Post Secular?

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

 

Although pundits on both sides of the issue can claim that the US is now post-religious or post-secular, there is real ambivalence about which badge we should claim. A quick turn of the television dial will bring numerous evangelists into your living room, and a quick scan of the churches in which they are preaching would convince you that religion is a big deal for most Americans. Go to a bookstore and scan the shelves of a religion section, and you’ll find it full of books that guide readers in the ways of various religious traditions and encourage them to bring their flock—er, families—back to the traditions. Scan another set of shelves in the same store, and you’ll find the secularists, or atheists, or agnostics preaching to a choir of post-secular Americans for whom religion is a long gone memory. Two recent books, however, try to address the space between the post-religious and the post-secular. They’re not as strident in tone as books by Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, and they lack the evangelizing tone of books by popular preacher like Joel Osteen, but these two books offer insightful examinations of the way we got to this point in our culture.

In his characteristically erudite yet engaging fashion, Mark C. Taylor, winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, takes up where he left off in his magnificent Sources of the Self (1989) and brilliantly traces the loss of a focus on the religious and the emergence of secularity and the processes of secularization in the modern age in A Secular Age. Challenging the idea that the secular takes hold in a world where religion is experienced as a loss or where religions are subtracted from the culture, Taylor discovers the secular emerging from the midst of the religious. The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on breaking down the invidious political structures of the Catholic Church, provides the starting point down the road to the secular age. Taylor sweeps grandly and magisterially through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as he recreates the history of the secular age and its parallel challenges to religion. He concludes that a focus on the religious has never been lost in Western culture but that it is one among many stories striving for recognition and acceptance. Taylor’s examination of the rise of unbelief in the nineteenth century is alone worth the price of the book, and offers a very helpful reminder that the Victorian age, more than the Enlightenment, contains the strands of the narratives that dominate our present view of the meanings of secularity and its impact on religion. Taylor’s inspired combination of philosophy and history sparkles in this virtuoso performance that is a must-read.
 
In his typically gifted fashion, Charles Taylor—who has written broadly on religion (Deconstructing Theology), architecture (Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion), and emergent technologies (The Moment of Complexity)—explores the nature of religion in the contemporary world in After God. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and Walter Benjamin and theologians Paul Tillich, Thomas Altizer, and Martin Luther, Taylor brilliantly demonstrates the creative force of religion as a complex system that both structures and destabilizes our experience. In the days after God religion is “an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that . . . figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose. . . . and disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure,” not simply located in institutions such as churches, synagogues, or mosques. Religion can be reduced neither to dualism nor monism but can be experienced and expressed as a kind of Hegelian dialectic, or a virtual reality, where the Other remains “so near that it is infinitely distant.” Religion after God—which lacks the absolutes of monistic religious systems—allows us to experience the creative possibilities of being human and embracing the complexities of our world. Although his dense and complex arguments can sometimes require patience and persistence, Taylor’s virtuoso performance clearly repays every effort.

These books are required reading for anyone who would try to understand the continual clash between religion and secularism in American culture.

Books mentioned in this column:
After God by Mark C. Taylor (University of Chicago, 2009)

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Belknap Press, 2007)

Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.