How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Here again, the equilibrium between mundane demands and eternal requirements is maintained, not by resolving the tension in one direction or another, but by inhabiting the tension. Ideally, the demands and expectations of virtue are not compromised or relaxed or dismissed as untenable — they are just periodically suspended.4 What society recognized was a need for ritualized “anti-structure” (p. 50).

What changes in modernity is that, instead of inhabiting this tension and trying to maintain an equilibrium between the demands of creaturely life and the expectations for eternal life, the modern age generates different strategies for resolving (i.e., eliminating) the tension.5 There are a couple of options: you can either effectively denounce creaturely domestic life and sort of demand monasticism for all (the so-called puritanical option); or you can drop the expectations of eternity that place the weight of virtue on our domestic lives — that is, you can stop being burdened by what eternity/salvation demands and simply frame ultimate flourishing within this world. (Taylor will suggest that modes of Reform that sought to merely clarify the tension and equilibrium actually unleashed the latter option, “resolving” the tension by eliminating it altogether.)

In the premodern understanding, because “mundane” or secular1 time is transcended by “higher” time, there is an accounting of time that is not merely linear or chronological. Higher times “introduce ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events that were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked” (p. 55).

This is somewhat akin to Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity” in Philosophical Fragments: “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997” (Secular Age, p. 55).

Our “encasing” in secular time has changed this, and so we take our experience of time to be “natural” (i.e., not a construal): “We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done” (p. 59). So nothing “higher” impinges upon our cal...

The final aspect of the shift involves our view of the natural world; in the premodern imaginary, we live in a cosmos, an ordered whole where the “natural” world hangs within its beyond (p. 60). It’s as if the universe has layers, and we are always folded into the middle. If the premodern self is “porous,” so too is the premodern cosmos.

At this point, we simply recognize that the shift from cosmos to universe — from “creation” to “nature” — makes it possible to now imagine meaning and significance as contained within the universe itself, an autonomous, independent “meaning” that is unhooked from any sort of transcendent dependence.

However, the removal of obstacles doesn’t get us on the move; or, to frame this in terms of subtraction stories: it’s not the case that “the secular” is what’s left over once you’ve subtracted these obstacles. So he still hasn’t identified any causal factors in this story. What we need is a positive account of the engine that drove the positive production of both the secular and exclusive humanism. Taylor locates that engine in “Reform.”

Conversely, because spiritual pressure was sequestered to the religious vocation, the “weight of virtue” was relaxed for the wider populace.

So Taylor’s foray into this foggy past (for most of us) is not an arcane detour; it’s the family history we need to make sense of the 1960s — the decade we’ve never left. As Rusty Reno quipped recently, it’s always 1968 somewhere.

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.

Fundamentally, there is a leveling at work here. Rejecting the “multi-speed” and “two-tiered” models, Reform ratchets up expectation: in Reform movements within Christendom, everyone is now expected to live all their lives coram Deo, before the face of God. In the language of Saint Paul, they are expected to do all for the glory of God (Col. 3:17). This is actually the flip side of a new sanctification of “ordinary life” — a refusal of sacred/profane distinctions and the beginning of the erosion of the sacred/secular distinction. Domestic life is affirmed as a sphere of grace. It’s not just priests and nuns who are “religious”; the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker can also undertake their mundane, “this-worldly” tasks with a sense of devotion and worship.

In this sense, “Protestantism is in the line of continuity with mediaeval reform, attempting to raise general standards, not satisfied with a world in which only a few integrally fulfill the gospel, but trying to make certain pious practices absolutely general” (p. 82).

This version of Reform “levels” two-tiered religion by actually expecting everyone to live up to the high expectations of disciplined, monastic life. But Taylor hints that another sort of leveling is possible: you could also solve the two-tiered problem by lifting the weight of virtue, disburdening a society of the expectations of transcendence, and thus lop off the upper tier or the eternal horizon. In fact, he seems to suggest that it was the first strategy of higher expectations that might have driven some to the latter strategy of lowered expectations.

The Reformers “all see the reigning equilibrium as a bad compromise” — a Pelagian assumption of human powers and thus an inadequate appreciation for the radical grace of God and for God’s action in salvation. If anything of salvation is under our control, then God’s sovereignty and grace are compromised. This leads Reformers like Calvin to reject the “localization” of grace in things and rituals, changing the “centre of gravity of the religious life” (p. 79). Taylor considers John Calvin as a case study: in emphasizing the priority of God’s action and grace, Taylor notes, “what he can’t admit is that God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action, because that is the cost of really sanctifying creatures like us which are bodily, social, historical” (p. 79). It is the (relatively immaterial) spoken Word of God and not magical things like the Host that is the means of grace.

