Charles Taylor’s Naïveté (2024)

William T. Cavanaugh

Charles Taylor is one of the world’s eminent philosophers, and he is also a Catholic from Quebec. This biographical detail is important for explaining Taylor’s abiding interest in the process of secularization in the West. It is only a small exaggeration to say that the five-hundred-year process that Taylor describes in his landmark book, A Secular Age, was compressed into just a few years in his home province. Along with the French language, Catholicism was one of the principal ways with which Quebecois marked their identity over against the rest of Canada. The Catholic Church and the civil government were densely intertwined for much of the history of Quebec, and by the twentieth century the Church was deeply implicated in the everyday lives of the people of the province. The official Church controlled education, healthcare, the regulation of marriage, and most charitable activities, and was deeply involved in labor organizing, cooperatives, and other aspects of economic life. As late as 1960, 80% of Quebecois went to Mass at least once a month. And then they stopped. Seemingly overnight in the decade of the 1960s, the Quiet Revolution brought an end to Church hegemony in Quebec society, and the active practice of Catholicism went into steep decline. What took its place is what Taylor calls a “closed secularism” that is often hostile to any appearance of faith in public. Within a short time frame, Quebec went from one of the most Catholic to one of the most militantly secularist places on earth.

One Quebecker who did not give up on practicing his Catholic faith was Charles Taylor.1Close He has, however, been careful in his professional life to keep his personal convictions out of direct application to his philosophical work. Taylor’s faith nevertheless lurks at the borders of his work and is clearly one of the main motivators for his inquiries into the secular. Taylor wants to understand what happened in Quebec, and in the Western world more generally. How did we go from a situation—five hundred years ago in Europe, more recently in Quebec—in which belief in God was taken for granted to one in which belief in God is entirely optional and increasingly unpopular? One common assumption is that the discoveries of science have made religious belief untenable or unnecessary, but what happened in Quebec had nothing to do with scientific discoveries, and Taylor thinks that the same holds true more broadly in the West. Like Weber, Taylor thinks that what happened to religion in the West had its origins not in science but in Christian reform efforts. Also like Weber, Taylor describes these changes in terms of disenchantment: “Everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of 500 years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world and we do not.”2Close

Taylor’s work on secularity begins from this notion of a big difference between “us” and everyone else. The first paragraph of A Secular Age remarks on this yawning gap, both across space and across time. Taylor notes how secularity makes “the ‘we’ who live in the West” different from “almost all other contemporary societies (e.g. Islamic countries, India, Africa), on the one hand; and with the rest of human history, Atlantic or otherwise, on the other.”3Close This secular exceptionalism is based in a series of binaries that play crucial roles in Taylor’s analysis: West/non-West, modern/premodern, secular/religious, nonbelievers/believers, immanence/transcendence, natural/supernatural, disenchantment/enchantment, and so on. In every case, Taylor tries to bring the two poles closer together, to argue that those who stand on the opposing sides of these dichotomies have more in common than they think they do and more to say to one another than is usually supposed. But Taylor begins from these dichotomies and assumes that they describe the world as currently structured; though he acknowledges, in most cases, that there is nothing historically inevitable about them, he does think that, now that it has taken place, “the process of disenchantment is irreversible.”4Close There is no crossing back over the gap between enchantment and disenchantment once the gap has been opened. Though Taylor’s purpose is irenic, he begins from the fact of the big difference between the people who stand on either side of these divides—modern and premodern, Western and non-Western, nonbelievers and believers: “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.”5Close

In this chapter, I will argue that this language of different “races” of humans—nonbelievers and believers—is not simply exaggerated but deeply misleading. The differences between the people on the opposing sides of these binaries are not in the way they act in the world but in the way they have learned to describe the world. There are not two races of people, those who have beliefs and those who have no beliefs but only facts; what marks secularity is rather the condition under which we have been taught to separate people into believers and nonbelievers. Although in every case Taylor wants to bring the two terms in these binaries closer together, I will argue that he does not do enough to question the terms under which the binaries are given in the first place. I do think, however, that in many cases the resources to question these binaries can be found in Taylor’s work itself. As with Weber, there is a troublesome unthought in Taylor’s work that needs to be made explicit in order to tackle the problems that Taylor is trying to address.

In the first section of this chapter, I will lay out Taylor’s updating of Weber’s historical tale of secularization. In the second section, I will parse Taylor’s description of the modern secular world he says we live in. In the third section, I will examine some of the ways Taylor describes the modern world and argue that they distort our description of what is going on. I will conclude that there is a gap between our descriptions of the world as secular and the way we actually behave, and that we need a theology of idolatry to address this gap.

2.1. How We Got Here

Charles Taylor starts his historical tale of disenchantment, much like Weber does, in the so-called Axial Age, a term invented after Weber by Karl Jaspers under the influence of Weber’s work on “world religions.”6Close Until the Axial Age, roughly the eighth to the third century bc, the human person was subject to a triple embeddedness. In what Taylor calls “early religion”—before the Axial Age—the person is first embedded in society, and “religious life is inseparably linked with social life.”7Close Spiritual forces are ubiquitous, and society is structured around relations with them. The person relates to such spiritual forces and beings as a member of the social group; the group, or a representative of the group, is the primary protagonist of transactions with the gods. Ritual action is collective. There is no equivalent of a personal relationship with Jesus, nor would it be thinkable for a person within such a context to imagine opting out, emigrating to another social group, or ceasing to believe in or propitiate the gods of the group. The second embedding in early religion is of spiritual forces in the cosmos. The gods do not transcend the material world but are embedded within it, in totems and sacred places. The third form of embedding—and most crucial for Taylor’s thesis—has to do with human flourishing: it does not go beyond mundane goods. People implore the gods and spirits for health, prosperity, fertility, and long life, all inner-worldly things.8Close “There is a certain understanding of human flourishing here which . . . seems to us quite ‘natural.’ ”9Close There is as yet no appeal to “supernatural” goods like life after death.

The Axial Age marks the beginning of the road to disenchantment precisely insofar as it marks a disembedding in the above senses. The new “higher” religions—brought into being in vastly different civilizations by such founding figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets—introduced the differentiation of the individual from the social group, the transcendence of the cosmos by the gods, and the questioning of merely mundane flourishing either by a conception of salvation from the world or an imperative to change the world for the better.10Close Though “rationalization” plays a somewhat smaller role in Taylor’s narrative, he is clearly drawing on Weber’s account of the emergence of “salvation religions” out of the attempts by practitioners of “magic” to coerce mundane goods out of a recalcitrant nature.11Close As in Weber, the Hebrew prophets’ critique of idolatry plays a significant part in disenchantment. Taylor cites Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel to illustrate a world in which enchantment has been banished. Rather than counter bad magic with good magic, Elijah shows that the transcendent God alone has power over nature, and the supposed magic of Baal’s prophets is nothing at all. The world is emptied of enchantment, and all power resides with God in heaven.12Close As in Weber, however, the disenchantment process begun in the Axial Age took a long time to come to fruition. The old-time religion retained much of its hold on the people, especially the peasants, even after the Axial religions gained official status in their societies. The individualism latent in Axial spirituality, for example, was practiced by elites such as monks.13Close It would take reform movements in late medieval Christianity to move the disembedding process forward, precisely in their attempts to bring the fullness of Christian practice out of the monasteries and into the everyday lives of rank-and-file lay Christians.

Weber’s story of this decisive move centers on the Protestant Reformation, most especially Calvinism, but Taylor picks up the story of disenchantment before the Reformation, in the late medieval efforts that he calls “Reform,” which predated Protestantism. Reform indicates a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the two-tiered ethic that characterized medieval Catholicism: perfection for those in the vowed religious life, lower standards for the laity. Periodic reform movements had always existed to try to convert some of the laity to a higher standard of Christian practice. But what characterized Reform was an attempt to delegitimize the two-tiered system itself and elevate all Christians to a higher standard. Reform was pushed from below by lay movements that cultivated intensely personal devotions to, for example, the suffering humanity of Christ. Reform was pushed from above by the clergy and eventually by civil authorities, who came to understand their task as the Christianization of the common people, which would, not coincidentally, produce disciplined and orderly citizens. Whether from above or from below, Reform, according to Taylor, moved the central locus of the practice of the faith from external ritual to the interior of the human person. Meditation on the Five Wounds of Christ, for example, was meant to produce intense feelings of identification with the suffering of Christ. The crucial effect was on the human heart rather than on the material world.14Close

In the enchanted medieval world, material things could be what Taylor calls “charged” objects, bearers of power that he calls “magical.”15Close Such objects could be used to ward off illness or bad weather. Except in heretical movements like the Waldensians and the Lollards, Reform did not attack the Catholic sacramental system until the Reformation broke out. The attack on sacraments and the whole gamut of Catholic rituals and sacramentals—pilgrimages, relics, rosaries, holy water, and so on—was theologically motivated. Reformers rejected the confinement of God to merely material objects; such materialization of God’s power was an affront to the transcendence of God over all creation. It was also a distraction from the spiritual life; Erasmus chided his fellow Catholics for venerating the bones of St. Paul without paying attention to his teachings.16Close The attack on what Taylor calls the Church’s “white magic” thus reinforced a barrier between the spiritual and the material that would come to play a significant role in the disenchantment and secularization of the world.

