How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

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).