Abstract
The single most monumental study to appear in recent decades on the subject of secularism and the secular is no doubt Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). For a long time, post-war Western sociology of religion was concerned both with the idea that religion was in decline and with the idea that religion was becoming increasingly privatized. Working in a tradition that to a large extent harked back to Max Weber’s theses on rationalization and secularization, authors such as Berger (1967) and Luckmann (1967) became key proponents of the idea that religion was losing significance in general, and public significance in particular. For some time now, both ideas have been disputed. While some defend versions of the ‘secularization thesis’ (Bruce, 2002), many have come to doubt its empirical foundations. For one, the public irrelevance of religion in modern life has been critiqued, most eloquently by José Casanova (1994), and Habermas’s recent dialogue with then soon-to-be pope Ratzinger can be seen as a significant sign of a re-evaluation of the public relevance of religion (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2005; cf. Habermas, 2001). And what is more, the idea of a ‘decline’ of religion has come under attack, even so much so that it has by now become a truism to say that ‘religion is back’ (from never having been gone). Even a canonical author in the ‘secularization’ tradition, Peter Berger, has changed his long-standing views on the subject (cf. Berger, 1999). What Charles Taylor has brought to such discussions is a change of paradigm. Instead of focusing on either more religion and less secularity, or on less religion and more secularity, Taylor’s book brought a crucial reconceptualization of concepts such as ‘the secular’ and ‘secularization’. His book, at the time I write this only three years old, has rightfully already been much acclaimed, and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is testimony to its relevance. This edited volume collects contributions to many aspects of Taylor’s work, all of them by knowledgeable contributors, ranging from sociologists to theologians, from political scientists to anthropologists and from philosophers to literary theorists. It therefore marks an important step in what may well be a long Wirkungsgeschichte of A Secular Age. 1
As the editors, Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen and Craig Calhoun make clear in their Introduction, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is meant as a way of taking up the discussions opened up by A Secular Age, all the while illustrating the complexities of Taylor’s work. A Secular Age, Warner, Vanantwerpen and Calhoun note, was too carelessly reviewed when it was published. It was either seen as another critique of the ‘religion in decline’ thesis, or as a rather personal work of Catholic apologetics. As the introduction of Varieties makes clear, Taylor’s work most decisively is not simply a ‘post-secular’ work (p. 6). It is rather formulated in direct opposition to the idea that there is a ‘post-secular’ age, for its main argument is that, in a secular age, both belief and unbelief are transformed. As Taylor himself makes clear in his Afterword to Varieties, his theory is formulated against what he calls ‘subtraction theories’, which identify ‘a certain essential tendency or character which holds everywhere and always of human beings’ (p. 301). Taylor’s is a ‘master narrative of modernity’ that rather sees modernity as shaped by a variety of ‘constructed cultures’. Modernity is thus not the absence of tradition or religion, but the active construction of another kind of human culture (p. 302). In A Secular Age, Taylor thus discerns a first meaning of secularity – the idea that religion retreats from public life – from a second version of the secularity thesis – the idea that religious practice and belief are in decline. Both versions he rejects in favour of a third conceptualization of secularity: the idea that social life has moved into a phase where belief in God is challenged and hence understood as one option among others (Taylor, 2007: 3). In this situation, both belief and unbelief exist in what Taylor dubs ‘the immanent frame’, which entails the idea ‘of living in impersonal orders, cosmic, social, and ethical orders which can be fully explained in their own terms’ (Afterword to Varieties, pp. 306–7). Taylor’s third conceptualization of secularity moreover has the broader goal of circumscribing a modern social imaginary (cf. Taylor, 2004). As the editors of Varieties note in their Introduction, crucial to Taylor’s argument is the idea that ‘secularity in its modern Western sense is significantly a product of the long history of reform movements within Western Christianity’ (p. 15). There is, for Taylor, no ‘opposition’ between ‘religion’ and ‘modernity’. Taylor’s general hermeneutic effort is to come to an understanding of a modern common understanding (a ‘background’ in phenomenological terms) prevalent in social life. The secular age, Taylor contends, is the result of a ‘long march’ consisting of an immanentization of various orders which gave rise to ‘the great disembedding’ in which the individual, as a ‘buffered self’ over against traditions, became the primary category of social life. This entailed a cultural ‘nova’ consisting of reactions and counter-reactions against the historical process of immanentization. In his Afterword to Varieties, Taylor thus illustrates the connections of A Secular Age with his earlier work in hermeneutics and the social sciences, as well as his work on authenticity and modern culture (cf. Taylor, 1989).
Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age engages with this broad-ranging narrative first of all by three essays which relate Taylor’s work to various other intellectual traditions. In Chapter 1, Robert Bellah discusses Taylor in relation to Maruyama Masao and Jürgen Habermas. All three authors, Bellah states, have been preoccupied with democracy and with the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern. Yet Bellah’s comments on Taylor’s conception of the ‘postsecular’ and on his ‘being both modern and Catholic’ (p. 52) appear yet to miss the full import of Taylor’s narrative. In Chapter 2, John Milbank discusses Taylor’s historical analysis of the self-transformation of Western Christianity, eventually ending up in the immanent frame. Milbank’s is an intricate, densely argumented chapter that touches on a variety of issues and makes important points, for instance, when he argues that Taylor is inconsistent in his historical account of ‘disenchantment’ and in his account of the ‘discovery of ordinary life’, which Milbank argues shows signs of a ‘subtraction thesis’ (pp. 60–1). Milbank moreover pursues a further consequence of Taylor’s ‘reform master narrative’ – the idea that Christian reform brought about secularization. The larger issue concerning religion that looms here, Milbank argues, is that religion involves ‘a closer walk on the wild side’: it is both ecstatic and Dionysiac, and a disciplined source of moral order (pp. 63–4). Milbank then discusses the combination of a festive and erotic Christianity with contemporary liberalism. In Chapter 3, Wendy Brown discusses Taylor’s views in light of those of Marx and Feuerbach. She nicely illustrates the religious aspects of the Obama presidential election. She critiques Taylor’s conception of materialism to then make the point that Taylor’s historical account of the transformation of Latin Christian beliefs and practices is idealistic and misses a materialist focus on the historical forces conditioning modern secularism.
The next three chapters do not so much relate Taylor’s work to other traditions, but tack on to specific aspects of Taylor’s thesis. In Chapter 4, Simon During offers a critical reading of A Secular Age and extends this into a discussion of the mundane as a philosophical and historical concept. In so doing, and building on Taylor, During sketches an alternative to Taylor’s narrative from the perspective of literary criticism. Against Taylor’s assumptions of a ‘spiritual hunger’, During posits a conception of the mundane as ‘those forms of life and experience that are not available for our moral or political or philosophical or religious or social aspirations and projects’ (p. 113). Thus formulated, however, the question arises just why Taylor should have been concerned with the category of the mundane. For During, it remains outside the opposition religious/secular, but the precise nature of this ‘opposition’ in Taylor can be debated. But During’s contribution is interesting also in light of his discussion of ‘endgame capitalism’ as producing an experience rivalling Taylor’s ‘spiritual hunger’ from within mundanity. Thus, During argues, there is an experience of ‘fullness’ or ‘richness’ which is not, as Taylor argues it is, connected to the transcendent. Not directly related and yet further pursuing this, is William Connolly’s argument in Chapter 5. Connolly contrasts Taylor’s account with philosophies of time and becoming. Connolly enters into a sympathetic discussion with Taylor on the question of ‘mundane transcendence’ in a ‘world of immanence’ (p. 133). More ‘naturalist’ than Taylor would prefer, Connolly argues that a conception of becoming allows for a ‘mundane transcendence’ in the back and forth of feedback cycles, the self-organization of life at various levels, thus bringing forth an affirmation of life that overcomes the distinctions of class, gender, ethnicity and creedal faith. Also questioning the precise meaning of ‘immanence’ is Akeel Bilgrami’s essay in Chapter 6. In an account sympathetic to Taylor, Bilgrami argues that enchantment necessarily lies in a relation to the object of human desire. It therefore serves as a possible counterforce against conceptions of disenchantment that helped bring about a certain reductive view of human agency. Bilgrami moreover illustrates how Taylor’s rich, ‘religious’ conception of transcendence is not easily debunked by scientist perspectives à la Dawkins and Dennett.
