How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

It was this “rage for order,” Taylor suggests, that unwittingly contributed to the disenchantment of the world:

In contrast, highlighting the complexity of causes and the contingency of different developments, Taylor offers a “zigzag account” that recognizes a contingent sort of pinball effect.

Our anachronistic hindsight tends to impose a secularist trajectory on earlier shifts whereas, in fact, they might have been “pointed” in a very different direction.

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).

“But this seemed to some thinkers an unacceptable attempt to limit God’s sovereignty. God must always remain free to determine what is good.” So if one were going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.” And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are named (nom-ed) (p. 97).

The result is a monster: a Christianized neo-Stoicism that appends a deity to Stoic emphases on action and control. “Neo-Stoicism is the zig to which Deism will be the zag” (p. 117).

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).

We will encounter these themes again when he introduces the notion of “excarnation” as an effect of Reform.

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). So what made that possible? How did we get here? Well, it turns out that this was made possible by theological shifts associated with movements of Reform. Once we learned to distinguish transcendent from immanent, “it eventually became possible to see the immediate surroundings of our lives as existing on this ‘natural’ plane, however much we might believe that they indicated something beyond” (p. 143).

This disembedded, buffered, individualist view of the self seeps into our social imaginary — into the very way that we imagine the world, well before we ever think reflectively about it. We absorb it with our mother’s milk, so to speak, to the extent that it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world otherwise: “once we are well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one” (p. 168).

We can’t tolerate living in a world without meaning. So if the transcendence that previously gave significance to the world is lost, we need a new account of meaning — a new “imaginary” that enables us to imagine a meaningful life within this now self-sufficient universe of gas and fire. That “replacement” imaginary is what Taylor calls “exclusive humanism,”

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.

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.’

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.

Like the roof on Toronto’s SkyDome, the heavens are beginning to close. But we barely notice, because our new focus on this plane had already moved the transcendent to our peripheral vision at best. We’re so taken with the play on this field, we don’t lament the loss of the stars overhead.

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.

Moreover, there didn’t seem to be any essential place for the worship of God, other than through the cultivation of reason and constancy.” What we see, then, is the “relegation of worship as ultimately unnecessary and irrelevant” (p. 117). This is the scaled-down religion that will be rejected “by Wesley from one direction, and later secular humanists from the other” (p. 226).

And it is precisely in this context, when we adopt a “disengaged stance,” that the project of theodicy ramps up; thinking we’re positioned to see everything, we now expect an answer to whatever puzzles us, including the problem of evil. Nothing should be inscrutable.

Here’s where Taylor’s “irony” comes into play: What’s left of/for God after this deistic shift? Well, “God remains the Creator, and hence our benefactor . . . but this Providence remains exclusively general: particular providences, and miracles, are out” (p. 233).

The “modern moral order,” as Taylor often calls it, which amounts to an ordering of society for mutual benefit (“economy”), will come to reflect the generic nature of this religion.

What we have, in other words, is the making of a “civil religion,” rooted in a “natural” religion, which can allegedly transcend denominational strife. (Welcome to America!) The ultimate and transcendent are retained but marginalized and made increasingly irrelevant.

What emerges from this is what Taylor describes as “polite society,” a new mode of self-sufficient sociality that becomes an end in itself.

What becomes increasingly distasteful (the word is chosen advisedly) is the notion of God’s agency, and hence the personhood of God.

Salvation is only effected by, one might say, our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion, viz., the church” (pp. 278-79). To depersonalize God is to deny the importance of communion and the community of communion that is the church, home to that meal that is called “Communion.”

So it is not surprising, then, that the “religion” of this impersonal order is also de-Communion-ed, de-ritualized, and disembodied. Taylor helpfully describes this as a process of excarnation.

Taylor’s earlier criticism of Protestant “disenchantment” finds a corollary in this loss of communion, and hence the loss of the Eucharist as central to the practice of Christian worship. Could we imagine a Protestantism that has room for both Word and Table — for that “faith that comes by hearing” and communion with the triune God? One might suggest that this is just the Protestantism found in John Calvin, despite the flattened spirituality of his professed heirs.

It turns out it’s not so hard to see ourselves four hundred years ago; it’s as if we’re looking at childhood photos of our contemporary culture.

What this means, of course, is that Taylor has now brought us to a secular3 age — an age in which the plausibility structures have changed, the conditions of belief have shifted, and theistic belief is not only displaced from being the default, it is positively contested.

Taylor doesn’t buy it. On his account, our secular age is haunted, and always has been.

