Secularization and A Secular Age: Charles Taylor and the Immanent Frame

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in Western society around 1500, whereas by 2000 unbelief had become not merely possible but, for many, the most natural stance — sometimes the only conceivable one? This is the question that drives A Secular Age (2007), the most ambitious work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931). The book — nearly nine hundred pages that grew out of his 1998–99 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and earned him the 2007 Templeton Prize — refuses the easy explanations of secularization and offers, in their place, a historical and philosophical reconstruction of how the very conditions of belief in the West shifted over five centuries.

1. Three senses of “secular”

Taylor’s first move is to dissolve a confusion. We speak of “secularization” as though it were one thing, but the word covers at least three distinct phenomena:

• Secularity 1 — the withdrawal of religion from public space. In a society secular in this sense, the state, the economy, science, and law operate by reference to their own norms, without invoking God. Politics ceases to justify itself theologically.
• Secularity 2 — the decline of religious belief and practice. This is the sociologist’s sense: fewer people attend church, fewer pray, fewer say they believe. It is what classical “secularization theory” usually measures.
• Secularity 3 — the change in the conditions of belief. This is Taylor’s focus. What changes is not only how many people believe, but the status of belief itself: it passes from an unquestioned, taken-for-granted background to one option among others, and often not even the easiest one. To believe today is to take up a position within a field of live alternatives — and the believer knows it could be otherwise.

The book’s central claim is that secularity 3 is the decisive and least understood phenomenon. A person can live in a society where almost everyone still believes (low secularity 2) and yet fully inhabit a secular age in the third sense, because their faith has already become reflexive, fragile, shot through with the awareness of other possibilities.

2. Against “subtraction stories”

The standard account of modernity is what Taylor calls a subtraction story. On this script, modern man is what is left over once the illusions are removed: take away religion, superstition, and fear, and the “natural” human being will emerge from underneath — rational, self-interested, oriented to this world — having been there all along, merely covered over. Secularization would then be a simple emancipation: the maturity of a species that finally throws away the crutches of the sacred.

Taylor rejects this plot head-on. Secular modernity is not what remains after a subtraction; it is a positive construction, the historical invention of new ways of being human, new moral ideals, and new ways of imagining the self, society, and time. Beneath medieval belief there was no modern humanist waiting to be freed. The very possibility of living without God as a horizon had to be created — painstakingly, over centuries. Understanding the secular age therefore demands a genetic narrative, not a fable of liberation.

3. Exclusive humanism: a historical novelty

The most original fruit of that construction is what Taylor calls exclusive humanism: a conception of the good life that acknowledges no end beyond human flourishing and no allegiance to anything that transcends it. For the first time in history, a fully articulated morality became possible — with its ideals of benevolence, justice, and the reduction of suffering — that is self-sufficient, anchored neither in God, nor in the cosmic order, nor in any “beyond.”

This is the point that subtraction stories cannot explain. That human beings should seek happiness is nothing new; what is new is that whole societies came to conceive of earthly flourishing as the ultimate end, without nostalgia for the transcendent. Exclusive humanism is a late and improbable cultural achievement — and it is what opens the contemporary range of options, within which religious belief now figures as merely one choice among many.

4. The immanent frame

We live, Taylor says, within an immanent frame: the natural, social, and moral order built by modernity appears to us as a self-sufficient system, governed by its own laws, that can be described and inhabited without reference to anything beyond it. This frame is the air we breathe; it structures the experience of believer and unbeliever alike.

The subtle point is that the immanent frame does not decide on its own between faith and unbelief. It can be lived in two ways: as closed — a “closed world structure” in which transcendence does not even present itself as a serious hypothesis — or as open — porous to something that exceeds it. The shift from one reading to the other is not, for Taylor, dictated by the evidence: it is a “spin,” a pre-reflective inclination that each age and each person imparts to the frame. The error of militant naturalism is to take the closed reading as the only rational one, when it is in fact one interpretive option among others.

5. From the porous self to the buffered self: disenchantment

To measure the distance that separates us from 1500, Taylor takes up the Weberian theme of disenchantment (Entzauberung) and reworks it with two concepts of his own.

Pre-modern human beings had a porous self: they lived in an enchanted world, peopled by spirits, forces, demons, and sacred powers that could invade them from without. Meaning was not merely “in the head”; it was in things, in relics, in places. The boundaries between mind and world, between self and cosmos, were permeable — and so the subject was vulnerable, but also a participant in a meaningful order larger than itself.

