How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

What’s the result of such a shift? Well, even believers end up defending a theistic universe rather than the biblical cosmos.

What is unique in Taylor’s story is the significance he accords to both the Renaissance and Romanticism. Philosophical accounts of modernity — and hence our present (or “postmodernity”) — tend to have an epistemological fixation that seizes upon the Enlightenment as the center of the story.18 But Taylor’s account is much more nuanced, recognizing early and important shifts in the Renaissance.

Taylor describes this as yet another “disembedding” by which art now begins to emerge as an autonomous entity and institution. In earlier societies, the aesthetic was embroiled with the religious and the political — what we look back on as ancient “art objects” were, in fact and function, liturgical instruments, etc. What we see in modernity, however, is a shift whereby the aesthetic aspect is distilled and disclosed for its own sake and as the object of interest. And from this emerges “art” as a cultural phenomenon and an autonomous reality (p. 355). So now we go to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor (a liturgical work whose “home,” as it were, is in worship) in a concert hall to “appreciate” it as a work of art disembedded from that liturgical home.

Well, these “subtler languages operating in the ‘absolute’ mode can offer a place to go for modern unbelief”; more specifically, they provide an outlet and breathing room for those who feel cross-pressured precisely by the Romantic critique of the deism and anthropocentric shifts that have flattened the world, leaving no room for mystery. For those who can’t tolerate such ruthless flattening of instrumental reason (and Taylor thinks our better nature will never tolerate that), this emergence of the arts provides another venue for a kind of immanent mystery, an anthropologized mystery within.

And so we get the new sacred spaces of modernity: the concert hall as temple; the museum as chapel; tourism as the new pilgrimage (p. 360).

On the one hand, one might simply claim that we’re still haunted because we’re still too close to the time when we used to believe in ghosts; on the other hand (and one gets the sense this is Taylor’s position), we might be haunted because, well, there’s a Ghost there. (To paraphrase Kurt Cobain: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.)

But you can also understand how, on the retelling, the convert to unbelief will want to give the impression that it was the scientific evidence that was doing the work. Converts to unbelief always tell subtraction stories.

Taylor suggests that those who convert to unbelief “because of science” are less convinced by data and more moved by the form of the story that science tells and the self-image that comes with it (rationality = maturity).

If Taylor is right, it seems to suggest that the Christian response to such converts to unbelief is not to have an argument about the data or “evidences” but rather to offer an alternative story that offers a more robust, complex understanding of the Christian faith.

At the same time, there can be something exhilarating in this loss of purpose and teleology, because if nothing matters, and we have the courage to face this, then we have a kind of Epicurean invulnerability. While such a universe might have nothing to offer us by way of comfort, it’s also true that “in such a universe, nothing is demanded of us” (p. 367).

We have arrived at a new place in human history: “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respect, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless” (p. 376).

Just as secularity cannot be adequately explained by a subtraction story, neither can it be accounted for with a diffusion story — as if secularization was just the trickle-down effect of elite pluralism making its way to the masses (p. 424).

Furthermore, what’s the point of comparison? If secularization theory claims a decline in religious participation, “what is the past we are comparing ourselves with? Even in ages of faith, everybody wasn’t really devout.”

Rather, Taylor remains confident that there can be dialogue and even persuasion across “unthoughts.” Though he comes at secularity from a different unthought than those who espouse secularization2 theory, “that doesn’t mean that we have simply a stand-off here, where we make declarations to each other from out of our respective ultimate premises.

Taylor crystallizes this with a kind of case study: one can see these different tempers manifest in what you think about Francis of Assisi, “with his renunciation of his potential life as a merchant, his austerities, his stigmata”: “One can be deeply moved by this call to go beyond flourishing”; or “one can see him as a paradigm exemplar of what Hume calls ‘the monkish virtues,’ a practitioner of senseless self-denial and a threat to civil mutuality” (p. 431). Tell me what you think of Saint Francis, Taylor suggests, and I’ll tell you what your “unthought” is.

It is, Taylor suggests, “an outlook which holds that religion must decline either (a) because it is false, and science shows this to be so; or (b) because it is increasingly irrelevant now that we can cure ringworm by drenches [the ‘artificial-fertilizers-make-atheists’ argument]; or (c) because religion is based on authority, and modern societies give an increasingly important place to individual autonomy; or some combination of the above” (pp. 428-29).

If this is your “unthought,” you’ll tend to look at Saint Francis with rather pitiful eyes: that poor, benighted, misguided, but sincere soul (er, brain).