But almost as soon as unbelief becomes an option, unbelievers begin to have doubts — which is to say, they begin to wonder if there isn’t something “more.”

The outcome of the turn documented in part 2 is what Taylor calls the “nova effect.” The astronomical metaphor indicates an explosion of options for finding (or creating) “significance.”

This kind of multiplicity of faiths has little effect as long as it is neutralized by the sense that being like them is not really an option for me.

Ironically, it is the overwhelming homogeneity of our lives in modernity that makes our faith stances all that more strange and contested: “Homogeneity and instability work together to bring the fragilizing effect of pluralism to a maximum” (p. 304).

Taylor’s analysis of this point is deeply existential. As he puts it, while the world is disenchanted for “us moderns,” we nonetheless also experience a sense of loss and malaise in the wake of such disenchantment (p. 302). As I noted in the introduction, I think one can feel such cross-pressures in the fiction of David Foster Wallace. One might feel something similar in the poetry of Mary Oliver — whose popularity probably owes less to the intrinsic merit of her poetry and more to her ability to give voice to this feeling of cross-pressure shared by so many.

It is the intensity of these cross-pressures that causes the explosion, the nova effect, which is effectively an explosion of all sorts of “third ways.”

Our insulation breeds a sense of cosmic isolation. We might have underestimated the ability of disenchantment to sustain significance. But now there’s no going back.

“We moderns” are not entirely comfortable with modernity. These negative reactions include Romanticism and Pietism, which contribute to some of the options exploding out of the cross-pressured situation. In other words, Romanticism and Pietism are part of the nova effect.

In other words, we now have the rise of the evidential argument from evil: if God is all-good and all-powerful, then there shouldn’t be evil. But there is evil. Therefore, this God must not exist. This sort of skeptical argument could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence:

Prior to this stance, the conditions would have yielded lament, not theodicy: “If one is in a profoundly believing/practicing way of life, then this hanging in to trust in God may seem the obvious way, and is made easier by the fact that everyone is with you in this” (p. 306).

is this lack, loss, and emptiness that — in and by the absence of transcendence — press on the immanence of exclusive humanism, yielding what Taylor calls “the malaises of immanence” (p. 309). The new epistemic expectation that comes with enclosure in immanence — namely, that whatever is within the sphere of immanence should be understandable to us — means we expect an answer to such matters.

“There is a kind of peace in being on my/our (human) own, in solidarity against the blind universe which wrought this horror.” But this is a possibility “opened by the modern sense of immanent order” (p. 306).

“There is a generalized sense in our culture,” he claims, “that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost.”5 Recall Julian Barnes’s plaintive quip: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”

This “felt flatness” can manifest itself in different ways at different times. For example, it can be felt with particular force in rites of passage in life: birth, marriage, death.

On the one hand, Rieff is ruthlessly “rational” about the experience; even if his mother was tempted by faiths of various sorts, Rieff won’t take any “consolation in unreason.”7 But on the other hand, his questions attest to some sort of cross-pressure. “Am I to ascribe some special meaning to the intensity of her final years, as if somehow she had a premonition that her time was ending?” he asks. “Or is all of this just that vain, irrational human wish to ascribe meaning when no meaning is really on offer?”8 It’s not that he’s tempted by faith or toying with reenchantment; it’s that ruthless disenchantment seems more than we can bear.

It’s a way to deal with the pressure of the loss. Recall the shape of Taylor’s account here: the feeling of loss exerts its own kind of pressure, the strange pressure of an absence. And if that can be felt in the momentous, it can also be felt in the mundane. Indeed, “this can be where it most hurts,” he concedes: “some people feel a terrible flatness in the everyday, and this experience has been identified particularly with commercial, industrial, or consumer society. They feel emptiness of the repeated, accelerating cycle of desire and fulfillment, in consumer culture; the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb”

Note his appeal to a sense: this is an analysis you’ll find convincing if his phenomenology has just named something that’s been haunting you. If not, then Taylor doesn’t have any “proof” to offer you.12

Now, as he rightly notes, “it doesn’t follow that the only cure for [it] is a return to transcendence” (p. 309). The dissatisfaction and emptiness can propel a return to transcendence. But often — and perhaps more often than not now? — the “cure” to this nagging pressure of absence is sought within immanence, and it is this quest that generates the nova effect, looking for love/meaning/significance/quasi “transcendence” within the immanent order.

In other words, there has now been a fundamental shift in how people imagine nature, their environment, and our cosmic context.

What I am talking about is the way the universe is spontaneously imagined, and therefore experienced” (p. 325).