Religion Exposed In Thomas Luckmann's Invisible Religion

In Luckmann’s Invisible Religion, he argues that the world has not essentially become secularized, but that religion has become ‘invisible’ and ‘personal’. He does this by proposing that religion has lost the prestige it once had in society and instead has evolved to become personal for the individual. Religion has now adopted a more private form; its once-held institutionalized form has broken down, and it has now been sculpted into a more individualized shape by man. The author’s ideas on religion are remarkably similar to Berger’s as both hold the stance that the importance of religion is falling, although Berger has a broader, social perspective and Luckmann focuses on the value of religion for individuals.

Thomas Luckmann advocates that following the Protestant Reformation and industrial capitalism, personal reasoning has trumped religion in importance. Its presence communally has disappeared, and it has become a personal matter. The dialectic of religion has broken down owing to a lack of their ‘modernization’ quality. Rosalind Hackett, a theologian, in his article “Hackett on Revitalization” notes that a modern religion is one which is ‘reformative in nature and propagates the traditional

However, Luckmann’s ideas are in contrast to Berger’s as he still feels religions play a pivotal role in individual lives. Luckmann also debates about the relation between religion and individuals – holding the viewpoint that people would still resort to them for morals and judgements – but Berger only analyses the association of religions with societies. According to Berger, a crisis of credibility and plausibility – coexistence of various nomoii – has ultimately led to decline of religions socially, as such a state encourages the infusion of ideas from different ‘sacred’ nomos and this questions the legitimacy of those nomos and