One can see how this entails a kind of disenchantment: “we reject the sacramentals; all the elements of ‘magic’ in the old religion” (p. 79). If the church no longer has “good” magic, “then all magic must be black” (p. 80); all enchantment must be blasphemous, idolatrous, even demonic (Salem is yet to come). And once the world is disenchanted and de-charged of transcendence, we are then free to reorder it as seems best (p. 80). In other words, the Reformers’ rejection of sacramentalism is the beginning of naturalism, or it at least opens the door to its possibility. It is also the beginning of a certain evacuation of the sacred as a presence in the world. And that leads to a completely new understanding of social and cultural life as well. Social and political arrangements are no longer enchanted givens; the king or monarch can’t be any sort of “sacramental” reality. There is no enchanted social order. If the world is going to be ordered, we need to do it.11

It is religious Reform that calls for secular reform, which in turn makes possible exclusively humanist reform. The Reformation has some explaining to do.

Now, from the vantage point of secular humanism, this new interest in nature can look like the next logical step on the way to pure immanence: first distinguish God/nature, then disenchant, then be happy and content with just nature and hence affirm the autonomy and sufficiency of nature. Such a story about the “autonomization” of nature posits a contrast or dichotomy between belief in God and interest in “nature-for-itself” (p. 91). The only problem with such a story is that it fails to account for two important historical realities: (1) it was precisely Christians who were exhibiting a new interest in creation/nature for theological reasons; and (2) this interest was clearly not mutually exclusive with belief in God and an affirmation of transcendence.

This was primarily a revolution in devotion, not metaphysics. Thus “the new interest in nature was not a step outside of a religious outlook, even partially; it was a mutation within this outlook” (p. 95).

While this shift might, from a later vantage point, look like the first step toward exclusive humanism and pure immanence, it was not at the beginning — and could have gone otherwise.

True to his zigzag account of causal complexity, Taylor notes another development, roughly parallel to the incarnational emphasis: the rise of nominalism, which is a metaphysical thesis. Taylor notes that nominalism was not a proto-secularism precisely because the motives behind nominalism were fundamentally theological. In particular, nominalism arose as a way of metaphysically honoring a radical sense of God’s sovereignty and power.

“But if this is right,” Taylor comments, “then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to these things not in terms of the normative patterns they reveal, but in terms of the autonomous super-purposes of our creator [which can’t be known a priori]. The purposes things serve are extrinsic to them. The stance is fundamentally one of instrumental reason” (p. 97). Part of the fallout of such a metaphysical shift is the loss of final causality (a cause that attracts or “pulls”), eclipsing any teleology for things/nature. Understanding something is no longer a matter of understanding its “essence” and hence its telos (end). Instead we get the “mechanistic” universe that we still inhabit today, in which efficient causality (a cause that “pushes”) is the only causality and can only be discerned by empirical observation. This, of course, is precisely the assumption behind the scientific method as a way of divining the efficient causes of things, not by discerning “essence” but by empirical observation of patterns, etc. The result is nothing short of “a new understanding of being, according to which, all intrinsic purposes having been expelled, final causation drops out, and efficient causation alone remains” (p. 98).

There is a sort of intellectual chemical reaction between the two that generates a by-product that neither on its own would have generated — or would have wanted.

“Civility was not something you attained at a certain stage in history, and then relaxed into”; rather, “civility requires working on yourself, not just leaving things as they are, but making them over. It involves a struggle to reshape ourselves” (pp. 100, 101). This required disciplines, and such disciplined citizens would also be contributors to the common good (especially in terms of productivity). This really translated into a program of self-discipline (p. 111), an internalization of discipline, while also contributing to the development of the “police state” — statecraft as discipline (pp. 110-11).

So religious expectations of sanctification are increasingly generalized, yielding a new vision of how society can and should be ordered. But there is a corresponding shift in religious practice that must also be noted. These developments — de-sacramentalization and the generalization of “discipline” — come with the “eclipse” of other key features of premodern Christian religion. In particular, Taylor highlights the loss of any coherent place for worship: “the eclipse of certain crucial Christian elements, those of grace and of agape, already changed quite decisively the centre of gravity of this outlook. Moreover, there didn’t seem to be an essential place for the worship of God, other than through the cultivation of reason and constancy” (p. 117).

So Taylor summarizes the point: “A way of putting our present condition [our ‘secular age’] is to say that many people are happy living for goals which are purely immanent; they live in a way that takes no account of the transcendent” (p. 143).

But we cannot anachronistically impose the accomplishment of secular humanism as the necessary end of such a shift. Indeed, Taylor sees such overconfidence as failing to note an irony: the “naturalization” that is essential to exclusive humanism was first motivated by Christian devotion.14 “The irony is that just this, so much the fruit of devotion and faith, prepares the ground for an escape from faith, into a purely immanent world” (p. 145).