Chapters 7 through 9 are concerned with the style, form and method of A Secular Age. In Chapter 7, Colin Jager positions Taylor in a post-reflexive moment, i.e., in Romanticism (p. 174). In Chapter 8, Jon Butler criticizes Taylor for recognizing nor conceptualizing ‘the variability of religious belief’ (p. 203). Specifically, Butler critiques Taylor’s dichotomous distinction between belief and unbelief, arguing that these categories fail to adequately capture the complexities of everyday behaviour and attitudes (p. 211). Most critical of Taylor is Jonathan Sheehan, who in Chapter 9 questions the idea that ours is a ‘secular age’ on the basis of a critique of Taylor’s account of early modern religious (Christian) reform that in some respects runs parallel to that of Butler (p. 244) but that starts more methodologically fundamental in questioning the very possibility of concluding that ours is ‘a secular age’ on the basis of the historical data Taylor provides. Over against such critiques, one might do well to remember that Taylor’s is a form of ‘conjectural history’, as Simon During remarks in Chapter 4 (p. 108).
More sympathetic to Taylor, although far from uncritical, are the last set of essays in Varieties. Chapters 10 through 12 present insightful analyses that expand on Taylor’s framework, in part, by applying it to contemporary problematics. Nilüfer Göle does so in Chapter 10 by addressing questions of colonialism and sexuality. She acknowledges Taylor’s distance from ethnocentrism, but argues that Taylor’s reading of ‘Western secularism’ is too ‘internalistic’ and blots claims of civilizational superiority from view (p. 244). Göle extends her discussion to contemporary struggles in the West concerning the (public and private) role of Islam, which she sees as ‘a challenge to the hegemonic control of the secular’ (p. 255). She also, as does Saba Mahmood in Chapter 12, brings in a welcome discussion of the work of Talal Asad, and it would have been interesting to see Asad’s own reaction to A Secular Age. 2 In Chapter 11, José Casanova offers a sympathetic reading of A Secular Age. Casanova asks the important sociological question of how Taylor’s unitary phenomenological perspective can account for the differences in today’s ‘condition of belief’ (a concept espoused by Taylor) (p. 270). Casanova doubts the validity of Taylor’s perspective for the United States, and discusses (European) theories of American exceptionalism. While he underscores Taylor’s argument of the internal reform of Latin Christianity leading up to the secular age, he at the same time discerns a Protestant and a Catholic path towards secularization, and he is thus able to account for some of the national differences in the tensions also discussed by Nilüfer Göle in Chapter 10. In Chapter 12, Saba Mahmood then extends such discussions by focusing on ‘the normative thrust of Taylor’s account of secularism in Euro-Atlantic Christian societies’ (p. 282), as well as on the subjectivist account Taylor offers and the emerging of Christianity vis-à-vis Western liberalism. She critiques Taylor’s boundary around Latin Christendom (p. 286), and at the same time finds in Taylor’s exclusive focus on secularism as a Latin Christian phenomenon a normative claim to universality, paradoxically on the basis of a Western exceptionalism (pp. 289–90).
These last three chapters are no doubt the most interesting ones from the perspective of social theory. They also illustrate that there is critique of Taylor’s perspective in Varieties, most prominently in the essays by Brown, Butler, Sheehan and Mahmood, but overall the book manages to adopt a generous tone and to expand on Taylor’s insights and point out possible limitations and amendments. Its interdisciplinarity well captures the complexities of Taylor’s approach. For Taylor, religion entails transcendence. At the same time, Taylor sees as characteristic of human life a ‘fullness’ – a sense of transcendence, of a deep sense of meaning engendering possible beliefs. It remains a challenge to combine this with the anti-essentialism Taylor espouses in his critique of subtraction theories. And it also seems as if Taylor reintroduces into the meaning of the secular the idea of a ‘loss’, namely a loss of fullness, a dimension of life available only to those capable of engaging the transcendent – a problem touched on by Simon During in his chapter in Varieties. But it at the same time opens the door to the interpretation of the religious in various ‘non-religious’ practices and institutions, not unlike in Paul Tillich’s existential and socialist theology (Tillich, 1961). Such a radical reconceptualization, with strong social philosophical overtones, of the religious and the secular indeed appears to be what Taylor is, in the end, after. It opens a challenging path that, as Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age illustrates, is too diverse to be captured from within one discipline. In bringing such a variety of scholars together, the book marks a welcome and important reference point in future discussions brought about by Taylor’s interventions in our secular age.