Public Religions in the Modern World By José Casanova (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 407 Public Religions in the Modem World. By José Casanova. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. x, 320. $49.95 clothbound; »17.95 paperback.) Casanova's study is impressive and scholarly, yet at times densely written and quite technical in its theoretical formulations. His overall theme is "that we are witnessing the 'deprivatization' of religion in the modern world." By deprivatization he means "the fact that religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them" (p. 5). To his credit, the author offers no simplistic, unilinear, or modal schema; he gives ample evidence of making important distinctions and qualifications and of noting counter-trends. For instance, the manner in which he dissects secularization theory into three distinct propositions is quite useful, claiming that only one of them is universally defensible. In short, Casanova argues that the propositions that equate secularization with, respectively, religious decline and privatization do not always historically hold up while the remaining proposition does, that is, that religion in the modern world is differentiated from other secular spheres. Moreover, he attempts to explore "the issue of the changing boundaries between differentiated spheres and the possible structural roles religion may have within those differentiated spheres as well as the role it may have in challenging the boundaries themselves" (p. 7). In another example, he acknowledges and analyzes the existence and proliferation of other religious phenomena of the 1980's (e.g., New Age, cults and sects) that do not conform to his deprivatization thesis. The core of die volume offers five empirical case studies ofpublic religions in the modern world, each offering, according to the author, something distinctive . As he states, "In the case of Spanish Catholicism, the problem at hand is the change from an established authoritarian state church to the disestablished church of a pluralist civil society. In the case of Poland, the analysis traces the more subtle change from a disestablished church that protects die nation against foreign rule to a national church that promotes the emergence of civil society against a Polish authoritarian state. The chapter on Brazilian Catholicism analyzes the radical transformation of the Brazilian church from a state-oriented oligarchic and elitist institution to a civil society-oriented populist one. Moving on to the United States, . . . [analyzed is] the transformation of Evangelical Protestantism in America from its public hegemonic status as a civil religion during the nineteenth century to its sectarian withdrawal into a fundamentalist subculture in the late 1920's to its public reemergence and mobilization in the 1980's. The last case study analyzes the transformation of American Catholicism from an insecure sect to a defensive private denomination to an assertive public one" (p. 8). 408 BOOK REVIEWS In a short review, it is simply impossible to respond adequately to such a rich, complex, controversial, and worthwhile volume—a volume that all college libraries should order. However, as a sociologist who derives much inspiration and insight from an orthodox reading of Catholic social doctrine, I find two aspects of Casanova's overall argument especially problematic. The first is his empirical argument that the economic and social justice statements and policy suggestions of the post-Vatican Council II Catholic Church in the United States are motivated by an authentic understanding and development of the faith. I wish it were the case; rather, I accept the interpretation of Catholic conservatives that a great deal of it is generated by non-Catholic ideologies with reference to church tradition serving as little more than a thin veneer to hide a massive internal secularization from within. The second is Casanova's theoretical reliance on, and normative attraction to, an admittedly slightly reformulated version of Jürgen Habermas' analysis of "communicative interaction" and "discourse ethics." As the author states, "According to this model, modern social integration emerges in and through the discursive and agonic participation of individuals, groups, social movements , and institutions in a public yet undifferentiated sphere of civil society where the collective construction and reconstruction, contestation, and affirmation of common normative structures—'the common good'—takes place ... By going 'public,' religions...