Breaking the Spell of the Immanent Frame: Charles Taylors A Secular Age

Captulo 8 de Rethinking Secularization, por David Storey

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor poses the following question: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable? His almost 800 page answer is an ambitious revision and retelling of the process that we call secularization, and his intention is to demonstrate the inadequacy of mainstream secularization theory (MST). The MST generally states that 1) in the modern period, beginning in the 17th century and increasingly in the 19th, the place of religion in public life declined and religious belief and practice substantially decreased; 2) these changes are the result of something like industrialization, urbanization, the differentiation of value spheres, or the progress of the natural sciences; and 3) that this decline and decrease should be seen as a linear progression, was all but inevitable, and will almost certainly continue. The MST is an example of what Taylor calls subtraction stories, the chief culprits in Taylors account.

By a subtraction story, Taylor means

stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this processmodernity or secularityis to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.

Reason dispels Myth. Science supplants Religion. Darwin refutes the Bible. And so forth. These stories are subtractive in two senses. First, the move to modernity is described as a skimming off of the dross of religious belief, freeing up the underlying positum and essential kernel of human nature; fanciful interpretations are dismissed, leaving pure, brute fact laying about for all and sundry to see. Second, these stories are to Taylors eye far too simple and reductive; they either unduly prioritize one factor as the major motor of secularizatione.g., economics, science, etc.and/or drastically distort religious belief, practice, and institutions in order to fit the bounds of their interpretative frame.

Taylor is convinced that MST is propped up by a cluster of thoroughly modern prejudices which he yokes under the phrase The Immanent Frame. The gradual emergence and eventual victory of the immanent frame involves a great many tectonic shifts in human thought, practice, and experience, such as the disenchantment of the world, an ethic increasingly concentrated on discipline, rules, and norms, the vision of nature as an impersonal order, and the rise of an exclusive humanism, to name but a few; but the upshot of these changes is the eclipse of any reference to a transcendent reality in general, or God in particular. Human flourishing, moral life, and nature all come to be understood in a self-sufficient, this-worldly, naturalistic, immanent way.

Taylors alterative, the Reform Master Narrative (RMN), can be distilled into three claims. (267-9) First, exclusive humanism and the modern moral order, the anthropocentric shift that rejects a transcendent reality and refuses to acknowledge a good beyond natural human flourishing, arose mainly as a result of pressures within Latin Christendom, pressures toward reform which collapses the long-standing complementary between the higher spiritual vocations of the clergy and the more lax practices of the laity, a social hierarchy anchored in a cosmic great chain of being.

Taylors second claim is that exclusive humanism could not have arisen on any other basis. His conviction is that it was the new ethical options opened up by exclusive humanism--not the cogency of its arguments or the plausibility of its theories--that led (tempted?) larger segments of the population to drift toward unbelief. A question Taylor poses well into his narrative crystallizes his convictions about this issue: How could the immense force of religion in human life [in pre-modern times] be countered, except by using a modality of the most powerful ethical ideas, which this religion itself had helped to entrench? (267)

The third claim is that the secular age bears a constitutive reference to belief in God, albeit usually negative, as something that has been overcome. This is the reason Taylor focuses so much on narrative and historicity in his account of secularization. He detects a double historicity that determines secularization and religious belief and that is quite lost on MST:

On the one hand, unbelief and exclusive humanism defined itself in relation to earlier modes of belief, both orthodox theism and enchanted understandings of the world; and this definition remains inseparable from unbelief today. On the other hand, later-arising forms of unbelief, as well as attempts to redefine and recover belief, define themselves in relation to this first path-breaking humanism of freedom, discipline, and order.

Taylor thinks that our present predicament must be seen not as a black and white tug of war between belief and unbelief, Science vs. Religion, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, etc.but rather as a three-cornered affair involving those who acknowledge some good beyond life, (traditional) secular humanists, (modern) and neo-Nietzscheans, (postmodern). Taylors point is to show not only just how schizophrenic the secular age really is, but to suggest that it opens up new possibilities for belief and unbelief alike. Secularization should be seen as fundamentally ambivalent with regard to religion.

Taylors main objective, then, is to draw the immanent frame into focus, lay bare its origin and development, and plead that an open spini.e., a strong sense of faith in a transcendent reality and the pursuit and vision of a good that transcends human life--is not foreclosed, and a closed spini.e., this is all there is--is not demanded, by the frame itself; his aim is to, as it were, rattle Weberss iron cage by giving a different account of what it is made of. Taylors remolding of Webers powerful image as a frame, rather than a cage, is surely intentional, and probably meant to cast our condition less as a fateful fact, and more as a dominant frame of reference; as a social imaginary, not a solid reality. His main quarrel with Weberand othersis his characteristically modern tendency, set in motion most powerfully by Nietzsche, to define religion as mans search for meaning; this is what triggers the closed spin on the immanent frame. There are alternatives, and merely recognizing this fact is, for Taylor, an important and necessary step toward a rounder understanding of what it means to live in a secular age.

