Intellectual history Archives

Cover image of "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor

A Secular Age, Charles Taylor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (ISBN: 9780674026766), 2007.

Summary: How Western society moved from a shared belief in God to a secular age in which belief was one option of many.

Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, has become a primary source of sorts for anyone trying to understand our present time. On a regular basis, I come across writers invoking “disenchantment, “social imaginaries,” “the buffered self,” and “the immanent frame.” All of these concepts come out of Taylor.

Like many primary sources, reading Charles Taylor is daunting for most of us. There are 776 pages of dense text that introduce us not only to a breadth of intellectual and cultural history spanning 500 years. We also encounter a truly erudite mind, who quotes literature in several European languages (usually offering translations and weaves a number of people, events and schools of thought in an analysis that seeks to answer one question: how did we move from a world, indeed a cosmos, of shared belief in God to a secular age where belief in God was merely one option of many?

I’ll be honest. I don’t have the learning to offer a detailed analysis of this book. What I will try to do is offer a summary of the major contours of his argument. Following this, I will comment on what I thought the most significant contributions of the book. I’ll note a few questions I have. And I’ll make several suggestions for intrepid souls who want to tackle this book.

Summary

Charles Taylor makes the case that secularization is not a matter of subtracting religion from society. Rather, he traces the beginnings to the Reformation that removed hierarchy, elevating the individual. With this comes the disciplinary society, using practices to elevate the spiritual and moral life of all. In time, discipline was separated from devotion to God to stand on its own as a form of incipient humanism. Belief in God wasn’t jettisoned but relegated to a providential Deism. In turn, enlightenment science reduced a cosmos filled with God’s grandeur to an impersonal mechanism and this way of thinking spread to different aspects of society. A shift occurred from the “porous self” exposed to the workings of God and the cosmos to the “buffered self” insulated from such supernatural forces.

These developments created the conditions for what Taylor calls “the nova effect,” an explosion of different ways of believing (or not believing). They range from a theistic or deistic humanism, to a humanism without God, embracing moral virtues. Nietzsche and his followers rejected the quest for truth and morality as camouflages for the will to power. For others, the disconnect of the material world from the supernatural led to the embrace of materialist and atheist belief.

This hardly led to the eradication of belief in God. Taylor describes the era from 1800 to 1960 as “The Age of Mobilization” where movements like Catholic Action in France and Methodists and revivalists in England and North America succeeded in recruiting large numbers of people. Taylor believes that the cultural revolution of the 1960’s introduced an “Age of Authenticity” introducing a variety of religious experiences, designer belief, and the celebration of bodily pleasure.

Having lost connection with the transcendent, we live in the immanent frame, and yet we struggle to find a basis in it for some of our deepest longings, and to deal with the ultimate reality of death. We live amid cross pressures and dilemmas, including the troubling presence of human violence. He concludes the work with narratives of those who believe, often out of some sense of the transcendent. He has strong words to say about the church’s rediscovery of an incarnational life and connects this to an re-consideration of the erotic and its connection to divine love.

Significant Insights

Perhaps the most significant insight is that secularization does not mean the subtraction of religion from our view of the world. Instead, belief in God and Christianity, once shared by all, becomes one of many options.

Second, science isn’t the enemy, according to Taylor. The Reformation created the milieu leading to the eclipse of the transcendent. It’s fascinating that Taylor doesn’t think much of the atheist scientists who challenge belief.

He helps us see how radically our world has shifted, including the eclipse of the supernatural and the rise of the autonomous self.

He shows the inadequacy of humanism to address many of our deepest questions and the challenge of Nietzsche as an alternative that seems to be attractive to many embracing authoritarian leaders in our day.

Questions

While we cannot return to pre-modern times, can believing people find a way to live in a supernatural, transcendent frame? It seems that the church, pre-Christendom, and perhaps in parts of the world outside the West, faced or faces the same conditions.

This raises the question of the nearly exclusive focus on the West. What might be learned from other societies and cultures? By the same token, it could be argued that secularization has become a global phenomenon.

His comments on incarnation versus excarnation and sexuality come at the very end. I would love to know if he has developed these further.

Reading Taylor

For most of us, Taylor is a tough read. I read most books in about a week. It took me nearly three months to read A Secular Age. At the suggestion of my reading buddy, I reduced my pace to 10 pages of a day, which is about all I felt I could absorb. I wish I had kept some notes along the way, which would have made tracking Taylor’s thought easier.

