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  • Debating the Secular
  • Robert Miles
Michael Warner,Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 2010). Pp. vii + 337. $45

I want to begin this review with a confession: debates about secularization did not interest me much. I was not engaged, because I could not imagine their possible use. Yes, the Enlightenment insisted on the separation of church and state, and yes, there was less religion, not immediately, of course, but despite the odd revival and awakening, great or otherwise, there was a long-term slide; and yes, where religion once was, “natural supernaturalism” now is—at least in my period, the really long eighteenth century that includes Romanticism.1 But since reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), I have become somewhat Taylor obsessed.2

What made the difference? Not only in A Secular Age, but also in Taylor’s The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), and Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), I encountered the most compelling intellectual history of the long eighteenth century since reading Foucault, another obsessive historian of the key century in the “rise” of Western modernity (Taylor, as much as Foucault, would insist on the scare quotes).3 Like Foucault, Taylor restlessly pushes his history back, and while he focuses primarily on Latin Christendom, he extends his reach to the “Axial Age,” so dubbed by Karl Jaspers, meaning [End Page 110] “the extraordinary period in the last millennium B.C.E. when various ‘higher’ forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such founding figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.”4 Taylor is a militant anti-idealist; the history he sketches turns on unintended consequences and intellectual accidents. And as with Nietzschean genealogy, to trace one contingent mutation involves numerous antecedent others. So, while Taylor’s historiography—part history, part philosophy—has a bold overview, its inner workings are extraordinarily intricate, detailed, and erudite.

But it was the general thrust of A Secular Age that undid my preconceptions. With a single, brilliant stroke, Taylor destroys the two usual accounts of secularization, the separation of church and state, and the decline of religion, by labeling them subtraction stories. According to the usual conceit of secularists, once one has banished superstition and the supernatural, one is left with man in his default state, where he is free to pursue his interests and his happiness in an unencumbered, rational manner. Laid out in this way, the conceit is obviously threadbare: “man in his/her natural state” has no decent, philosophical clothes to wear. Taylor argues, to the contrary, that what we live through now—the condition of “secularity 3,” as he calls it, in opposition to the other exploded two—is itself the result of “new constructions of identity, . . . institutions, and practices,” as one of the contributors to the volume under review, Wendy Brown, puts it (89). Taylor defines secularity 3 as “our” deep-rooted assumption (where “our” refers to the modern products of Latin Christendom only) that we each have a choice as to whether we locate our notion of human flourishing, of “fullness,” in the transcendental, or the immanent; in some form of religious belief, or in a vague sense that some alien value yet inheres in nature, as a glow or aura, expressed, perhaps, ecologically, whereby every tree is sacred; or in the extreme case of immanence having been closed off, in a militant sense of the human as the locus of all value, or whatever value, or no value at all, as one pleases. In short, for us Westerners, what we believe is a lifestyle choice. By reaching back to the Axial Age, Taylor shows how unique this bland assumption actually is, and how significant.

As he explains in his afterword to Varieties of Secularism, Taylor believes in master narratives, in part, because they are inescapable: “The attempt to escape them only means that we operate by an unacknowledged, hence unexamined and uncriticized, narrative. That’s because we (modern Westerners) can’t help understanding ourselves in these terms” (300). One could say that a grand theme of Taylor’s narrative is why we cannot do...

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