I will proceed as follows. First, I lay out Taylors methodology because it is it integral to his account. His method is not just analytical but phenomenological and genealogical/historical. By historical, he mean that as moderns, we understand ourselves as historical beings, as having transcended a prior condition and undergone some process of development or maturation; he calls this our stadial consciousness. Taylors methodology, in other words, reflects his third claim. Second, I sketch some of the basic contours, pivotal concepts, and key constructions in Taylors story. Since his retelling of the last five hundred years is far too rich and contains too many moving parts even to summarize in such a short space, my aim here is to zero in on and connect a handful of the major themes in order to illuminate the basic arc of the story, and suggest that his notion of Reform is the driving force of his narrative. Finally, I break down his critique of MST and probe some of his conclusions about the place of religion and the meaning of secularity in our own day.

I. Taylors Methodology

Sociologist Jose Casanova usefully describes Taylors account of secularization as analytical, phenomenological, and genealogical. Let us examine the second and third parts of this three-pronged methodology in order to set the stage for Taylors account and thesis. The first is straightforward, is obviously found in any secularization theory, and consists of a dissection of the salient factors constituting and responsible for the emergence and process of secularization. The second and third, however, are unique, and shed light on the novelty of Taylors approach.

A.Phenomenology

There are at least two reasons Taylors account can be classified as phenomenological: his unique sense of secularity, and his notion of fullness. First, to see why Taylor makes recourse to phenomenology, we must look at how he defines secularity. Taylor is not just concerned to offer another secularization theory, or a modification or synthesis of extant theories. His Ur-question is designed to make us think about what we mean when we claim to live in a secular world. As such, he tries to reframe the debate by starting out from a different sense of secularity. The MST operates with two basic definitions of secularity, which Taylor identifies as the decline of religion in public spaces (secularity 1) and the waning of religious belief and practice in modern populations (secularity 2). Yet Taylor thinks this leaves out something essential. He introduces a third category, which he calls conditions of belief (secularity 3):

I want to talk about belief and unbelief, not as rival theories, that is, ways that people account for existence. Rather I what I want to do is focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other, on what its like to live as a believer or an unbeliever.

Taylor wants to focus, in other words, on what in phenomenology is commonly called the lifeworld, the pre-reflective, pre-theoretical, everyday sense of the world that most people share yet rarely, if ever, explicitly formulate. This is why he thinks we treat belief in God analytically--understood as a mere theory or proposition about reality--at our peril; belief in God means different things in 1500 and 2000 because all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated. And it is inattention to the background of the secular agethat is, the immanent framethat Taylor sees as the blind spot of MST. It results in an overly intellectualized reading of secularization that distorts the experience of pre-modern societies by viewing them through the immanent frame, and misidentifies its own position by failing to acknowledge its status as a narrative, as an interpretation, as a framework of belief.

A second reason his account is phenomenological is his reliance on a general notion of human fullness. At the outset, Taylor presents a pencil sketch of a phenomenology of moral/spiritual experience, which serves as the backbone for his analyses of the conditions of belief of people at various points in history from 1500 to the present. One of Taylors crucial premises is that, whether we are believers or unbelievers, nihilists, secular humanists, or Franciscans, we all have some general understanding of human flourishing: I am taking it as axiomatic that everyone, and hence all philosophical positions, accepts some definition of greatness and fullness in human life. The way we interpret this will differthe monk may view fullness as the grace of God, the scientific materialist may see it as a brain-bath of oxytocin, etc.but, from an experiential standpoint, Taylor claims, we all see our lives as having a certain a moral/spiritual shape, even if we are materialists.

This basic understanding involves three points, which we can call fullness, emptiness, and averageness. Fullness can be seen as the over-arching goal organizing our activities and primary good for which we strive; it need not be something we explicitly formulate. It is something that can break through in limit experiences, or can simply be the sense that somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be. Emptiness or desolation is obviously the opposite, while the third amounts to some stable, even routine order in life, in which we are doing things which have some meaning for us; for instance, which contribute to our ordinary happiness, or which are fulfilling in various ways, or which contribute to what we conceive of as the good.

Now, what is distinctive about the immanent frameas a theoryis that it has no place for a robust sense of fullness, in the sense of flourishing grounded in a transcendent source; it eschews the transformation perspective. As such, par for the course, succeeding on one or all of the above middle-brow endeavors, becomes fullness itself; and indeed, questing after enlightenment, sanctity, or salvation can distract from, and be destructive to, the sober pursuit of a human, all too human happiness. In other words, the difference in the content and interpretations of the believer and the unbeliever may be so great as to render Taylors scheme too narrow. Indeed, this is actually one of Taylors own critiques of the modern approach to religion, namely, that it is watered down into a general search for meaning; he considers this is a wet blanket prejudice, a non-starter that forecloses any serious, substantive discussion of religion. Taylor insists, however, that even for the secular humanist who denies the existence of God and an afterlife, there is something he aspires to beyond where hes at. Put differently, his ethical aspirations are not congruent with his worldview. Taylor holds that the failure to appreciate the enduring tension between a transformation perspective and the more modest view of flourishing--a tension whose roots are, Taylor thinks, quite Christianis a great problem with MST.

