A Secular Age

charles taylor

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2007

Copyright © 2007 by Charles TaylorAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America

Design by Annamarie McMahon Why

Poems by Robinson Jeffers are quoted from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. TimHunt (Stanford University Press, 2001). Copyright © 1927, 1955 by Robinson Jeffers; copy-right Jeffers Literary Properties. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of StanfordUniversity Press. “Rock and Hawk,” copyright 1934 and renewed 1962 by Donnan Jeffersand Garth Jeffers, is quoted from Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers. Usedby permission of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Charles, 1931–A secular age / Charles Taylor.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02676-6 (alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-674-02676-4 (alk. paper)1. Secularism. 2. Religion and culture. I. Title.

BL2747.8.T39 2007211�.6—dc22 2007008005

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

part i The Work of Reform

1 The Bulwarks of Belief 25

2 The Rise of the Disciplinary Society 90

3 The Great Disembedding 146

4 Modern Social Imaginaries 159

5 The Spectre of Idealism 212

part ii The Turning Point

6 Providential Deism 221

7 The Impersonal Order 270

part iii The Nova Effect

8 The Malaises of Modernity 299

9 The Dark Abyss of Time 322

10 The Expanding Universe of Unbelief 352

11 Nineteenth-Century Trajectories 377

part iv Narratives of Secularization

12 The Age of Mobilization 423

13 The Age of Authenticity 473

14 Religion Today 505

part v Conditions of Belief

15 The Immanent Frame 539

16 Cross Pressures 594

17 Dilemmas 1 618

18 Dilemmas 2 676

19 Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity 711

20 Conversions 728

Epilogue: The Many Stories 773

Notes 779

Index 853

viii contents

Preface

This book emerges from my Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in the spring of 1999,entitled “Living in a Secular Age?”. It’s been quite some time since then, and in factthe scope of the work has expanded. Basically, the lectures of 1999 covered Parts I–III of the present book, and Parts IV and V deal with matters I wanted to discussthen, but lacked the time and competence to treat properly. (I hope the passingyears have helped in this regard.)

The book has grown since 1999, and also increased its scope. But the first processhasn’t kept pace with the second: The larger scope would have demanded a muchbigger book than I am now offering to the reader. I am telling a story, that of whatwe usually call “secularization” in the modern West. And in doing so, I am trying toclarify what this process, often invoked, but still not very clear, amounts to. To dothis properly, I should have had to tell a denser and more continuous story, some-thing I have neither the time nor the competence to do.

I ask the reader who picks up this book not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a set of interlocking essays, which shed light on eachother, and offer a context of relevance for each other. I hope the general thrust ofmy thesis will emerge from this sketchy treatment, and will suggest to others furtherways of developing, applying, modifying, and transposing the argument.

I want to thank the Gifford Lectures Committee at Edinburgh for giving methe initial impetus to start on this project. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Can-ada Council for an Isaac Killam Fellowship during 1996–1998, which allowed meto get started; and to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Can-ada for their Gold Medal Award of 2003. I benefited greatly from visits to theInstitut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 2000 and 2001. TheWissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin gave me a fellowship in 2005–2006 that allowed meto complete the project in the best possible conditions, including discussions withJosé Casanova and Hans Joas, who have been working on parallel projects.

I must also express my gratitude to the members of the network around the Cen-tre for Transcultural Studies. Some of the key concepts I use in this work haveemerged during our exchanges.

In producing the book, I was greatly helped by Bryan Smyth, who made or dis-covered many of the translations as well as preparing the index. Unmarked transla-tions are almost always by him, occasionally modified by myself.

x preface

Introduction

1

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agreethat in some sense we do: I mean the “we” who live in the West, or perhaps North-west, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world—although secularity extends alsopartially, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the judgment of secularityseems hard to resist when we compare these societies with anything else in humanhistory: that is, with almost all other contemporary societies (e.g., Islamic countries,India, Africa), on one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or other-wise, on the other.