In the Reformation, Taylor’s narrative dovetails with parts of Weber’s again. The Calvinists play a key role for Taylor, in two ways. The first is in the disenchantment of religious life, in the precise sense of the elimination of magic from the world. Central to Calvin’s thought is the utter depravity of human beings and our complete helplessness to surmount that depravity by our own power. It is idolatrous to think that manipulating sacraments and sacramentals could affect our salvation. The Eucharist is important to Calvin, but the effect is interior, dependent upon God’s act of faith within the human person. What Calvin “can’t admit is that God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action, because that is the cost of really sanctifying creatures like us which are bodily, social, historical. . . . So we disenchant the world; we reject the sacramentals; all the elements of ‘magic’ in the old religion.”17Close The second important effect of Calvinism on the eventual rise of secularization lies in its drive to reform not only the Church but the entire secular order. As does Weber, Taylor emphasizes the tension between renunciation of the world to love God, and the demand to affirm ordinary human life and flourishing in work, family, and civic life. The attempts by Calvin’s Geneva and by the Puritans to bring the Gospel to bear on every aspect of daily life, vanquishing all vices, had the effect in the long term of validating worldly life. The attempt to transform the world for God became, in the long run, a kind of worldliness. The more the Calvinists built an orderly society for the glory of God alone, the more they became confident in their own abilities to impose order on the world. The theological conviction that they were helpless sinners was eventually hollowed out by their own success.18Close In these moves—the removal of God from the material world and the confident embrace of mundane life—Taylor sees a “double movement towards immanence.”19Close

The development of a full-blown exclusive humanism is still a long way off, but Taylor sees an interiorization of the Christian life in Reform more generally and the Reformation more particularly. The eventual evacuation of God from the world was prepared by the movement of God to the interior life of the human person. Taylor describes the difference between medieval and modern selves in terms of the permeability of the boundaries between the self and the world. He contrasts the modern world with the enchanted medieval world,

In the enchanted world, power resided not only in human minds, for there were other spirits and demons and saints in heaven that had their own personal agency. Power furthermore resided not only in minds but in the external world of things, such as holy relics, which had the power to impact not only minds but the material world by curing illness or saving ships from being wrecked, for example. “Thus in the enchanted world, charged things can impose meanings.”21Close This type of power, says Taylor, shows how the line between personal agency and impersonal force was blurred in the medieval world, because the cure was equally attributable to the relic itself and the saint it belonged to. At the same time, the boundary between mind and world was also hazy; events in the physical world like bumper harvests or famines were acts of personal agents, be they saints or demons, and not just the result of exceptionless physical laws. More crucially, the mind/world boundary is blurred because power and meaning can overwhelm the mind from without. The person can become possessed by a spirit or fall under the influence of a spell or be taken over by melancholy. Meaning here is neither simply within nor simply outside of the mind; “we think of this meaning as including us, or perhaps penetrating us.”22Close In such a world, selves are “porous.”23Close

The disenchanted world, by way of contrast, is inhabited by “buffered selves,” for whom the boundaries between mind and world are clear and distinct. Meaning resides in the mind, so that the effect of prayer or even veneration of a relic is on the interior of the person, and not on the material world outside the person. Meaning is furthermore under the control of the mind, at least to a certain extent. The buffered self can still become overwhelmed with feelings of depression and melancholy. But one can be told that it is just a matter of body chemistry, and thus take some distance from the bad feelings. The meaning of depression is at least partially defined by one’s response to it. For the porous self, on the other hand, there is no such recourse. In the medieval period, black bile is not simply the cause of melancholy; it is melancholy. Once one is in the grips of melancholy, one can only pray that another external force, like the intervention of a saint, will offer relief.24Close

Taylor’s historical narrative, like that of Weber, is centered on two crucial turning points—the Axial Age and the age of Reform—but Taylor adds a wealth of detail in bringing the tale of secularization up to the present. Political elites play an important role in the early modern period, moving to ban carnivals, dancing in cemeteries, and a host of other unruly popular practices that Taylor regards as “enchanted.” In coordination with church authorities, the civil powers in the nascent state became increasingly interventionist, attempting to uniformize and hom*ogenize the populace, eliminating marginal populations and educating the masses to speak and act more like their social betters. Such attempts, writes Taylor, are “rationalizing” in Weber’s dual sense of using instrumental reason and in ordering society by a set of values (Wertrationalität).25Close These efforts serve to focus attention on this world, as opposed to the next. Philosophers and theologians play a role in Taylor’s narrative as well. The nominalists helped disenchant the world by collapsing the analogy of being into univocity; God is sheer will confronting the world rather than revealing Godself through the world in signs and symbols. Intrinsic teleology is expelled from nature, resulting in nature as a mechanism.26Close Descartes brings this mechanistic view of the material universe to completion, instituting the most rigorous mind/body and mind/world dualism, relegating all meaning to the intra-mental. Descartes’s agent is “super-buffered.”27Close The Romantics reacted against the reduction of human life to rational control,28Close but although Romanticism pushed back against disenchantment, in some crucial ways Romanticism moved the process of secularization forward by anticipating the kind of expressive individualism that breaks into a mass phenomenon in the West after World War II. Taylor calls this the Age of Authenticity: each of us has our own way to realize our humanity, and we need to be true to our interior self, not conform to what society or the previous generation or religious or political authority expects of us. This individualism coincides with a breakdown of communities like churches, and also produces a “nova effect” of extreme plurality, the availability of myriad choices of what to believe and how to live. Through all these shifts and more, Taylor argues, secularity advances in the contemporary West in three different senses: (1) reference to God or religion is removed from public spaces, such as the state, the market, and educational institutions; (2) religious belief and practice decline; and (3) religious belief becomes optional. According to Taylor, what it means to live in a secular age is that some people believe and some do not, but all of us live in the condition where belief is just one option among others.29Close

2.2. Where We Are

This brief summary does not do justice to the rich historical detail Taylor lays out across hundreds of pages of text and notes in A Secular Age. I am primarily interested, however, in Taylor’s description of the world we live in now. After laying out his historical narrative in the first four parts of the book, Taylor begins part 5 with a condensed description of “where we are . . . the spiritual shape of the present age.”30Close Taylor begins with disenchantment, specifically its “inner” side, the movement from porous to buffered selves. This is accompanied by interiorization, by which Taylor means not only the division between mind and world and the epistemologies—from Descartes to Richard Rorty—that promote it, but also the development of the idea that there is a rich inner life of thought and feeling to be explored. “We might even say that the depths which were previously located in the cosmos, the enchanted world, are now more readily placed within.”31Close With interiority comes discipline, self-control, and a concern for intimacy to be carried out in private spaces. Interiority also presupposes individualism, the idea that society is made up of and constructed by individuals, rather than seeing the social group as the primary given reality, the person as embedded in that group, and the group as embedded in the cosmos. The obverse of individualism is the atrophy of ideas of cosmic order and teleology. Such a diminishment Taylor calls “another facet of disenchantment,”32Close the outer side of that phenomenon. Finally, Taylor remarks on the movement from reference to a “higher time,” an epoch of cosmic fulfillment, to secular time, measured instrumentally by the hom*ogeneous modality of clock readings. In summary of this description of our world, Taylor writes:

In these few pages many of the most important analytical terms Taylor uses are on display, and they come in binaries: enchantment/disenchantment, exterior/interior, transcendent/immanent, religious/secular, supernatural/natural. In each case, the first term pertains to the premodern, and the second to the modern. Though the first terms are intimately related to each other, and the second terms to each other as well, the terms within each group are not simply synonymous. Taylor argues, for example, that religion and enchantment are not the same thing. Disenchantment is sometimes confused with the end of religion, and the terms are often used synonymously. As Taylor points out, even Weber sometimes uses the term in this way. “But I have been using the word here in a narrower sense: disenchantment is the dissolution of the ‘enchanted’ world, the world of spirits and meaningful causal forces, of wood sprites and relics.”34Close Taylor says that enchantment is essential to some forms of religion, but not to others, such as Christianity that has gone through Reform, in both its Protestant and Catholic varieties. Such kinds of religion have gone from being more embodied to being more in the mind; they have changed but not disappeared.35Close Part of what Taylor is trying to rebut here is the idea that scientific views of the natural world inevitably lead to the decline of religion, as if religion has become superfluous because we no longer think that saints control lightning.36Close

For Taylor, the process of disenchantment achieved a “sorting out” of the transcendent from the immanent, and the supernatural from the natural, not only in theory but in the experience of Western Christians. This sorting was at first fully compatible with belief in God, and in fact was pushed forward by a more intense dedication to God and a zeal to extirpate all forms of idolatry in the early modern period. This “rage for order” wanted both to sort out God from the world, so that God would be all in all, and to bring God into all aspects of daily life, as in Luther’s idea that every Christian, not just those called to vowed religious life, has a vocation. According to Taylor, this dual process invests the immanent with a new kind of significance and solidity that would eventually lead to the possibility of living in a purely immanent world, with no reference to the transcendent.37Close

Taylor uses “immanence” and “transcendence” to denote what pertains to this world and what goes “beyond” it. The key question, as Taylor puts it, is “[D]oes the highest, the best life involve our seeking, or acknowledging, or serving a good which is beyond, in the sense of independent of human flourishing?”38Close For a Christian, the answer is yes; worshiping God is the ultimate end, and even though God wills human flourishing, worshiping God is not contingent on this fact. “The injunction ‘Thy will be done’ isn’t equivalent to ‘Let humans flourish,’ even though we know that God wills human flourishing.”39Close Buddhism also goes beyond human flourishing, but in a very different way. In one sense, the Buddha can be construed as directing us toward true human bliss, but “it is clear that the understanding of the conditions of bliss is so ‘revisionist’ that it amounts to a departure from what we normally understand as human flourishing.”40Close In both Christianity and Buddhism, believers are called to detach themselves from their own flourishing. Renunciation cannot simply be redefined as flourishing, according to Taylor, because the ultimate goal remains something beyond one’s own flourishing and that of other humans.41Close In the Christian case, those who are open to transcendence, this “beyond,” live it in three dimensions: the sense of a higher good beyond human flourishing, belief in a transcendent higher power that makes this higher good intelligible, and belief that our lives extend beyond this mundane life between natural birth and death.42Close

Taylor contrasts this transcendence—or what he sometimes calls “transformation”—perspective with the “immanence perspective,”43Close which is “a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.”44Close This is what Taylor calls a “self-sufficient” humanism. Before modernity, humans were in “an order where we were not at the top.”45Close Now, for the first time in history, a self-sufficient, purely immanent humanism is a widely available option.46Close Taylor offers a “one-line description of the difference between earlier times and the secular age: a secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people.”47Close Such a purely immanent humanism needs to be distinguished from what Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” which encapsulates both religious people and exclusive humanists. The immanent frame creates buffered selves living within a society seen as rationally constructed by human hands and subject to secular time; it contrasts the immanent and the transcendent, but it does not necessarily do away with the transcendent. “What I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West, or at least that is what I am trying to portray. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it.”48Close The immanent frame means that being open to transcendence is now optional.