It is important for Taylor to validate this phenomenology of fullness and shore up this premise in his argument because it is the wedge he will use later on in claiming that MST and the closed spin on the immanent frame simply do not canvass the conditions of belief of the secular age; despite the iron grip of the immanent frame of the present age, an aspiration for a higher-order fullness, Taylor thinks, still flickers in even the staunchest materialist, and this is the clue to rattling the frame. This shows why Taylor places such a premium on the phenomenological perspective.

B. Genealogy

Turning to the genealogical aspect, Taylor unabashedly presents his account as a master narrative, which he defines as a broad framework [picture] of how history unfolds. He considers the post-modern dismissal of the latter as self-deceptive and disingenuous; we all need and use them, including those who claim to repudiate them, he thinks, and the answer to a bad master narrative is not a pox on any master narrative, but a better one. Taylors genealogy differs from others in that it is not meant to debunk. The subtraction stories of secularization and MST tend to treat pre-modern peoples as nave and benighted, blind to the real motives for their beliefs in the transcendent; only the genealogist can tell them what is actually going on behind the back of their consciousness, e.g., economic forces, biological drives, political ideologies, etc. Once the cumbersome yokes of belief are fried by the sun of Enlightenmenti.e., subtractedthen we have attained the normal, natural state. Taylors tack, however, is different, because it is also phenomenological, in the sense that he brackets the truth and ontological status of the world of, e.g., the 16th century Catholic worshipper, and simply tries to describe her world from the inside. This interpretive charity enables Taylor to address the dizzying constellation of factors driving the process of secularization, without settling for the soft sell of a subtraction story that privileges one factor and marginalizes others.

The genealogical perspective is intimately tied to the third claim in Taylors thesis: namely, that the secular age is marked by an inescapable (though often negative) God reference, in much the way that a tattoo cleverly and carefully hidden by an adult is the unwanted sign of a wild youth he wishes he could divorce, but cannot quite erase. Taylor is adamant that it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. This is why a purely analytical account will not do; the narrative is not an optional extra for history buffs that can be cleanly separated from the mechanism of secularization. We are studying not just factual changes in the shape of Western societiessecularity 1 and 2but we are also the heirs of and participants in a conflict of interpretations, and that is why analysis and narrative must reflect one another. So long as we fail to do justice to the variety of and connections between the narratives composing our past and guiding our present, we will continue to misinterpret our own position.

Taylor also describes the modern historical self-understanding as a stadial consciousness, and he never tires of stressing just how remarkable and unprecedented it is:

In virtually all pre-modern outlooks, the meaning of the repeated cycles of time was found outside of time, or in higher time or eternity. What is peculiar to the modern world is the rise of an outlook where the single reality giving meaning to the repeatable cycles is a narrative of human self-realization, variously understood as the story of Progress, or Reason and Freedom, or Civilization or Decency or Human Rights; or as the coming to maturity of a nation or culture.

What is peculiar, that is, is the level of confidence and certainty that the pillars of the immanent frame are obvious, self-evident, natural, etc., the sense that we have dispersed the childish clouds of myth-making and come to take our stand on the sure ground of mature rationality. Once the immanent frame is set in place, it comes to be seen as natural, as given, as the way things are. Taylors stresses that

the narrative dimension is extremely important, because the force of [the immanent frame] comes less from the supposed detail of the argument (that science refutes religion, or that Christianity is incompatible with human rights), an much more from the general form of the narratives, to the effect that there was once a time when religion could flourish, but that this time is past.

But the narrative dimension is either disavowed or whitewashed; this recalls Nietzsches observation that democratic societies harbor a prejudice against origins. The birth certificate is burned; the mythos masked; the origin obscured. Taylors twist is not to escape from the stadial consciousnessindeed, this would be a very stadial thing to do!but to tell a more adequate story and expand our frame of reference so that we can see just how close the secular age remains to its late medieval roots in Latin Christendom, to enrich the thin-soup conception of religion underwriting the MST and subtraction stories, and to undermine the assumption that modernity entails secularity 2; this is how the shift to studying the conditions of beliefsecularity 3meshes with his genealogical perspective.

Lastly, Taylor relies on a construct he calls the social imaginary. This idea is a variation of the notion of background mentioned above. For one, it is not a social theory, such as we might find in sociology, i.e., an explanation of human motivation and behavior formulated in terms of laws. Second, it is not equivalent to the idea of the social construction of reality; it is always based on and constrained by an actual state of affairs and inflected through a cultural inheritance. Third, it mostly concerns the way ordinary people imagine their surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. Fourth, its edges are intrinsically ragged and hazy; it cannot be defined with analytical clarity and precision. Finally, it is a shared understanding that underwrites and legitimizes common practices. As examples of social imaginaries, Taylor points to the economy, the public sphere and the sovereign people as mainsprings of what he calls the modern moral order that, he insists, must be seen as partly a social imaginaryan invention and constructionand not just as a self-evident, factual, given state of affairs. With Taylors premises and methodology laid bare, we can now turn to some of the finer points of his story of secularization.

