That Charles Taylor’s massive book on the malaises and predicaments of secularity could be taken by so many distinguished intellectuals as a defining tome for our age comes as a surprise. At the very moment when it would have appeared that theories of secularization and disenchantment had finally exhausted their own mythological power to frame modernity, Taylor devotes his immense philosophical gifts to delineating and diagnosing the secular colossus. No doubt I find the trumpeting of “a secular age” particularly problematic because I come at it from the standpoint of what Taylor himself calls “the great enigma of secularization theory,” religion in the United States.
Taylor, in this wondrously encyclopedic work, concentrates especially on the British and French cases, though he is deeply aware of the problem of the “American exception” in debates about the rise and triumph of secularism. He admits that “a fully satisfying account of this difference” between Europe and America eludes him, despite this being “in a sense the crucial question facing secularization theory”: “Here I confess that I am making stabs in the dark.” The problem is not merely that Americans remain peculiarly religious with high rates of church membership, but that the statistical trend in American history has largely been the reverse of what secularization theory would have predicted (at least, in terms of Taylor’s secularity 2: the decline of religious belief and affiliation). By most calculations church membership at the time of the American Revolution hovered around a mere 15% of the population, only to climb steadily over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. There is little demographic evidence, in other words, for a decline from Bible commonwealth to post-Christian nation. This means that many historians of American religion see the narrative trajectory as one of Christianization rather than secularization. The prevailing question is not how did the United States become irretrievably secular, but why has the country been so religiously vital?
There are, of course, many ways to re-insert secularization into heart of the American story and one way certainly is to define secularity in terms of Taylor’s secularity 3: that is, a society is secular when religion becomes optional, voluntary, and pluralistic; when religion becomes defined in terms of expressive individualism and authenticity; when religion as communal norms gets trumped by spirituality as privatized alternatives. If those “conditions of belief” constitute secularity, then no doubt the United States is a profoundly secular nation. This is not to question Taylor’s secularity 3 as a useful analytic tool for thinking about the dilemmas of Christian belief amid modern social, intellectual, and political structures, but it is to wonder how far it can take us in elucidating the enigma of American religion.
In addressing the puzzle head on, Taylor examines five explanations for the oddity of American religion (though, as he well recognizes, from a perspective broadened beyond the North Atlantic, Europe is the exception, not the United States). These five are: 1) the repeated impact of the immigrant experience in which religion is used to negotiate ethnic identities amid the pressures of cultural dislocation and assimilation; 2) the greater authority of elites in European societies, including secular intellectuals and freethinking academics; 3) the absence of an ancien régime in the United States, and, with that, weaker forms of anti-clericalism and Enlightenment critique; 4) “the reigning synthesis between nation, morality, and religion” in the United States offers more effective resistance to the destabilizing effects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—in effect, the ongoing strength of the evangelical Right; and 5) the combined force of religious liberalism and Whitmanesque romanticism in which individual freedom, choice, and expressiveness have come to make up the American gene pool (“their whole religious culture was in some way prepared for the Age of Authenticity”). These five points are clearly much more than stabs in the dark, but number five turns the American case into a supreme example of Taylor’s secularity 3. So, despite the ostensible vitality of religion in the United States, secularism quickly comes back to dominate the scene. On these terms, modern forms of religion will always lose out (at least in the scholarly imagination): why bother attending to such anemic imitations of the real thing—a religion of transcendence and fullness? The secular age is all-consuming.
