A Secular Age

By Charles Taylor.

What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we―in the West, at least―largely do. And clearly, the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean―of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

Taylor, one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in “Western Christendom” of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today’s secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion―although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined―but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

What this means for the world―including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence―is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

-Recommended by Traversing Tradition-

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
Taylor’s tour de force throughout the history of Western civilization examines and disagrees with the common assumptions on how the “secular age” came into being, namely the rise of “science” as refuting religious normativity. Instead, Taylor explores the complex relationship between the symbolic and phenomenological being of religious experience in pre-modernity. He discusses the ways in which science, culture, industrialization, and new technologies of self-making undermined the ontological, epistemic, and experiential basis of a “religious” age in a way that cannot be recreated simply by moving away from the scientific paradigm. Rather, it requires an examination of what it means to live in a society in which it’s impossible not to believe in God. He analyzes how both the religious age and the secular one employ specific technologies of self-making and being in the world.

by Aqil Azme and Faizan Malik.