Though religious people in modernity live in the immanent frame, they are open to something beyond it. In telling the story of the secular age, Taylor makes extensive use of the opposite term to “secular,” which is “religious.” But what is “religion”? Taylor says the term “famously defies definition, largely because the phenomena we are tempted to call religious are so tremendously varied in human life.”49Close It is a daunting task to determine what is common between archaic societies where “religion is everywhere” and the “clearly demarcated” beliefs, practices, and institutions in our society that we call “religion.” Taylor plainly thinks that “religion” is a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon, present both today and in ancient societies.

The change that matters in the West is the movement from “a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or ‘beyond’ human life” to an age in which some contest this understanding and place it “ ‘within’ human life.”51Close “In other words, a reading of ‘religion’ in terms of the distinction transcendent/immanent is going to serve our purposes here. This is the beauty of the prudent (or cowardly) move I’m proposing here.”52Close Taylor acknowledges that this will not do for a definition of “religion in general,” but it will do for a definition of religion in the West, which invented an immanent order in nature that does not necessarily require reference to the transcendent.53Close

Taylor thinks that this concept of religion gives him a handle on what has declined as the secular has advanced. He engages with secularization theorists and partially agrees and partially disagrees with their description of where we are and how we got here. He agrees that we need a definition of religion that allows us to see that something has changed; it will not do to cast the definition of religion so broadly—as one’s “ultimate concern,” for example—that we can simply claim that, since everyone holds some sort of value in their lives as ultimate, people are still as religious as ever.54Close Taylor thereby rules out functionalist, Durkheimian definitions of religion, at least for his purposes. Taylor accepts Steve Bruce’s definition of religion as “actions, beliefs and institutions predicated upon the assumption of the existence of either supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs.”55Close Taylor acknowledges that we could cavil about the details of this definition. There are some “spiritual” outlooks that do not seem to invoke the supernatural, but it is hard to say in many cases, and sharp lines elude most definitions. The natural/supernatural divide is furthermore a Western concept, which would be a problem, says Taylor, if he were not limiting himself to the West. Taylor does, however, appreciate Bruce’s inclusion of “impersonal powers” because it recalls what Taylor calls “moral forces” in our enchanted past.56Close And so Taylor accepts Bruce’s definition, writing, “Plainly something important has happened; there has been a decline in something very significant, which most people recognize under the term ‘religion.’ We don’t have to follow the masses in our use of this term, but we need some word if we are to try to understand the significance of this decline, and ‘religion’ is certainly the handiest one.”57Close Taylor continues:

Defining secularization in terms of beliefs is noteworthy here. Although Bruce’s definition of religion includes actions and institutions along with beliefs, the actions and institutions are defined by their reference to a certain kind of belief, the assumption of the existence of supernatural entities or impersonal forces possessed of moral purpose. Bruce’s definition is substantivist, that is, based on the substance of what people claim to believe, which helps to restrict the definition of religion to the usual suspects: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a few others. Functionalists, on the other hand, are more interested in what people do than in what they claim to believe. As Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne put it, “Functionalists prefer to define ‘religion’ not in terms of what is believed by the religious but in terms of how they believe it (that is in terms of the role belief plays in people’s lives). Certain individual or social needs are specified and religion is identified as any system whose beliefs, practices or symbols serve to meet those needs.”59Close So secular nationalism, for example, can be considered a religion under this definition. Taylor’s endorsem*nt of religion and secularization as a matter of belief seems designed to head off any such expansive, functionalist view of religion. He is trying to explain what has changed in Western society and thinks it is unhelpful to use a functionalist definition of religion to claim that nothing has changed; for example, nationalism proves we are just as religious as ever. He does acknowledge, in a footnote, that a broader definition of religion can be useful for other kinds of reflection: “Sometimes it helps in understanding our society to bring out the common elements between different outlooks, which straddle what we normally see as the secular/religious divide. But for my purposes here, I need the narrower concept.”60Close

What declines in secularization is religion, but Taylor adds to Bruce’s definition that it is not only belief in supernatural entities and impersonal powers that fades but also the belief that Taylor calls the “transformation perspective,”61Close that is, that the goal of life is beyond human flourishing. So far Taylor and standard secularization theorists like Bruce agree, though the latter do not focus on “transformation” as such. But Taylor goes on to argue that the standard secularization thesis—that religion is on a trajectory of terminal decline in modern societies—is flawed. Taylor rejects the tendencies among secularization theorists to equate religion with enchantment, such that religion declines inevitably as technology advances, and to see religion as merely epiphenomenal, a symptom of underlying economic or political or social or psychological dynamics. Taylor suggests instead that the demand for religion is a perennial human need,62Close though it is also in our society cross-pressured by resistance to it, for the historically contingent, that is, not inevitable, reasons that he has laid out. Taylor agrees with secularization theorists on many of these reasons—factors like urbanization, mobility, and so on. But he does not think the process of secularization is linear, nor does he think that these factors simply lead to a loss of religion. While traditional religion has been challenged, these factors did not bring about “an atrophy of independent religious motivation.”63Close Instead, the breakdown of traditional religious forms in modernity has led to the formation of new forms: new religious orders in post-Revolution France, the identification of God with the nation in imperial Britain, the proliferation of denominations in the United States, and so on.64Close Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. There is now a tremendous plurality of outlooks, not only religious but also nonreligious and antireligious.65Close Of his three types of secularity, Taylor points most especially to the third, optionality. What is most interesting about the present situation is not simply the decline in religious belief but the change in the conditions of belief. Now, as never before, belief in God is optional. Optionality, not simply loss, is the heart of Taylor’s narrative of secularization.

Optionality describes for Taylor the change in the past five hundred years from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God to a society in which belief in God is just one of the available options. Pluralism describes the fact that there are many options, both of types of supernatural entities in which to believe and of forms of disbelief. Taylor describes the shift in Western society by means of another binary: naïve/reflective. Medieval Christians experienced God naïvely, as an immediate certainty. Atheism was simply not an option for the overwhelming majority of people. We live now in a reflective society, one in which—no matter how strong one’s own convictions—virtually all are aware that there are other options available. It may be that, in some milieux, certain options are the default; a small town in Utah might have one default position on God, a sociology department at a state university might have another. But all are aware that other options are out there, even though it might take a radical break with one’s own context to embrace them. Secularization is the process by which the spaces in which unbelief is the default option expand, but more important for Taylor, it is the process by which faith in God becomes optional. By this, Taylor does not mean merely optional, as if God were an item on a menu. The option of choosing belief or unbelief is generally not taken lightly. But optionality means that we recognize there are others who take different options, and they are not necessarily subhuman savages or morally blind.66Close This is what it means to live in a reflective society. The medieval tacit, taken-for-granted background of belief in God is simply gone. “The frameworks of yesterday and today are related as ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective,’ because the latter has opened a question which had been foreclosed in the former by the unacknowledged shape of the background.”67Close Furthermore, while naïveté achieved hegemonic status in premodern society, reflectivity has achieved hegemonic status in the present.

2.3. Misrecognition

So far I have laid out Taylor’s account of how “we” modern Westerners got to be secular and what being secular entails. For Taylor, secularity means reflectivity, optionality, disenchantment, the decline of transcendence, and the decline of religion. I want now to examine each of these aspects of secularity and question whether they in fact describe how our world actually works. I will use Taylor’s concept of misrecognition to query his descriptive account of our secular age.

2.3.1. Reflectivity

A few pages after declaring the end of naïveté in modernity, Taylor begins talking about what we moderns perceive naïvely. We are convinced that the only locus of thoughts, feelings, and spiritual élan is within the mind; we have the possibility of introspective self-awareness, even though we also believe that some things in the mind are unconscious and cannot be brought to consciousness. Taylor calls this modern view “radical reflexivity”:69Close “What I am trying to describe here is not a theory. Rather my target is our contemporary lived understanding; that is, the way we naïvely take things to be. We might say: the construal we just live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or—for most of us—without ever even formulating it.”70Close Taylor is not thereby opting for a particular theory of the relationship of body and mind, Cartesian or otherwise. He is trying to describe a naïve, taken-for-granted background assumption that even very untheoretically inclined moderns live in, without articulating it. Here he is interested not in what people believe, but how they believe; not in what people say they believe, but how their actions and words express implicit beliefs:

So the move from taking God for granted to disputing God’s existence is a move from naïve to reflective, from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where that set of options is fully available. Underlying that move, however, is the move from porous to buffered selves, and that is a move from naïve to naïve. It is, in other words, a move from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where another set of options is precluded.

At first glance Taylor’s use of “naïve” and “reflective” seems to fit with the standard Enlightenment narrative of modernity as maturity, as the move from childish credulity to full adult awareness. But Taylor’s continued use of “naïve” for our modern understanding of the self names the possibility that modernity has its own forms of credulity. Taylor does not mean “naïve” as a pejorative term; every society necessarily has its own forms of taken-for-granted understandings. The real question is not whether premodern and modern societies have such unarticulated background understandings, but whether or not those understandings really differ from each other as much as Taylor seems to believe they do. Taylor presents optionality as a qualitatively different kind of naïveté; optionality implies awareness, a heightened mindfulness of many options. But what if optionality is not optional? What if there is a gap between belief and behavior even in a so-called reflective society that has shed its “naïveté”? If optionality has become our naïveté, as Taylor himself indicates, then our descriptions of our own beliefs and behaviors will unavoidably be structured by a larger political context that escapes our notice. Hent de Vries asks:

As de Vries comments, if optionality cannot be rejected, then

The problem here is not that there are background understandings that never rise to explicit consciousness. We need many such assumptions in order to function in any world. As de Vries points out, we need to take for granted a “vast majority of things” in daily life. The problem for Taylor is that his description of the new regime of optionality and choice implies a level of explicitness that can never be attained. The problem is not in the “fact” of optionality but in the ideology of optionality. We are convinced that we live in a regime of choice, whereas in fact we cannot opt out of seeing ourselves essentially as choosers. Taylor himself describes this new situation as a new naïveté, but he thinks that it is a qualitatively different kind of naïveté that decisively separates us from our ancestors; we are reflective as they were not. But if reflectivity is our new naïveté, then perhaps the difference is not as great as Taylor would have it. Reflectivity implies that we modern Westerners have closed or at least narrowed the gap between what is and our descriptions of what is. But Taylor himself at points indicates that the difference between us and our ancestors might not be as great as we suppose.

