The impact of modernity on religion is commonly seen in terms of the process of secularization, which can be described simply as one in which religion loses its hold on the level both of institutions and of human consciousness. This is not the place to review the by-now immense literature on the causes, character, and historical course of secularization. But one point should be made here: At the very least, there is a close connection between secularization and the pluralization of plausibility structures. Nor are the reasons for this hard to understand. A religious worldview, just like any other body of interpretations of reality, is dependent upon social support. The more unified and reliable this support is, the more these interpretations of reality will be firmly established in consciousness.
The typical premodern society creates conditions under which religion has, for the individual, the quality of objective certainty; modern society, by contrast, undermines this certainty, de-objectifies it by robbing it of its taken-for-granted status, ipso facto subjectivizes religion. And this change, of course, is directly related to the transition from fate to choice: The premodern individual was linked to his gods in the same inexorable destiny that dominated most of the rest of his existence; modern man is faced with the necessity of choosing between gods, a plurality of which are socially available to him. If the typical condition of premodern man is one of religious certainty, it follows that that of modern man is one of religious doubt. Needless to say, this difference is not absolute. There were premodern individuals who struggled with religious doubt, as there are people today with unshaken religious convictions. The difference is one of, so to speak, frequency distributions. The frequency of religious uncertainty in the modern situation, however, is so drastically greater that it is valid to embody it within a notion of typicality. Whatever other causes there may be for modern secularization, it should be clear that the pluralizing process has had secularising effects in and of itself.
The English word "heresy" comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means "to choose." A hairesis originally meant, quite simply, the taking of a choice. A derived meaning is that of an opinion. In the New Testament, as in the Pauline epistles, the word already has a specifically religious connotation-that of a faction or party within a wider religious community; the rallying principle of such a faction or party is the particular religious opinion that its members have chosen. Thus, in Galatians 5:20 the Apostle Paul lists "party spirit" (hairesis) along with such evils as strife, selfishness, envy, and drunkenness among the "works of the flesh." In the later development of Christian ecclesiastical institutions, of course, the term acquired much more specific theological and legal meanings. Its etymology remains sharply illuminating.
For this notion of heresy to have any meaning at all, there was presupposed the authority of a religious tradition. Only with regard to such authority could one take a heretical attitude. The heretic denied this authority, refused to accept the tradition in toto. Instead, he picked and chose from the contents of the tradition, and from these pickings and choosings constructed his own deviant opinion. One may suppose that this possibility of heresy has always existed in human communities, as one may suppose that there have always been rebels and innovators. And, surely, those who represented the authority of a tradition must always have been troubled by the possibility. Yet the social context of this phenomenon has changed radically with the coming of modernity: In premodern situations there is a world of religious certainty, occasionally ruptured by heretical deviation. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty, occasionally staved off by more or less precarious constructions of religious affirmation. Indeed, one could out this change even more sharply: For premodern man, heresy is a possibility-usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative.
Now, suddenly, heresy no longer stands out against a clear background of authoritative tradition. The background has become dim or even disappeared. As long as that background was still there, individuals had the possibility of not picking and choosing-they could simply surrender to the taken-for-granted consensus that surrounded them on all sides, and that is what most individuals did. But now this possibility itself becomes dim or disappears: How can one surrender to a consensus that is socially unavailable? Any affirmation must first create the consensus, even if this can only be done in some quasi-sectarian community. In other words, individuals now must pick and choose. Having done so, it is very difficult to forget the fact. There remains the memory of the deliberate construction of a community of consent, and with this a haunting sense of the constructedness of that which the community affirms. Inevitably, the affirmations will be fragile and this fragility will not be very far from consciousness….
The orthodox defines himself as living in a tradition; it is of the very nature of tradition to be taken for granted; this taken-for-grantedness, however, is continually falsified by the experience of living in a modern society. The orthodox must then present to himself as fate what he knows empirically to be a choice. This is a difficult feat. It goes far to explain the attraction of such movements as that of Lubavitcher Hassidism, which constructs an artificial shtetl for its followers. The difference from the old shtetl is, quite simply, this: All the individual has to do to get out of his alleged Jewish destiny is to walk out and take the subway. Outside, waiting, is the emporium of lifestyles, identities, and religious preferences that constitutes American pluralism. It is hard to believe that this empirical fact can be altogether pushed out of the consciousness by an individual reared in America, even if his conversion to a neotraditional existence has been intensely fervent. That existence, consequently, has a fragility that is totally alien to a genuinely traditional community.
The weight of the peculiarly American phrase "religious preference" may now have become apparent. It contains within itself the whole crisis into which pluralism has plunged religion. It points to a built-in condition of cognitive dissonance-and to the heretical imperative as a root phenomenon of modernity.
To sum up the argument thus far: Modernity multiplies choices and concomitantly reduces the scope of what it experiences as destiny. In the matter of religion, as indeed in other areas of human life and thought, this means that the modern individual is faced not just with the opportunity but with the necessity to make choices as to his beliefs. This fact constitutes the heretical imperative in the contemporary situation. Thus, heresy, once the occupation of marginal and eccentric types, has become a much more general condition; indeed, heresy has become universalized.
