How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

All these Reform movements sought to reform and renew social life to address this “two-tiered” distortion we noted above. While Taylor emphasizes that there were solidly Roman Catholic projects of Reform, one can see why he makes the Protestant Reformation a central, if not pivotal, expression of this (p. 77).6 At its heart, Reform becomes “a drive to make over the whole society to higher standards” (p. 63) rooted in the conviction that “God is sanctifying us everywhere” (p. 79). Together these commitments begin to propel a kind of perfectionism about society that wouldn’t have been imagined earlier. Any gap between the ideal and the real is going to be less and less tolerated, either because more is going to be expected of society in terms of general sanctification, or because less is going to be expected and self-transcendence will be simply eclipsed. If people aren’t meeting the bar, you can either focus on helping people reach higher or you can lower the bar. This is why Reform unleashes both Puritanism and the ’60s. Insofar as Reform is a reaction to this disequilibrium, it can seek to “solve” the problem in two very different ways — and it will take centuries for this to become clear.