The Place of Religion in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor's Explanation of the Rise and Significance of Secularism in the West (original) (raw)

Can Secularism be Other-wise? (A Critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age)

Given the extensive commentary and discussion that has followed the publication of A Secular Age, any further re flection on this work seems to risk repetition and redundancy. To avoid this, I will focus for the most part on three issues that I think have received little attention so far. These are: (1) the normative thrust of Taylor's account of secularism in Euro-Atlantic Christian so ci e ties; (2) the relationship of this largely subjectivist account to political secularism; and (3) the place accorded to religious difference in Taylor's vision for reshaping contemporary Christianity in Western liberal so ci e ties.

Does Religion need Rehabilition? Charles Taylor and the Critique of Secularism

Between 2006 and 2014, Quebec -Charles Taylor's homehas witnessed some of the fiercest political debates about secularism and public religion in recent history. In this chapter, I explore how A Secular Age is related to the normative claims made in these debates and to Taylor's own political interventions in them. Similar to other Western societies, contestations about secularism in Quebec are characterized by the fact that they drew on divergent understandings of 'the secular.' In other words, participants in these discourses crafted divergent versions of secularism as a "problem-space" (Agrama 2012). As I will show, centered on the notion of emancipation from religion on the one hand and respect for religious diversity on the other, these discourses feed on collective memories that were mobilized to buttress the claims made in their name.

Between Secularity and Post-Secularity: Critical Appraisal of Charles Taylor's Account

Bogoslovni vestnik

The article deals with Charles Taylor's account of the secular age. In the first part, the main constituents of Taylor's narrative account are presented: the central concepts, distinctions, definition of the subject, the aims etc. The author pays special attention to the notions of secularity, secular age, religion, and transcendence. In the second part, Taylor's genealogy of the secular age is outlined and comparatively placed in the context of other main relative forms of genealogical account. Because our age is an age of authenticity, a special section is devoted to it. The final section presents some reproaches to Taylor and evaluates their strength and the value of Taylor's contribution. Besides, some speculative »forecasts« about secularity and post-secularity in Europe, the USA, and at the global scale are presented (by reference to Taylor's account). The author concludes that despite some (serious and cogent) reproaches and second thoughts about Taylor&#3...

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2012

Debates about secularism refuse to go away just because some have declared that we live in a post-secular world. Indeed, it is only now when a high-decibel monologue about the importance of saving secularism has quietened down that certain conversations about secularism are possible. Efforts to come to a more fine-grained understanding of the different facets of secularism are underway in academia and this book is a valuable addition to that project. The original impetus for this collection was Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. This poses the challenge of placing the collection: is it to be read with and/or after Taylor's book or separately from it, as a book in its own right? In their introduction to this collection, the editors provide a helpful overview of Taylor's book and place it within his larger body of work. It would, of course, be helpful to have read the 896 pages of A Secular Age to engage fully with the ideas which the contributors to this collection present, but, equally, the collection can serve as a guide to reading Taylor's work with a more critical eye. To my mind, however, the collection can stand alone-largely because of the strength of some of the chapters which make a wider contribution to debates about secularism. At the very least, the collection of responses to Taylor's work moves beyond his arguments, with most authors bringing their distinctive disciplinary and critical perspectives into the discussion. Jon Butler's contribution, for instance, is a much-needed corrective to the lack of historical specificity, not just in Taylor's book but in most theory-driven investigations of secularism and secularisation. (Another recent contribution in this regard is the volume edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones on Religion and the Political Imagination.) Butler rightly points out that there is significant historical material which goes against the assumption that belief was axiomatic prior to the Reformation. Acknowledging the presence of indifference if not outright lack of belief in the pre-Reformation period dislodges the singularity of contemporary developments and ''secularization theory's impulse towards inevitability'' (211). Butler contends that Taylor ignores this literature not for lack of learning but due to epistemological bias. Jonathan Sheehan's contribution may initially seem to be orthogonal to Butler's when he asks if questions of historical specificity, including those raised by Butler, ''irritate or otherwise deflect the 'secular age' concept in any way'' (224) and answers in the negative. Yet, Sheehan, too, suggests a fundamental alternative to Taylor's reading of history by arguing for a deeper exploration of the non-religious outside the concept of 'secular'. Similarly, Wendy Brown's contribution is an excellent example of an interlocutor who engages generously but critically with Taylor's arguments and in the process opens doors for thinking about secularism more deeply. Brown tackles Taylor's dismissal of historical materialism and attempts to show why and how a nuanced historical materialism may yield results in furthering our understanding of secularism within a neo-liberal context. In a Book Reviews 147

Charles Taylor on Secularization: Introduction and Interview

According to Charles Taylor secularization is not so much a process that has developed on neutral epistemic grounds, but rather on moral and spiritual grounds. One aspect of this process is the turn to 'personal religion' mediated by the Reformation. This shift fits a broad cultural pattern that arose during modernity and that he refers to as the ethics of authenticity. This led not only to a rise in new kinds of religion and spirituality, but also in the number of people who are declaring themselves to be atheist or agnostic. In the interview, Taylor explains how this process can be interpreted in terms of a gradual shift from a hierarchical social imaginary, where God is present in the sacred, to a horizontal social imaginary in the form of a providential design. He also discusses how the backlash against multiculturalism might be related to the process of secularization.

The Debate on Secularization and Religion. What Is Left?

There is a common view in the field of sociology, particularly, and social sciences, in general, that the world, as we know it, is a secular world and the role of religion in the public space is therefore minimal. This view has been challenged by a few sociologists of religion that pretended to see in the appearance of new religiosities and spiritualities, in the late 1970s and 1980s, a reawakening of the reality of the sacred and belief, now bound for the personal sphere and aside from the institutional functioning of churches and main denominations. Some of them have even talked about the privatization of religion and the disenchantment of the world, exhibiting mixed feelings of revivalism and nostalgia. They consider the thesis of secularization elaborated by important figures of sociology, like Max Weber, Durkheim and Marx, historically rooted and discredited by recent events in America and Great Britain and by the evolution of former atheist societies such as Russia and Eastern Europe. Modern sociologists of religion that subscribe to the thesis of secularization of the world, like Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce and Charles Taylor, reformulated their initial outline of the model. These changes have not convinced those who shield themselves in the essentiality of religion in human society. The debate has somehow become frozen, in the two camps, around previous arguments. This essay looks to portray the evolution of the secularization thesis, taking in consideration other contributions beyond those originated in the English-speaking world. The Secularization Paradigm It was common, during the 1970s, to state that the Western world was more and more secularized and that only a few people recognized themselves as religious and pious.