How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

But it didn’t take long for you to realize that the questions weren’t just unanswered; they were unasked. And they weren’t questions. That is, your “secular” neighbors aren’t looking for “answers” — for some bit of information that is missing from their mental maps. To the contrary, they have completely different maps. You’ve realized that instead of nagging questions about God or the afterlife, your neighbors are oriented by all sorts of longings and “projects” and quests for significance. There doesn’t seem to be anything “missing” from their lives — so you can’t just come proclaiming the good news of a Jesus who fills their “God-shaped hole.” They don’t have any sense that the “secular” lives they’ve constructed are missing a second floor. In many ways, they have constructed webs of meaning that provide almost all the significance they need in their lives (though a lot hinges on that “almost”).

No, it seems that many have managed to construct a world of significance that isn’t at all bothered by questions of the divine — though that world might still be haunted in some ways, haunted by that “almost.” Your neighbors inhabit what Charles Taylor calls an “immanent frame”; they are no longer bothered by “the God question” as a question because they are devotees of “exclusive humanism” — a way of being-in-the-world that offers significance without transcendence. They don’t feel like anything is missing.

But maybe this doesn’t describe you. Maybe you consider yourself “secular” — an atheist, perhaps, or at least agnostic, and generally just completely unconcerned with God or religion or church or any of that. It’s not like you’ve “left” the faith or killed God; he never existed in the Brooklyn you call home. Indeed, in the circles you run in, matters of spirituality or transcendence just never arise. The existential world is flat. You’re over it. Let’s move on. Sure, we’re all trying to “find” significance or “make” meaning and vaguely trying to figure out just what the hell this is all about. But c’mon: that doesn’t mean we’re going to entertain fairy tales.

On the one hand, this is a book about a book — a small field guide to a much larger scholarly tome.1 It is both an homage and a portal to Charles Taylor’s monumental Secular Age, a book that offers a genealogy of the secular and an archaeology of our angst. This is a commentary on a book that provides a commentary on postmodern culture.

Anyone who apprehends the sweep and force of Taylor’s argument will get a sense that he’s been reading our postmodern mail. His account of our “cross-pressured” situation — suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence — names and explains vague rumblings in the background of our experience for which we lack words.

They might be artists or entrepreneurs, screenwriters or design consultants, baristas or political staffers — but they all intuit what Taylor is trying to diagnose: that our “secular” age is messier than many would lead us to believe; that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so; and that they need to forge meaning and significance in this “secular” space rather than embracing modes of resentful escape from it.

At the same time, Taylor’s account should also serve as a wake-up call for the church, functioning as a mirror to help us see how we have come to inhabit our secular age. Taylor is not only interested in understanding how “the secular” emerged; he is also an acute observer of how we’re all secular now. The secular touches everything. It not only makes unbelief possible; it also changes belief — it impinges upon Christianity (and all religious communities). So Taylor’s account also diagnoses the roots and extent of Christianity’s assimilation — and hints at how we might cultivate resistance.

Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.1

At the same time — and sometimes as a reaction — various fundamentalisms seem intent on selling us maps to buried treasure, pulling out yellowed parchments and trying to convince us that these dated maps tell us the truth about ourselves, about our present. But their maps are just as flat, and we feel like they’re hiding something. We feel like there are whole regions of our experience they’ve never set foot upon — as if they claim to have mapped Manhattan because they visited Madison Square Garden. Who’s going to buy that map?

These road atlases of belief versus disbelief, religion versus secularism, belief versus reason provide maps that are much neater and tidier than the spaces in which we find ourselves. They give us a world of geometric precision that doesn’t map onto the world of our lived experience where these matters are much fuzzier, much more intertwined — where “the secular” and “the religious” haunt each other in a mutual dance of displacement and decentering.

Indeed, there is something fundamentally literary, even poetic, in Taylor’s prosaic account of our “secular age” — this pluralized, pressurized moment in which we find ourselves, where believers are beset by doubt and doubters, every once in a while, find themselves tempted by belief.4 It is Taylor’s complexity, nuance, and refusal of simplistic reductionisms that make him a reliable cartographer who provides genuine orientation in our secular age. A Secular Age is the map of globalized Gotham, a philosophical ethnography of our present.

Taylor names and identifies what some of our best novelists, poets, and artists attest to: that our age is haunted. On the one hand, we live under a brass heaven, ensconced in immanence. We live in the twilight of both gods and idols. But their ghosts have refused to depart, and every once in a while we might be surprised to find ourselves tempted by belief, by intimations of transcendence.

On the other hand, even as faith endures in our secular age, believing doesn’t come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of its contestability. We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.

Consider, for example, Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of as an example of another existential map of our secular age. The book is penned as a response to what he calls, cribbing from French critic Charles du Bos, le réveil mortel. On Barnes’s account, a first, clunky translation of the phrase remains the best. Though “ ‘the wake-up call to mortality’ sounds a bit like a hotel service,” in fact this translation’s metaphor hits just the right note: “it is like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.”