Mark Twain tells a freakish tale of “Extraordinary Twins,” Luigi and Angelo Capello, “a double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs.” It is a story worth recalling as a parable about religion’s fate in a supposedly secular age. These conglomerated twins were terribly divided on matters of faith: Luigi’s tastes ran to Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, pipe tobacco, rum shops, and the Freethinkers’ Society. Angelo’s ran instead to Protestant devotionals, temperance, Methodist meetings, and eventually to Baptist full immersion (a miserably wet day for Luigi). Being inseparably joined to his irreligious brother was a trial to Angelo, who, in despairing moments, wished that “he and his brother might become segregated from each other and be separate individuals, like other men.” Then he shuddered at the thought: “To sleep by himself, to eat by himself, walk by himself—how lonely, how unspeakably lonely.” Troubling it was to be bound together, but Luigi and Angelo required one another. And, so it is, we must pair our narratives of modern secularization with narratives of modern sanctification. To see Luigi’s humanistic alternative as creating the secular conditions of Angelo’s faith would be to mistake the weight of this relational dynamic. Only on such doubled terms will we discern the fullness of “that weird strange thing,” America’s uncanny twins.
Does Taylor really mistake the weight of this relational dynamic?
This highly thought-provoking response to Taylor’s book suggests that Taylor employs his third definition of secularization in such a way that it becomes again possible “to re-insert secularization into the heart of the American story.” Whatever else religion in America might become in a secular age–however the people of the United States may continue to buck the predictions of the secularization thesis–religion in America, on Taylor’s account, is destined ultimately to be circumscribed by the modern values of authenticity, expressive individualism, free choice, and pluralism. Schmidt uses Twain’s narrative of the conjoined twins Luigi and Angelo to brilliant effect to suggest that the traffic, and therefore the cultural influence, between religious and secular perspectives in America is less unidirectional than that.
This is a great point, but, as it stirred me to think more deeply about Taylor’s intentions in this book, I found myself wondering whether in fact Taylor doesn’t already accept it. That is, I think Taylor would agree that both Luigi and Angelo need each other, that each reminds the other of dimensions of human existence that the other tends to overlook or neglect. This openness to differing perspectives, for example, seems to be the hermeneutic that informs the books final chapter, where Taylor is discussing the relationship of different perspectives within the Christian tradition.
Beyond this, however, in the final chapters, especially “Dilemmas 1&2” and “Conversions,” I see Taylor drawing the outlines of a “new religious itinerary” that would have profound critical implications for the worldviews of both Luigi and Angelo. He would warn Luigi about the inadequacy of the immanent frame, and the need to move beyond it in certain ways. To Angelo he puts the equally serious warning not to conflate Christianity with Christendom, to resist identifying the agapistic message of the gospel, which stresses incarnation, particularity, and contingency, with the code fetishization of the modern moral order (read: Western Civilization), which stresses excarnation and a universality of rules.
In positioning himself this way, Taylor claims to take up a seat in “modern civilization’s loyal opposition.” Taylor applies this label to himself as a way of saying that he affirms the modern emphases on expression, authenticity, democracy, and human rights as real historical gains, while he remains critical of the flattening materialism that seems to him to be the fate of those who remain within the immanent frame.
Several students participating in a seminar I’m currently leading on this book also read Taylor’s affirmation of expression and authenticity as potentially problematic. What is so good about these things in themselves? Is it true that one’s religious orientation is now a matter of choice, or self-consciously held as one option among many possible alternatives? More importantly, how do these modern values that Taylor affirms comport with the “new religious itinerary” he attempts to draw in the book’s final chapter? My guess (based on p. 759) is that Taylor thinks the “quintessentially modern” demand for authenticity can provide the impetus we require to drive us toward the sort of new religious itinerary he recommends (while recognizing that embarking on such a path will also be fraught with risk). That is, he seems to be recommending a certain “channeling” of the modern quest for authenticity. It would be nice, however, if Prof. Taylor could say more about how he understands this connection.
This is a long way of saying that Taylor accomplishes more in this book than simply to find a way to re-insert secularization into the heart of the American story. That is, he does put some stock in the fact that cultural influence can and does travel in the other direction. As Schmidt agrees, secularization-3 does have a formative impact on modern religious expression in America. But Taylor’s story doesn’t end there, for it is precisely the new religious itinerary which he attempts to draw near the end of the book that he thinks also “has something very important to say to modern times” (703). That itinerary, on my reading, is the telos toward which the book continually moves, and it contains a radical and urgent message for both religious and secular people in our time.