old by virtue of their abundant experience no longer exists. The young do not listen to the elders’ instructions at all; instead, it is the young who know more than the old, and the old in turn have to learn from the young. As for the value of the old, aside from the little that remains in sustaining emotion (and even that is being worn away), all that is left is to wait for death. And the sacred meaning of death has also been taken away—after death, it is best if one is burned to ash to be used as fertilizer, which makes old age and death into frightful things, as if the meaning of the whole world resided only in the young. But everyone grows old: how can one keep one’s life forever full of hope? It is difficult to achieve this requirement in modern society.

January 28, 2006

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.