II. Taylors Story: Inventing the Modern Moral Order

Taylor sets out to trace how the bulwarks of belief were gradually worn down, how a vision of the world as enchanted, in which nature bore the mark of divine intention and agency, and in which God was omnipresent in society and practically unavoidablein which, moreover, there was no such distinction between cosmos, nature, and society--how such an outlook came undone. He posits that five major moves had to be made in order for this bubble to be burst. First, the cosmos had to be disenchanted: the world must be drained of moral and spiritual forces, of demons, witches, sacred places, etc., and reduced to brute facts, physical forces, mere matter and organisms. Second, society had to be re-imagined as capable of being founded and existing independently of divine agency and oversight. Taylors favorite example here is the doctrine of the Kings two bodies and the saying, The King is dead. Long live the King! To modern ears, this either makes no logical sense, or has purely symbolic meaning: let us keep the king alive in our collective memory and public rituals. For the pre-modern, however, it is understood literally: the temporal, flesh and blood king is dead, but the eternal, spirit body of the king will live on and inhabit another vessel. Third, the equilibrium or hierarchical complementarity between pre-Axial forms of religion and post-Axial forms had to be disrupted. Here, Taylor draws deeply on Karl Jaspers construct of the Axial Age, the period beginning around 500 B.C., in which numerous visionariese.g., Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates--proposed novel forms of human flourishing beyond the natural, the this-worldly, the immanent, that broke with the morally ambivalent divine-in-nature vision of magical and animistic worldviews and recognized a transcendent and unambiguous good beyond nature. One of the constituent features of Latin Christendom, according to Taylor, was its synthesis of magic and myth, a laity prone to a spirituality of enchantmentwhat we today would call superstitionand a clergy bound by stricter codes of devotion and celibacy. This equilibrium had to be punctuated in order for exclusive humanism to emerge on a collectively significant scale. Fourth, time had to be homogenized and flattened; the social timeframe had to be modeled on a horizontal, linear, unidirectional model unimpeded and uninterrupted by a vertical dimension of eternity or cosmic cycles, by what Taylor terms higher times. What happens in time and history not only mattersthat is, in addition to and only on account of its grounding in, eternityit is all that matters. Fifth, the notion of the cosmos as a graduated great chain of being, as a hierarchy of meanings in which all beings have their proper place, had to be collapsed into the modern neutral universe.

I want to focus these vectors through the prism of Reform. The purpose of examining this facet of Taylors story is twofold. First, the collapse of the bulwarks of belief, hastened by the spread of Reform, is for him a necessary condition for the eventual rise of exclusive humanism. Second, this story of Reform is where we find the basis for Taylors claim that the disenchantment of the world, the disembedding of self from society and society cosmos, the rise of the disciplinary society, and the process that he calls excarnation--the withdrawal of both spiritual and everyday life from the body and into the mind--are, ironically, powered mainly by unresolved tensions within Latin Christendom. Though Taylor gallantly resists the attempt to seize upon one factor as the Ur-cause of secularizationindeed, this is his pet peeve about MSTI contend that Taylors reconstruction of Reformthe rage for order--is the skeleton key to his story.

Reform: Circes Rod

Since disenchantment is already a familiar trope in secularization theory, and since Taylor follows others closely here, I will only refer to it as it relates to Taylors presentation of reform. As he sees it, there are two long-term effects of disenchantment, one negative and one positive. The first is the crusade to banish idolatry. All magic is branded black, all spirits are concentrated into the figure of the Devil, and Salem becomes possible. The second effect pivots off the first. No longer assailed by invasive and unpredictable spiritual forces, humans began to wield a new-found freedom to chart their own course and determine their own destiny: we can rationalize the world, expel the mystery from it (because it is all now concentrated in the will of God). A great energy is released to re-order affairs in secular time. Disenchantment makes Reform not only possible, but plausible; recall that Taylor is trying to account for how modern modes of belief and practice became available, acceptable, and sensible to society as a whole.

When Taylor discusses Reform, he is not merely referring to The Reformation, but to the period roughly 1400-1650. Taylor clarifies his broad understanding of Reform thus:

Briefly summed up, Reform demanded that everyone be a real, 100 percent Christian. Reform not only disenchants, but disciplines and re-orders life and society. Along with civility, this makes for a notion of moral order which gives a new sense to Christianity, and the demands of the faith. This collapses the distance of faith from Christendom. It induces an anthropocentric shift, and hence a break-out from the monopoly of Christian faith.

By the distance of faith, Taylor is referring to the equilibrium or complementarity between spiritual comportments of varying devotion, intensity, and stricture. Taylor recounts an old formula to illustrate this form of life: the clergy pray for all, the lords defend all, the peasants labor for all. The key, Taylor notes, is that these social functionsworshippers, warriors, and workers--are of unequal dignity. Reform levels the playing field.

