How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

This book is a summary of another book. I picked this one up because Sam Chan mentioned it Evangelism in a Skeptical World to better understand what this post-something culture thinks. I had also heard about Charles Taylor around form people like Tim Keller and this seemed like a good introduction because it seems that Taylor is hard to read.

James K. A. Smith seems to convey Taylor's argument in a concise way, which I think is useful. From what I can gather Taylor, seeks to give a history as to how we moved from Christendom many years ago to now, describing the thought patterns and shifts. He also seeks to look at today and work out how we went from a society about 300 years ago where belief in God was the norm and default position to one where it is the exact opposite.

Like Schaffer does in some of his books, this one does a bit of a historical and philosophical survey teasing out ideas that brought us to this point. Taylor seems to have quite a complex understanding of how history and ideas develop. Nothing is linear, ideas move in a zig-zag way over time, and sometimes it is almost by chance that we zagged this way and not the other. This means we may not have ended up in our secular culture today, as we could have just as likely zigged a different direction. The idea that we a progressing in "the right" direction towards some golden era is a myth.

With these zig-zagging ideas, Taylor puts forward the idea that all the coming of age stories of people putting off religion and embracing atheism/secularism/agnosticism that we hear today don't really hold. He called these "subtraction stories" the taking away religion which results in what we have now. This is not true, as there are underlying ideas that allowed that taking off religion to seem plausible. Those who speak of only subtraction in their progressive story haven't thought through their own culture and realised there are more things at work than their own rejection of a particular religion.

Taylor talks about the driving ideas behind this secular shift over time. We now are what he called a "buffered self". Significance doesn't reside in places or things (think mystical religions), but now it is in your mind. The movement away from things disenchanted the world, it was no longer mysterious, disease and disasters were not punishments from the gods (this idea is also explained in this book review using Star Wars as an analogy). This move also gives us more autonomy from society at large and we can live with our own identity, apart from external expectations. This means ideas on what it means to flourish are redefined and possibly lowered as we are not relying on the whole, but on the self to be fulfilled.

This buffered self protects us from the outside world/culture, but it also isolates us. This leaves us with a little uneasy feeling, that there is something out there that we can't describe, leaving us with a sense that we may be lost, or missing out, or not grasping the whole. Maybe someone else's ideas on fulfilment are better than ours. Are we doing it right? All of this feeling or sense is hard to pin down and put into words, but Taylor suggests this is the majority of feelings for those today in a secular world.

At the end of the book, after talking about how we got to where we are Taylor goes on to address the framing of stories and ideas today, taking on the general progressive idea that we are here because we have evolved and are smarter and better than those in the past. And "framing" is the best word for it, for you are drawing a box around certain ideas while at the same time cutting others out of the picture. Taylor seems to classify the confidence we have in our framing of the world into two categories. A "take" is an explanation on the world we have while also recognising the vague loss or "sense" of unfulfillment or humbly addressing the limit of what we really know in our "take". Others who are confident in their assessment of the world, who consider their view "just obvious" and right, is categorised as "spin". They dismiss other views because they have elevated their own to be the truth. People in the "spin" category are seen to be religious fundamentalist as well as people in the established academy.

There are a few more ideas in this book, but these are the big ones that I can remember (from like 4 months ago). I assume Smith gives a balanced view of Taylor, but he also engages a little bit with the book, and asks questions and brings in his reformed views in some areas (Taylor was a Catholic). There are a few direct quotes from Taylor and from these, you can see why Smith's book needs to exits. It is hard work in reading Taylor and I am not sure I would be able to cope with 850 pages of it. As one of my friends said, Taylor expects his reader to do a lot of heavy lifting. There is also a glossary of terms you need to learn to understand Taylor, as well as three different definitions of what "secular" means in different senses. Some stuff in this book I probably didn't get, and Taylor seems to buy a little bit more into post-modernism that I think a religious guy should. But overall, this was an ok book, probably not for everyone.