In order to get to the bottom of this puzzle, we need to examine Taylor’s notion of “social imaginary.” Taylor uses this term to describe the background frameworks of our thought and action, not the explicit beliefs or intellectual schemes with which people explain their world, but something broader and deeper that Taylor sometimes calls the “conditions of belief.” The social imaginary is the way people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.”74Close Social imaginary differs from social theory because the former is often expressed not in theoretical terms but in images and narratives; it is not an elite exercise but is shared by large groups of people, even the whole society; and it is “that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”75Close Sometimes a social imaginary starts out as an elite theory and eventually comes to be held by the whole society; Taylor thinks this is what happened with the theories of Grotius and Locke.76Close A social imaginary is not opposed to theory, but it can never be adequately expressed in theory; what makes it what it is its taken-for-granted and unarticulated nature across a whole society. In this sense, a social imaginary is like the fourth sense of the word “myth” that I outlined in the first chapter.

A social imaginary, according to Taylor, is “both factual and ‘normative’ ”; we have a sense of the way things are and the way things ought to go and what practices violate those norms.77Close A social imaginary is deeper and wider than practices; it includes a notion of the ideal behind actual practices and some sense of a “moral or metaphysical order” beyond the ideal that helps make sense of it. This background understanding makes the practice possible, but the practice largely “carries” the understanding. There is a mutual influence between understanding and practice that allows for changes over time. In the change from the medieval to the modern, says Taylor, “the modern theory of moral order gradually infiltrates and transforms our social imaginary. In this process, what is originally just an idealization grows into a complex imaginary through being taken up and associated with social practices, in part traditional ones but often transformed by the contact.”78Close

Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary” is behind his repeated claims that the transition from, for example, porous to buffered selves “has to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of ‘theory,’ or ‘belief.’ ”79Close What Taylor means here is that, whether or not medieval or modern people would be able to come up with a theoretical understanding of the self as either porous or buffered, they experience the self in one of these ways. Taylor repeatedly emphasizes that the difference between then and now is not just that we give two different descriptions of the same experience, as two people might have the same sore throat but give different etiologies for it. In the case of porous and buffered selves, different interpretations mean different experiences: “Because the meaning is integral to, it is constituent of the experience.”80Close And this is the case not only with the experience of the self, but with the experience of the world. The cosmos in modernity is no longer experienced as ordered according to an antecedent plan.

Taylor makes clear that when he talks about “experience,” he does not mean merely subjective feelings independent both of the object experienced and of changes in our dispositions and the bent of our lives. Such individual “experiences,” distinct from both object and agent, are “quintessentially modern” and spring from the influence of Descartes and others.82Close What Taylor means by “experience” is not interior and individual but rather a social production, affecting the individual person but formed by the images and practices of the social imaginary.

Taylor’s concept of social imaginary is not deterministic; he thinks that, with some effort, we can see things differently from what is given by the social imaginary. With reflection, a modern Western person can see the universe as ordered by divine Providence; with some philosophical study, one can come to reject the quintessentially modern, Cartesian view of the subject and its subjective experiences. Despite saying that “the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West”83Close—though some live it as open to something beyond, and others as closed—Taylor begins his final chapter with stories of “some of those who broke out of the immanent frame.”84Close To break out of the dominant social imaginary, however, takes effort, training, and maybe some luck; most of us will be unable to resist the gravitational pull of the spontaneous, naïve view of reality, whether in premodern or modern Western society. In the modern West, this does not necessarily mean it is extraordinarily difficult to believe in God; rather, it means that it is hard not to see belief in God as one option among many. Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. Taylor’s language of “breaking out” of the immanent frame indicates that the social imaginary is not all in all. Social imaginaries are contingent, they change over time and across space, and the individual person is never entirely determined by any given social imaginary.

All of this opens up the possibility of a gap between the way we imagine and describe the world and the way it actually is, between the social imaginary and what Taylor in places calls “reality.” When Taylor says, “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent,”85Close he does not mean that God is really dead or that reality is whatever a social imaginary says it is. When Taylor collapses description and interpretation into experience, he does not mean that the world is entirely the product of the human imagination. The fact that we experience the world in a certain way does not necessarily mean it really is that way. Although Taylor mostly tries to stay on the descriptive level throughout A Secular Age, there are a few places where he lets show his normative convictions about what really is. For example, he thinks that those who experience the world entirely as immanent are subject to a deleterious “spin,” a judgment which he says is not as harsh as Weber’s accusation of intellectual dishonesty against those unmanly men who take refuge in churches.86Close “My concept of spin here involves something of this kind, but much less dramatic and insulting; it implies that one’s thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality. I want to argue that those who think the closed reading of immanence is ‘natural’ and obvious are suffering from this kind of disability.”87Close It must be the case, then, that there are true and false social imaginaries, or at least truer and falser, or better and worse. Likewise, in the last pages of A Secular Age, Taylor tips his hand as a believing Christian. In opposition to those who think “religious, transcendent views” are erroneous and will fade over time, Taylor writes:

This notion of “misrecognizing” reality raises some intriguing possibilities for Taylor’s description of the modern Western world. There are clearly some aspects of the modern social imaginary that Taylor thinks are misrecognizing reality. For example, he objects to the sharp modern distinction between the natural and the supernatural that creates a view of nature as hermetically sealed and closed off from any reality beyond it: “Indeed, what may have to be challenged here is the very distinction nature/supernature itself.”89Close There are other aspects of the modern social imaginary, however, that Taylor seems to accept as accurate representations of reality. For Taylor, the differences between naïve and reflective, conformity and optionality, enchantment and disenchantment, religious and secular, premodern and modern, and so on, seem to capture something important about the modern world. I would like to probe further into some of these binaries and ask if they are not themselves part of the misrecognition that Taylor would like to challenge.

2.3.2. Optionality

As we have already seen, optionality is closely bound up with reflectivity in Taylor’s thought. I have just discussed Taylor’s concepts of reflectivity and social imagination as he grapples with what we know and what we know we know in both premodern and modern societies. Now I would like to probe further into the choices we are free to make. For Taylor, the Age of Authenticity—which he dates from the 1960s—is marked by a plurality of choices in the matter of religion, over against the conformity of previous eras. The 1960s accelerated the modern process of individuation, the social imaginary that insists each individual must follow their own path in life and not conform to the crowd.

What strikes Taylor most about modern Western society is not that it has made us all into materialists and foreclosed the religious option. The most important fact is that modernity has created a “free space” in which people can wander amid a plurality of options without having to remain definitively in any one.90Close In an earlier dispensation, what Taylor dubs the “paleo-Durkheimian,” one’s connection to the holy involved belonging to a church, which was coextensive with society. In the neo-Durkheimian dispensation, the primary locus of the sacred is the nation-state, though one still belonged to a denomination of one’s choice. The post-Durkheimian Age of Authenticity, which Taylor dates from the middle of the twentieth century, has elevated individual freedom of choice as its primary value; one must always be true to whatever rings true to one’s inner self. What the individual finds meaningful has no necessary embedding in either church or state.91Close The story of this dispensation is, of course, intertwined with the rise of consumerism.

When Taylor comes to discuss consumer culture in this context, however, his analysis is in tension with his narrative of optionality. Taylor does not present consumer culture as simply offering us more options; in fact, it functions more like a premodern religion, linking people through branding and mutual display to each other and to a higher meaning. And behind the retail choice of consumerism lies wholesale manipulation:

Taylor himself thus questions whether what we have in this situation is “real individual autonomy.” The possibility of misrecognition here explains his reference a few pages earlier to “this new (at least seeming) individuation.”93Close What seems does not necessarily line up with what is. For Taylor, individuation is in fact a new form of relationality; rather than the common action of the Age of Mobilization, what we have in the Age of Authenticity is mutual display, individuals expressing their individuality to each other through the purchase and use of consumer products.

What Taylor means by “mutual display” is illustrated by individuals who identify themselves with a brand, and therefore brand themselves; they purchase Nike shoes, and thereby display themselves as those who “just do it,” joining themselves imaginatively to a pantheon of sports heroes and other consumers, all of whom are expressing their individuality in the same way. Taylor calls this “linking myself to some higher world, the locus of stars and heroes, which is largely a construct of fantasy.”94Close The notion of a “higher world” seems to link these practices with transcendence, though Taylor does not make this explicit. His language of “higher” and “lower” here is hard to miss, however. Modern consumer society “link[s] us through commodities to an imagined higher existence elsewhere.”95Close Taylor notes that, for many people today, identification with a brand or style has tended to “displace” belonging to traditional collective agencies like church, state, and political party.96Close

This displacement (migration?) is usually narrated as liberation, but Taylor notes the coercive effects that produce it and that it produces. The post-Durkheimian dispensation either had the effect of gradually releasing people into the fragmented world or, where consumer culture has taken over, “explosively expelling” people into it. “For, while remaining aware of the attractions of the new culture, we must never underestimate the ways in which one can also be forced into it: the village community disintegrates, the local factory closes, jobs disappear in ‘downsizing,’ the immense weight of social approval and opprobrium begins to tell on the side of the new individualism.”97Close This is one of the few places in Taylor’s massive book where he hints at the role that capitalism plays in the story of secularization. In this respect, he is very unlike Weber, for whom capitalism occupies a central role. Taylor does, however, at least show signs of sympathy with Weber’s verdict that “material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.”98Close Taylor notes both the power of branding in creating meaning and the discipline that corporations exert on both workers and consumers. He might be more sanguine than Weber about the possibility of escaping the iron cage: “a more genuine search for authenticity begins only where one can break out of the Logo-centric language generated by trans-national corporations.”99Close But Taylor also notes that the people who have lately rebelled against church and sexual mores and an ethic of self-sacrifice in their personal lives have remained rigidly disciplined in their work life.100Close This is one of the few places where Taylor at least tacitly acknowledges that capitalism has managed to shake loose attachments to family and community that might interfere with the flexibility and malleability of consumers and workers, while simultaneously augmenting their responsiveness to the corporation. Being a rebel consumer in private life while being a cog in a cubicle at work is not a contradiction, since both keep the wheels of production moving.