But it’s not so clear in what this secularity consists. There are two big candidatesfor its characterization—or perhaps, better, families of candidate. The first concen-trates on the common institutions and practices—most obviously, but not only, thestate. The difference would then consist in this, that whereas the political organiza-tion of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaran-teed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, themodern Western state is free from this connection. Churches are now separate frompolitical structures (with a couple of exceptions, in Britain and the Scandinaviancountries, which are so low-key and undemanding as not really to constitute excep-tions). Religion or its absence is largely a private matter. The political society is seenas that of believers (of all stripes) and non-believers alike.1

Put in another way, in our “secular” societies, you can engage fully in politicswithout ever encountering God, that is, coming to a point where the crucial impor-tance of the God of Abraham for this whole enterprise is brought home forcefullyand unmistakably. The few moments of vestigial ritual or prayer barely constitutesuch an encounter today, but this would have been inescapable in earlier centuriesin Christendom.

This way of putting it allows us to see that more than the state is involved in thischange. If we go back a few centuries in our civilization, we see that God was pres-

ent in the above sense in a whole host of social practices—not just the political—and at all levels of society: for instance, when the functioning mode of local govern-ment was the parish, and the parish was still primarily a community of prayer; orwhen guilds maintained a ritual life that was more than pro forma; or when theonly modes in which the society in all its components could display itself to itselfwere religious feasts, like, for instance, the Corpus Christi procession. In those soci-eties, you couldn’t engage in any kind of public activity without “encounteringGod” in the above sense. But the situation is totally different today.

And if you go back even farther in human history, you come to archaic societiesin which the whole set of distinctions we make between the religious, political, eco-nomic, social, etc., aspects of our society ceases to make sense. In these earlier socie-ties, religion was “everywhere”,2 was interwoven with everything else, and in nosense constituted a separate “sphere” of its own.

One understanding of secularity then is in terms of public spaces. These havebeen allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality. Or takenfrom another side, as we function within various spheres of activity—economic, po-litical, cultural, educational, professional, recreational—the norms and principleswe follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to anyreligious beliefs; the considerations we act on are internal to the “rationality” of eachsphere—maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatestnumber in the political area, and so on. This is in striking contrast to earlier peri-ods, when Christian faith laid down authoritative prescriptions, often through themouths of the clergy, which could not be easily ignored in any of these domains,such as the ban on usury, or the obligation to enforce orthodoxy.3

But whether we see this in terms of prescriptions, or in terms of ritual or ceremo-nial presence, this emptying of religion from autonomous social spheres is, ofcourse, compatible with the vast majority of people still believing in God, and prac-tising their religion vigorously. The case of Communist Poland springs to mind.This is perhaps a bit of a red herring, because the public secularity was imposedthere by a dictatorial and unpopular régime. But the United States is rather strikingin this regard. One of the earliest societies to separate Church and State, it is alsothe Western society with the highest statistics for religious belief and practice.

And yet this is the issue that people often want to get at when they speak of ourtimes as secular, and contrast them, nostalgically or with relief, with earlier ages offaith or piety. In this second meaning, secularity consists in the falling off of reli-gious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going toChurch. In this sense, the countries of western Europe have mainly become secu-lar—even those who retain the vestigial public reference to God in public space.

Now I believe that an examination of this age as secular is worth taking up in a

2 a secular age

third sense, closely related to the second, and not without connection to the first.This would focus on the conditions of belief. The shift to secularity in this senseconsists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is un-challenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be oneoption among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace. In this meaning, asagainst sense 2, at least many milieux in the United States are secularized, and Iwould argue that the United States as a whole is. Clear contrast cases today wouldbe the majority of Muslim societies, or the milieux in which the vast majority of In-dians live. It wouldn’t matter if one showed that the statistics for church/synagogueattendance in the U.S., or some regions of it, approached those for Friday mosqueattendance in, say, Pakistan or Jordan (or this, plus daily prayer). That would be evi-dence towards classing these societies as the same in sense 2. Nevertheless, it seemsto me evident that there are big differences between these societies in what it is to be-lieve, stemming in part from the fact that belief is an option, and in some sense anembattled option in the Christian (or “post-Christian”) society, and not (or not yet)in the Muslim ones.

So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in this third sense, which Icould perhaps encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is onewhich takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe inGod, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibil-ity among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, butthere are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living Icannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have nofaith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiom-atic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certainmilieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel boundto give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experi-ence in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be manyothers to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainlymillions today of whom this is true.

Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding inwhich our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place. By ‘con-text of understanding’ here, I mean both matters that will probably have been ex-plicitly formulated by almost everyone, such as the plurality of options, and somewhich form the implicit, largely unfocussed background of this experience andsearch, its “pre-ontology”, to use a Heideggerian term.

An age or society would then be secular or not, in virtue of the conditions of ex-perience of and search for the spiritual. Obviously, where it stood in this dimensionwould have a lot to do with how secular it was in the second sense, which turns on

introduction 3

levels of belief and practice, but there is no simple correlation between the two, asthe case of the U.S. shows. As for the first sense, which concerns public space, thismay be uncorrelated with both the others (as might be argued for the case of India).But I will maintain that in fact, in the Western case, the shift to public secularity hasbeen part of what helped to bring on a secular age in my third sense.

2

Articulating the conditions of experience turns out to be harder than one mightthink. This is partly because people tend to be focussed on belief itself. What peopleare usually interested in, what arouses a lot of the anguish and conflict, is the secondissue: what do people believe and practice? How many believe in God? In which di-rection is the trend going? Concern for public secularity often relates to the issue ofwhat people believe or practice, and of how they are treated in consequence: doesour secularist régime marginalize believing Christians, as some claim in the U.S.A.?Or does it stigmatize hitherto unrecognized groups? African-Americans, Hispanics?or else gays and lesbians?

But in our societies, the big issue about religion is usually defined in terms of be-lief. First Christianity has always defined itself in relation to credal statements. Andsecularism in sense 2 has often been seen as the decline of Christian belief; and thisdecline as largely powered by the rise of other beliefs, in science, reason, or by thedeliverances of particular sciences: for instance, evolutionary theory, or neuro-phys-iological explanations of mental functioning.

Part of my reason for wanting to shift the focus to the conditions of belief, expe-rience and search is that I’m not satisfied with this explanation of secularism 2: sci-ence refutes and hence crowds out religious belief. I’m dissatisfied on two, relatedlevels. First, I don’t see the cogency of the supposed arguments from, say, the find-ings of Darwin to the alleged refutations of religion. And secondly, partly for thisreason, I don’t see this as an adequate explanation for why in fact people abandonedtheir faith, even when they themselves articulate what happened in such terms as“Darwin refuted the Bible”, as allegedly said by a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s.4

Of course bad arguments can figure as crucial in perfectly good psychological orhistorical explanations. But bad arguments like this, which leave out so many viablepossibilities between fundamentalism and atheism, cry out for some account whythese other roads were not travelled. This deeper account, I think, is to be found atthe level I’m trying to explore. I will return to this shortly.

In order to get a little bit clearer on this level, I want to talk about belief and un-belief, not as rival theories, that is, ways that people account for existence, or moral-ity, whether by God or by something in nature, or whatever. Rather what I want to

4 a secular age

part IThe Work of Reform

1 The Bulwarks of Belief

1

One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why was it virtuallyimpossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so thealternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. Weneed to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become think-able?

One important part of the picture is that so many features of their world told infavour of belief, made the presence of God seemingly undeniable. I will mentionthree, which will play a part in the story I want to tell.

(1) The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imag-ined, testified to divine purpose and action; and not just in the obvious way whichwe can still understand and (at least many of us) appreciate today, that its order anddesign bespeaks creation; but also because the great events in this natural order,storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flour-ishing, were seen as acts of God, as the now dead metaphor of our legal languagestill bears witness.

(2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society (but not described assuch—this is a modern term—rather as polis, kingdom, church, or whatever). Akingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere hu-man action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of the various associationswhich made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds, and so on, were interwoven withritual and worship, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. One could not but en-counter God everywhere.

(3) People lived in an “enchanted” world. This is perhaps not the best expression;it seems to evoke light and fairies. But I am invoking here its negation, Weber’s ex-pression “disenchantment” as a description of our modern condition. This term has

achieved such wide currency in our discussion of these matters, that I’m going touse its antonym to describe a crucial feature of the pre-modern condition. The en-chanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces whichour ancestors lived in.

People who live in this kind of world don’t necessarily believe in God, certainlynot in the God of Abraham, as the existence of countless “pagan” societies shows.But in the outlook of European peasants in 1500, beyond all the inevitableambivalences, the Christian God was the ultimate guarantee that good would tri-umph or at least hold the plentiful forces of darkness at bay.

