Religious Encounters in Profane Spaces. Siegfried Kracauer’s Reading of Spatial Images and His Critique of Modern Sacred Architecture

Abstract

The German-Jewish writer Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) developed, among other things, a critical sociology of space and architecture that continues to influence scholarship today. The following chapter explores the lesser-known implications he drew from this work for religious phenomena. Kracauer’s theory of religion is not so much a descriptive study of religion as a normative theory of the legitimate place of religious experience in modernity. According to Kracauer, truth has migrated from the sacred to the “profane.” This means that official reli gions, according to Kracauer, are merely empty shells; their former content must be found elsewhere. Churches are empty, and even the modern sacred buildings of new religious movements are at best “demonic” in character. Instead, Kracauer argues, religious experience can be found where it is least expected: In waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, and the twilight of nightlife.