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We all know we live in an age of secularism. Few of us have a philosophical and theological
vocabulary which helps us to describe what it means to live in such an age. Naming one’s context
is the first step in learning how to deal with it. The future direction of the Christian Church
depends upon how we will react to this current age. Being able to accurately describe what this
age consists of affects what are the possible future directions which are open to us.
Taylor notes there are three kinds of secularism.

1. The first stage is characterized by the withdrawal of the religious world-view from the
public sphere. This is the result of much more than just the rise of scientific world-view.
This is the disenchantment of the cosmos. Secularism is the move from the enchanted
reality to the de-enchanted reality – this freed science to follow its own trajectory. In an
enchanted worldview science, politics and religion all shared the same world view. When
that enchanted world-view disappeared science became free to follow its own rationale.

2. The second stage is seen in the decline in personal religious practice and commitment.
This is a individual’s withdrawal from the community. People shift the source of meaning
away from external ‘eternal’ sources to more personal choices.

3. The third stage is the most recent development, which has caused a fragmentation of our
ideas of social order. This is the shift in the culture away from assuming Religious Faith is
the norm, or the default expectation of how to live your life. Faith is now one option
among many. This is society living in a universe which has no central point around which
it revolves.

Secularism is a world view, a philosophy like any other. It is not necessarily an accurate
description of reality. It is currently the most powerful world-view at play in Western society.
It is the philosophical outcome of 500 years of the Enlightenment and the Reform movements of
both Protestantism and Catholicism. The events of the 1950’s and 1960s were just the time when
these ideas made the leap from the intellectual elites to the public social sphere.

Secularism does not negate the existence of God- it just pushes God into the transcendent realm,
which is considered supernatural, and therefore ‘unbelievable’. It pushes God into a realm outside
the objective knowable scientific world, making it difficult for belief in God to have ultimate claim
on our lives.

The second stage of Secularism is a reaction against the philosophical inadequacies of
providential deism. (That is, of a good God who provides for our needs.) The argument for
Atheism is a specific rejection of the God of providential deism.

The Secular narrative states that to be a fully actualized individual who seeks the higher goal of
self-realization one must leave behind the childish attitude of faith in God. Since much of
Christian thinking does not offer positive moral guidance in the fields of modern sexuality, selffulfillment in relationships, technology and commerce, it is easy to see how this coming of age
narrative became popular. In the secular world-view, people no longer need to look beyond
themselves to find their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value. Taylor asserts this
‘coming of age’ narrative has done more to push the advance of Secularism than the advance of
scientific thinking has.

In a secular age, as a result, God is reduced to the margins of life. This gives rise to the concept
of God as ‘providential deism’. God is thus pictured as a distant deity, who is the unknown other,
the unmoved mover, the absent clockmaker of the universe. Such a deity can only be known
through the providential design of the world. The order of the universe is the ‘proof’ of God, which
gives rise to Natural Law. To go to church is to show you recognize and support God’s
providential order. Prayer is the act of conforming your will to God’s design. To join the church,
and serve on a committee becomes the way we join God’s ruling order. Being a Christian is
reduced to ‘being good’. Upholding the moral codes of social conformity and obeying the rules
such as the ten commandments is how one lives the Christian life. This is the civil religion
practiced by the UCCan among many other liberal mainline churches for most of the 20th
Century.

It is not a stretch to go from seeking to be good for the sake of God to ‘being good’ as a goal for
its own sake. When human flourishing becomes reduced to a simple code, God can quickly drop
out of the rationale for the code. As God becomes less of a philosophical category, or personal
reality, there are many more options to choose from beyond the simple belief-unbelief dichotomy.
We now live in an age where there are many moral alternatives as a result, and Christianity is not
the default option. The concept of the sacred is no longer the foundation of our social or political
order. This leads to the third stage of secularism, where there is a fragmenting of the common
order.

We now live in an expressive age, where personal experience is the foundation of people’s moral
systems. Religion is one factor among many in those moral systems. A religion which relies upon
its doctrines rather than personal spiritual experience as the foundation for its moral claims and
its dreams of controlling the moral order of society will have a difficult time being heard in this
climate. Taylor suggests the failure of the Christian faith to move away from an authoritative
model, to one which encourages personal self-fulfillment, has caused many people to become
alienated from the Church. Much of what he says comes from his perspective as a practicing
Catholic, and from his experience as a philosopher, which draws heavily from the French schools
of post-modernity, and contemporary Thomist moral thinking (which is interestingly enough
starting to embrace the Virtue Ethics of Alisdair McIntyre, whose endorsement is on the back
cover of this book).