Atheism comes close to being inconceivable in a world with these three features.It just seems so obvious that God is there, acting in the cosmos, founding and sus-taining societies, acting as a bulwark against evil. So part of the answer to my open-ing question, what happened between 1500 and 2000? is that these three featureshave vanished.

But that can’t be the whole story, as I argued in the previous chapter. The rise ofmodernity isn’t just a story of loss, of subtraction. The key difference we’re lookingat between our two marker dates is a shift in the understanding of what I called“fullness”, between a condition in which our highest spiritual and moral aspirationspoint us inescapably to God, one might say, make no sense without God, to one inwhich they can be related to a host of different sources, and frequently are referredto sources which deny God. Now the disappearance of these three modes of God’sfelt presence in our world, while it certainly facilitates this change, couldn’t by itselfbring it about. Because we can certainly go on experiencing fullness as a gift fromGod, even in a disenchanted world, a secular society, and a post-cosmic universe. Inorder to be able not to, we needed an alternative.

And so the story I have to tell will relate not only how God’s presence receded inthese three dimensions; it also has to explain how something other than God couldbecome the necessary objective pole of moral or spiritual aspiration, of “fullness”. Ina sense, the big question of what happened is, how did alternatives to the God-refer-ence of fullness arise? What I’ll be concerned with is the Entstehungsgeschichte ofexclusive humanism.

A common “subtraction” story attributes everything to disenchantment. First,science gave us “naturalistic” explanation of the world. And then people began tolook for alternatives to God. But things didn’t work that way. The new mechanisticscience of the seventeenth century wasn’t seen as necessarily threatening to God. Itwas to the enchanted universe and magic. It also began to pose a problem for partic-ular providences. But there were important Christian motives for going the route ofdisenchantment. Darwin was not even on the horizon in the eighteenth century.

Then, of course, society comes to be seen in secular terms. People make revolu-tions. In certain cases, this involved rebelling against churches. But it could be in

26 a secular age

the name of other church structures, as in the 1640s, and with a strong sense ofProvidence guiding us.

A fuller subtraction story holds that not just disenchantment, but the fading ofGod’s presence in all three domains made us look afresh at the alternative possiblereference-points for fullness. As though these were already there, just waiting to beinvited in.

My point is that, in an important sense, they weren’t yet there. True, there werevarious doctrines, which some people had imagined, even which orthodox writershad inveighed against; in some cases, which ancient authors had spelled out. Butthese weren’t yet really available alternatives. I mean alternative construals of full-ness which could really make sense to people, outside of a few very original spirits.

Negatively, it was very hard to see how an exclusive humanism could fill this role,as long as people had an enchanted view of the universe; that is, saw us human be-ings as in a field of spirits, some of whom were malign. In this respect, of course, sci-ence in helping to disenchant the universe, contributed to opening the way for ex-clusive humanism. A crucial condition for this was a new sense of the self and itsplace in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits andpowers, but what I want to call “buffered”. But it took more than disenchantmentto produce the buffered self; it was also necessary to have confidence in our ownpowers of moral ordering.

But surely, the resources for that were available, in the non-theistic ethics of thepagan ancient world? Only very partially, I believe. First, some of those views alsoplaced us in a larger spiritual or cosmic order. Platonism, Stoicism, for instance.True, they had no necessary truck with magic and wood spirits, but they resisteddisenchantment and the mechanistic universe in their own ways. They were not re-ally exclusive humanisms in my sense. I would argue this even for Aristotle, becauseof the important role for contemplation of a larger order as something divine in us.

Where an exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available was in Epicureanism.And it is no surprise that Lucretius was one of the inspirations for explorations inthe direction of naturalism, e.g., with Hume. But Epicureanism just as it wascouldn’t really do the trick. It could teach us to achieve ataraxia by overcoming ourillusions about the Gods. But this wasn’t what was needed for a humanism whichcould flourish in the modern context. For this was becoming one in which thepower to create moral order in one’s life had a rather different shape. It had to in-clude the active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social; and ithad to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence. To put this second require-ment in a way which refers back to the religious tradition, modern humanism, inaddition to being activist and interventionist, had to produce some substitute foragape.