Second, Taylor does not reduce religion to mere belief in supernatural entities. Instead, he emphasizes that a “transformation perspective” is essential to religion — “the perspective of a transformation of human beings which takes them beyond or outside of whatever is normally understood as human flourishing” (p.

So religion isn’t just about a set of propositional beliefs regarding certain kinds of supernatural entities; religion isn’t merely an epistemology and a metaphysics. It is more fundamentally about a way of life — and a “religious” way of life, on Taylor’s account, is one that calls us to more than the merely worldly, more than just “human flourishing.”

It is this new placement of religion that is constitutive of our “secular age.”6 It’s not just that belief in supernatural entities becomes implausible; it’s that pursuing a way of life that values something beyond human flourishing becomes unimaginable.

But “religion of this kind is uniquely vulnerable to the defection of élites, since they are often in a position severely to restrict, if not put an end altogether to the central collective rituals” (p. 441). The disruptive effect of the Reformation in certain regions, for example, was due in no small part to the ability of the Reformers to convince princes.

Taylor suggests that the Age of Mobilization is roughly 1800-1960 (p. 471).7

This contemporary social imaginary is crystallized in terms of authenticity. So the primary — yea, only — value in such a world is choice: “bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain” (p. 478). And tolerance is the last remaining virtue: “the sin which is not tolerated is intolerance” (p. 484).

This breeds a new kind of self-consciousness: “My loud remarks and gestures are overtly addressed only to my immediate companions, my family group is sedately walking, engaged in our own Sunday outing, but all the time we are aware of this common space that we are building, in which the messages that cross take their meaning” (p. 482). In other words, we all behave now like thirteen-year-old girls.9

And this language is the object of constant attempted manipulation by large corporations” (p. 483). Indeed, this construction of a consumer identity — which has to feel like it’s chosen (consider the illusion of nonconformity in the case of the suburban skater kid whose mom buys him the $150 board blazoned with “anarchy” symbols) — trumps other identities, especially collective identities like citizenship or religious affiliation.10

We might describe this as the “constructive” part of his project, but it’s also where Taylor goes on offense, taking on the smug confidence of “secularist spin” — not in an apologetic mode of thereby smugly and confidently “proving” Christianity to be true, but instead undercutting the confidence of the secularist “take” on the world, showing it to be a take, a construal, a reading.

It is in this context that Taylor coins what will be a crucial concept going forward: the immanent frame. This metaphorical concept — alluding to a “frame” that both boxes in and boxes out, encloses and focuses — is meant to capture the world we now inhabit in our secular age:

We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence.

So the question isn’t whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but how. Some inhabit it as a closed frame with a brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open frame with skylights open to transcendence.

And then a more meta-question: Why do some not recognize that their construal of the frame as open or closed is just that — a construal, a “take” on things? In particular, why do secularists so confidently assume that this is just “the way things are” — the “obvious” and only thing to conclude?

However, the problem is that this question is not usually put to us in just this way, and we don’t often articulate a “position” on these matters. This is because, “not only is the immanent frame itself not usually, or even mainly a set of beliefs which we entertain about our predicament, however it may have started out; rather [the immanent frame] is the sensed context in which we develop our beliefs.”

And here Taylor works with another important distinction: we can either inhabit the immanent frame as a “Jamesian open space”3 where we recognize the contestability of our take on things, and even feel the pull and tug and cross-pressure of the alternative; or we’ll fail to recognize that ours is a “take” and instead settle for “spin” — an overconfident “picture” within which we can’t imagine it being otherwise, and thus smugly dismiss those who disagree.

Taylor is most interested in considering (and contesting) the “spin of closure which is hegemonic in the Academy” (p. 549). This is the spin that is dominant amongst intellectuals and elites who would actually see the “open” take on the immanent frame as “spin” and see their own “closed” take as just the way things are. For these secular “fundamentalists,” we might say, to construe the immanent frame as closed is to just see it as it really is, whereas construing it as “open” is a mode of wishful thinking.

But again Taylor’s more affective epistemology (or better, hermeneutics) points out that our “take” is not something reasoned to as much as it is something we reason from.

It is something in the nature of a hunch” or what we might call “anticipatory confidence” (p. 550).

One can imagine what sort of account of this would be generated by closed spin — just consider Christopher Hitchens’s excoriating book on Mother Teresa.6 But interestingly, that’s not what we get in the HBO documentary. Indeed, the documentary is a refreshing example of a closed take. The point of view is respectfully puzzled, admiringly incredulous.