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My review of Charles Taylor’s book,

“A Secular Age”
By Sally Morem

[I pulled the following quotes from Wilfred M. McClay’s review of A

Secular Age by Charles Taylor from First Things, a very literate
monthly magazine, edited by Father John Neuhaus.]

Charles Taylor addresses questions of religion and politics that

struck me as making an important point about secularism, one
that I realized needed to be made, especially after reading a
number of political columns by religious conservatives
depicting America as a soulless pit of amoral materialism going
to hell in a hand basket because we Americans have failed to
hold tight to our religious convictions and have succumbed to
secular temptations. (FYI, author Taylor is a Canadian
Catholic philosopher with no ideological axes to grind):

“Taylor eventually takes on all these matters but does so

obliquely, choosing to begin with a deceptively simple question:
“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” As he
works his way through the book, the query becomes more
specific: “Why is it so hard to believe in God in the modern
West,” he asks, “while in 1500 it was virtually impossible not
to?”

The phrasing of these questions is a clue to what Taylor is after.

‘A Secular Age’ is not primarily interested in examining what
might be called political or legal secularism: the role of laïcité in
France, for instance, or the constitutional separation of church
and state in America. Neither is it much concerned with what
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might be called philosophical or theological secularism, the

gradual recession of religious practices and beliefs in modern
countries.

Instead, Taylor invites us to consider a third meaning of

secularism, based on the texture of the world as we actually
experience it. This third way derives from the conditions under
which we moderns approach the problem of belief and unbelief.
A society is secular, he explains, when it arrives at a settled moral
order in which belief in God is no longer regarded as something
automatic, axiomatic, and socially obligatory. Instead it is
regarded as a choice that one makes for oneself—something
freely chosen in a way that would have been unthinkable in an
earlier time.”

The idea that we’ve achieved a culture where “belief in God is

no longer regarded as something automatic, axiomatic, or
socially obligatory” is strikingly important. For thousands of
years, ever since the rise of monotheism, the default
assumption was belief in the existence of one particular god.
People were shocked (shocked!) by the expression of the least
doubt by any relative or neighbor. How to explain this massive
change in what was once considered acceptable thought and
the growing tolerance of beliefs that millions of Europeans had
once believed went beyond the pale? The answering of that
question is what Taylor’s book is all about.

“Taylor finds profoundly inadequate the standard view that

secularism was a direct and inevitable consequence of the rise of
modern science—rejecting, as he does, all efforts to account for
modernity as a “subtraction story,” a simple liberation from
prior confinements and a sloughing off of preexisting
superstitions and illusions.
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Instead, Taylor argues, the secularity of our world should be

seen as “the fruit of new invention”—a reconfiguration of
consciousness and a product of our own choices. As he puts it,
‘The story of a rejection of the old, unchanging religion, which
uncovers and releases the perennial human, is wrong on both
counts. Reinvention and innovation exist on both sides, and
continuing mutual influence links them.’”

I partially disagree with Taylor here. I believe secularism is

literally inconceivable without the rise of modern science—and
its Siamese Twin, modern technology. Not because they
“subtracted,” but because they offered an alternate story of
Life, the Universe, and Everything to that presented to us by
the ancient mythos of the Near and Far East.

And naturally, I also partially agree with Taylor. Secularism is

indeed “the fruit of new invention,” again, quite literally. Our
scientists “reinvented the universe” (see James Burke’s “The
Day the Universe Changed”) while our inventers reinvented
our surroundings, our tools, our work and our leisure.
Secularism is a refitting of our mental models of the universe,
making them more supple, more comprehensive, and more
accurate, in that they explain physical processes that
traditional religions merely told “just so” stories about over the
centuries, not to mention explaining processes humans never
had access to before. It was modern science and technology
that opened our senses to the very fast, the very slow, the very
huge and the very tiny events that operate in our universe and
make it function.

“The rise of science and the “disenchantment of the world”

were part, but only a part, of this process. Taylor also emphasizes
a variety of other factors: the steady decline of popular piety and
other communal and ritual aspects of religion, for instance, and
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the growth of a reform-minded elite religious culture, which

sought to pare away such irrational embarrassments, systematize
theology, and focus greater attention on moral self-improvement.

The effect was to lessen Christianity’s communitarian dimension

and accentuate its individual dimension. The Protestant
Reformation was perhaps the most salient expression of that
tendency, but in many ways it was less a cause than an effect of
forces much older and more pervasive. “Disenchantment,
Reform, and personal religion went together,” asserts Taylor.
“Just as a church was most perfect when each of its members
adhered to it on their own individual responsibility”—a tendency
most notable in places like colonial New England—‘so society
itself comes to be reconceived as made up of individuals.’”

When great changes happen over a comparatively short time in

history, one can be sure that there are a number of factors
involved, bouncing off of one another, entwining, deflecting,
catalyzing one another in bewildering ways. And so we should
pay attention to secularizing trends during the Enlightenment
in the growth of classical liberal political philosophy and
economics, in the development of treatments of human
concerns in the arts and architecture (contrasting with the
traditional artist’s concentration on depictions of the Divine),
and in the emergence of secular themes in literature
(Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne), as well as in the
manifestly secular impulses borne by science and technology.

And don’t forget religion itself as we consider the many

recipients of the revolutionary impact of science and
technology. Can anyone really imagine Martin Luther and his
Protestant movement succeeding without the invention and
deployment of numerous printing presses throughout 16th
century Europe? Hardly. Certainly, the rapidly rising literacy
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rate was at least partially the result of much more readily

available reading material. And certainly, the chance to
actually read a Bible fired the imaginations of those who had
serious questions about the worldly ways of the Catholic
hierarchy and wished to do something about it.

The same technology that permitted the printing of much

cheaper Bibles, and to distribute them to ardently religious
tradesmen and farmers who could never hope to own a Bible
before, also stoked the fire of secularism by feeding fuel back
into the scientific revolution. With the explosive growth of the
printing of professional journals in every scientific field
imaginable, scientific discovery accelerated across Europe…
which fed back into the cultural and technological
infrastructure of the West…which in turn fed back into
science…a virtuous cycle that spins faster and faster as we
move deeper into the 21st century…

…And that same revolutionary growth in technology and

literacy primed the pump of political revolution. To put the
overall point bluntly: The “invention” of the infant United
States of America was midwifed by secularism in every single
facet of life highlighted by Taylor. It is inconceivable that our
Democratic Republic could possibly have come into being in a
West ruled exclusively by orthodox Christianity.

The historic antecedents of America render the assertion that

secularism is destroying our Great Republic wholly
nonsensical. How could the womb of our creativity doom us?
Religious critics of our Secular Age fail to grasp America’s
strange irony: A mostly religious people erected a secular
society and filled a continent with its people, wealth, and power
while living their religious lives in it quite peaceably. This
achievement must rank up there as one of the most important
in any age, secular or not.
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Sources:

“A Secular Age” by Charles Taylor was published by Belknap Press on

September 20, 2007. Check out the book here at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-
Taylor/dp/0674026764/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=12170
22456&sr=1-1

“The Day the Universe Changed,” a companion book to James Burke’s

PBS series of the same name, was published by Back Bay Books; Rei
Sub edition on September 1, 1995. Check out the book here at
Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Universe-Changed-Dramatically-
Understanding/dp/0316117048/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=121
7031569&sr=1-2

Wilfred McClay’s original review can be found here:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6204