Secularism is pervasive but not inevitable

To say that these are pervasive concerns in the modern West is an understatement, and they filter all the way down—and are perhaps felt most acutely—in religious communities that still live in enchanted worlds. Even in the most isolated corners of religious experience, people know that lots of other people belong to other religions or to no religion, and that people see religious experience as impossible, outdated, crazy, etc. No matter how real the experience is, it’s “subtly but importantly different” in that it is no longer absolute and unquestionable, even for the most convinced.

Perhaps this is indeed an ambiguity or contradiction in Taylor’s argument, but I would argue again that Taylor’s account of the rise of the detached self does not have to mean that modern experience is a universal, uncomplicated, mind-centered Cartesianism. The claim is more modest; it describes a shift from a time when virtually no one saw themselves as a brain in a head to a time when almost everyone in the Western world does, including the most orthodox believer. For example, Taylor highlights how we “accuse each other of ‘magical thinking,’ of indulging in ‘myth,’ of giving way to ‘fantasy’” (A Secular Age, 29). This suggests we all understand that secularity is a new way of thinking and that we are perhaps “naturally” more inclined toward thinking of another sort. Analytic philosophers may have the most extreme commitment to what Gordon calls the “disengagement model,” but they’re far from the only ones who feel the change.

Sullivan and Dreher followed up on this as did Sessions again. 

Linker is back into the conversation

And that, more than anything fundamental about modernity as such, is what I think Taylor is really talking about when he describes the challenges faced by the devout (or potentially devout) in the modern world. “Enchantment” and “disenchantment” apply not to historical epochs but to individuals. And there are a lot of individuals in the modern world who have been disenchanted — by a combination of skeptical intellectual developments and a sense of human self-sufficiency or pride. We think we’ve figured it all out — or that we eventually will — on our own, without God’s help. And so we ensure our own disenchantment.

But the possibility of enchantment, of hearing the call, of receiving the command, and of undergoing conversion — all of it remains a living option, in our time no less than in premodern eras, so long as we don’t refuse ourselves to it ahead of time.

And Dreher follows up with a meatier post with some of his own story. A lot here on belief.

And now James KA Smith wades in. I’m looking forward to the book he’s got coming out.

Taylor has his own account of disenchantment, but disenchantment is not what he sees as the kernel of secularization.  Instead, for Taylor, ours is a “secular” age because it is an age in which all of our beliefs are contestable. It is a shift, not in what we can believe (or “experience”), but in what is believable. Ours is a “secular” age, not because we’re all doomed to inhabit the world as disenchanted, but because even those who experience itas enchanted have to realize that not everyone does. Taylor never suggests that belief, conversion, and religious experience are impossible in a secular age. Instead he emphasizes that they are “fragilized”—undertaken and experienced with a sense that our neighbors don’t share our convictions.