How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

He seems, if not tempted by, at least a bit intrigued by an aesthetic argument never entertained in Aquinas’s “Five Ways”: that religion might just be true simply because it is beautiful. “The Christian religion didn’t last so long merely because everyone believed it” (p. 53), Barnes observes. It lasted because it makes for a helluva novel — which is pretty close to Tolkien’s claim that the gospel is true because it is the most fantastic fantasy, the greatest fairy story ever told.7 And Barnes, a great lover of both music and painting, knows that much of what he enjoys owes its existence to Christianity. Without the madness of the gospel, Mozart would never have composed a requiem, Giotto would never have left us the treasures in the chapel of Padua. Thus he finds himself asking, “What if it were true?” — a question never entertained by the dogmaticians of the new atheism. What would it be like, he asks, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem and take it as nonfiction?8 In this openness to

We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives. Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament, thrown back onto themselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs.12

As you’ll notice, these questions are not concerned with what people believe as much as with what is believable. The difference between our modern, “secular” age and past ages is not necessarily the catalogue of available beliefs but rather the default assumptions about what is believable. It is this way of framing the question that leads to Taylor’s unique definition of “the secular.”

But Taylor’s account of disenchantment has a different accent, suggesting that this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.”1 Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. The external world might be a catalyst for perceiving meaning, but the meanings are generated within the mind — or, in stronger versions (say, Kant), meanings are imposed upon things by minds. Meaning is now located in agents. Only once this shift is in place can the proverbial brain-in-a-vat scenario gain any currency; only once meaning is located in minds can we worry that someone or something could completely dupe us about the meaning of the world by manipulating our brains. It is the modern social imaginary that makes it possible for us to imagine The Matrix.

These developments — de-sacramentalization and the generalization of “discipline” — come with the “eclipse” of other key features of premodern Christian religion. In particular, Taylor highlights the loss of any coherent place for worship: “the eclipse of certain crucial Christian elements, those of grace and of agape, already changed quite decisively the centre of gravity of this outlook. Moreover, there didn’t seem to be an essential place for the worship of God, other than through the cultivation of reason and constancy” (p. 117).

This disembedded, buffered, individualist view of the self seeps into our social imaginary — into the very way that we imagine the world, well before we ever think reflectively about it. We absorb it with our mother’s milk, so to speak, to the extent that it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world otherwise: “once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one” (p. 168). And yet, Taylor’s point is that this is an imaginary — not that this is all just a fiction, but rather that this is a “take” on the world. While we have come to assume that this is just “the way things are,” in fact what we take for granted is contingent and contestable. But before we can contest it, we need to further understand it.

What becomes increasingly distasteful (the word is chosen advisedly) is the notion of God’s agency, and hence the personhood of God. Sometimes dismissed as a feature of gauche “enthusiasm,” at other times seen as a threat to an ordered cosmos, there would be an increasing interest in jettisoning the notion of “God as an agent intervening in history. He could be agent qua original Architect of the universe, but not as the author of myriad particular interventions, ‘miraculous’ or not, which were the stuff of popular piety and orthodox religion” (p. 275). Such an active God would violate the buffer zone we have created to protect ourselves from such incursions. And so the “god” that governs the cosmos is the architect of an impersonal order. In short, we’re all Masons now. But to reject God’s personhood and agency entailed rejecting an entire fabric of Christianity that revolved around the notion of religion as communion.12 According to historic, orthodox Christian faith, “salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being, or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by, one might say, our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion, viz., the church” (pp. 278-79). To depersonalize God is to deny the importance of communion and the community of communion that is the church, home to that meal that is called “Communion.” So it is not surprising, then,

Taylor helpfully describes this as a process of excarnation. In contrast to the central conviction of Christian faith — that the transcendent God became incarnate, en-fleshed, in Jesus of Nazareth — excarnation is a move of disembodiment and abstraction, an aversion of and flight from the particularities of embodiment (and communion). This will be a “purified” religion — purified of rituals and relics, but also of emotion and bodies (p. 288) — of which Kant’s “rational” religion is the apotheosis. With the body goes the Body; that is, with the abandonment of material religion we see the diminishment of the church as a communion as well. The “Deist standpoint involves disintricating the issue of religious truth from participation in a certain community practice of religious life, into which facets of prayer, faith, hope are woven” (p. 293). We might describe this as “deistic” religion — if it didn’t look like so much contemporary Protestantism.13

In other words, we now have the rise of the evidential argument from evil: if God is all-good and all-powerful, then there shouldn’t be evil. But there is evil. Therefore, this God must not exist. This sort of skeptical argument could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence: “Once we claim to understand the universe, and how it works; once we even try to explain how it works by invoking its being created for our benefit, then this explanation is open to clear challenge: we know how things go, and we know why they were set up, and we can judge whether the first meets the purpose defined in the second. In Lisbon 1755, it seems clearly not to have. So the immanent order ups the ante” (p. 306).4

Hence in chapter 10, in contrast to the subtraction stories that focus on scientific enlightenment, Taylor considers the central role of art in creating this “open space” that characterizes our secular age. One of the features of post-Romantic art, he suggests, is a fundamental shift from art as mimesis to art as poeisis — from art imitating nature to art making its world. This was necessary precisely because the flattening of the world meant the loss of reference. We find ourselves in Baudelaire’s “forest of symbols” but without tether or hook, without any given to which the symbols/signs refer. Enclosed in the immanent frame, which

