Let's be honest: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is one of those intimidating tomes you keep hearing about; maybe (probably) you even talk about it yourself, but you haven't read it. There it ponderously occupies your bookshelf, or your Amazon wish basket, its spine uncracked, its pages crisp, unread. Its very reality diminishes you: Why haven't you read it yet? And let's be more honest: you're not going to.

Which brings us to a great piece of news: James K. A. Smith read it for you, and he's written an altogether readable, charming, and short—I'll repeat that last—short introduction to Taylor's behemoth. It is also comparatively cheap.

With introductions to introductions (e.g., this review), there's always the danger of a "game of telephone" gone bad, which is one reason Smith himself exhorts us to read his introduction paired with A Secular Age, as a guide to—not replacement for—Taylor's work. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is, unapologetically, a book about a book, but the book in question merits such attention. Taylor is one of Canada's grandest public intellectuals, and A Secular Age is a conversation-defining account of modernity, religion, and secularity (however defined). But (see above) it is so long, so narratively dense, that while most everyone is aware of it, very few people outside rarefied academic circles have actually read it. And this is a genuine problem, because Taylor's arguments are urgently needed—not least in Canada—at exactly this moment.

The most important contribution that Taylor makes is to shift the terms of the so-called debate about religion and secularity. I say "so-called" because Taylor sets out to undress the fiction of religion versus secularism, or belief versus reason, as though these were two discrete, transcultural, transhistorical things. Here's how Taylor phrases it himself: "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?"

In other words, as Smith puts it, the question is not so much about what people believe as much as about what is believable. This is far more useful than the bromide that "everybody believes in something." A cathartic yawn later, we more or less shrug agreement with this as yesterday's news. Taylor alters the terms of engagement: it's not merely that people believe things, it's the conditions of those beliefs that have radically changed. "Even as faith endures in our secular age," writes Smith, "believing doesn't come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of contestability. We don't believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We're all Thomas now." These are the conditions for belief today, in what Taylor calls "the immanent frame."

In reimagining the conditions for "reasonable" belief, and the boundaries and limits of that belief, a revolution in the "secular" has accompanied a parallel one in the "religious." The two, we learn, were invented poles of a historically very recent way of practicing and understanding social life, where transcendence itself became an option among others. This is not merely the blunt instrument often invoked by pundits, "the separation of church and state." This is the whole social-religious transformation which invented things like states, with their own smuggled transcendence and their cultic powers of life and death.

So if the facile polarities between "the religious" and "the secular" we take for granted not only have a contestable history but also a morally ambiguous genealogy, how should we think (for instance) about the challenges posed by "secularization"? Here A Secular Age introduces a series of disambiguated uses of the term secular, which Smith (following Taylor) calls secular[1], secular[2], and secular [3]. It's worth pointing out that even this list is hardly exhaustive. At last count, I've found at least nine meaningfully distinct uses of secular.

It's secular[2] vs. secular[3] where things get interesting. Secular[2] is the allegedly nonreligious meaning of secular, a neutral, or public definition, with ostensibly no religious content. It dovetails with what is often called the secularization thesis, the corrosive effect that modernization (inevitably, so we're told) has on religious belief, or what is called the subtraction theory.

Secular[3] is the articulation of secular the way Taylor means in his title, A Secular Age. Secular[3] defines a society where religious belief is understood to be an option among others, and transcendence itself is a choice. That is, it becomes possible to imagine a social contract that is exclusively humanist, which aims at no higher goal than the mutual flourishing of human persons. Writes Taylor, "For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true."

Mind you, of no current society is this really true either. Secular[3] is a kind of fairy tale, a story we must be told because "human flourishing" is in fact neither self-obvious nor naturally rational. The mutual benefit that we are supposed to imagine is at the basis of our ostensibly secular society is, in a word, haunted. We feel the "cross-pressure" of wanting our lives to mean more than a menial project of mutual security and prosperity. And we see the evidence of the perplexing lack of rationality (as though this meant only one thing) in society around us, and in our own lives. We, also, transcend, in some sense, this goal of flourishing. Our lives are characterized by a kind of existential journey to discover what flourishing means for me, for you. We have interiorized transcendence.

All of which might make you think A Secular Age is one long "gotcha" moment for believers to savor, but if there really are such moments in Taylor's narrative, they're as uncomfortable for the professedly religious as for the professedly secular. No wonder the religious-rest-of-the-world finds our (Western) cultural fault lines so perplexing. That there was never a seriously discrete, "neutral," or "'nonreligious" (whatever that means) secular[2] has been said before, many times. What's new in Taylor's account is the way he makes us aware of the immanent frame, which conditions the terms of our debate, the terms of flourishing, the terms of what constitutes a good and full life. Smith wrote his primer with a primarily religious audience in mind, but it is not merely the religious that should tolle lege. We are haunted, in our secular society, and its ghosts are making quite a ruckus. Time to hear what they have to say.

Robert Joustra is assistant professor of international studies at Redeemer University College. He has two books on Charles Taylor in the pipeline—one on "the religious problem with religious freedom: toward principled pluralism in Canadian foreign affairs," and one with Eerdmans (co-authored with Alissa Wilkinson) on "the politics of apocalypse: a popular culture of the malaise of modernity."

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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