This is an important point, and we won’t understand Taylor’s critique of subtraction stories without appreciating it: on the subtraction-story account, modern exclusive humanism is just the natural telos of human life. We are released to be the exclusive humanists we were meant to be when we escape the traps of superstition and the yoke of transcendence. On such tellings of the story, exclusive humanism is “natural.” But Taylor’s point in part 2 of A Secular Age is to show that we had to learn how to be exclusively humanist; it is a second nature, not a first.