Taylor interjects an important point here about a common feature of pre-Axial societies: rituals of reversal, the notion that order binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order, and that the order or structure of society must be periodically suspended and overturned in a kind of cyclical purging. In other words, all structure needs anti-structure. As an example of anti-structure in medieval Christendom, Taylor points to Carnival; the key is that such a ritual of reversal is carried out on a public scale: the personal, public, and cosmic are all intertwined in the body which connects us to everyone and everything.

The hierarchical structure entails that some are closer to God and are, in a sense, more Christian. This stands in tension, however, with the pull of communitas associated with the Axial aspect of Christianity, namely, its recognition of a good beyond this life, beyond normal human flourishing and the social order: the pull of communitas is potentially multi-valenced. It can not only bring to the fore our community, but that of humankind. While the late medieval balance of pre-axial and post-Axial spiritualities repeated the rituals of reversal and the cyclical play of structure/anti-structure, it was nevertheless shot through with a universalist, egalitarian twist, a top-, or, depending on how one sees it, bottom-heavy tilt that would enable it to tumble, first, into an inclusive humanism, in which the sources of universal benevolence were located within human nature, with the latter created by divine design and progressively carrying out the divine plan in history, and later, into a full-blown exclusive humanism, in which the universalism is retained but the God-reference and super-human goodthe transcendent ontology and transformational morality--are jettisoned.

What happens as a result of Reform is the almost total triumph of structure. Reform, Taylor says, was originally meant to make the spirit of communitaswhich breaks out in moment of reversal or transgression, and which gives legitimacy to the power of the weaka concrete social reality. Communitasthe vision of the church as the body of Christ on earthwas supposed to replace the parochial and exclusive social identities of pre-Axial societies, which were based on bloodlines, kinship, tribal affiliations, etc.with a universal and inclusive one; Taylor calls this the Great Disembedding of self, society, and cosmos. The goal was to maintain the carnality of the relations, but expand their scope. But the project misfired. The order that emerged from the spirit of reform was not a network of agape, but rather a disciplined society in which categorial relations have primacy, and therefore norms. That is, the new social identity that takes hold is based on abstract categories drained of content and meaning; more and more layers are padded on to the buffered self, to the point that the original motivations for disenchantment, disengagement, and discipline are lost.

One of Taylors signature observations is his astonishment that the project of Reform got off the ground at all. The creation of Webers protestant work ethic, suffused with an inner-worldly asceticism, was to happen very much through the active, reconstructive efforts of political authority. The goals were audacious: the eradication of violence and social anomie and the universal inculcation of at least a modicum of the new civility, a project of social engineering simply unprecedented in human history. Indeed, Taylor is convinced that the modern lack of astonishment at this fact is perhaps the greatest testament of its near total success. But the basic shift in the social imaginary was the belief that, as Raeff notes, human nature was essentially malleable, that it could be fashioned by will and external circumstances. Lockes epistemology of the tabula rasa is the perfect image of the new ethic; for Taylor, its primary significance derives from its attraction as an ethical stance, not its plausibility as a theory of knowledge.

The other key belief that made Reform possible, or that convinced people it was plausibleand that would set the stage for exclusive humanism--was that we dont need to compromise, that we dont need complementarity, that the erecting of order doesnt need to acknowledge limits in any opposing principle of chaos. The exhilaration of the new freedom and zeal for order, which was originally intended to bring the Kingdom down to earth, would inadvertently power not just the decline of Hell, the watering down of sin, the taming of violenceand its replacement by economic production as the highest human activity--and so on, but eventually the exclusion of God. The irony is that the same forces that drove the sanctification of ordinary life would produce the view that ordinary life was all there is. Taylor yokes these various developments under the phrase The Modern Moral Order (MMO), which he sums up thus:

the order of mutual benefit holds (1) between individuals; the benefits (2) crucially include life and the means of life, however securing these relates to the practice of virtue; it is meant (3) to secure freedom, and easily finds expressions in terms of rights. (4) these rights, this freedom, this mutual benefit is to be secured to all participants equally.

But how was this MMO shorn of its constitutive reference to God? How did the shift to exclusive humanism occur? Recall Taylors first claim: the MMO was built on the back of Latin Christendom, which we see in its activist, interventionist stance, both towards nature and to human society, and in its appropriation of universalism from its Christian sources. This latter is crucial: the increasing and eventually all but universal recognition of inner sources of benevolence, whether the powers of disengaged reason (neo-Stoicism), a pure, universal will (Kant), or a sense of universal sympathy (Rousseau). Taylor urges that the paradox of these new views of human nature, fruits of an inward turn, is that, on the one hand, this inward turn is also evident in religious life; indeed, the whole turn was largely driven by religious motives; on the other, these immanent sources of human goodness are the charter of modern unbelief. So how did humanism become exclusive? How was the God reference of the MMO dispatched? What triggers the anthropocentric shift?