The fact that so many find secularism to be flat, without an engaging picture of the purpose of life
shows it to be an incomplete picture of reality. In time it will be questioned more, and the
possibility of transcendence will be more acceptable again in the social understanding of our life
together.

While worship is how we connect with God in a liturgical context, this explosion of cultural change
is so immense that a simple tinkering with the techniques of how we worship will not be sufficient
to bridge this gap. It is our understanding of the Christian life which must evolve. Taylor notes
how our modern understanding of human sexuality has never really been fully embraced by our
spirituality in a healthy way.

Taylor notes that at the heart of the Christian faith is the message of incarnation. God becomes
human, so the human can become divine (this is from the Catholic and Orthodox catechisms).
Incarnation involves the whole body and the spirit as one. The goal of the religious life is
communion, to share in God’s love. To be a Christian is not about following the rules. It is to heal
the world (The Hebrew concept of tikkun olam). The Church is to be a network of agape, of
healing supporting relationships. Our acts of outreach are acts of communion, for charity is
something only the elites can do for others. Agape is something we can all do for everyone.
(Agape is the Greek word used in the New Testament for God’s love. Unlike other Greek words
for love: friendship (phileos), sexual attraction (eros), and generosity of spirit (caritas); Agape is
unconditional, self-giving for the good of the other. How this “good” is now understood is part of
the challenge of the secular age to traditional religious understandings.)

Much of our religious tradition practised excarnation, the denial of the body. Judgment is not the
purpose of religion. Taylor says one positive effect of secularism is the eliminating the use of Hell
as a primary religious motivator. Death should not undermine the meaning of life. Resurrection
should be the final word, but it only makes sense if there is first a strong belief in incarnation.
We must learn how to deal with the religious understanding of violence, and evil, which allows for
true freedom of will and choice, and the resulting ownership of the consequences. Taylor notes
how the loss of religion in our culture has resulted in a loss of meaning and purpose. This does
not mean the purpose of religion is to give meaning – a loss of meaning is the trace which is left
by the absence of religion. Religion gives us much more than just meaning.

Taylor describes our current problems with theodicy as being one of secular thinking having us
ask the wrong question. The rational thinker asks “Why did this bad thing happen?”. We look for a
logical reason. Finding none, we become angry with God. Taylor argues that the real question of
theodicy is “Something bad has happened – so what is our response to be?” Will we choose
revenge or forgiveness, judgment or reconciliation. If the goal of the life of faith is restoring
communion then we will know how to respond to every unjust situation.

Taylor shows how secularism is a narrative, which tries to describe the world we live in, and
which gives an explanation as to why the transcendent should be excluded. It is not the only
narrative of our life together. History is the memory of our experience. History is not an objective
science. Our experience of the transcendent reality of God cannot be forgotten. Secularism is a
reaction to that experience.

It is secularism which has led to the “flatness of modern civilization which sees the final triumph of
the Hollow Men, who, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, have lost the
ability to feel or think deeply about anything.” (“Hollow Men” refers to a 1925 poem by T. S. Eliot.
“Knowing the price … value of nothing” is Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic.)

The hold of the former Christendom on our imagination is immense. So the sense can easily arise
that the task of breaking out of the dominant secular immanentist orders today is already defined
by the model of Christianity. Of course the issue remains open of how much we can actually go
back, but this earlier civilization gives us both our paradigm language, which we are seeking, and
perhaps also the model of a society and culture which is not in tension with, but fully expresses
the faith. (P. 735)

The truth is we can’t simply turn back the clock and pretend the past five hundred years didn’t
happen. Just as liberalism leads to providential deism which leads to secularism and which can
lead to atheism, a Conservative world-view can lead to fundamentalism which can lead to a
denial of the scientific reality of the world. Neither extreme pole is a helpful position.
Resurrection only makes sense to us when we take seriously incarnation, and overcome
excarnation.

“We should find the center of our spiritual lives beyond the code (of morals and laws) deeper than
the code, in networks of living concern (agape) which are not to be sacrificed to the code, which
must even from time to time subvert it.” p. 743

“Authentic freedom, which links us to and continues our past, is seen as freedom. It is the highest
freedom to be moved by one’s mystique (one’s experience of the Holy Spirit) as against being
organized and mobilized and constrained by political authority to follow the rules. ” p749

Taylor notes that Christianity is a living tradition, which changes and adapts in each new age. We are to be faithful to the tradition, and not to the past.