FROM RATIONALITY TO SUBJECTIVITY
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much "disappear" as it is "worked through." The contemporary world has
undermined the taken-for-grantedness of the traditions. The traditions are
reinterpreted to make sense of the present, and the present is made com–
prehensibl e in tradi tional ways. In thi s way the traditions come to mean
something different from what they had meant to previous generations.
In the end, belief has not dissolved but the feeling of serene certainty
has. Truth is no longer something unconsciously assumed but is something
to which the individual must consciously and intellectually assent. All tra–
ditional normative commi tments lose their authority when the institutions
that carry them no longer communicate them in ways that are inwardly
motivating or subjectively compelling; all moral and religious convictions
lose their force when subject to the therapeutic requirements of self-reflec–
tion. The authority of religious tradition loses its binding address.
The organizational consequences of this shift in religious authori ty are
equally significant. Consider the matter this way. In 1966, Peter Berger
wrote that the privatization and pluralization of religion forced traditional
faith into a "market" situation. What had previously been authoritatively
imposed, now had to be traded, merchandised, retailed. It had to be "sold"
to a clientele that was no longer constrained to "buy." In it, the religious
institutions become marketing agencies and the religious traditions become
consumer commodities. Thus, religious groups came to organize themselves
in such a way as to woo a population of consumers. Yet it was recognized as
impossible to market a commodity to a population of uncoerced consumers
without taking their wishes concerning the commodity into consideration.
Thus, consumer preference was introduced into the religious sphere.
Curiously, what Berger intended as a social scientific metaphor three
decades ago has been embraced deliberately today as a strategy in the fastest
growing development within Evangelicalism-the seeker church move–
ment. In this movement, the shopping mall becomes the paradigm of
organizational effort. Marketing research is used to determine what insid–
ers call the "felt needs" of the consumers. Rather than preaching what the
traditions always held to be objectively true, ministry has now become ori–
ented toward satisfying the psychological and emotional needs of those in
the pew. Religious authority is transformed from external demands of the
institution to the internal needs of the individual. The very content of
what is preached is determined less by the historical traditions of the
church as by the felt needs of the parishioner. In this, the organizational
seat of authority is no longer the church, its traditions, its sacred texts or
its leadership but the parishioner him or herself. The consumer, even of
truth, has become sovereign.
In sum, a key difference between religion at the end of the nineteenth
century and religion today is not so much its prevalence but in the nature
