Secular Age

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, 776 pages

The conventional account of the process of secularization is a simple negative.  Scientific discoveries disenchanted the world, providing natural explanations which proved superior to the old supernatural explanations, stripping away the mystery and superstition of the past, leaving behind secularized society as the natural norm.  Taylor, by contrast, sees the progress of secularity as the replacement of a transcendent, transformative ideal of human life with an immanent concept of human flourishing.

It is impossible to accurately summarize such a long, nuanced, rich work, but, briefly put, Taylor describes how the Reformation (in both its Protestant and Catholic forms), in part an implementation of the desire to raise the spiritual level of the ordinary Christian, also involved, necessarily, the imposition of new forms of social order.  This reordering of society produced an increased focus on purely immanent models of social and individual flourishing.  This combined with a disenchantment of the world, driven not only by scientific advances but also by the theological rejection of mediating agents between God and man, to create a secular sphere in which the supernatural was irrelevant.  The concept arose of a God-created order accessible to human reason and achievable by human effort, but this proved vulnerable to challenges based on theodicy and utility.  Ultimately, the existence of God became viewed by many as unnecessary or even detrimental to human flourishing.  The desire for a transformative encounter with the transcendent remained, however, but was frequently rechanneled into a natural connection to the distant past, a present connection to an identity group, or an utopian connection to the future.  As these declined, an expressivist, experiential spirituality rose to dominance in a multicultural era, and it is this which is the dominant form of belief (or unbelief) today.

An unqualified masterpiece.