How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

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,