How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Taylor describes the second aspect of this anthropocentric shift as the “eclipse of grace.” Since God’s providential concern for order is reduced to an “economic” ordering of creation to our mutual benefit, and since that order and design is discernible by reason, then “by reason and discipline, humans could rise to the challenge and realize it.” The result is a kind of intellectual Pelagianism: we can figure this out without assistance. Oh, God still plays a role — as either the watchmaker who got the ball rolling, or the judge who will evaluate how well we did — but in the long middle God plays no discernible role or function, and is uninvolved (pp. 222-23). This is why Taylor describes all these as features of a “providential deism” — a deism that opened the door for exclusive humanism.