Taylor summarizes the movement:

Because the very attempt to express what the Christian life means in terms of a code of action in the saeculum opens the possibility of devising a code whose main aim is to encompass the basic goods of life in the saeculum: life, prosperity, peace, mutual benefit. In other words, it makes possible the anthropocentric shift. Once this happens then the break-out is ready to occur. It just needs the step to holding that these secular goods are the point of the whole code. Pushed by annoyance at the ascetic demands of ultra-conformity, many will be willing to take this step.

Taylors second claim, recall, is that this step must be seen not as a giant, boot-strapping leap of mankind out of myth and superstition, a heroic casting off of the yokes of belief, but as part of a stairway partly composed of Christian materials. It is as though we climbed so high on the stairway that we can no longer see what the lower steps were made of.

Taylor is at pains to convince us that this new order, the immanent frame, must be seen as an invention, not a discovery; as a social imaginary, not just a social theory, or naturalistic reality. If notin other words, if we ignore the conditions of belief and our stadial consciousnessthen we are apt to take it as natural, given, obvious, self-evident, and will fail to appreciate just how much its erection was a hard slog. It seems obvious and undeniable that the MMO is the way things are once the bogeymen of belief have been banished. Taylor insists, however, that

the reverse is the case. Humans have lived for most of their history in modes of complementarity, mixed with a greater or lesser degree of hierarchy. What is rather surprising is that it was possible to win through to modern individualism; not just on the level of theory, but also transforming and penetrating the social imaginary. Now that this imagination has become linked with societies of unprecedented power in human history, it seems impossible to try to resist.

This is why he finds it simply inconceivable that exclusive humanism could have arisen on a non-religious base. The modern attachment to the immanent frame is based on just such an inabilityor unwillingnessto divine the origins of its own historical, stadial consciousness. This modern mis-identification of itself, its history, and of religion is of a piece with the MST and reductive construal of secularity in terms of beliefin terms of the theoretical and the cognitiverather than conditions of beliefwhich also gives gravity to the ethical and the affective.

Taylors main points in expanding the sense of Reform and retelling the story of secularization thus, are to show, first, that disenchantment, the dis-equilibrium of the hierarchical society/cosmos, the disembedding of society, cosmos, and human good, and the project of Reformin short, the invention of the Modern Moral Order--are induced by Latin Christendom through its post-Axial sense of flourishing, the pull of communitas, and the ardor to enact Gods plan in the world. And second, by casting the Modern Moral Order as a social imaginary, he means to subvert the subtraction story of secularization which holds that the truths we moderns hold to be self-evident are not, in fact, a-historical facts covered for centuries by superstition and metaphysics and simply discovered by natural science and clear-eyed, unbiased reason, but are in part social constructions based onand unimaginable apart from--prior, religious social imaginaries. Or, as Taylor puts it, What happened here was not that one moral outlook bowed to brute facts. Rather we might say that one moral outlook gave way to another. Viewed in this broader context, first, religion isor can be--a catalyst for the blossoming of reform and rationalization, not always an impediment, as MST holds, and second, the latter holds moral stances that its naturalistic ontology cannot ground.III. Taylors Critique of Mainstream Secularization Theory

With the broad beams of Taylors narrative in place, let us look more closely at his analysis and critique of the MST, or strong secularization thesis. I want to address three questions here: First, what does Taylor see as MST? Second, on what points does he agree with it? Third, what does he think is missing from it? As to the first question, Taylor notes that MST is mainly concerned with the first and second senses of secularity: religion retreats from public spaces, and religious belief and practice dramatically decline. Taylor sees the MST as a structure with three stories. The first floor can be seen as the factwhich he does not disputeof secularity 2. Almost everyone seems to agree that something like the process we call secularity 2 has indeed happened; the differences have to do with how and why it happened, and this corresponds to the basement of the MST, which comprises the various explanations proposed to account for the first floor, such as disenchantment, differentiation of social functions, rationalization, and so forth. This is usually understood as a linear and all but inevitable process. The third, upper floor consists of the state of belief and unbelief today; in other words, Taylors third sense of secularity, the conditions of belief. In his view, the MSTs view of this upper floor is constrained by two assumptions: the disappearance thesis and the epiphenomenal thesis. (433) The first holds that the independent motivation to religious belief and action (if, indeed, it hasnt always been epiphenomenal) tends to disappear in conditions of modernity. The second maintains that in conditions of modernity (if not always), religious belief and action can only be epiphenomenal, that is, functional to some distinct goals or purposes. Taylor agrees with MST on the fact of secularity 2 (the ground floor). He allows that MST is right to this extent, that most of the changes [it identifies] (e.g., urbanization, industrialization, migration, the fracturing of earlier communities) had a negative effect on the previously existing religious forms. They often made some of their earlier practices impossible, while others lost their meaning or their force. Taylor concedes that these factorsthe basement--all played an important role in bringing about secularity 1 and 2.So what does Taylor quibble with? For starters, he refuses to see secularity 2 as linear, the decline of one unchanging thing, over centuries, under the steady operation of a single set of causes. This is precisely why Taylor spends the first third of his book painstakingly retelling the history of pre-Reformation Latin Christendom, namely, to show how complex and variegated it actually was.