But he receives this as a challenge to find the words to, if not make sense of, at least be articulate about le réveil mortel — a veritable gauntlet that death throws down at the writer’s feet. At one point he castigates himself for failing in the face of this challenge: Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitch-forked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist shouting “oh no Oh No OH NO” in an endless wail, the horror of the moment — the minutes — overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of self-exhibitionist pity. An inarticulate one, too: for what sometimes shames me is the extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive, words that come out of my mouth. For God’s sake, you’re a writer, I say to myself. You do words. Can’t you improve on that? Can’t you face down death — well, you won’t ever face it down, but can’t you at least protest against it — more interestingly than this? (p. 126)

In her much-discussed book When God Talks Back, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann asks: “If you could believe in God, why wouldn’t you?” At the same time, she concedes: “It ought to be difficult to believe in God.” To live in a secular age is to inhabit just this space and tension. What are the implications of this for Christian witness in a secular age? How do we recognize and affirm the difficulty of belief?

Barnes’s own testimony in this regard is entirely adolescent and completely honest: “My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion, happened at a later age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist because the notion that He might be watching me while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching too. . . . The thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke” (p. 16). No evidential problem of evil; no intellectual dissatisfaction with the doctrine of the incarnation; no vaulted claims to rational enlightenment; just an honest, onanistic confession of a rather pragmatic agnosticism. But more titillating, in fact, is Barnes’s mature reflection on this loss of faith: As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, this might be because the sky did not judge it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it, there won’t be much more of that once you’re a disembodied spirit, so have another one...

At a dinner party with neighbors he overheard a young man shout sarcastically, “But why should God do that for His son and not for the rest of us?” “Because He’s God, for Christ’s sake” (p. 77), Barnes shouted back.

Unlike Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie (literary figures with their own epistles in Hitchens’s canon), Barnes lacks the fundamentalist swagger of the new atheists. In particular, he lacks their chronological snobbery and their epistemological confidence: If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I’ve acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know enough to know? As twenty-first century neo-Darwinian materialists, convinced that the meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear since the year 1859, we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous knee-benders who, a speck of time away, believed in divine purpose, an ordered world, resurrection and a Last Judgment. But although we are more informed, we are no more evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What convinces us our knowledge is so final? (pp. 23-24) Given his own epistemological tentativeness, Barnes can’t resist a bit of fun, imagining a divine game at the expense of our celebrity atheists: If there were a games-playing God, He would surely get especial ludic pleasure from disappointing those philosophers who had convinced themselves and others of His non-existence. A. J. Ayer assures Somerset Maugham that there is nothing, and nothingness, after death: whereupon they both find themselves players in God’s little end-of-the-pier entertainment called Watch the Fury of the R...

Not surprisingly, where Barnes really appreciates the haunting of immanence is in the realm of the aesthetic.6 Barnes’s appreciation for religious art — both painting and music — is one of the best aspects of the book, and leaves him a little spooked. “Missing God is focused for me,” he confesses, “by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art” (p. 54). He seems, if not tempted by, at least a bit intrigued by an aesthetic argument never entertained in Aquinas’s “Five Ways”: that religion might just be true simply because it is beautiful. “The Christian religion didn’t last so long merely because everyone believed it” (p. 53), Barnes observes. It lasted because it makes for a helluva novel — which is pretty close to Tolkien’s claim that the gospel is true because it is the most fantastic fantasy, the greatest fairy story ever told.7 And Barnes, a great lover of both music and painting, knows that much of what he enjoys owes its existence to Christianity. Without the madness of the gospel, Mozart would never have composed a requiem, Giotto would never have left us the treasures in the chapel of Padua. Thus he finds himself asking, “What if it were true?” — a question never entertained by the dogmaticians of the new atheism. What would it be like, he asks, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem and take it as nonfiction?

But the haunting is mutual, which is why religious literature in our secular age attests to the persistent specter of doubt.

What Taylor describes as “secular” — a situation of fundamental contestability when it comes to belief, a sense that rival stories are always at the door offering a very different account of the world — is the engine that drove Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. As she attested in a letter about her first novel: I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

While Taylor will complicate that last flourish of individualism, the diagnosis and description are the same: there’s no going back. Ardor and devotion cannot undo the shift in plausibility structures that characterizes our age. There’s no undoing the secular; there’s just the task of learning how (not) to live — and perhaps even believe — in a secular age.