All this means that an acceptable form of exclusive humanism had to be imag-

the bulwarks of belief 27

ined. And this couldn’t be done overnight. Nor could it arise in one leap, but itcame to be in a series of phases, emerging out of earlier Christian forms. This is thestory I’m going to try to tell.

As of the late nineteenth century, indeed, we have fully-formed alternativeswhich are there before us. And people can be influenced towards one or the other,partly in terms of their views of science—even though, as I shall argue, here too, acrucial role is still played by their moral ontologies. But today, for instance, when anaturalistic materialism is not only on offer, but presents itself as the only viewcompatible with the most prestigious institution of the modern world, viz., science;it is quite conceivable that one’s doubts about one’s own faith, about one’s ability tobe transformed, or one’s sense of how one’s own faith is indeed, childish and inade-quate, could mesh with this powerful ideology, and send one off along the path ofunbelief, even though with regret and nostalgia. But it is wildly anachronistic toproject this very familiar scenario of Victorian times, or today, onto earlier centu-ries, when the rival outlooks between which we hesitate today were still beingforged.

2

My opening question stated a contrast, between the conditions of belief in 1500and 2000. And then I talked about the story I want to tell to clarify this contrast.But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what thingswere like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needsall this detail, this history? Haven’t I already made a satisfactory start on such an an-alytic contrast in identifying the three ways of God’s presence then which havefaded by now?

Now in a way, the ultimate goal is to arrive at such a contrast, or at least to getinto focus our situation in 2000 by means of such a comparative description. But Idon’t think it can properly be done if one tries to elide the history. I hope the rea-sons for this will become clearer and more convincing as I proceed. But just to givethe general shape of them here: it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predica-ment that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we standis partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome aprevious condition. Thus we are widely aware of living in a “disenchanted” uni-verse; and our use of this word bespeaks our sense that it was once enchanted.More, we are not only aware that it used to be so, but also that it was a struggle andan achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement isfragile. We know this because each one of us as we grew up has had to take on thedisciplines of disenchantment, and we regularly reproach each other for our failingsin this regard, and accuse each other of “magical” thinking, of indulging in “myth”,

28 a secular age

of giving way to “fantasy”; we say that X isn’t living in our century, that Y has a“mediaeval” mind, while Z, whom we admire, is way ahead of her time.

In other words, our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story ofhow we got there. In that sense, there is an inescapable (though often negative)God-reference in the very nature of our secular age. And just because we describewhere we are in relating the journey, we can misdescribe it grievously by misiden-tifying the itinerary. This is what the “subtraction” accounts of modernity havein fact done. To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the storyproperly.

Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify our-selves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from. This is why the narra-tive is not an optional extra, why I believe that I have to tell a story here.

That enlarges the task, potentially without limit. The story of what happened inthe secularization of Western Christendom is so broad, and so multi-faceted, thatone could write several books this length and still not do justice to it. This is themore so, in that my chosen area, Latin Christendom, is not homogeneous. As wewill see below, there is more than one path here, and different nations and regionshave trodden their own way at different speeds and times. I can only give the barestbones of the story, and touch on some of the major transitions. My hope is that ageneral picture of the dynamic involved will emerge from this skeleton account. Butsome such diachronic account is indispensable.

3

Telling the story can’t be elided; but it isn’t sufficient of itself. In fact, the whole dis-cussion has to tack back and forth between the analytical and the historical. And atthis point I want to start by laying out some broad features of the contrast betweenthen and now, which will be filled in and enriched by the story. They fall in therange of the three big negative changes I alluded to above, but I’ll be proceedingfrom last to first, and in fact I want to mention five changes.

The first is disenchantment, the undoing of obstacle 3 above to unbelief (I).Then entering the terrain of obstacle 2 (II), I want also to look at the way in whichearlier society held certain profound tensions in equilibrium (III). This in turn waslinked to a common understanding of time, which has since been done away with(IV). And lastly, I want to deal with the erosion of obstacle 1, in the way in whichthe old idea of cosmos has been replaced by the modern neutral universe (V).

I. Let me start with the enchanted world, the world of spirits, demons, moralforces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is thedisappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in

the bulwarks of belief 29