Second, his third central claim about secularity leads him to reject the disappearance thesis. He thinks that our modern consciousness is stadial, in that it defines itself as having overcome belief, and that to move to a condition in which religious questions and motivations disappeared completely would be to trade a fractured identity for no identity at all. He also feels this thesis has been dealt a serious blow by the cultural revolution of the 60s, which saw the rise of new forms of spirituality and innovations of religious traditions; indeed, this period plays an important role in Taylors reconstruction of our recent history. The schizophrenia of the social imaginary--modernitys reflexive mis-identification of itself--is a crucial part of the current conditions of belief. The bulk of Taylors account of the process of secularization, which I sketched above, is concerned with tracing the roots, emergence, and dissemination of exclusive humanism. But the latter really only forms the first of what he sees as a three-stage process. The second two stages, the Nova Effect and the Super-Nova are really just different degrees of the same trend, and bear more upon the conditions of belief today. The Nova Effector what Taylor calls the Age of Mobilization--comprises the multiple critiques leveled at orthodox religion, Deism, and the new humanism, and their cross-polemics. These, he says, end up generating a number of new positions, including modes of unbelief which have broken out of the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit (e.g., Nietzsche and his followers)and lots else besides. The Nova picks up speed in the 19th century and is still in full swing. The third stage, The Super-Novawhich Taylor also dubs The Age of Authenticity, is merely the spread of the Nova to Western popular culture, which accelerates after the second world war, and is powered by the ethic of authenticity or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, do their own thing. While there is not room to sufficiently sketch Taylors portrait of the contemporary scene, his intention in narrating these two latter stages in the process of secularization, roughly from the middle of the 19th century to the present, is to underwrite his third central claim, namely, that the secular age bears a constitutive reference to God. His conviction is that our age is deeply cross-pressured: The salient feature of Western societies is not so much a decline of religious faith and practice, though there has been lots of that, more in some societies than in others, but rather a mutual fragilization of different religious positiosn, as well as the outlooks of both belief and unbelief. This is what he means when he says that belief in God does not mean the same thing in 2000 as it did in 1500, and why he questions whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated. The MST tends to answer this question in the affirmative, but Taylor thinks that such a response is predicated on a profound misunderstanding of its own condition.

Another of Taylors other main misgivings with MSTas well as modern theories of religion of, e.g., Nietzsche, Weber, and Gauchet-- is its generalized view of religion. He believes this elides a tension fundamental to our modern self-understanding. As noted above, MST tends to focus on belief, and frames religion as mainly about belief in supernatural entities. But Taylor wants to both broaden and specify the sense of religion, all while avoiding a universally applicable definition: I want to focus not only on beliefs and actions predicated on the existence of supernatural entities, but also on the perspective of transformation of human beings which takes them beyondwhatever is normally understood as human flourishing. He thinks that as far as secularization theory goes, we fudge the facts when we talk about religion in general, rather than the specificity of belief as Christian, since the ethical forms handed down to us by the latter have such a hand in shaping the very modern posture that tries to analyze it! As he puts it, In the Christian case, this means our participating in the love (agape) of God for human beings, which is by definition a love which goes way beyond any possible mutuality, a self-giving not bounded by some measure of fairness. Taylors attachment to a more specific, substantive, content-based view of religion is the key to 1) his lament at the over-reach of Reformthe corruption of Christianity2) his conviction about modernitys self-misunderstanding; and 3) his claim that it is the ethical attraction of debunking, not the theoretical plausibility or historical adequacy of the modern alternatives, that fuels the immanent frame and MST. In an important passage discussing Nietzsche, Taylor writes,

I have reservations about the idea that there is a demand for meaning as such, as it were, any meaning, against something more specific. Thisis rather endemic to our modern humanist consciousness of religion and gives a particular (and I think dubious) twist to the hunger for religion in human beings. Nietzsche is followed in this, among others, by Weber, and also Gauchet.

Taylor also links this to what he sees as Webers and Gauchets occasional conflation of enchantment and religion; this is not consistent with their recognition, elsewhere, that both Judaism and Christianity have themselves at different times fostered various kinds of disenchantment. Taylor seems to think that this inconsistency may derive from the ethical reaction in the face of the loss of meaning, the defiant attitude of digging in ones heels and facing the void pervasive in modernity. He dubs Weber one of the most influential proponents of the view that we must accept that this sense of loss is inevitable; it is the price we pay for modernity and rationality, but we must courageously accept the bargain. The debunker believes this because he is convinced that his position does not run ahead of reasons, that it is yielding to his intellectual conscience. But Taylor holds that both open and closed stances [on the immanent frame] involve a step beyond available reasons into the realm of anticipatory confidence. His point is that there is belief involved here, aspiration to meet a high water mark, embody a set of virtuescourage, intellectual honesty, living in touch with reality, etc.not a mere recognition of and capitulation to the facts. Here, Taylor turns the tables on the debunkers, who accuse all believers of intellectual dishonesty--the sacrifice of the intellect, in Webers words-- and charges that the closed spin implies that ones thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality. I want to argue that those who think the closed reading of immanence is natural and obvious are suffering from this kind of disability. The disabling prejudice is the watered-down, hollowed out view of religion as an expression of mans natural hunger for meaning as such.

