Public Religions in the Modern World.

Perhaps only once in a decade is a book published in the sociology of religion that brings about a fundamental rejection or revision of revered theoretical paradigms. Thomas Luckmann's The Invisible Religion did that in the 1960s by rejecting Emile Durkheim's thesis that all societies would manifest a national public religious dimension. In the 1970s Robert Bellah's Beyond Belief used an alternative hermeneutical approach to introduce the power of "symbolic realism" to challenge the positivistic presuppositions of sociology. Robert Wuthnow's The Restructuring of American Religion was the paradigm reshaper of the 1980s. Wuthnow claimed that America was ceasing to be a society whose religious forms were mainly shaped by denominationalism.

Casanova's study is likely to be the paradigm iconoclast of the '90s. An associate professor of sociology at the New School of Social Research, Casanova wants to explain the worldwide emergence of new forms of public religion since the 1970s. Such a revitalization of religion was not what the widely accepted secularization thesis in sociology would, or even could, have predicted.

Perhaps professional face can be saved, as Casanova notes, by explaining the new visibility of Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Evangelical Christianity using "utilitarian secularist explanations which reduce the phenomenon either to an instrumental mobilization of religious resources for nonreligious purposes or to an instrumental adaptation of religious institutions to the new secular environment." But the first theory makes the new forms of public religion a very dependent (perhaps manipulated) variable. The second theory sees the forms as a kind of way-station adjustment to secularism. In any event, in most sociological accounts, the continuing vitality of public religion in modernity remains, still, an irrational outbreak of the premodern.

Casanova sets out to dispute this standard account by turning to two different theoretical enterprises. He criticizes secularization theory for relegating religious commitment or faith to the realm of pure myth. Moreover, he shows that the entire modern sociological enterprise depends on some version of this flawed secularization thesis. He argues that the traditional secularization paradigm conflates three quite different, and independent, theories: (1) secular modernity causes a religious decline (unproven as a master trend); (2) secular modernity involves a radical differentiation of societal spheres in which religion ceases to define the all-encompassing reality within which the secular realm finds its proper place. Casanova notes that, with modernity, "the secular sphere will be the all-encompassing reality to which the religious sphere will have to adapt... the religious sphere now becomes a less central sphere within the new secular realm"; (3) secular modernity necessarily entails the privatization of religion.

Only the second theory is unambiguously valid. The other two are empirical possibilities but, in no sense, inevitable. Modernity derives from four different sources: the Reformation, the formation of the modern state, the rise of secular science, and capitalism. Consequently, we should expect different historical patterns of secularization to be evident in Protestant and Catholic nations and to be dependent on differing patterns of modern state formation, for example, in France, England, Germany, and the United States.

Casanova's second theoretical enterprise is the more innovative and daring. Appealing to the democratic discourse theory of the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, as well as to earlier critiques of the Enlightenment, Casanova makes a stunning claim. "After all the beatings it has received from modernity," he writes, religion "could somehow unintentionally help modernity save itself."

That would prove a profound irony, to say the least.

But according to Casanova, public religion furthers the project of modernity in three ways: (1) When religion enters the public sphere to protect not only its own freedoms but all modern freedoms and rights and especially the right of a democratic civil society to exist against an absolutist, authoritarian state; (2) when religion enters the public sphere to question the absolute autonomy of the secular spheres and their claims to be free from any extraneous ethical or moral considerations; and (3) when religion enters the public sphere to protect traditional social patterns and loyalties from administrative or juridical state penetration. In doing all three of these things, religion brings the issue of normative values into the public realm for the self-reflection of modern discursive ethics.

Casanova anchors his theoretical claims about public religion in five case studies: Catholicism in modern Spain, Brazil, and Poland, and Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism in the United States. He demonstrates how after Vatican II, Catholicism, the paradigmatic form of antimodern public religion, "refuse[d] to become a private religion. It wants to be both modern and public." On the other hand, the fundamentalist style of the Religious Right exemplifies the more common perception that public religion is incompatible with modernity and cannot contribute to open discourse.

This is a remarkable book, one certain to change and shape sociological thinking and research. By grounding theory in a dynamic and changing Catholicism, Public Religions reverses the Protestantcentered biases of the modern sociology of religion. It challenges the popular belief that the privatization of modern religion is the only form consistent with modernity. And in a more academic vein, it locks horns with Habermas's systematic theoretical blindness toward religion. Casanova contends that the religious defense of "normative traditions constitute the very condition of possibility for ethical discourse...without normative traditions neither rational public debate nor discourse is likely to take place. It seems self-evident that religious normative traditions should have the same rights as any other normative tradition to enter the public sphere as long as they play by the rules of open public debate."

Finally, as in the classic sociological paradigms of Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, Casanova's study is as much about the status and discontents of modern society as it is about religion.