Institutions also producemechanisms of sanctions, but they are of a secondary or supplementary kind. The primary social control is given in the existence of an institution as such. Social control leads to some limitations, which always evoke tensions between individual and group interests. An institutional world is experienced as an objective persistent reality, external to the individual. However massive the objectivity of the institutional world may appear to the individual, yet it is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity. As Berger and Luckmann note (1966, 89), “[r]eification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly suprahuman terms. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by one as a strange facticity, anopus alienumover which one has no control.” The possibility of reification is never far away and also threatens religious communions. Words, gestures, art, feasts, customs, all of which used to refer to noble transcendence, beauty and truth, can become empty and misunderstood and can return to a set of rules restricting the people. Another important subprocess of the social construction of reality is legitimation. “It is a second-order objectivation of meaning” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 92). It has some interesting implications – for example, every society produces a symbolic universe. Legitimation leads to the division betweenofficial and heretical symbolic universes, which are joined with repressive procedures. On the occasion of confrontation between two societies with conflicting universes, the result will depend more on the power than on the theoretical ingenuity of the respective legitimators. Inquisition and religious wars confirm these theses. 4 Reasons and consequences of secularization The complexification of society is joined with specialization. In early modern Western societies, religion had noticeably separated from other social institutions. Development in such a society has a paradoxical character. On the one hand, there is a tendency to extend individual freedom more and more, but on the other hand members of the contemporary society are more dependent in a new and sophisticated way. In many spheres of life they have options to choose between rival institutions, services and products: in politics, economics, education, and also in the religious area. It seems that the pressure of such a lifestyle on an individual is finally greater than in less technically advanced societies, as the increased measure of stress on people shows. This tension between freedom and de- pendecy is visible also in the religious life of people as a tension between indivi- dual religiousness and official religion. This is described as aprivatization of religion. There emerge new religious groups and movements and together with globalization, spreading and mixing of older religious traditions, this establishes the situation of Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 115 (3)
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