What passes for “atheism,” he observes, is still a mode of worship, “a kind of anti-religious religion, which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof, human autonomy, and self-determination.” But the narrator is not ready to convert to the gospel of immanence. To the contrary, “the fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life’s meaning.”27 This too is haunted: by the sense that we’re just making this up, that the religious is as fictive as his parents’ attribution of magic to the cement mixer, that we can’t trust our impulses or memories or inclinations to reverence. And yet this religious ghost can’t be exorcised either.28

Taylor’s Question Our goal in trying to understand our “secular age” is not a descriptive what, and even less a chronological when, but rather an analytic how. The question is not whether our age is less (or more) “religious”; nor is it a question of trying to determine when some switch was tripped so that, in the world-historical language of Will Durant & Co., we went from an “age of belief” to an “age of reason.” Instead, Taylor is concerned with the “conditions of belief” — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.

As you’ll notice, these questions are not concerned with what people believe as much as with what is believable. The difference between our modern, “secular” age and past ages is not necessarily the catalogue of available beliefs but rather the default assumptions about what is believable. It is this way of framing the question that leads to Taylor’s unique definition of “the secular.”

Such debates are still focused on beliefs, whereas Taylor thinks the essence of “the secular” is a matter of believability.

It is the emergence of “the secular” in this sense that makes possible the emergence of an “exclusive humanism” — a radically new39 option in the marketplace of beliefs, a vision of life in which anything beyond the immanent is eclipsed. “For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true” (Secular Age, p. 18).

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.

On Taylor’s account, the force of such subtraction stories is as much in their narrative power as in their ability to account for the “data,” so to speak. There is a dramatic tension here, a sense of plot, and a cast of characters with heroes (e.g., Galileo) and villains (e.g., Cardinal Bellarmine). So if you’re going to counter subtraction stories, it’s not enough to offer rival evidence and data; you need to tell a different story. And so Taylor not only “has to tack back and forth between the analytical and the historical” (p. 29), he has to offer the history as story, as a counternarrative.

This is because ultimately Taylor wants to try to communicate what it feels like to live in a secular age, what it feels like to inhabit the cross-pressured space of modernity. Jager thus reformulates Taylor’s question in light of this methodology: “What does secularity feel like from the inside?” This changes how we approach the argument: “When Taylor says he has a story to tell, he means that his account must be undergone, not simply paraphrased or glossed.”

Second, akin to Alasdair MacIntyre and Christian Smith, Taylor seems to recognize that we are “narrative animals”: we define who we are, and what we ought to do, on the basis of what story we see ourselves in. “Our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition” (Secular Age, p. 28).

Unfortunately, at this point Barnes constructs a false dichotomy: “The Christian,” he surmises, “would . . . have been concerned more with truth than aesthetics.” Whence the distinction? One might say that the madness of the incarnation obliterates such a dichotomy, that the logic of incarnation scandalously claims that truth and beauty kiss (cp. Ps. 85:10). Taking it to be true does not trump the beauty; receiving it as nonfiction does not de-aestheticize the work of art, reducing it to a textbook. But though Barnes’s dichotomy is misplaced, it seems laudable that he entertains what it would mean for these works of art to also be more than (merely) aesthetic. “It is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the non-believer,” he concludes: “what would it be like ‘if it were true’ ” (p. 54).

This is pictured in François Mauriac’s classic, Vipers’ Tangle, trans. Warren B. Wells (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1957). In a Christopher Hitchens–like preemptive note, the curmudgeonly, miserly Louis warns his family that should he, upon his deathbed, call a priest, they should merely chalk this up to irrational weakness. But he later makes a confession: “it is, on the contrary, when I study myself, as I have been doing for the past two months, with a curiosity which is stronger than my disgust; it is when I feel myself most fully in possession of my faculties that the Christian temptation torments me. I can no longer deny that a route exists in me which might lead me to your God” (p. 104).

On these criteria, the ancient world into which Christianity emerged — and perhaps because Christianity emerged — would have been secular3. So something like modernity may not be a necessary condition for secular3. Granted, the ancient world could not yet have imagined exclusive humanism as a viable option, and that is an important feature of our secular age.

The “secular” is not just the neutral, rational, areligious world that is left over once we throw off superstition, ritual, and belief in the gods. This is because the secular is not just unbelief, or lack of specifically religious belief. What characterizes secularity3 — and the secular3 age — is not merely privative. The emergence of the secular is also bound up with the production of a new option — the possibility of exclusive humanism as a viable social imaginary — a way of constructing meaning and significance without any reference to the divine or transcendence. So it wasn’t enough for us to stop believing in the gods; we also had to be able to imagine significance within an immanent frame, to imagine modes of meaning that did not depend on transcendence. This is why “subtraction stories” of the sort offered by secularization theory will always fall short. The secular is not simply a remainder; it is a sum, created by addition, a product of intellectual multiplication.

