Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism

Abstract

In The Many Altars of Modernity (2014), Peter Berger proposed a replacement for secularization theory, declared obsolete by many, suggesting instead a theory of ‘‘two pluralisms’’—one a plurality of religions, their worldviews and moral systems, and the other a coexistence of those religions amid a similarly influential and multiple secular discourse. Berger’s vision was the inspiration for Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism, edited by Helmuth Berking, Silke Steets, and Jochen Schwenk, the result of a conference focused on cities as major sites of contact between the various players, both religious and secular. Berger himself was unable to attend the conference, but he gave the keynote address via Skype and is clearly at the center of the various authors’ analysis. Sociology of religion meets urban sociology in this set of essays, including elaborations of Berger’s theory as well as empirical case studies of religious/secular interactions in specific cities across the globe. As a sociologist of religion, I found much that was fun and familiar, but also much that was new, both regarding the urban focus and in the extension of Berger’s pluralization thesis. As with all edited volumes, some chapters are better than others, depending on one’s area of expertise, one’s methodological training, and so on. I learned something in every chapter, but there were some chapters that really got me thinking. The very first substantive chapter, ‘‘Urbanity as a Vortex of Pluralism,’’ was one of my favorites. It was written by Berger and nicely set up everything that followed. I studied with Berger in graduate school—just one class, but I remember it and him well. Reading this chapter made me feel like I was back in his class. It was, all at the same time, theoretically interesting, personally powerful, and even sassy. He didn’t just explain the two pluralisms in theory but gave a number of engaging examples from his and others’ lives that made them crystal clear. I’m sure there will be critiques, but he made his case and set the stage for the chapters that follow. Another favorite was an empirical chapter by Marian Burchardt, Irene Becci, and Mariachiara Giorda on what they call ‘‘superdiversity’’ in complex and multicultural cities as a way to illustrate Berger’s vision of two pluralisms. Specifically, they made comparisons of the religious and secular uses of space in two cities: Barcelona and Turin. Their model envisions three relationships with space, largely contingent on the status of the religion or secular group in each society/place: place-keeping (the preservation of long-established but declining religious traditions, such as Roman Catholicism), place-making (the appropriation of urban space primarily by newer immigrants practicing older religions, such as Islam), and seeking place (more ephemeral use of space as preferred by newer religious movements, such as Soka Gakkai). These ways of understanding the spatial presence of religious structures and communities within urban environments, considering both the specific religious group’s history and theology as well as the specific urban site, all within different historical/secularizing cultural realities, was extremely compelling and should be examined in other cities. My other personal favorite in the collection was one of the final chapters, by Tovi Fenster, which was also empirical in its focus on a specific site, West Jerusalem, but examined the visual representations of the religious-secular Jewish conflicts there. Most interesting was the author’s observations about a growing neoliberal consumerism that, over time, has contributed to a softening of religious-secular tensions, as everyone embraces, to some extent, shared capitalistic interests, making for what Fenster calls a neoliberal tolerance. This change has taken place over a series of municipal elections in which the leadership shifted from an ultra-Orthodox to a secular mayor. This urban political and economic backdrop has provided the context for a very specific religious-secular intersection. 518 Reviews