How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

In Christendom this tension is not resolved, but inhabited. First, the social body makes room for a certain division of labor. By making room for entirely “religious” vocations such as monks and nuns, the church creates a sort of vicarious class who ascetically devote themselves to transcendence/eternity for the wider social body who have to deal with the nitty-gritty of creaturely life, from kings to peasant mothers (which is why patronage of monasteries and abbeys is an important expression of religious devotion for those otherwise consumed by “worldly” concerns). We miss this if we retroactively impose our “privatized” picture of faith upon abbeys and monasteries and imagine that the monks are devoting themselves to personal pursuits of salvation. The monks pray for the world, in the world’s stead. So the social body lives this tension between transcendence and the mundane by a kind of division of labor.3 Second, the social body in Christendom has a sense of time that allows even those daily engaged in domestic life to nonetheless pursue rhythms and rituals that inhabit this tension between the pressures of now and the hopes of eternity. Rhythms and seasons create opportunities to live the tension (this can be as simple as no meat on Fridays or during Lent). The rituals deal with this tension in order to foster equilibrium.