“But all this conformity and alienation may nevertheless feel like choice and self-determination.”101Close Here Taylor notes a gap not only between the ideology of choice and real autonomy (as in the last block quote above) but between the experience—what it feels like—and the reality, the conformity and alienation to which the person is actually subjected. Taylor’s analysis raises the possibility that the way we have learned to name the modern era—as a regime of unbridled freedom of choice—does not match up with reality. Taylor does not think that this is the only story to tell about expressive individualism. He thinks that metatopical spaces of mutual display can unite people around genuine issues.102Close He acknowledges that there have been gains and losses in the post-Durkheimian dispensation, and judges that the gains have outweighed the losses. Taylor rejects the ideology of choice—the notion that more choice always makes us happier and authority is inherently suspect—but seems to accept the fact that we have more options than ever.103Close His comments on conformity and coercion in consumer culture and the generation of new forms of “imagined higher existence” through commodities, however, cut against the overarching tale of optionality, plurality, and secularity that he is trying to tell.

Taylor wisely tries to avoid any narrative that ends in resentful nostalgia for an age that is not coming back and was not that great to begin with. The dismantling of traditional societies’ rigid conformity to gender, family, social, and economic roles has been a significant gain. And the problems with consumer society must not be caricatured into some kind of totalitarian regime. Since the 1980s there has been a reaction against earlier critiques of consumerism that present consumers as mindless dupes being controlled by corporations. More recent critics have shown how consumers are active agents at the micro level, shaping their own identities and meanings through acts of consumption without regard to status. Such studies are an important correction to previous work, but as Juliet Schor has argued, they often ignore the macro level, or conflate the micro and macro levels. Such analyses tend to be depoliticized and unable to account for the power that producers wield in the marketplace. At the micro level, consumers may be conscious and active, but at the macro level they reproduce predictable class-based outcomes, outcomes that are in part anticipated and engineered by producers. As corporate power has grown to dominate not just “economic” space but also politics and the informational and symbolic systems of society, consumer choice operates within the very construction of the person as consumer. Schor writes:

The problem again is precisely that optionality is our new naïveté. On the micro level we have plenty of choices, but we cannot opt out of a particular kind of anthropology that constructs the subject as consumer. Consumerism functions as a myth, an unquestionable ideology. Thus, not just the ideology but even the “fact” of choice is questioned. If optionality is not optional, then perhaps the “fact” of choice is itself an ideology; we do have plenty of choices on the micro level, but on the macro level we cannot choose not to be a chooser, to define the self as an autonomous “god” that creates its own world through choice. It is not just the commodities themselves, as in “commodity fetishism,” that exert power over us; the fetishism of the self as chooser blinds us to real authenticity. If optionality is our new naïveté, then we can never bring it to explicit consciousness. If this is the case, then optionality is something that has power over us. The hegemony that optionality exerts is in part due to our inability to see and name that power. It is a power that always operates behind our backs. As in Weber, we become subject to the power of gods of our own making. Because this is the new naïveté, it is nearly impossible to name that power as anything other than freedom.

Taylor is not unaware of this dynamic, as we have seen. His general approach is to appreciate the freedoms that modernity has made possible while warning against the new unfreedoms that it has spawned. Taylor favors “open secularism,” in which religion is welcome as an option in public discourse, over “closed secularism,” which tries to exclude religion from public expression, as in France. In an interview, Taylor suggests that closed secularism is more prevalent in Europe than in the United States because of the legacy of confessional states in the former: “[H]ard secularists like the Jacobins couldn’t envision any other structure. So they had to swap one total society for another. . . . How can we run a society if we don’t agree on these fundamental things? . . . In some sense, closed secularism is still in the mindset of confessional states, only we change the confession.”105Close Taylor thus rejects closed secularism, but his comments on individuation in the age of consumerism open the possibility of seeing something “confessional” about open secularism as well. If one cannot escape the regime in which religion is a consumer choice, then perhaps the nova effect masks a more fundamental uniformity.

2.3.3. Disenchantment

Taylor nevertheless believes that there is a qualitative difference in the kind of naïve subjectivity experienced by premodern and postmodern Westerners that is captured by the term “disenchantment.” In a response to responses to A Secular Age, Taylor identifies disenchantment as one of two large developments that explain how we got to the place where faith is considered optional.106Close He thinks the disenchantment of the modern world is something on which everyone can agree.107Close As we saw in chapter 1, however, everyone does not agree that the modern world is disenchanted; Landy and Saler point to all kinds of immanent reenchantments, and Josephson-Storm thinks there is no reenchantment because the modern world was never disenchanted in the first place. Why does Taylor think everyone can agree that the modern world is disenchanted, and why does he think that description does necessary work?

Taylor himself, in responding to questions on his concept of disenchantment, has identified it as one of his “fuzzy areas, which I’m still having trouble working out.”108Close He tries to confine the concept to a “narrow corral”: “The ‘enchanted’ world which disenchantment brought to an end was a world full of spirits, and moral forces embedded in things, like relics or love potions.”109Close But he admits that “[d]isenchantment (Weber’s ‘Entzauberung’) is a concept which has trouble staying in place. It regularly escapes the corral of exact definition.”110Close Taylor thinks he knows why it won’t stay put: “It is widely felt that the modern training and discipline which has made us ‘buffered’ has excluded too much.”111Close Movements like Romanticism see disenchantment as a loss and call for reenchantment, living in attunement with the natural world and the cosmos. Taylor thinks this is something different from the narrow sense of disenchantment as experience of wood sprites and so forth, which cannot be reconstituted in modernity. But he says:

In a footnote Taylor takes solace in the fact that Weber’s horse also jumped the fence; Weber began with a notion of disenchantment as the extirpation of “magic,” but then expanded the notion to include the sidelining of religion itself.113Close

Insofar as disenchantment is identified with a general decline in encounters with wood sprites and seeking cures through relics, then, Taylor’s thesis is fairly uncontroversial (although the polling data Josephson-Storm cites on modern Western belief in ghosts, demons, witches, etc., should give us pause even here).114Close Insofar as it is uncontroversial, however, it is also not very interesting. Taylor clearly wants the concept of disenchantment to say more about the world we inhabit than simply that most people no longer believe in fairies.115Close With the Romantics, on whose side he puts himself,116CloseTaylor experiences disenchantment as a more general loss in Western modernity.117Close He clearly thinks there are gains that come with the loss, but there is a loss nonetheless. But a loss of what? Taylor does not miss wood sprites but rather “kinship with the universe” and “attunement with the world,” which he calls a “profound human need/aspiration.”118Close Taylor seems to buy the Romantic idea—found in a different form in Weber—that Western modernity threatens to subject human existence to the soulless march of instrumental rationality. Sometimes disenchantment means decline in encounters with fairies and the like, but sometimes for Taylor it means a much more general sense of the deadening of the world, the reduction of encounters with the material universe to instrumental attempts to manipulate mere matter.119Close This is the usual way the trope of disenchantment has been used to describe Western modernity, both by those who celebrate the decline of superstition and irrationality and by those who mourn the loss of a deeper connection to the natural world. Taylor has not been able to resist the gravitational pull of this common story that modern Westerners tell about themselves.

But is this description true? Taylor clearly does not think that it is true in the sense that it corresponds to the way the universe actually is. He does not believe in fairies, but he does believe that the universe is in fact infused with the presence of God. Those who describe the world as mere matter, closed to any contact with something beyond mere matter, are misdescribing the universe. But there is another sense in which we can challenge the story of disenchantment: we can doubt whether it accurately describes the way that modern Western people actually experience the world. Perhaps even those who would deny that the modern West is enchanted experience it as enchanted. To argue this, one would have to posit a possible gap between the way people experience the world and the way they describe that experience.

Taylor himself hints at this possibility in his discussion of the Age of Authenticity, specifically in the rise of consumer culture. He cites Yves Lambert’s study of Breton village life, where “since time out of mind” a modest subsistence economy was densely intertwined with ritual communal life centered around the local Catholic church. After World War II, the advent of consumer society turned people very quickly toward the pursuit of personal prosperity. Lambert quotes a local: “We no longer have time to care about that [religion]. One seeks money, comfort, and all that; everyone is now into that, and the rest, bah!”120Close The tight community life fragmented into individualism and a plurality of options. But it was the way that different aspects of community life—what we would call religious and economic—were so closely united that caused the fragmentation. Otherworldly salvation and inner-worldly material well-being had been so tied together in Breton Catholicism that any change in the one would necessarily affect the other. Another local: “Why would I go to mass, they say to themselves, when my next-door neighbour is doing as well as me, perhaps even better, and he doesn’t go.”121Close Taylor comments, “It is almost as though the ‘conversion’ was a response to a stronger form of magic, as earlier conversions had been.”122Close

The single word “almost” here keeps Taylor’s thesis about the disenchantment of the modern Western world from unraveling. Taylor recognizes a strong similarity between premodern and modern forms of society, but then pulls back; it is almost there, but not quite. What if we removed that “almost” and explored the unthought behind Taylor’s insight here? What if modern consumer culture really is a form of magic, indeed a “stronger form of magic,” Zauber, than the Catholicism which had structured Breton life since time out of mind? Magic, as Taylor uses the term, is associated with the “moral forces embedded in things” that is part of his definition of enchantment. By pointing to a stronger form of magic in consumer culture, Taylor indicates that consumer culture is responding to material things as if they were invested with moral force, the ability to deliver happiness, comfort, salvation. Material objects are not at all dead matter for the Bretons and for Westerners more generally. They are rather the totems around which so much of social life is structured. Taylor’s insight here is not exactly new; Marx identified the fetishism of commodities long before consumer culture came to dominate Western society. I will explore these matters in depth in chapter 7. For now, it is important to note that Taylor himself raises the possibility that magic still pervades contemporary culture, and that his own analysis of the disenchantment of modernity would come apart if the “almost” were removed.

