ABSTRACT
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor sets the context for his investigation by distinguishing three different but interrelated senses of secularity. The first focuses on those public spaces that have been allegedly emptied of God. So we may want to ask, for example, how, when and where have the practices and norms of economics, politics or education become dissociated from religion or any reference to God? In the second sense ‘secularity consists of the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church.’1 Here, for example, we may inquire whether there has really been a decrease of religious belief and/or practices, how are we to determine this and where, why and when this has occurred. The third sense, which is Taylor’s primary concern, concerns the ‘conditions of belief’. ‘The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.’2 By ‘a secular age’ Taylor means an age in which both religious belief and unbelief have become real and viable options.3 The question that Taylor poses is,
How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naïvely within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option? This is the transformation that I want to describe, and perhaps also (very partially) explain.4
