How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

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.

Taylor’s question puts him on the terrain of “secularization theory” — a long-held thesis that hypothesized that religious belief would decrease as modernity progressed. Such prognostication has not proven to be true, so most debates about secularization have been wrangling about empirical data regarding rates of religious belief, etc.

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

Similarly, secularists, who demand the decontamination of the public sphere as an areligious zone, tend to be a bit unreflective about the epistemic questions that attend their own beliefs.

So battles over “the secular” are usually flummoxed by the equivocal nature of the terms.

In classical or medieval accounts, the “secular” amounted to something like “the temporal” — the realm of “earthly”33 politics or of “mundane” vocations. This is the “secular” of the purported sacred/secular divide. The priest, for instance, pursues a “sacred” vocation, while the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker are engaged in “secular” pursuits.34 Following Taylor, let’s call this secular1 (Secular Age, pp. 1-2).

In modernity, particularly in the wake of the Enlightenment, “secular” begins to refer to a nonsectarian, neutral, and areligious space or standpoint. The public square is “secular” insofar as it is (allegedly) nonreligious; schools are “secular” when they are no longer “parochial” — hence “public” schools are thought to be “secular” schools. Similarly, in the late twentieth century people will describe themselves as “secular,” meaning they have no religious affiliation and hold no “religious” beliefs. We’ll refer to this as secular2 (pp. 2-3).

Secularism is always secularism2.35

People who self-identify as “secular” are usually identifying as areligious.

But Taylor helpfully articulates a third sense of the secular (secular3) — and it is this notion that should be heard in his title: A Secular Age. A society is secular3 insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested).

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

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

He offers at least a couple of reasons. First, he needs to offer a story to counter the “subtraction stories” of secularization theory, those tales of enlightenment and progress and maturation that see the emergence of modernity and “the secular” as shucking the detritus of belief and superstition.

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.

This means that, despite the prosaic verbosity and intellectual detours of the text, one needs to read A Secular Age almost like a novel — or at least absorb it as a story.

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.

We need to attend to the background of what Jeffrey Stout calls our “dialectical location,”43 the concrete particulars that make us “us,” that got us to where we are.44 This is a bit like realizing that forging a relationship with a significant other requires getting her or his back story; that there is a family history that is embedded in your partner, and understanding the partner requires understanding that story if the relationship is going to move forward.

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 some part of the answer to Taylor’s overarching question about how this changed is that “these three features have vanished.” Not until these obstacles were removed could something like exclusive humanism emerge.

Because we’re not really talking about what people think; it’s more a matter of the difference between what we take for granted — what we don’t give a second thought — and what people of that age took for granted.

But 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.”

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), ...

only once meaning is located in minds can we worry that someone or something could completely dupe us about the meaning of the world by manipulating our brains. It is the modern social imaginary that makes it possible for us to imagine The Matrix.

In this premodern, enchanted universe, it was also assumed that power resided in things, which is precisely why things like relics or the Host could be invested with spiritual power.

the enchanted world, the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn” (p. 32). There is a kind of blurring of boundaries so that it is not only personal agents that have causal power (p. 35). Things can do stuff.

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).

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 only were things invested with significance in the premodern imaginary, but the social bond itself was enchanted, sacred. “Living in the enchanted, porous world of our ancestors was inherently living socially” (p. 42).

As a result, a premium is placed on consensus, and “turning ‘heretic’ ” is “not just a personal matter.”

“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.

Individual disbelief is not a private option we can grant to heretics to pursue on weekends; to the contrary, disb...

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.”

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.

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.

Taylor’s most extensive example is Carnival (we get dimmed-down, distorted versions of this in Mardi Gras or Halloween). Carnival is a sanctioned way to blow off the steam that builds up from the pressure of living under the requirements of eternity.

Ideally, the demands and expectations of virtue are not compromised or relaxed or dismissed as untenable — they are just periodically suspended.

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.

“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 calendars — only the tick-tock of chronos, and the self-imposed burdens of our “projects.”

While there are many “causes” for the shift just documented, Taylor appeals to something like a meta-cause — or perhaps better, an umbrella name for these multiple causes: “Reform” (with a capital R). This rubric names a range of movements already under way in the late medieval period, and so shouldn’t be reduced to the Protestant Reformation.

What had been intended as a division of labor between religious and lay vocations had taken on this hierarchical ordering and become a “two-tiered religion” (p. 63), a “multi-speed system” (p. 66) with monks and clergy on a fast track, looking disdainfully at the domestic slowpokes mired in “the things of this world” (even though their labor and profit sustained the monasteries and abbeys).

And Taylor suggests we won’t understand 1968 — or 2018 — without some chronological archaeology that takes us back to 1518.

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.

The result is that “for the ordinary householder” this will “require something paradoxical: living in all the practices and institutions of [‘this-worldly’] flourishing, but at the same time not fully in them. Being in them but not of them;

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.

By railing against vice and “crank[ing] up the terrifying visions of damnation,” Protestant preachers effectively prepared “the desertion of a goodly part of their flock to humanism” (p. 75).9

It is the (relatively immaterial) spoken Word of God and not magical things like the Host that is the means of grace.10

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).