Taylor describes this shift — in which society will come to be seen as a collection of individuals (p. 146) — as “the great disembedding.” But we can only make sense of this claim about disembedding if we appreciate the embedding that it’s dissing, so to speak.

Most germane to understanding the point of this chapter is appreciating what Taylor calls the “triple embedding” of premodern societies, a configuration of society that goes along with what he’s been calling enchantment: “Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine” (p. 152).15 The disembedding, then, happens gradually by targeting different facets of this triple embedding (e.g., disenchantment targets the third aspect; social contract theory targets the second aspect; etc.).

And yet, Taylor’s point is that this is an imaginary — not that this is all just a fiction, but rather that this is a “take” on the world. While we have come to assume that this is just “the way things are,” in fact what we take for granted is contingent and contestable. But before we can contest it, we need to further understand it.

Taylor considers the emergence of “realism” in Renaissance Italian and later Netherlands painting as a case in point: “the realism, tenderness, physicality, particularity of much of this painting . . . instead of being read as a turning away from transcendence, should be grasped in a devotional context, as a powerful affirmation of the Incarnation” (p. 144). And yet by so investing the material world with significance, these movements also gave immanence a robustness and valorization that no longer seemed to need the transcendent to “suspend” it. In other words, the work of art that could be “iconic” — a window to the transcendent — becomes so fixating in its naturalistic realism that it absorbs our entire gaze and interest and ends up functioning as an idol.

A secular world where we have permission, even encouragement, to not believe in God is an accomplishment, not merely a remainder. Our secular age is the product of creative new options, an entire reconfiguration of meaning.

So it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.

The first, and most significant, is an eclipse of what he calls a “further purpose” or a good that “transcends human flourishing.”1 In the premodern, enchanted social imaginary, there was an end for humans that transcended “mundane” flourishing “in this world,” so to speak. As he puts it elsewhere, “For Christians, God wills human flourishing, but ‘thy will be done’ doesn’t reduce to ‘let human beings flourish.’ ”2 In short, both agents and social institutions lived with a sense of a telos that was eternal — a final judgment, the beatific vision, etc. And on Taylor’s accounting, this “higher good” was in some tension with mundane concerns about flourishing (recall his earlier point concerning equilibrium). This entailed a sense of obligation “beyond” human flourishing. In other words, this life is not “all there is” — and recognizing that means one lives this life differently. It will engender certain ascetic constraints, for example: we can’t just eat, drink, and be merry because, while tomorrow we may die, that’s not the end. After that comes the judgment. And so our merriment might be curtailed by this “further purpose,” as Taylor describes it.

Many evangelicals are reacting to the “dualism” of their fundamentalist heritage that seemed to only value “heaven” and offered no functional affirmation of the importance of “this life.” Their rejection of this finds expression in a new emphasis on “the goodness of creation” and the importance of social justice. Are there ways that such developments are a delayed replay of the “eclipse of heaven”? Might Taylor’s account be a cautionary tale?

providence is primarily about ordering this world for mutual benefit, particularly economic benefit.

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.

Since what matters is immanent, and since we can figure it out, it’s not surprising that, third, “the sense of mystery fades.” God’s providence is no longer inscrutable; it’s an open book, “perspicuous.” “His providence consists simply in his plan for us, which we understand” (p. 223). Mystery can no longer be tolerated.

Finally, and as an outcome, we lose any “idea that God was planning a transformation of human beings which would take them beyond the limitations which inhere in their present condition” (p. 224). We lose a sense that humanity’s end transcends its current configurations — and thus lose a sense of...

In this context Taylor offers an analysis of the apologetic strategy that emerges in the midst of these shifts — not only as a response to them, but already as a reflection of them. In trying to assess just how the modern social imaginary came to permeate a wider culture, Taylor focuses on Christian responses to this emerging humanism and the “eclipses” we’ve just noted. What he finds is that the responses themselves have already conceded the game; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important ways (Taylor will later call this “pre-shrunk religion” [p. 226]). As he notes, “the great apologetic effort called forth by this disaffection itself narrowed its focus so drastically. It barely invoked the saving action of Christ, nor did it dwell on the life of devotion and prayer, although the seventeenth century was rich in this. The arguments turned exclusively on demonstrating God as Creator, and showing his Providence” (p. 225). What we get in the name of “Christian” defenses of transcendence, then, is “a less theologically elaborate faith” that, ironically, paves the way for exclusive humanism. God is reduced to a Creator and religion is reduced to morality (p. 225). The “deism” of providential deism bears many marks of the “theism” that is often defended in contemporary apologetics. The particularities of specifically Christian belief are diminished to try to secure a more generic deity — as if saving some sort of transcendenc...