How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Ours is a secular3 age. While the conditions of secularity — the nonaxiomatic nature of belief in God, the contestability of all ultimate beliefs — are not unrelated to the prescriptive project of secularism2, there is no necessary connection between the two. A secular3 society could undergo religious revival where vast swaths of the populace embrace religious belief. But that could never turn back the clock on secularization3; we would always know we used to believe something else, that there are plausible visions of meaning and significance on offer. We would also believe amidst the secular3 condition; indeed, conversion is a response to secularity, not an escape from it.