Peter berger is an inexhaustible fount of radical ideas, mellifluously expressed, about “modern” religiosity. He makes these ideas come alive with thought experiments and illuminating stories. Berger is also an influential political entrepreneur, who in apartheid South Africa, and now in religiously repressive China, conducts direct conversations with the power elites. There is also the Peter Berger who has gallantly invited three scholars to comment on his new thesis about the corrosive effects of pluralism and diversity on the taken-for-granted nature of religious belief: their contributions are included in The Many Altars of Modernity.Yet this “new” thesis looks oddly like an old one for which Peter Berger was famous decades ago. This argument is a key element i