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[Expo. 3.1 (2009) 97–114] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.97 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Academic Roundtable
On Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Bellknap Press, 2007. HB. 
$39.95, ISBN 9780674026766. 

Secularism’s Fragile Buffered Selves

MICAH WATSoN

Union University 
mwatson@uu.edu

This is an extraordinary book. It is extraordinary because it is authored 
by a profound thinker, addresses and attempts to answer a defining 
question of our era, and does so with a breadth and depth that are 
rare in contemporary political theory. It is the sort of book that will  
engender conversations for years to come and create ripples in litera-
tures across several disciplines. It is an unhurried work that does not 
shy away from delving into exquisite detail while steadily working  
toward an overarching argument. It will be one of those landmark 
books that scholars and students will feel compelled to acquaint them-
selves with even if they do not read it cover to cover.

What is the defining question that Taylor addresses, and what is his 
overarching argument? The question is rather simple. Almost everyone 
in Western society in the beginning of the sixteenth century believed in 
God, and society was ordered with this in mind. Not believing in God 
was hardly a plausible option. over five hundred years later, it seems 
that belief in God is one option among many, and an increasingly  
unnecessary option at that. How has this come to be the case?

It is helpful to think about Taylor’s answer to this question on two 
levels. The first level is Taylor’s basic approach to the subject. one hall-
mark of Taylor’s approach and argument is that the story of how West-
ern culture moved from a God-soaked society in early modernity to a 
secular contemporary society is a dizzyingly complex narrative. He is 

mailto:mwatson@uu.edu


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interested not merely in what we might take to be the obvious criteria 
whereby we measure the loss of religious influence—religious presence 
in the public square, church attendance, survey results, etc.—but in 
the underlying “conditions of belief ” that lie beneath the surface.

Taylor takes issue with the standard Enlightenment account of the 
rise of secularity, what he calls the “subtraction thesis” (26). This is the 
simple notion that religion and its influence retreated with the rise of 
science and its Newtonian, mechanistic account of the world. Subtract 
religion, and rational modernity fills the void. A major theme of the 
work is Taylor’s insistence that this is a self-congratulatory and sim-
plistic account that obscures much and reveals little. What, then, does 
account for the shift?

Here we move to the second level of Taylor’s argument. Given his 
criticism of the Enlightenment’s subtraction thesis as overly simple, 
we can expect Taylor’s retelling to be complex, and so it is. Indeed, his 
account defies a quick summary, but the following three aspects of his 
argument will have to do.

The first component is Taylor’s description of how certain cultural  
realities shifted such that elites and then the common people viewed  
religion less and less as the necessary framework holding society  
together. In short, society became disenchanted, undergoing massive 
programs of “Reform,” and people came to understand religion as per-
sonal and not first and foremost corporate.

Disenchantment was a process whereby people became what Taylor 
calls “buffered selves.” They no longer believed that spiritual beings or 
magical objects, like relics of saints, could affect them directly. They 
began to see such beliefs as superstitious. “Reform” is what Taylor calls 
the attempts of religious elites to standardize the high demands of reli-
gious faith. No longer would the lofty moral life demanded of believ-
ers be expected only of priests and monks, but the laity must be made 
moral as well. Finally, the Reformation was the culmination of an  
ongoing process whereby faith was seen as something that “I” have 
as an individual. In addition to these factors, Christians began to  
emphasize the dignity of the natural world as opposed to a purely “oth-
erworldly” approach that denigrated creation.

What is so welcome in Taylor’s account, in contrast with the subtrac-



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tion thesis, is that such developments did not lead to a loss of faith in 
a straightforward linear fashion. The mistake of the simple Enlighten-
ment account is to equate disenchantment with irreligion. Taylor con-
vincingly argues that disenchantment, “Reform,” the personalization 
of faith, and an appreciation of the natural world were all motivated by 
religious reasons and had some very positive consequences for believ-
ers. At the same time, these developments made possible an “imma-
nent” view of the world in which God became decreasingly necessary.

The second aspect of Taylor’s thesis is that God’s diminishing role 
in society creates more and more possibilities for how we account for 
morality, meaning, and humanity’s place in the world. Taylor notes 
that the fracturing of the pre-Reformation understanding led to a 
“nova effect” (299). Going well beyond a matter of belief or unbe-
lief, Christian or atheist, a spectrum of possibilities emerged, which 
has only expanded into modern times in what Taylor aptly coins a  
“supernova.” Perhaps the chief thread that unites the at-times remark-
ably eclectic meanderings in Taylor’s book is the tracing of how the 
various possibilities exploded from a more-or-less accepted and com-
mon pre-Reformation framework.

Finally, the third helpful aspect in Taylor’s account is his delight-
ful problematizing of the standard transcendent-Religion contra  
immanent-Enlightenment narrative. The standard story, perhaps 
best expressed by Rousseau, is that Enlightenment humanism rescues 
the earthy goodness of human life from Christianity’s denigration of  
human nature given its doctrine of original sin and its therefore unfair 
and impossibly lofty moral demands. The people must be saved from 
their erstwhile ecclesial saviors, and the Voltaires, Spinozas, and Rous-
seaus are employed in the delicate task of dismantling the Christian  
edifice for the sake of the equality, freedom, and elevation of the masses.

