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C       F    Theorizing Secularity 3 Authenticity, Ontology, Fragilization          S Life in a secular age (in sense 3) is uneasy and cross-pressured, and doesn’t lend itself easily to a comfortable resting place. —Charles Taylor, A Secular Age One of Charles Taylor’s ambitions—perhaps even his central ambition— in A Secular Age is to shed light on Secularity 3, as he calls it, or the current conditions of religious belief and experience in Western societies. This is what, in Taylor’s eyes, sets his approach apart from other analyses of secularity , which see the term as referring either to the evacuation of religion from the public and other social spheres—which he calls Secularity 1—or to the decline in the number of people expressing allegiance to traditional religious views and in particular Christianity—which he dubs Secularity 2. While Taylor’s preferred approach to secularity cannot ignore either of 98 these developments, it is distinguished by its preoccupation with experience , with what it is like to be a religious believer or nonbeliever in contemporary Western societies.1 This chapter begins by identifying the conceptual tools Taylor employs to understand religious belief and nonbelief in contemporary Western societies. The second section discusses the phenomenon of religious authenticity, while the third section raises a number of questions about Taylor’s cross pressures and fragilization thesis: what it means, how it affects people, how widespread it is. The fourth section contends that underlying Taylor’s diagnosis of a secular age is an ontological claim that some orientation toward religion or transcendence is lodged in human nature. It is important to note here that Taylor counts any perspective or worldview that remains open to transcendence of the human, all too human, as religious.What matters is whether an outlook has a transcendent axis and whether its sense of the transcendent returns to inform its conception of human flourishing.2 By this logic, the category of religion embraces more than theism—theism is but one form of religion. A chapter of this length can, of course, deal with only a sliver of a work as formidable as A Secular Age. This chapter draws from those sections discussing the conditions of contemporary religious belief and experience without engaging the historical material that constitutes a large slice of the book. My comments therefore pertain primarily to material from the introduction and from chapter 13,“The Age of Authenticity,” to the book’s end.3 An immediate objection to limiting the parameters of my discussion to those sections of A Secular Age dealing with the conditions of contemporary religious experience comes from Taylor’s insistence that the history he weaves is inseparable from the present he presents.“Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we have come from. This is why the narrative is not an optional extra, why I believe that I have a story to tell here.”4 Much later in the book he declares one of its “structuring principle [s]”to be the conviction that“the story of how we got here is inextricably bound up with our account of where we are.”5 Despite these remarks, I focus on contemporary conditions for two reasons. The first is practical: in a paper of this size, it is impossible to do justice to the book as a whole. The second justification is my sense that, Theorizing Secularity 3 99 pace Taylor, it is possible to analyze his comments about the contemporary condition without constant reference to his historical narrative.6 Whatever the details of that narrative, and whatever its value as a history of Christianity, my sense is that Taylor uses history in this book for three major purposes.7 One is to show that Western societies were not always secular (in senses 1, 2 or 3) and thus that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the contemporary condition. It has to be explained rather than taken for granted. The second major purpose is to encourage readers to take some imaginative distance from the present and try to see it from a perspective somewhat different from that in which we are immersed when living it. In both cases, the awareness of history has an exoticizing function, and it is this shift in perspective on the present, rather than the particular details of the history, that seems crucial to Taylor’s task of examining Secularity...

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