How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

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