Taylor highlights three features of this medieval imaginary that functioned as obstacles to unbelief (p. 25): 1. The natural world was constituted as a cosmos that functioned semiotically, as a sign that pointed beyond itself, to what was more than nature. 2. Society itself was understood as something grounded in a higher reality; earthly kingdoms were grounded in a heavenly kingdom. 3. In sum, people lived in an enchanted world, a world “charged” with presences, that was open and vulnerable, not closed and self-sufficient.

It’s not that these features guarantee that all medieval inhabitants “believe in God”; but it does mean that, in a world so constituted, “atheism comes close to being inconceivable” (p. 26) because one can’t help but “see” (or “imagine”) that world as sort of haunted — suffused with presences that are not “natural.” To say this was part of the ancient and medieval imaginary is to say that it’s what was taken for granted.

“What I am trying to describe here,” he urges, “is not a theory. Rather my target is our contemporary lived understanding; that is, the way we naïvely take things to be. We might say: the construal we just live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or — for most of us — without ever even formulating it” (p. 30). It is at this “level” that the shift has occurred; it is a shift in our naïve understanding, in what we take for granted (pp. 30-31). And this shift to a new “background” is not just true for exclusivist humanists; even believers believe in a way that also generally takes for granted this new background. So the shift to a secular age not only makes exclusive humanism a live option for us, it also changes religious communities. We’re all secular now.

Taylor’s account of disenchantment has a different accent, suggesting that this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.”1 Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. The external world might be a catalyst for perceiving meaning, but the meanings are generated within the mind — or, in stronger versions (say, Kant), meanings are imposed upon things by minds. Meaning is now located in agents.

At this point Taylor introduces a key concept to describe the premodern self: prior to this disenchantment and the retreat of meaning into an interior “mind,” the human agent was seen as porous (p. 35). Just as premodern nature is always already intermixed with its beyond, and just as things are intermixed with mind and meaning, so the premodern self’s porosity means the self is essentially vulnerable (and hence also “healable”). To be human is to be essentially open to an outside (whether benevolent or malevolent), open to blessing or curse, possession or grace. “This sense of vulnerability,” Taylor concludes, “is one of the principal features which have gone with disenchantment” (p. 36).

At stake in disenchantment, then, are assumptions not just about meaning but also about minds, about the nature of agents and persons. In the shift to the modern imaginary, minds are “bounded,” inward spaces. So the modern self, in contrast to this premodern, porous self, is a buffered self, insulated and isolated in its interiority (p. 37), “giving its own autonomous order to its life” (pp. 38-39).

Why would this make unbelief so hard in a premodern world? Taylor suggests it yields a “very different existential condition” because in an enchanted, porous world of vulnerable selves, “the prospect of rejecting God does not involve retiring to the safe redoubt of the buffered self, but rather chancing ourselves in the field of forces without him. . . . In general, going against God is not an option in the enchanted world. That is one way the change to the buffered self has impinged” (p. 41). In other words, it wasn’t enough to simply divest the world of spirits and demons; it was also necessary that the self be buffered and protected. Not until that positive shift came about did atheism/exclusive humanism become more “thinkable.”

The good of a common weal is a collective good, dependent upon the social rituals of the community. “So we’re all in this together.” As a result, a premium is placed on consensus, and “turning ‘heretic’ ” is “not just a personal matter.” That is, there is no room for these matters to be ones of “private” preference.

“This is something we constantly tend to forget,” Taylor notes, “when we look back condescendingly on the intolerance of earlier ages. As long as the common weal is bound up in collectives rites, devotions, allegiances, it couldn’t be seen just as an individual’s own business that he break ranks, even less that he blaspheme or try to desecrate the rite. There was immense common motivation to bring him back into line” (p. 42). Individual disbelief is not a private option we can grant to heretics to pursue on weekends; to the contrary, disbelief has communal repercussions.

The buffering of the self from alien forces also carves out a space for a nascent privacy, and such privacy provides both protection and permission to disbelieve. Once individuals become the locus of meaning, the social atomism that results means that disbelief no longer has social consequences. “We” are not a seamless cloth, a tight-knit social body; instead, “we” are just a collection of individuals — like individual molecules in a social “gas.” This diminishes the ripple effect of individual decisions and beliefs.

Taylor identifies a critical third element that we might describe as the mundanization of the ne plus ultra — a sort of “lowering of the bar” in how we envision the requirements of a life well lived.

Especially in Christendom, Taylor recalls, there was a unique tension between “self-transcendence” — a “turning of life towards something beyond ordinary human flourishing” — and the this-worldly concerns of human flourishing and creaturely existence. We might redescribe this as a tension between what “eternity” required and what the mundane vagaries of domestic life demanded. It was assumed that human life found its ultimate meaning and telos in a transcendent eternity and that the demands of securing such an ultimate life required a certain ascetic relation to the pleasures and demands of mundane, domestic life.

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.

Carnival is a sanctioned way to blow off the steam that builds up from the pressure of living under the requirements of eternity. “These