To see consumer culture as a form of magic, we would need to refuse the idea that modern Westerners experience their world as disenchanted, even if they still describe it as such. We would need to allow for a gap between experience and description. To do so would call into question the usefulness of the enchantment/disenchantment divide as a purely descriptive tool. Taylor is flummoxed by the fuzziness of the concept of disenchantment: “It regularly escapes the corral of exact definition.”123Close Perhaps it is better to see it not as a purely descriptive tool; the enchantment/disenchantment binary is instead prescriptive, a rhetorical device that helps make the world in a certain way.124Close As Courtney Bender puts it, “[T]he secular is marked not by disenchantment, but by an oft-repeated claim that we have been disenchanted.”125CloseThe interesting question is why we have been taught to describe the modern Western world as disenchanted even though we might not experience it that way. One way of answering that question is to acknowledge that the enchantment/disenchantment binary is most commonly used to drive a wedge between “us” and “them,” between us moderns and either our ancestors or non-Westerners. The terms are most commonly used either to dismiss practices and beliefs we don’t like as superstitious or primitive, or to bemoan the soullessness of the modern world. As descriptive terms, they are incoherent and misleading. The key question, to restate one of the main points of chapter 1, is not whether modernity is disenchanted, but rather what kind of work is being done, in any given context, by labeling things either enchanted or disenchanted? In other words, whom and what does the enchanted/disenchanted distinction authorize, and whom and what does it marginalize?

To remove the “almost” from Taylor’s comment on consumer culture would also help Taylor make sense of his Romantic and Christian conviction that “living in attunement with the world is a profound human need/aspiration.”126Close If this profound need to encounter transcendent reality in material things is in fact hardwired into human existence, even though we are capable of misrecognizing it, then it must go somewhere other than simply going away when it is suppressed. Removing the “almost” allows us to see consumer culture as a different way of dealing with this basic human need. The holy in this case has not simply disappeared from things but has migrated to other kinds of things and taken on different modalities. The formal similarities between Catholicism and consumerism—between sacramentality and the fetishization of material goods especially127Close—help explain how the transition in Breton culture could take place so quickly, so thoroughly, and without much resistance. This explaining the transition by way of formal similarity is an extension of Taylor’s own comment about the deep connection between salvation and material well-being in the predecessor culture, except that the connection remains, mutatis mutandis, in Breton culture after the transition as well. The locus of salvation has simply migrated to consumer goods. Perhaps the people lined up at the Best Buy on Thanksgiving, waiting to burst into the store at midnight and run frenzied for the discounted televisions, are not “buffered” selves after all. William Desmond has written on the “ontological porosity” of the human person—visible in human responses to touch, music, laughter, and other common experiences—by which we find (or lose) ourselves by surrendering to what is beyond ourselves. Desmond insists that we are never simply buffered, and that porosity does not fade away with Western modernity.128Close Seeing the translation of devotion from relics to consumer goods as a migration, and not simply as a loss of “magic,” would help reinforce Taylor’s claim at the conclusion of his final chapter: “The account I’m offering here has no place for unproblematic breaks with a past which is simply left behind us.” Taylor quotes Robert Bellah: “[N]othing is ever lost.”129Close The sense of the holy may take different, even perverse and idolatrous forms, but if Taylor is right about perennial human needs and aspirations,130Close it does not simply disappear.

2.3.4. Decline of Transcendence

One of the most significant changes in the social imaginary of the West, according to Taylor, has been the sorting out of transcendence from immanence and the relative decline of belief in the former. Taylor defines transcendence as that which takes people beyond human flourishing, and contends that there now exists, for the first time in history, a race of people who experience their world as purely immanent, as purely to do with human flourishing. Defining religion in terms of transcendence, and not simply in terms of belief in God, allows Taylor to include Buddhism and other nontheistic belief systems in his category of religion, and allows him to distinguish Christians and Buddhists on the one hand from exclusive humanists on the other.

There are multiple problems with this categorization. Whether or not the transcendent/immanent divide really makes sense in Buddhism is a difficult question. The distinction between transcendence and immanence comes from the Judeo-Christian context, with its distinction between a Creator God and creation, a distinction that Buddhism does not have. In order to make Buddhism fit the transcendent/immanent paradigm, transcendence has to be given a very broad and nonspecific sense. Taylor locates the distinction within Buddhism through his distinction between mere human flourishing and goals that go beyond human flourishing. Both Buddhism and Christianity, according to Taylor, offer renunciation of normal human flourishing; both serve goals that are “independent of human flourishing.”131Close There are at least two problems here. One is in his characterization of Christian renunciation.132Close The eternal goal of Christian life is not independent of human flourishing. The gift of self in Christian renunciation is simultaneously the receiving of one’s true self, which is described as theosis, the deification of the human person. The created order, furthermore, is not met with mere detachment but is integral to the process of theosis. Human flourishing in communion with God, other people, and the material order is a foretaste of the eschaton, which is not just the entry of the individual into heaven after death but the re-creation of the material order, a new heaven and a new earth (Is. 65:17; II Peter 3:13). The relationship between Christian renunciation and human flourishing is at least more complicated than Taylor makes it out to be.133Close The second problem is that Taylor struggles to distinguish “religious” renunciation from other kinds of renunciation, such as that of the Stoics. According to Taylor, Christian and Buddhist renunciation is out of compassion for others, whereas Socrates’s death—“utterly different” from Christ’s—is “leaving this condition for a better one.”134Close Why the “better condition” is not “beyond human flourishing” is unclear to me. Taylor seems to be working too hard here to get Christianity and Buddhism to stay on one side of the divide and Stoicism and exclusive humanism to stay on the other.

If this battle is unwinnable, Taylor can fall back to his “prudent (or cowardly)” claim that the transcendent/immanent divide needs to work only within modern Western culture, for it is only here that the formerly interpenetrating realms of transcendence and immanence became “watertight,” to use his term, in modernity.135Close Even within Western culture, however, the distinction is hard to maintain with anything like watertight clarity. William Connolly, for example, has responded to Taylor by distinguishing between two types of transcendence, radical and mundane. Connolly does not believe in God (radical transcendence), but he does believe in experiences outside of conscious awareness or full representation that interact with actuality in fecund ways (mundane transcendence).136Close Connolly identifies himself with other immanent naturalists who project an open temporal horizon that is irreducible to either closed naturalism or radical transcendence.137Close Martha Nussbaum likewise distinguishes between two different types of transcendence: external, which she rejects, and transcendence that is internal to human life, which she accepts.138Close Then there are philosophers of immanence who prefer to do away with the transcendent/immanent distinction altogether. For such philosophers, the very distinction perpetuates the traditional problem of seeing immanence as negatively related to transcendence. Immanence remains transcendence minus something, a remainder when transcendence is sealed off. Immanence in the presence of transcendence remains something fallen, incomplete, limited, and inferior. For Gilles Deleuze, for example, there is nothing but pure immanence; the creativity formerly assigned to transcendence is an effect of immanence. There is no negativity within immanence, no differencing from what something is not. The positivity within immanence is only a temporal “going beyond” into an open future, a dynamic process of ceaseless becoming new. It is not expressed in spatial “upper” or “lower” terms.139Close

What does Taylor make of such attempts to scramble the transcendence/immanence binary? Taylor responds to Nussbaum in the pages of A Secular Age. He tries to make sense of what distinguishes internal from external transcendence; perhaps external means any transformation that would render certain human goods impossible for us. Ruling out external transcendence would then mean rejecting Plato’s denigration of erotic love, but would we not then also have to declare a universal and decentered ethical concern for others forbidden? Taylor concludes, “All this underscores how problematic are the distinctions, not only between internal and external transcendence, but even transcendence/immanence itself.” Nevertheless, Taylor goes on to say, “Of course, I want to retain the notion of transcendence, along the lines of my original distinction between exclusive and inclusive humanisms, for the purposes of my principal thesis.”140Close Does the kind of internal or mundane transcendence of certain humanisms count as real transcendence for Taylor? Ruth Abbey says it does; she thinks Taylor accepts “deep ecology,” for example, as a kind of transcendence without traditional religion, thus denying traditional religion any monopoly on transcendence.141Close Peter Gordon disagrees; for Taylor naturalistic experiences of mystery in nature do not count as “actual transcendence” but are ultimately reducible to exclusive humanism.142Close

Which interpretation of Taylor is correct? As with disenchantment, Taylor tries to distinguish between a broad sense and a narrow sense of transcendence, recognizing aspirations to transcendence in Nussbaum’s “broader sense,” but adding, “I have normally been using the term in a narrower sense in this book.”143Close He does not do so consistently, however. When he needs to find transcendence in nontheistic Buddhism in order to count Buddhism as a religion, Taylor uses transcendence in a broad and nonspecific sense. When he needs to locate nontheistic humanisms on the immanent side of the dichotomy, he uses transcendence in a narrow sense. Taylor sees in the “immanent transcendence” of the heirs of Nietzsche a restlessness “at the barriers of the human sphere.”144Close But he is unwilling to abandon the barrier that separates the transcendent from the merely human. He expresses doubt that a fully adequate account of transcendence or “upper” language can be given in purely immanent or “lower” terms.145Close Nevertheless, there are many borderline cases. Festive events like rock concerts, Taylor says, are “plainly ‘non-religious’; and yet they also sit uneasily in the secular, disenchanted world. . . . The festive remains a niche in our world, where the (putatively) transcendent can erupt into our lives, however well we have organized them around immanent understandings of order.”146Close Here Taylor’s use of “disenchantment” has clearly jumped the fence, and the only thing keeping transcendence in his narrower corral is the word “putatively” in parenthesis, which operates like the “almost” in his discussion of consumerism—as a hastily erected bit of fencing to protect the binaries that Taylor thinks he needs.

