In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernised. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance. Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernisation as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophies of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth – one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

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