Read this with a reading buddy or group. It helped me keep going and we helped each other understand Taylor’s dense prose. I had this book for years, collecting dust. I wouldn’t have finished it without my friend.

It also helps to read this along with a commentary. Several, including my reading buddy recommended, James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.

This seems to be one of those books where one reading isn’t enough. Yet, I find myself wondering if I want to set aside that much time. Ah…time will tell.

Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, Matthew Stewart. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014.

Summary: An argument that the key ideas at the foundations of our country were not Christian but rather traceable back to Lucretius and to European thinkers, the foremost of whom was Spinoza, whose ideas were shaped by Enlightenment reason resulting more in a materialist atheism or nature pantheism/deism.

There is an ongoing argument surrounding American beginnings as to whether these were Christian or more attributable to a kind of vague deism. While I as a Christian would love to believe it was the former, when I read the writings of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and other founders, I find that while they recognize the place and importance of Christian churches, they are not Christian in any orthodox sense in the personal beliefs that shaped the thinking behind our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (which omits even the mention of “God”).

Matthew Stewart explores the intellectual genealogy of the founders, but does so in an unusual fashion. He starts out with a book, The Oracles of Reason, written by Ethan Allen, of Green Mountain Boys and Fort Ticonderoga fame. This inelegantly written book conveys Allen’s repugnance of the idea of the Christian deity, argues for a god of nature, the place of reason (“self evident truths”) and a state free of control by the church. Where did Allen get these ideas, as an uneducated man? From Dr. Thomas Young, who exists around the edges of the more famous founders. Stewart will weave these two characters throughout the narrative.

What I think Stewart is trying to demonstrate is how widely held these ideas, often classed under deism, but in fact were closer to pantheism (“all is god”) or even outright atheism. He then follows back the lineage of these ideas to Lucretius, and Epicurean philosophy, which rather than being hedonistic, actually talked about the idea of living well, or moderately. Stewart follows these ideas into Europe to Benedict de Spinoza, Hobbes, and John Locke, who may clothe them at times in Christian language, but actually lays the groundwork for a view of reality that is sees God and Nature as synonymous (hence making this either pantheism, or outright atheism if nature is viewed simply as matter). Truth is “self-evident” in that what we think has an existence of its own that precedes all else. As with Lucretius, the pursuit of happiness is not wild pleasure-seeking but virtuous living. This leads to an “empire of reason,” a rational rule of law that recognizes the equality of all, unalienable rights, government by the consent of the governed, the right to abolish governments that do not serve these ends and to institute new ones.

The concluding chapter is titled “The Religion of Freedom”. It explores the fact that the founders, while protecting the free exercise of religious faith, believing that popular religion served a certain good in inculcating morals necessary for a good society, ultimately envisioned a government free of religion’s control, where the individual could believe what he or she wants without constraint. Stewart argues that many of the founders were free-thinkers who might be classified as atheists today. And while religion went through a resurgence, and continues to play an important role, by and large it conforms to liberal ideals and only causes problems when it is not content to exist in a very privatized form.

One gets the sense in reading Stewart that he thinks that this is not only the truest account of the genealogy of ideas that formed our beginnings as a nation, but that this is as it ought to be, and that the continued existence of religion is an annoying hindrance. He writes,

“The main thing we learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution” (p. 431).

What bothers me in Stewart’s work is not the accuracy of the case he makes for the ideas that undergird our republic, but rather the selective treatment of Christian faith that presents a caricature featuring its most invidious expressions. Little attention, for example, is given to the educational enterprise, an extension of the churches, that brought together such a learned generation. No attention is given to another founder, Reverend John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), who thoughtfully sought to integrate Christian ethics and enlightenment thought, serving in the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1782. It seems to me that Stewart’s intent is to marshal his evidence, as have some of our popular militant atheists, to make us want to eradicate “supernatural religion” (and one wonders if this also includes those who embrace it).

Likewise, for all it vaunting of reason and virtue, the tacit admission of the power of religious faith to foster morals, and public order suggests a certain weakness in this “empire of reason.” Might a more constructive course be one that admits both the distinctive contribution of founders who articulated a vision of a public square not dominated by a single faith, but open to all, and the vibrant, but messy competing ideologies that seek to shape the minds, hearts, and moral life of our people that allows a thing rare in the annals of human history–freedom of conscience?