So again, the question is how we inhabit the immanent frame. And here Taylor works with another important distinction: we can either inhabit the immanent frame as a “Jamesian open space”3 where we recognize the contestability of our take on things, and even feel the pull and tug and cross-pressure of the alternative; or we’ll fail to recognize that ours is a “take” and instead settle for “spin” — an overconfident “picture” within which we can’t imagine it being otherwise, and thus smugly dismiss those who disagree. If we settle for “spin,” we’ll think it’s just “obvious” that the frame is open or closed. Thus “what I am calling ‘spin,’ ” Taylor summarizes, “is a way of avoiding entering this [Jamesian] space, a way of convincing oneself that one’s reading is obvious, compelling, allowing of no cavil or demurral” (p. 551).4

Another (still Platonizing) “wrong” form of Christianity misunderstands the nature of ascetic sacrifice. In this misprision, what is sacrificed is castigated as bad, whereas in authentic Christianity, the sacrifice is a sacrifice precisely because what’s “given up” is not essentially bad or evil. It is not a “constitutive incompatibility” (p. 645) but rather a temporal, existential tension. The transformationist perspective does not essentially denigrate what’s sacrificed, but rather strategically. It is characterized by a “fundamental ambivalence.”26 This will always sit in tension with an immanentist move that is not haunted by any “beyond” that would ever ask for ascetic denial. And this immanentization — in which ascetic denial makes no sense — will be part of what cross-pressures faith in a secular age.27 Here Taylor tends to focus on sex.28 So, for example, transformationist Christianity emphasized the importance of chastity and celebrated celibacy as a calling. This obviously curtails bodily desires and cravings, “repressing” sexual urges, etc. Does it thereby denigrate sex as evil? Not necessarily. It only relativizes the good of sex vis-à-vis other (eternal) goods, asking us to sacrifice a relative good to achieve an ultimate good. But in “Platonizing” forms, the sex that is denied and repressed is not really a “sacrifice” but more an evil that is exorcised. So we have two very different “Christianities” at work here. The misprision of the “Platonic” form is right...

untenable: “If the good that God wills for us doesn’t just include, but consists entirely in human flourishing, what sense does it make to sacrifice some part of this in order to serve God?” Sacrifice becomes untenable, even unthinkable (hence the rejection of traditional theories of the atonement). There is no room left in our plausibility structures to make sense of divine violence — which again undercuts any notion of “atonement” (p. 649). Indeed, the penal substitutionary account of the atonement can only look “monstrous.” Which is why the cross drops out; what becomes important is the life of Christ — what he says or teaches (p. 650). We’re on our way to Unitarianism.

So shouldn’t an “authentic” Christianity want to turn back the clock? “Isn’t the answer easy? Just undo the anthropocentric turn” (p. 651). Not so fast, cautions Taylor. First, even if we wanted to, there’s no simplistic going back. The anthropocentric turn is in the water; it’s increasingly the air we breathe.31 Not even orthodox Christians might realize the extent to which we’ve absorbed this by osmosis. Second, for Taylor, we shouldn’t want to.32 Taylor attributes this whole atonement-damnation complex to a “hyper-Augustinianism” that assumed that “the majority of the human race will be damned” (p. 652), and this is clearly an aspect of the tradition with which he does not want to be associated.33 But, he claims, “there is also a broader band of Christian belief and sensibility for which the decline of Hell is a positive change” (p. 653). So we get “modern Christian consciousness” (p. 655). This modern Christian consciousness thus lives in a tension, that may feel at times like a dilemma, between what it draws from the development of modern humanism, and its attachment to the central mysteries of Christian faith. It endorses the decline of Hell, the rejection of the juridical-penal model of the atonement, and any hermeneutic of divine violence, as well as affirming the full value of human flourishing. But it cannot accept the self-enclosure in immanence, and is aware that God has given a new transformative meaning to suffering and death in the life and death of Christ. ...

There is then a further revelation with Christ, which brings a new gift of power. Why Taylor avoids the traditional language of “grace” here is not clear.

Taylor sees such nostalgia as perhaps itself a product of modernity, in this sense: in premodernity, there would have been a healthy sense of an expected “gap” between the ideals of the City of God and the realities of the earthly city (p. 735). However, the late medieval drive to Reform changed that. Reform changes our expectations, raising them, and thus also leading us to expect less and less of a “gap.” Indeed, it breeds its own activism, a sort of realized eschatology. “This couldn’t help but bring about a definition of the demands of Christian faith closer into line with what is attainable in this world, with what can be realized in history. The distance between the ultimate City of God and the properly Christian-conforming earthly city is reduced” (p. 735). You can then get a Protestant version of this, where Christianity is reduced to a moralism and becomes merely identified with the progress of “civilization” (p. 736), or a Catholic version of this, where the church imposes itself upon the social order as the instantiation of the kingdom arrived. What’s problematic in both of these, according to Taylor, is a loss of the expectation of a gap (p. 737).

Modern moral order (MMO) A new understanding of morality that focuses on the organization of society for mutual benefit rather than an obligation to “higher” or eternal norms. Thus the “moral” is bound up with (and perhaps reduced to) the “economic.”

Secular3 Taylor’s notion of the secular as an age of contested belief, where religious belief is no longer axiomatic. It’s possible to imagine not believing in God. See also exclusive humanism.