Religion: The Death of Relevance

Delegates to the Consultation on Church Union in Denver last week were concerned with their lagging campaign to try to merge nine Protestant denominations.* Their keynote speaker, Peter L. Berger, however, had something more basic on his mind.

Berger, 42, perhaps America's leading religious sociologist, first won attention with The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, a trenchant attack on the smug, conventional Protestant churches of the 1950s. Back then, Berger reminded the ecumenical leaders last week, he and other critics seemed to be "banging against the locked gates of majestically self-confident institutional edifices." The situation could not be more different today. In...