How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Walker Percy, for example, welcomed the disestablishment of Christendom. Writing to his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, Percy mused that “Christendom no longer can or even should call the tune. If Christians believe in the kingdom, that’s their business, but they should realize that the world has by and large turned away. There is no longer such a thing as Christendom, and as Kierkegaard said, maybe it’s just as well.”13 Twenty years later he would repeat the same theme, effectively praising “the secular” as described by Taylor: “the present age,” he surmised, “is better than Christendom. In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.”