Modern human beings have a buffered self: protected, bounded, master of the meanings it confers on the world. Meaning migrates inward, becomes an act of the mind; the outer world is reduced to neutral mechanism. This buffered self is the condition of an enormous achievement — autonomy, discipline, self-mastery — but it pays for it with a possible malaise: the sense of an emptied, “flat” world, in which fullness no longer comes to meet us from outside.

6. The genesis: Reform, providential Deism, and the “nova effect”

Where did disenchantment come from? Here Taylor surprises: secularization was not born of a rebellion against religion but, to a large extent, from within it. Its engine was the long drive toward Reform — not only the Protestant Reformation, but the whole Christian effort, from the late Middle Ages on, to raise the mass of the faithful to a higher and more inward standard of devotion, abolishing the old divide between the “religious virtuosi” (monks, saints) and ordinary believers. This disciplinary project systematically combatted the enchanted world — relics, festivals, popular magic — in the name of a purer, more rational faith. In doing so, it unwittingly eroded the very ground of enchanted religion.

From this process intermediate forms emerged. The providential Deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reduced God to a distant architect of a rational order aimed at the mutual benefit of human beings — a short step from dispensing with him altogether. From there the road to exclusive humanism lay open.

Once the non-religious alternative became available, what Taylor calls the nova effect was set off: the explosive multiplication of spiritual and moral positions. We do not live a simple stand-off between “religion” and “atheism,” but a supernova of options — traditional faiths, diffuse spiritualities, humanisms, skepticisms, syncretisms — all fragilizing one another. In the age of authenticity, inaugurated above all from the 1960s by expressive individualism, each person is summoned to find their own path, which multiplies the field still further and makes every choice more conscious of its own contingency.

7. Fullness, cross-pressures, and the fragilization of belief

Every human being, religious or not, orients their life by some notion of fullness: a state in which existence seems richer, denser, more worth living. The believer locates that fullness in God; the humanist, in an ideal of reason, art, nature, or solidarity. The distinctive mark of the secular age is that no one holds their position with serenity. We live under cross-pressures: the believer feels the pull of unbelief, its plausibility, its intellectual respectability; the unbeliever feels, at certain moments — before death, beauty, birth — the pull of a meaning that overflows the immanent. Each position is haunted by the other.

It is in this sense that we are all secular: not because everyone has stopped believing, but because belief and unbelief have become mutually fragile, options lived against the backdrop of their possible negation. No one any longer inhabits a faith — or an absence of faith — that imposes itself as the plain evidence of the world.

8. Reception and criticism

A Secular Age has become unavoidable in debates on religion and modernity, but it has not escaped weighty objections.

• Eurocentrism and the focus on Latin Christendom. Taylor’s narrative is that of the Christian West — above all Latin Catholicism and Protestantism. Critics ask how far his categories (secularity 3, exclusive humanism) apply to non-Western trajectories or to other religious traditions, and whether the story told does not unduly universalize a particular case.
• The quarrel with secularization theory. Sociologists of religion have noted that Taylor at times attacks a simplified version of “secularization theory” and underestimates the robustness of its more sophisticated strands, which are not reducible to the subtraction story.
• The author’s standpoint. An avowed Catholic, Taylor is accused by some of steering the narrative so as to keep the door of transcendence open — of describing the secular age from the standpoint of one who laments (or at least does not celebrate) immanent closure. Others, on the contrary, see precisely here his strength: the refusal to treat unbelief as the neutral and inevitable outcome of reason.
• The anthropological critique. Thinkers such as Saba Mahmood and currents linked to Talal Asad question the very category of the “secular” as neutral, showing how it carries presuppositions of power and of the government of conduct — a more Foucauldian genealogy than Taylor’s.

Even his critics, however, acknowledge the feat: by reframing the question of secularization in terms of the conditions of belief, Taylor displaced the whole debate. The question ceased to be “how much religion is left?” and became “what kind of world made it thinkable to live without it — and what has that possibility made of us?” It is here that the work converses with the idea of a post-secular time, in which the public sphere must shelter believing and unbelieving voices on equal footing.

Essential reading

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007).
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989).
• Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (1991).
• James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (2014) — an accessible reader’s guide.
• Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen & Craig Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010) — a collective critical debate.

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