Part of the difficulty for Taylor is that he is trying to use the transcendence/immanence binary in a general way to divide modern Westerners into two categories, “believers” and “nonbelievers,” rather than examining the binary’s specific usefulness, or lack thereof, in any particular context. The transcendence/immanence binary has a very specific set of uses within the Christian tradition that may or may not be helpful when applied to other contexts. Even within the Christian tradition, transcendence/immanence is much more complex than simply distinguishing God who is “beyond” human life from what remains “within” human flourishing. The original context of the concept “immanence” in Christian thought was the inner perichoresis of the three persons of the divine Trinity, in which “all varieties of divine being and every divine person who is so by relating to the other, must necessarily be fully contained in the other.”147Close The relationship of transcendence and immanence in Christian thought is further complexified by the Incarnation, which makes the transcendent God visible in immanent form without thereby reducing God to something created.148Close In the Christian tradition, appealing to divine transcendence can support the integrity and intrinsic worth of material creation because God’s creative act allows things to exist for their own sake. It is precisely because God is wholly other, entirely transcendent to creation, that God is also entirely immanent in creation, “in all things, and innermostly,” as Aquinas says.149Close The relationship of transcendence to immanence in the Christian tradition is not spatial, as Taylor often portrays it; transcendent does not mean “over there” as opposed to immanence’s “in here.”150Close Precisely because God is wholly transcendent and not a thing in the universe, God does not compete with things or absorb them into God, but causes them to exist for their own sake. God does not take the place of something else, but invites difference to happen. As I will argue in the final chapter, the result of such a sacramental view of the world is a more satisfying materialism, a true immanent transcendence.

Taylor will object that he is not talking about transcendence and immanence in theory but about the social imaginary of the modern West. Transcendence and immanence were experienced as mutually interpenetrating until the modern secular age made them “watertight.”151Close Taylor thinks that his definition of religion in terms of transcendence needs to fit only the modern West. But in responding to critiques of his use of “transcendence,” he has also said that he needs it as a general term that applies universally.152Close What reasons can he give for using such a fraught term? “Well, one was that I wanted to say something general, something not just about Christians. In the end, I think there is a point one could make about the insufficiency of human flourishing as the unique focus of our lives, which recurs throughout all of human history and cultures, albeit in very different ways.”153Close When Taylor needs a term that will include both Christianity and nontheistic Buddhism, he uses “transcendence” in a broad and quite vague sense. When he needs a term that will include Christianity and exclude nontheistic types of humanism, he uses “transcendence” in a narrow sense. He wants to be inclusive, but not so inclusive that any experience of fullness counts as transcendent.

Why not allow that rock concerts are more than the “putative” eruption of transcendence in our lives? Because Taylor thinks that what we ultimately need is not rock concerts, but God. When Taylor says, “Modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it,” he does not really think they are responding to “transcendent reality”; he thinks they are responding to God. Taylor is a believing Christian, and he believes that God is a reality, the most real reality.154Close This, of course, does not mean that Christians have a monopoly on understanding God, nor on encountering God. Misrecognition means that God is active in all of reality, even if people don’t acknowledge it. And this means as well that people do need rock concerts and good art and the beauty of nature and all the sacramental encounters with God in material reality; it is misrecognition only if we fail to see that the true source of being and beauty is somehow more than the merely material.155Close

This, I think, is what Taylor really wants to say, but his status as a philosopher and his secular audience make him reticent to say it. What has declined in the modern West is not belief in transcendence; what has declined is belief in God. But if Taylor is right that humans have an inherent desire for God, then those longings will appear in all kinds of places, including rock concerts and consumer goods, even if they are misrecognized as such.

2.3.5. Decline of Religion

The idea that the holy migrates and is not simply lost or foreclosed would help Taylor tell his story of secularization as a new way of describing the world, but not necessarily as a completely new way of experiencing the world. As it is, Taylor’s contention on page 772 that nothing is ever lost stands in tension with his assertion on page 1 that secularity makes us modern Westerners different from “anything else in human history.” Taylor is trying to give a balanced account of what has and has not changed in the transition from premodern to modern societies. His most urgent task, however, is to explain what has changed; he did not write a massive book on the secular age in order to say Nothing to see here folks. Move along. His emphasis is on how peculiar we are. And the religious/secular distinction is key to his entire narrative.156Close If we live in a secular age, we must be able to answer the question Secular, as opposed to what? The other side of the binary from secular is “religious.” As we have already seen, Taylor rejects functionalist definitions of religion that would spread the meaning of the term broadly, to cover, for example, nationalism or Marxism. He is afraid that if we allow such Durkheimian definitions, we will be able to claim that nothing has really changed, that we moderns are still as religious as ever. Something has clearly changed, and Taylor defines that change in terms of a decline in religion: “[T]he proportion of belief is smaller and that of unbelief is larger than ever before; and this is even more clearly the case, if you define religion in terms of the transformation perspective. Thus my own view of ‘secularization’ . . . is that there has certainly been a ‘decline’ of religion.”157Close

Nevertheless, Taylor is more nuanced than typical theorists of secularization in describing this decline. Although he accepts that there has been a decline of religion, he rejects the idea that such a decline is a linear process made inevitable by advances in human understanding. He also thinks that religion does not simply go away; it mutates and takes new forms. Those forms, however, remain within what a substantivist would regard as “religion.” In the paleo-Durkheimian ancien régime, my connection to the sacred consists in belonging to the church, which is coextensive with society, which is ruled by a king. The sacred is embedded in a hierarchical cosmos to which one simply belongs. This order preexists the people who inhabit it since time out of mind. In the neo-Durkheimian Age of Mobilization, roughly 1800–1950, citizens see themselves as coming together as equals to form a political entity, which has a providential role to play in God’s design. I belong to the denomination of my choice, but I am still connected to what Taylor calls “the broader, over-arching ‘church,’ ” which is identified with the political entity.158Close “In both these cases, there was a link between adhering to God and belonging to the state—hence my epithet ‘Durkheimian.’ ”159Close The point that Taylor is trying to make here is that the neo-Durkheimian dispensation is a change in, but not simply a diminishment of, religion. Where there is “religiously-defined political identity-mobilization . . . a potential decline in belief and practice is retarded or fails to occur.”160Close Taylor’s point is similar with regard to the post-Durkheimian Age of Authenticity. Although religion in the West has declined, one should not read the precipitous drop in church attendance in some European countries as a sign of the end of religion. Expressivist individualism has fragmented religious identities, but the quest for transcendence lives on, and even in decidedly post-Christian places, people “may retain an attachment to a perspective of transformation which they are not presently acting on.”161Close Large-scale disasters bring even Swedes out to churches for memorial services.

So Taylor agrees that religion has declined, but he pushes back against the secularization thesis that religion is in terminal decline in the modern West. Taylor, as we have seen, nevertheless accepts the secularization theorists’ substantivist definition of religion as about beliefs, not function, and more specifically about beliefs in transcendence, something beyond the immanent world. Though they share the same definition of religion, Taylor thinks that the secularization theorists miss the continued salience of religious belief in our world. He continues to define religion, however, in terms of things that look like Christianity. So he acknowledges that everyone, believer and nonbeliever, has their own version of “fullness,” a perspective in which this life looks good and whole and as it should. Even a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins has a naturalistic “piety of belonging” and a sense of wonder; Taylor even comments that “the piety verges perhaps on the ‘religious.’ ”162Close But they are not religious in Taylor’s definition of the term. Here “verges,” “perhaps,” and the scare quotes around the word “religious” serve the same purpose that Taylor’s “almost” serves in his discussion of the stronger form of magic. They serve to maintain the definitional boundary that Taylor thinks he needs, even though the boundary gets quite fuzzy at this point.

Do we really need this boundary? Why accept the substantivist definition of religion as about belief in transcendence? Taylor thinks he needs such a definition in order to keep his subject matter properly delimited; if nationalism were a religion, then the whole religious/secular distinction would get thrown into confusion. But there might be good reasons to question this distinction. The distinction has come under increasing scrutiny from scholars who view the religious/secular distinction as both historically constructed and politically motivated. In other words, the religious/secular distinction is a modern Western invention and does not simply identify a natural kind “out there” in the world called religion that one bumps into in all times and places. And the religious/secular distinction is constructed in different ways according to different political purposes that need to be interrogated.163Close

Taylor thinks he can avoid the problem of the historicity of the religious/secular distinction by making the “prudent (or cowardly) move” of limiting his concept of religion to the modern West. What he means by “religion” is what “we modern Westerners” mean by religion: belief in God or something transcendent. Taylor has been criticized for ignoring the ways that the non-Western world has been deeply implicated in the West’s self-definition, including in its construction of the religious/secular divide.164Close But also problematic is the fact that Taylor does not consistently limit his use of “religion” to the modern West; he discusses “early religion” in the pre-Axial age, where “religion is everywhere” and is inextricably linked with social life,165Close he discusses “higher” post-Axial religions,166Close and he continues to use the term “religion” to describe what is going on in medieval Christendom.167Close What makes these very different phenomena “religious” is not a matter of belief in God; in assessing the “common human religious capacity” exhibited by “early religion,” Taylor is struck by

Taylor does not explain why religious experience is not merely a matter of belief for ancient peoples, but it is for us modern Westerners. If the “common human religious capacity” is not a matter of belief but about how one relates to “forces or powers” in the world, it is not clear why the sacred nationalism that Taylor describes in the neo-Durkheimian dispensation or the “stronger form of magic” that Taylor discovers in modern consumerism cannot count as religion, even if modern Westerners have learned to call these phenomena “secular.”

