How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

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...