A Secular Age

By Charles Taylor

2007

896 pages / 42 hours and 7 minutes

Nonfiction

—

Welcome to the 50th and final of my nonfiction reviews. I have tried to cover the widest possible latitude of topics, though my own interests are probably clear enough by now. But how do I finish? I have decided to conclude with the post-2000 book that has had the single greatest impact on the way I think. A Secular Age is about religion, to be sure, but it is more an act of history, sociology, philosophy, and cultural criticism.

As I’ve written the fiction reviews, I’ve tried to point out where the books might have offensive sex, violence, language or other assorted off-putting components. Readers deserve to be warned. So I have to offer a warning on this nonfiction entry: it is long and difficult! It is about 800 pages including the notes, there are a lot of words on every page, and the writing is often very dense.

When one of my friends asked if I’d read the book, all I could do was laugh. There was no way I was willing to make that kind of commitment. He then suggested I read How (Not) to Be Secular, James K.A. Smith’s wonderful summation (in fewer than 150 pages) of Taylor’s tome. I did, and it intrigued me. And then I began to notice that Taylor’s book was cited by almost everybody I was reading who was trying to understand the current religious situation. So I discovered the audiobook of A Secular Age and began to listen to it at about 20 minutes a day. I would then use the print copy to look at the footnotes or anything I had heard that I didn’t really understand. So over a period of several months I worked my way through the book.

A Secular Age is basically trying to answer one question. Over a period of 500 years how did it happen that in the West we went from a situation in which Christian faith was the default setting of almost everyone to our current situation where unbelief is now the default setting in many ways? In other words, how did we arrive at the secular age?

There is nothing to replace the richness of the book itself, but let me offer a couple of teasers that might entice you into believing it’s worth the effort. Taylor unravels the commonly accepted narrative of maturity, which says the world basically outgrew its need for superstitious religion. Nope. He also opens up the concept of social imaginary, which is the way ordinary people imagine their social situation. This is not an abstract, intellectual system but the way we actually look at the world – primarily through our stories. We are not always aware of what these are. And of course the book is rightfully famous for his exploration of the concept of disenchantment. When the Protestant Reformation took the mystery out of the mass, they may also have inadvertently taken the transcendent out of the world.

As I think about how to spiritually form students who, whether they go to church or not, and whether they have faith or not, are formed in this secular age, there is no book that has more deeply influenced how I think about that work. This book is long. Hard. Worth it.