I have already discussed Taylor’s views of consumerism. Let’s look at his analysis of “religion” in the neo-Durkheimian dispensation. Taylor invokes Durkheim here for the latter’s idea that religion and society are deeply intertwined. For Durkheim, the real object of religion is society; religion is the way that a society represents itself to itself. According to Durkheim, “a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions.”169Close What is sacred and what is not, however, is not defined by the content of belief. For Durkheim, anything can be regarded by a society as sacred. It does not matter if the national flag is explicitly believed to be a representation of a god or not; what matters is the function that such separation of the sacred from the profane serves in any given society. The social order is reinforced or contested by the symbolization of communal solidarity among the members of society. There is no essential difference between the rituals and taboos surrounding the flag and those having to do with God or gods; both represent a society’s symbolization of itself to itself. For Durkheim, all religion, insofar as it does not make explicit the reference to the society itself, is a kind of misrecognition. Durkheim thought that origin of this misrecognition lay in the complexity of society itself. People experience the constraints of social forces beyond the individual’s control, but since these forces are too complex for any individual to understand, they give rise to mythological accounts and ritual practices that pay homage to these forces.170Close

Taylor’s use of Durkheim seems limited to a general sense that, in some dispensations, religion and group belonging are closely related. Taylor thinks that only paleo- and neo-Durkheimian societies behave as Durkheim thinks all societies do. Taylor also defines religion differently than Durkheim does. Taylor does not think that the real object of religion is society itself; instead he defines religion as belief in the transcendent. So in the neo-Durkheimian dispensation, Taylor defines religion in Western society as still meaning almost exclusively belief in God, but he describes how such religious belief becomes thoroughly intertwined with the new sense of nationalism, as in Britain or Poland or the United States. What he cannot allow is Durkheim’s suggestion that nationalism is itself a kind of religion, that devotion to the nation is not essentially different from devotion to God, that nationalism is a kind of self-worship that reinforces social belonging and social order by the sacralization of the group itself. Taylor comes close to doing so in his suggestion that religion does not simply go away in modernity but takes on other forms. He comes close in his suggestions that national identity becomes a new sort of “church” in the neo-Durkheimian dispensation. He comes close in his extension of the neo-Durkheimian category even to virulently antireligious forms of nationalism like those of revolutionary and republican France.171Close But ultimately such forms of piety can only verge on religion, can only be almost religion, can only be putative religion if Taylor’s tale of secularization as the decline of religion is to hold up.

My point here is not to defend Durkheim’s reduction of all forms of worship to society’s worship of itself; as will become clear in the next chapter, I accept the basic biblical distinction between a true God and false gods. Nor am I interested in defending Durkheim’s functionalist definition of religion over against substantivist definitions. As I have argued at length previously,172Close any attempt to define “religion” once and for all times and places—whether a more restrictive substantivist attempt or a more expansive functionalist attempt—will get bogged down in anachronism and the imposition of a Western invention on non-Western contexts. There is an extensive and ever-growing corpus of scholarly work showing that the religious/secular distinction is a modern Western invention, one that was invented for very particular political purposes in early modern Europe and then exported to the rest of the world in the process of colonization.173Close In Europe, the distinction accompanied the rise of the state and divided the responsibility of the church from that of the state; in Europe’s colonies, the distinction divided local culture from the tasks of rule. Given the malleable and politically inflected ways that religion has been defined, the most sensible approach seems to be neither substantivist nor functionalist but constructivist: in any given context, one should ask why certain things get labeled “religion” and other things do not. What work is the distinction doing in any particular setting? Why did late nineteenth-century Western scholars consider Confucianism a religion, while Chinese scholars rejected that designation? Why do some consider American nationalism a civil religion, while others insist it is secular? Why is godless Theravada Buddhism considered a religion, but godless Marxism is not? In Durkheim’s case, John Bossy shows how he could not relate “religion” to “society” in the way he does without the simultaneous and mutually implicated invention of both concepts in early modern Europe.174Close Even within the modern West, we should examine the work that such concepts are doing, and not simply treat them as neutral descriptors.

Taylor is not unaware that the term “religion” is fraught, but, as we have seen, he thinks the reason it defies definition is that its different manifestations are so diverse. But how do we know that these different manifestations are all “religion” to begin with? Taylor says “the phenomena we are tempted to call religious are so tremendously varied in human life.”175Close But why are we “tempted” to call them all religious if they are so varied? More to the point, why do we want to call some things religious and some other, very similar things nonreligious? What makes nontheistic Buddhist rituals “religious,” by Taylor own reckoning, but rituals surrounding the proper treatment of the American flag—very precise rules for folding, displaying, venerating, and keeping it from touching the ground or being otherwise “desecrated”—are not? Taylor uses “religion” broadly when he wants to include Buddhism, but narrowly when he wants to exclude nationalism.176Close He hopes that his “prudent (or cowardly)” move to restrict “religion” to the way the term is usually used in the West will solve the problem, but it doesn’t. It merely casts a fog of legitimacy on the way we usually use the religious/secular distinction and makes sure that the way the distinction works in our society goes unquestioned. But the rise of the religious/secular distinction is part of the story of the changes in Western society that Taylor is trying to tell. Secularization, in other words, is not merely the waxing of the secular and the waning of the religious in the West; secularization is the very invention of the religious/secular binary and the process by which certain things got labeled religious and other things did not. And that process is a matter of the redistribution of power in the West, including the transfer of power from the church to the state. Indeed, the word “secularization” was originally used in the early modern period to denote the transfer of goods from ecclesiastical to civil control.177Close What the church was left with in this process is “religion,” which comes to be seen as inherently private; the state, being secular, is public. We can agree with Taylor that the removal of coercive power from the church is a gain. But we might be more able to see the problems with the transfer of violence from the church to the state if we could name that violence as sacred, not secular. This is what Durkheim helps us to do, and it is what the religious/secular distinction helps cover up.178Close

Taylor recognizes the continuation of Durkheimian rituals in the secular world but thinks that they are essentially distinct from religious rituals as experienced in premodern societies.

I think Taylor is right that we certainly do speak this way. But I don’t think he is sufficiently attentive to why we speak this way now. It may be that we are not simply using new categories to describe a new kind of experience; it may be that the categories themselves help to shape the description, and therefore the experience itself. In other words, the description of patriotic ritual as “only symbolic” might not be merely descriptive but prescriptive; it might be doing some political work. To recognize patriotic ritual as “religious,” as more than only symbolic, puts it on the same level as “traditional religions” such as Christianity and Judaism, and thereby sets up a confrontation between church and state over idolatry. To deny that patriotic ritual is religious, to call it “only symbolic,” is to preserve Western political arrangements from challenge.

Taylor’s account relies too heavily on people’s descriptions of their own beliefs, and not on their empirically observable behaviors. People may fully recognize that the nation is not a god, that the flag is just a piece of cloth, that the cause to which they are dedicating themselves is a temporal one, but what really matters is what they do with their bodies. If they are willing to kill and die for something they would describe as “only symbolic,” then their dedication to the cause is manifestly not something whose “efficacy here is inner,” as Taylor puts it. It is not only that Taylor’s account of internalization is itself too internalized. It is that the modern trope of internalization is itself an effect of external, political arrangements of power. To say that my ritual patriotic actions are “only symbolic” allows me to be a good Christian and a good American soldier at the same time.

Consider Taylor’s account of ritual sacrifice among the Dinka:

Compare this to Mark Twain’s account of his fellow citizens’ behavior during wartime:

Do we not here too see the whole community repeating the invocations of the masters, becoming possessed by a kind of divine force, and acting as a single body to prosecute the blood sacrifice? What Twain describes is not the action of “buffered selves,” and the religious/secular dichotomy applied to these two examples would only obscure rather than illuminate what is going on. And that may be precisely why it is used.

2.4. Conclusion

This kind of obscuration is of course not Taylor’s intention. Insofar as Taylor tries to explain how modern Westerners came to think about the world the way we do, his account is brilliant and largely successful. He is aware of the ambiguities of some of the dichotomies he employs, and in every case he tries to bring the two sides closer together, arguing that most everyone, believer and nonbeliever, feels “cross-pressured,” pulled by different forces in both directions. Taylor’s intention is irenic, to divest believers of fear and resentment of nonbelievers and disabuse nonbelievers of the tendency to see believers as credulous and backward.

Despite his intentions, however, Taylor’s dichotomies in some cases unnecessarily reinforce the divisions. I am not simply arguing that a society that claims to be reflective, pluralistic, disenchanted, immanent, and secular is in fact naïve, hegemonic, enchanted, transcendent, and religious. I am arguing that these very dichotomies undermine attempts to get our descriptions of the world right, because they are not neutral descriptors but in fact carry prescriptive power. The key question, again, is not whether or not our society is enchanted or secular but what kind of work those terms are doing when they are used. To say that we live in a secular age is really to say that we live in an age in which we use the religious/secular distinction the way we do, along with the other binaries Taylor employs. In a “secular” society these binaries are used to separate two “races” of people, believers and nonbelievers, when the real question is Belief in what? Everyone believes in something; you tell me what you believe, I’ll tell you what I believe, and then let’s have a conversation.182Close It is not belief that has declined in the modern West, but belief in the biblical God. It is not religion that has declined in the modern West, but Christianity (and maybe Judaism as well). These are real and important changes, but they are not adequately described as shifts from belief to unbelief, from naïveté to reflectivity, from enchantment to disenchantment, from transcendence to immanence.

The question of explicit belief, however, is only part of what is really happening. If we are going to get our descriptions of the world right, we need to attend not only to what people say they believe but to their actions, which may express implicit beliefs. Taylor ultimately wants to tell a story of misrecognition; God is still there, but we have been disciplined to ignore this fact. Instead of acknowledging God, we attempt to find fullness in material objects and social processes. At some point, Taylor—or at least those who think that Taylor is right on this crucial point—will need to do theology, that is, discuss God and why and how it is that God is misrecognized. The theological concept that corresponds to this misrecognition is idolatry. I will take up the analysis of idolatry in the next chapter.

Metrics

View Metrics

More from Oxford Academic