But we cannot anachronistically impose the accomplishment of secular humanism as the necessary end of such a shift. Indeed, Taylor sees such overconfidence as failing to note an irony: the “naturalization” that is essential to exclusive humanism was first motivated by Christian devotion.14 “The irony is that just this, so much the fruit of devotion and faith, prepares the ground for an escape from faith, into a purely immanent world” (p. 145).
