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March 9 - April 23, 2020
But it didn’t take long for you to realize that the questions weren’t just unanswered; they were unasked.
They don’t have any sense that the “secular” lives they’ve constructed are missing a second floor.
It turns out this isn’t like the Mars Hill of Saint Paul’s experience (in Acts 17) where people are devoted to all kinds of deities and you get to add to their pantheon by talking about the one, true God. 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.”
They don’t feel like anything is missing.
It’s not like you’ve “left” the faith or killed God; he never existed in the Brooklyn you call home.
So you stay home, alone, and before you know it, just as the bourbon is taking hold, one of those unbelievably ambiguous and nostalgic songs by The Postal Service comes on. You know, one of those songs with the sprite, light tune that lulls you into thinking it’s just banal triviality, but then somehow you hear it again as if for the first time and all of a sudden you feel yourself in the song . . . And I’m looking through the glass Where the light bends at the cracks And I’m screaming at the top of my lungs Pretending the echoes belong to someone — Someone I used to know. . . . and you’re
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So I’m trying to distill and highlight this aspect of his argument precisely because I think it matters — and matters especially for those believers who are trying to not only remain faithful in a secular age but also bear witness to the divine for a secular age.
Anyone who apprehends the sweep and force of Taylor’s argument will get a sense that he’s been reading our postmodern mail.
In many ways, Taylor’s Secular Age amounts to a cultural anthropology for urban mission.
Taylor is not only interested in understanding how “the secular” emerged; he is also an acute observer of how we’re all secular now.
So Taylor’s account also diagnoses the roots and extent of Christianity’s assimilation — and hints at how we might cultivate resistance.
You might say I’m trying to give readers a map of the forest that is A Secular Age, hoping to provide orientation so they can enter the larger forest of Taylor’s book and thus attend to all the trees therein.
As usual, my writing of this book was shaped by a veritable soundtrack — the artists who accompanied my writing in coffee shops in various neighborhoods of Grand Rapids. In the spirit of Taylor, I gravitated toward albums that reflected the malaise and cross-pressures and furtive wonder that characterize our secular age. So readers might set the mood for this book by listening to The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes, and especially Arcade Fire’s unique, holistic meditation, The Suburbs.
Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.
Like those hucksters on Venice Beach offering maps to the homes of the stars, there is no shortage of voices hawking road atlases for a secular age.
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.
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.
We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.
Such a guide “makes sense” of our situation not by didactically explaining it, and certainly not by explaining it away, but by giving us the words to name what we’ve felt.
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.”5 It is just this sort of unanticipated wake-up call that many experience, even in a “secular” age.
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” This is the opening line of the book, described by the author’s philosopher-brother as “soppy.”
He thus owns up to his “breezy illogic” in moments of self-critique, and the critique of others who lost faith in God because of unanswered prayers:
Intolerant of squishy spirituality, he finds “the notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you” nothing short of “grotesque” (p. 46).
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.
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)
In short, Barnes has nothing to do with the silliness that claims that “religion poisons everything.”
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.
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.
What would it be like, he asks, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem and take it as nonfiction?
The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.
Outside of Amish fiction and Disney-fied versions of biblical narratives, believers in contemporary literature are “fragilized,” as Taylor will describe it.
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.
Indeed, consider the dramatis personae of religiously attuned literature over the past fifty years, from Graham Greene’s whisky priest to Walker Percy’s Dr. Thomas More to Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder, even Marilynne Robinson’s Protestant pastor in Gilead: not a one matches the caricature of either the new atheists’ straw men or fundamentalist confidence. Their worlds seem as fraught as our own — and more honestly fraught than the areligious, de-transcendentalized universes created by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen.
We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike.
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.
This is a Catholic embrace of “secularity” as Taylor defines it, demonstrating that the terrain can’t be neatly carved up into rational secularists and resentful believers.
And he thinks that, in some fleeting moments of aesthetic enchantment or mundane haunting, even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more — some “fullness” that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we’ve constructed in modernity.
expressive individualism are in the water of our secular age, and only a heroic few can manage to quell their chatter to create an insulated panic room in which their faith remains solidly secure.
Conversely, the Nietzschean dream is alive and well, and the heirs of Bertrand Russell and Auguste Comte continue to beat their drums, and yet Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert still make it to the best seller lists and the magic of Tolkien still captivates wide audiences.
He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to
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While stark fundamentalisms — either religious or secular — get all the press, what should interest us are these fugitive expressions of doubt and longing, faith and questioning. These lived expressions of “cross-pressure” are at the heart of the secular.
Wallace’s corpus — both fiction and nonfiction — documents a world of almost suffocating immanence, a flattened human universe where the escapes are boredom and distraction, not ecstasy and rapture.18
His characters are anything but satisfied with what late modern capitalism has to offer, and so we see regular glimpses of what Taylor calls the “nova effect” — new modes of being that try to forge a way through, even out of, the cross-pressured situation where immanence seems ready to implode upon itself.
He sees and praises the beauty of the devout, and wants to believe, but the ghosts of self-awareness won’t let him go (they are Legion), “the real truth here being how quickly I went from being someone who was there because he wanted to wake up and stop being a fraud to being somebody who was so anxious to impress the congregation with how devoted and active I was.”22
The hints of this become almost shouts in a posthumously published story, “All That.” In it, a precocious young boy is fascinated by the fictive “magic” of a toy cement truck — a magic concocted merely by his parents saying so. In a Santa Claus–like fib, the parents tell the boy that the cement truck’s mixer moves, but only when he’s not looking. Impossible to confirm (since seeing it would stop it), the grown-up narrator looking back on this episode identifies the longing: “As an adult, I realize that the reason I spent so much time trying to ‘catch’ the drum rotating was that I wanted to
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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.”
It is my sense that more of us live in worlds like those portrayed by David Foster Wallace than those mapped by either new atheists or religious fundamentalists. It is this sort of contested, cross-pressured, haunted world that is “secular” — not a world sanitized of faith and transcendence, flattened to the empirical.
And I hope this book will be a guide to the guide — a brief, crisp overview that will serve as an invitation to unfold the larger, more detailed map.
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.
