The spiritual turn and the disenchantment of the world: Max Weber, Peter Berger and the religion–science conflict
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is little question that organized religion as embodied in the Christian churches has not fared well in recent decades. Yet, precisely the period when the decline of organized religion hit its stride – the 1960s and 1970s – also witnessed the rise of what Ernst Troeltsch referred to as ‘mystic religion’, only now it goes by ‘spirituality’. Indeed, recent empirical studies suggest that, in addition to secularization, we are also witnessing a veritable spiritual turn. How do we explain this? We pursue this puzzle in a somewhat peculiar fashion: by turning the sociological gaze toward the lives and oeuvres of the two sociologists who have arguably played the largest roles in the development of classical secularization theory: Max Weber and Peter Berger. Addressing their theoretical contributions in tandem with their personal stances vis-à-vis religion, we argue that the standard account of secularization rests on an extremely one-sided interpretation of their legacy: it leaves out their steadfast romanticism, their deep commitments to the value of individual freedom, and, most importantly, the particular religious paths they charted. Furthermore, we contend that each of them exemplifies a way of reconciling a rationalist commitment to disenchanting science with a romantic longing for ultimate meaning, which sheds significant light on why mystical religion (or ‘spirituality’) has come to flourish in late modernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".