How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

We live in the twilight of both gods and idols. But their ghosts have refused to depart,

and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition” (Secular Age, p. 28).

“This sense of vulnerability,” Taylor concludes, “is one of the principal features which have gone with disenchantment” (p. 36).

Individual disbelief is not a private option we can grant to heretics to pursue on weekends; to the contrary, disbelief has communal repercussions.

Once individuals become the locus of meaning, the social atomism that results means that disbelief no longer has social consequences.

“We” are not a seamless cloth, a tight-knit social body; instead, “we” are just a collection of individuals — like individual molecules

The spiritual disciplines of the saint are a lot to ask of the nursemaid or the peasant laborer

who is pressed by more immediate concerns.

“the heart of ‘secularization’ ” is precisely “a decline in the transformation perspective”

So while there has certainly been a decline of religion, that’s not the most interesting story: “the

interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relatio...

It’s not just that belief in supernatural entities becomes implausible; it’s that pursuing a way of life that values something beyond human flourishing becomes unimaginable.

He does so by introducing what he calls “Weber-style ideal types” of religious forms at different stages. So, for example, we begin with the “ancien régime” (AR) type, where there is an inextricable link between religious identity and political identity — “a close connection between church membership and being part of a national, but particularly local community” (p. 440).

Taylor sees the AR leading to a new phase and type: the Age of Mobilization (AM). The status quo and ancien régime having been displaced, we now realize that if anything is going to fill the void, we need to come up with it — we will need to “mobilize” new rituals, practices, institutions, and so forth. The old “backdrop” is gone; “whatever political, social, ecclesial structures we aspire to have to be mobilized into existence” (p. 445).

Ours is the Age of Authenticity (AA).8 So what we get in chapter 13 is Taylor’s explication of “the social imaginary of expressive individualism” — the “understanding . . . that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own,

as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside” (p. 486).

This contemporary social imaginary is crystallized in terms of authenticity. So the primary — yea, only — value in such a world is choice: “bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain” (p. 478).

And tolerance is the last remaining virtue: “the sin which is not tolerated is intolerance” (p. 484).

Taylor sees two temptations when it comes to our evaluation of the Age of Authenticity (p. 480): critics can too easily dismiss it as egoism; friends can too easily celebrate it as progress without cost. Taylor’s evaluation takes a different tack: on his reading, the AA has changed our available options — it has change...

is these spaces of mutual display, Taylor argues, that are most prone to being colonized by consumer culture, so that “consumer culture, expressivism and spaces of mutual display connect in our world to produce their own kind of synergy”

this construction of a consumer identity — which has to feel like it’s chosen (consider the illusion of nonconformity in the case of the suburban skater kid whose mom buys him the $150 board blazoned with “anarchy” symbols) — trumps other identities, especially collective identities like citizenship or religious affiliation.

benefit. Indeed, the MMO is the “ethical

base” for the soft relativism of the expressivist imaginary: Do your own thing, who am I to judge?

Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-’60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values that were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic; p. 484). ...

“The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this”

what’s most significant is that the sacred is uncoupled from political allegiance

“before the emphasis will shift more and more towards the strength and the genuineness of the feelings, rather than the nature of their object”

What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture

As a result, the expressivist revolution (1) “undermined some of the large-scale religious forms of the Age of Mobilization” and (2) “undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order”

is first worth noting that a desire for “the spiritual” endures. “This often springs from a profound dissatisfaction with a life encased entirely in the immanent order”

Nothing is given or axiomatic anymore, so one has to “find” one’s faith:

we choose to renounce the priority of individual choice; our quest leads us back to the ancien régime. That is what it means to live in a secular3 age.

the immanent frame. This metaphorical concept — alluding to a “frame” that both boxes in and boxes out, encloses and focuses — is meant to capture the world we now inhabit in our secular age: “this frame constitutes a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one” (p. 542).1 We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence.