Some of the most prominent intellectuals of the past century or so have attempted to tackle the question of the “secularization” of the Western world—two names that come immediately to mind are Max Weber and Peter Berger, though there are many others. How did a world that seemed to be filled with gods and magic and religion at every level of life for all of recorded history come to be so rapidly “disenchanted,” i.e., largely emptied of religious belief and actions, in just the past few hundred (or dozen) years? Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, has taken his best shot at answering this question, and the result is a massive (874 pages!) and, for the foreseeable future, definitive account of this process. 
After seeing the book at a local bookstore, and then reading a comment about it the very next day here on the blog last year, I thought, what the heck, the cosmos is speaking to me, and I should read the book. I did. It was long. But it was also one of the most profound and learned pieces of scholarship I have encountered in a long time. In what follows, then, I will not review the book point by point or chapter by chapter (sighs of relief ensue…), but rather, I’ll just jot down a couple of thoughts that seem relevant to the types of people that seem to read and comment here at NTRT…
Secularization is not a story of “subtraction.” To many casual thinkers, the process toward secularization seems to be about losing things; Taylor calls this the “subtraction theory,” and he doesn’t buy it. A subtraction theorist might say: God wasn’t needed to personally move the cosmos because laws of gravity and so on do that. God didn’t create humans or animals in seven days, because evolution supposedly did that. And then they took prayer out of schools. And so on. Rather, the story Taylor tells is far more interesting, and complex; things were subtracted, to be sure, but things were also added, and there have been seismic shifts and reconfigurations at many basic cultural and historical levels. And stuff like that.
The etymology of the word “secular” is interesting and leads to a significant change in our understanding of the world on the way to secularity. What does the word “secular” mean, anyway? The English “secular” is from the Latin saeculum, which means “a century” or “age.” Thus, a “secularist” is one who lives in the saeculum, one who is embedded in ordinary time, as opposed to, say, a monastic order, or those who live in an environment that is “closer to eternity,” i.e., structured, like the church calendar, kairotically, where time is measured not by a linear movement of events, but by the significance attached to specific events. One of Taylor’s repeated points is that secularity can be traced through changes in the way specific human communities view time. So, when church officials banished activities like carnival in periods where a “rage for order” and piety was particularly prevalent, the church was banishing the kairotic significance that was attached to feasts of reversal like carnival and their place in the kairotic time system, thus disrupting the structures of “holy” or “eternal” time that kept life from being a mundane series of linear events, without any special meaning. Note: this may explain something of the modern longing, among many younger faith-seekers, to have “liturgical” elements re-integrated into a life of faith. So much more to be said on this, but see pp. 54-9, 124ff, 194-5ff, and so on if you’re interested!
Decisions by prevailing church structures throughout the years have had unintended and seemingly unpredictable consequences toward creating the secular world in which we now live. One of my favorite examples adduced by Taylor toward this end has to do with the issue of indulgences. One simplistic view is to say, “Ah, medieval Catholics got greedy, introduced indulgences, went way too far with it, and thus corrupted the church, and this led to secularization.” On the contrary, Taylor suggests that the excesses of the medieval church were actually a response to a popular demand for things like indulgences and so on, connected as they were to death and time in purgatory, in an era when people increasingly feared death. Recall that the 14th cen. was kind of a bad time, to put it lightly. You know, the whole Black Death thing. At any rate, Protestantism played an important role in the secularization story also, but there is too much to be said on this. Let’s move along…
Our secular age is intricately bound up with the rise of many bedrock aspects of our “social imaginary,” i.e., the deep-deep background that provides the possibility for all of our thinking and existence in the time in which we live. Any attempt to reverse this secularity, then, would by extension entail an upheaval beyond what many of us would imagine. In other words, if one wants to turn back the clock on secularity, one might have to do things like a) find a way to banish all modes of media communication that have created a shared “public space” over the past 200 years, b) reverse the governmental idea of a “social contract” and its concomitant assumptions about the nature of humans and their needs in public discourse, c) banish our current economic system and its connection with our governmental ideals, d) reinstitute a radically hierarchical social structure, with a king at its head and with definitive classes/castes that cannot be transgressed, and so on. The explanations for how and why each of these factors
contributed to secularism is too complicated to spell out here,but I suppose most of us could imagine how the aforementioned institutions and so on undermined the idea of a hierarchical universe with an all-controlling God at its head. Of course, a world-wide nuclear holocaust or Black-Death like plague could turn back the clock, and leave us all living as characters in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (except that everyone seems like an atheist in McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic vision!? Well, maybe not. I tend to think such a catastrophe would produce the exact opposite effect—what do you think?).
Thus, a point not directly argued by Taylor, but which can be solidly inferred from the story Taylor tells in his book, is that the secular world in which we now live in Europe and America is irreversible, at least under the present circumstances. Thus, attempts at “fighting the culture,” “winning the culture war,” “taking back America for Jesus,” and so on and so forth are not only futile but counterproductive and wrongheaded church strategy. They’re not wrongheaded because they’re futile (I’m an idealist, I guess?), but rather, they’re wrongheaded because they fail to fundamentally reckon with the reality and complexity of our epoch. At any rate, the briefest perusal of Taylor’s work will leave you with the profound impression that secularization is more complicated than most of us typically imagine; hence, any spirituality or teaching meant for the secular age that fails to deal with this complexity is in deep, deep trouble. Preaching to the choir, I know. It is either incredibly naïve—or, at worst, even duplicitous!—to think that one can “fight secularism” without a parallel commitment to fighting everything that has made secularism the mode of thinking in our age. And, clearly, we want a representative government; we like the social contract; many readers here probably thrive off of the capitalist economic system; we crave our media and our public spaces for free expressions (Dave Schmelzer makes a somewhat related point in the chapter of his book, entitled “Why I’d Rather Live in Paris than Tehran”). Thus, our faith must paradoxically be a kind of secular faith.
To superficially jump to the end of the book, sort of: secularization is not about people losing all religious feelings and longings; rather, it is about a proliferation of options. Thus, humans are left grasping and choosing among so many things, like a weary shopper trying to pick out a brand of paper towels, and no particular idea or religion has the power or persuasiveness to claim hegemony over the world system.
Toward this end, note President Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech, where he asserted that “no one person, or religion, or nation can meet these challenges alone [i.e., the challenges of terrorism and global warming, etc.].” This seems true, and yet for some, such a statement would seem to pose a threat to certain forms of faith (including Christianity), which tend to present themselves, at least traditionally, as the singular answer to all of the world's problems. In a limited sense, of course, few would claim that only one faith has the power to solve a gamut of political problems; but certainly the implication here is also that no one faith can solve all of the world’s faith problems as well, an implication brought about by the proliferation of options. One could come to that conclusion, at least. At any rate, despite all of the trappings and impossibilities of our secular age, the modern order—which, despite its well-worn appearance, is quite a recent visitor on the world historical stage—still incites a lot of resistance, and has created many new problems, like…
Ah, and there are so many other things, but I see this little review getting out of hand and longer by the minute, and I’ve been caught up in the earlier material—which is so rich in its historical importance—so I’ll just stop here. Maybe I can try a “part two” later. If anyone out there has read this book, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Indeed, if anyone has not read the book, but any of Taylor’s ideas resonate with you, I’d love to hear you thoughts as well.
P.S. More comprehensive and professional reviews can be found here and here and here.
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