This premise underwrites the disappearance and epiphenomenal theses, and suppresses the extant tension between the two rival view of the human good. It is this essential tension between rival versions of human flourishingbetween the vertical, transformative perspective and the horizontal, MMO of mutual benefitthat produces the preponderance of positions crowding the secular age, i.e., the current conditions of belief. The MST is a subtraction story in this sense: by assuming that religion plays a purely functional role, and ignoring the content of the specific religion that forms the backbone of the story of secularization, it underestimates the persistence and power of the transformative perspective in our own day. Contrary to MST, Taylor holds that religious longing, the longing and response to a more-than-immanent transformation perspectiveremains a strong independent source of motivation in modernity.

IV. Opening Up the Immanent Frame

A Secular Age is not a Christian apologetic. Taylor is not making the case for faith per se. Instead, he is using a careful re-reading of the late medieval and modern history of Christianity in order to show the power that its (perhaps essential) tension between this-worldly and other-worldly ethical commitments shapes our contemporary consciousness as a whole, traditionalists, moderns, and postmoderns, the religious, the secular, and the spiritual but not religious. The constitutive God-reference that haunts the secular age should to seen not as an empty vestige, but a sign that religionreligion in Taylors strong sense, adherence to the transformation perspective (ethically), and openness to a transcendent reality (ontological)is not just here to stay, but destined to evolve; indeed, Taylor assiduously avoids positing some religious faculty of the soul, some universal constant in human nature that yearns for God but has been tamped down by modernity; as we saw, this is in fact the form of the subtraction story he sets out to criticize. He appears committed to the hermeneutical principle that we cannot speak of a bare human nature existing in itself apart from a network of historical prejudices and social imaginaries. Taylor is equally suspicious of some golden age of religion marked by universal devotion. Taylors own spin on the return of the religious and re-enchantment of the world is an argument for re-incarnation, which involves a more integral approach to religion that re-instates the transformative perspective and recovers a richer relationship to tradition and a renewal of the constitutive power of language [language quote]

Taylors story is not meant to be a prediction, or even a prescription; it is intended to hold up a more accurate mirror to our present, bring the regnant narrativethe immanent frameto light, and show that the way we spin itwhether closed or openis dictated not by the frame itself, but by the sundry sources of our secular selves. The gates of the immanent frame are locked from the inside.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 25.

Ibid., 22.

By exclusive, Taylor means a view of human flourishing not grounded in a transcendent source, such as God or the Tao, and without any good beyond nature or this life and world.

Ibid., 267-9.

Ibid., 269.

Jose Casanova, A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight? Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age, Yale University, April 3-5, 2008, 1.

Ibid., 4-5.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 597.

Ibid., 5.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 573.

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 269.

Ibid., 716.

Ibid., 590.

Ibid., 171-2.

Ibid., 172.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 63.

Taylor adverts to Gauchets work on the disenchantment of the world, noting how he too gives a crucial important to this long drive to Reform, and adds that Im not sure if we dont conceive it slightly differently, but does not explain his divergence in detail.

Ibid., 80.

Ibid., 80.

Ibid., 774.

Ibid., 45.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 50.

Ibid., 158.

The buffered self is Taylors construct of the modern subject that is self-reflective, uses instrumental reason to order about itself and the world, and is disengaged from society and nature; this he opposes to the porous self of the enchanted world, which is subject to the slings and arrows of magical forces, and cannot attain to full possession of itself.

Ibid., 119.

Ibid., 121.

Ibid., 125.

Ibid., 171.

Ibid., 246.

Ibid., 150-1.

Ibid., 258.

Ibid., 257.

Ibid., 267.

Ibid., 169.

Ibid., 563.

Ibid., 443.

Ibid., 443.

Ibid., 436.

Ibid., 436.

Ibid., 299.

Ibid., 299.

Ibid., 595.

Ibid., 269.

Ibid., 430.

Ibid., 430.

Ibid., 318.

Ibid., 553: Enchantment, [i.e., the world of spirits and meaningful causal forces, of wood sprites and relics], is essential to some forms of religion; but other formshave been built on its partial or total denial. We cannot just equate the two. He adds that Even Weber seems to have fallen into this at times.

Ibid., 426.

Ibid., 307.

Ibid., 551.

Ibid., 551.

Ibid., 717-18: [Many modern] have seen the essence of religion in the answers it offers to the question of meaning. I believe, as I argue above, that these theories are in an important way off the track. They imply that the main point of religion is solving the human need for meaning. In taking this stance, they absolutize the modern predicament. This is one of the most important passages in the book.

Ibid., 531.

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