Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, published in 2007 as the culmination of a career-long engagement with modernity, religion, and the philosophy of identity, is widely considered the most important work of philosophy of religion of the early twenty-first century. Its central argument - that the secular condition is not the defeat of religion but the product of a particular transformation within Latin Christendom - reverses the dominant secularization narrative and grounds the story of modern secularity in the very biblical reform impulse that secularization theory claimed to have left behind. At nearly 900 pages, the book is one of the most ambitious philosophical works of its era, drawing on history, sociology, phenomenology, and theology to answer a single question: what does it mean that religious belief is now 'just one option among many' in Western culture?
The Thinker and His Work
Taylor (b. 1931) is a Canadian Catholic philosopher who came to prominence with Sources of the Self (1989), a comprehensive history of the modern identity that argued that secular modernity is unintelligible without its religious and specifically Christian roots. A Secular Age extends and deepens this argument into a systematic account of the entire arc of Western modernity. Taylor writes as a practicing Catholic who is also one of the most sophisticated analysts of modern culture, and this combination - faith and philosophical rigor - gives the book its distinctive quality: it is simultaneously a philosophical analysis of modernity and a pastoral account of what it means to inhabit a secular age as a believer.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Matthew 5:48 - 'be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect' - is, in Taylor's argument, the driving impulse behind the transformation of Western culture. The medieval Church had institutionalized a two-tier system: ordinary Christians could be saved by following the basic commandments; the religious (monks, nuns) pursued perfection through the full evangelical counsel. The Reformation - both Catholic and Protestant - abolished this two-tier system and demanded that all Christians pursue holiness in ordinary life. This 'reform impulse' to sanctify all of life, grounded in Jesus's command to perfection, is the root of the disenchantment of the world: it drove the expulsion of magic, sacred objects, and special sacred times from ordinary Christian practice, gradually creating the 'buffered self' of modernity.
John 1:14 - 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us' - grounds Taylor's account of the Christian 'immanent frame.' The incarnation - God's full entry into the material, bodily, temporal world - implied a positive valuation of ordinary human life that was unprecedented in ancient philosophy. Taylor argues that this biblical affirmation of the goodness of created, embodied, historical existence - rather than the Platonic depreciation of the material world - is the theological root of the modern affirmation of ordinary life: work, family, sexuality, and democratic politics as intrinsically valuable, not merely as preparation for a higher spiritual life.
Romans 1:20 - 'his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made' - provides a Pauline basis for the natural theology that, in Taylor's account, became increasingly important as the Reformation's de-sacralization of the world required new grounds for belief. The 'immanent frame' of modernity is the world conceived as a self-sufficient order whose laws can be discovered without reference to transcendence - a frame whose construction Taylor traces through the natural theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Core Argument
Taylor defines secularity not in terms of the retreat of religion from public life (secularity 1) or the decline of religious belief and practice (secularity 2) but as a change in the conditions of belief (secularity 3): in the secular age, belief in God is only one option among many, even for believers. This is unprecedented: in pre-modern societies, the existence of God was not a conclusion one could decide to accept or reject but the taken-for-granted background of social life. The secular age is one in which even committed believers are aware that their faith is a choice, that non-belief is available, that people they respect have chosen differently.
Taylor argues that this condition is the product of a specific Western history rooted in the Latin Christian reform tradition. The drive to sanctify all of ordinary life (the moral reform of society), the disenchantment of the world (the expulsion of magic and sacred objects), the affirmation of ordinary life (work, family, the body as intrinsically valuable), and the 'disciplinary revolution' of the early modern period (the internalization of moral discipline as self-governance) all combined to produce the 'buffered self' - the self experienced as insulated from natural and supernatural forces, finding its resources within.
Intellectual Context
Taylor was writing in explicit dialogue with the secularization thesis as formulated by sociologists from Weber and Durkheim through Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, and Steve Bruce. He was also responding to the 'subtraction story' of secularity - the account in which modernity is what you get when you subtract religious belief from the picture, revealing a secular reason that was always there underneath. Taylor argues that this story is wrong: secular reason is not a neutral substrate but a historically specific achievement, formed by a particular Latin Christian history.
Reception and Critique
A Secular Age generated an enormous critical literature. Robert Bellah found it the most important work of sociology of religion in decades. Jurgen Habermas, in a series of exchanges with Taylor, argued that Taylor underestimated the resources of secular reason for sustaining liberal democracy without religious grounding - a dialogue that has been published as The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011). James K. A. Smith wrote an extended commentary, How (Not) To Be Secular (2014), making Taylor's argument accessible to a broader theological audience.
Critics from the left argued that Taylor's narrative is too Eurocentric - centered on Latin Christianity - to serve as an account of modernity as a global phenomenon. Critics from the secularist right argued that Taylor's evident sympathy for religious belief distorts his philosophical analysis.
Legacy
A Secular Age reconfigured the academic study of secularism, religion, and modernity. Its argument that secularity is not the absence of religion but a specific historical formation - produced by a particular religious history and therefore irreducibly religious in its structure - has been enormously productive for scholars in religious studies, sociology, political science, and theology. The concept of the 'immanent frame' and the 'buffered self' have entered the standard vocabulary of secularism studies.
Key Passages
'The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.' (A Secular Age, Introduction)
'The nova effect is producing a fracturing of the religious world, but also a fracturing of the secular world, into a gamut of positions between the two poles.' (Part IV)
Contemporary Relevance
Taylor's analysis of the secular age has proved remarkably prescient about the religious world of the early twenty-first century. The 'cross-pressure' he identifies - the sense of being pulled simultaneously by the attractions of religious transcendence and the pull of immanent fullness - describes the experience of millions of 'spiritual but not religious' people, as well as the experience of committed believers who are continuously aware of secular alternatives. His argument that religious faith in a secular age requires what he calls 'the new expressivism' - a faith that takes seriously the inner depths of personal experience - connects with the emergence of contemplative, mystical, and experiential forms of religion as alternatives to institutional and doctrinal Christianity. For anyone trying to think clearly about the relationship between Christianity and contemporary culture, A Secular Age remains indispensable.