But here the plot thickens. For just when it appears that a this-worldly 
Enlightenment has a transcendent Christianity up against the ropes, a 
third figure enters the ring and complicates matters. This third figure is 
Nietzsche and those who have followed in his wake. Taylor refers to their 
position as the immanent counter-Enlightenment. Disposing of God is 
not enough. God’s morality and the consequent commitments to equal-
ity and the precious “masses” must also be jettisoned (636). There are 



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echoes of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in Taylor’s account here.
In this new situation, any two may gang up on a third. Both En-

lightenment humanism and transcendent religion reject Nietzsche’s 
celebration of destruction and disdain for humanity. Christians and  
Nietzscheans alike find the Enlightenment project unsatisfactory, tep-
id, and small-minded. And Nietzscheans and Enlightenment human-
ists reject the claims of faith as sad, outdated relics of humanity’s child-
ish past. The jostling of these three perspectives makes up an important 
part of our current situation.

of course, these three aspects leave out a great deal in Taylor’s story. 
Yet they offer some idea of the sort of thesis Taylor defends, and the 
manner in which he goes about making his case. Things are not as easy 
as we might think, Taylor insists over and over, and we would do well to 
delve more deeply into not only what beliefs changed, but what cultural 
shifts made those beliefs and the changes possible in the first place.

A project this ambitious and far-reaching cannot help but provoke 
disagreement. Atheists and agnostics will likely find Taylor’s unique 
claims for a reconsidered Christian faith unpersuasive. orthodox 
Christians, and conservative Catholics in particular, will balk at some 
of Taylor’s descriptive and prescriptive claims about Christianity’s  
future. one virtue of the work is that Taylor’s sympathetic reading of 
all sorts of positions requires one to reject what he describes as a naïve 
view of faith or atheism. We ought not view our position—whatever it 
may be—as simply axiomatic. Epistemic humility requires us carefully 
to consider other positions in the emerging supernova.

Nevertheless, there are two related criticisms I want to raise briefly 
with regard to Taylor’s book. First, I question whether Taylor is right 
in his description of the extent to which secularism has taken hold of 
Western culture; second, I question his assertion that a non-transcend-
ent ethic can sustain a society over generations.

It is undeniably the case that there has been a massive shift from 1500 
to the present day, and the orthodox believer owes Taylor a great debt 
for debunking the simple myth about the rise of reason at the expense 
of religion. But how to measure the extent of the shift? Taylor is noth-
ing if not careful and circumspect in his observations, and he is surely 
correct to note that many believers recognize their faith as one option 



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among many, and recognize this in a way that seems entirely anach-
ronistic to ascribe to believers in the sixteenth century (31). Modern 
believers, Taylor argues, no longer understand themselves as open to 
external spiritual forces or seek objects which impart divine favor.

I’m not so sure. Because Taylor is interpreting underlying conditions 
of belief, he cannot rely on surveys or social science to support his 
claims. This is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that 
Taylor can investigate those elements of our culture not amenable to 
statistical measurement; the weakness is that he seems often to resort to 
his own sense of things. one wonders how ubiquitous the “we” is that 
he employs when describing the modern mindset.

My own sense of things is that where one stands makes a great deal of 
difference. Buffered selves living in an immanent world probably make 
up the vast majority of people living in Western Europe, Canada, and 
the academy. This is less the case in the “bellicose, hegemony-loving 
parts of U.S. society” that voted for George W. Bush (283). Leaving 
aside Taylor’s (rare) partisan jab here, there are tens of millions of peo-
ple who understand themselves to be open to spiritual realities out-
side their autonomous selves: Catholics who take in the real presence 
of Christ in communion, Calvinists who believe God chooses them  
before they respond to God, Mormons who perform baptisms for their 
deceased loved ones, and particularly the Pentecostals that Taylor fre-
quently mentions. Pentecostals, after all, are distinguished from other 
Christians by their belief that the Spirit of God speaks through them 
in an angelic language. This understanding of the self is hardly closed 
off to outside spiritual forces.

Another characteristic common to Pentecostals, Mormons, and many 
Catholics introduces my second criticism of Taylor’s project. Unlike 
the mainline denominations in the U.S. and elsewhere, Pentecostals, 
Mormons, and many Catholics churches are bursting at the seams. 
This is due in large part to their emphasis on missions and evangelism, 
but also because these believers are simply having more children than 
their mainline, and secular, fellow citizens.

While I am loathe to criticize Taylor for leaving anything out of such a 
robust book, it is remarkable that he does not address the capacity for non-
transcendent societies to pass on their way of life to future generations. 



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With one exception in which he endorses the world-changing power of 
raising children (700), Taylor does not address this rather key element of 
any sustainable way of life. Certainly it is the case that any individual, 
indeed millions of individuals, may live what seems to be a satisfactory 
life without transcendence or a belief in God or the afterlife. But Taylor 
too easily assumes that societies that have abandoned transcendence can 
inculcate the social goods necessary to maintain themselves.

We see this in his rejection of the Christian claim that civilization needs 
religion to ward off immorality and disorder (471, 638). But it is not 
only the Christian claim. While Christians may claim religion is neces-
sary because it is true, Taylor ignores the august company of philosophers 
who claim religion is necessary because it is useful. Hobbes dedicates the 
second half of Leviathan to the quixotic task of reconciling his system 
with the Bible. Spinoza avers that religion is a crucial tool in the hand of 
the enlightened sovereign in his Theologico-Political Treatise. Locke claims 
that belief in an afterlife is essential and so denies civil standing to athe-
ists. Rousseau creates a civil religion because no society has been founded 
without religion as its base. Even Nietzsche at times seems grateful for 
religion’s role in keeping the deluded occupied.1 Alexis de Tocqueville 
perhaps makes the strongest claim on this matter.2

Taylor may very well be correct that Tocqueville and the rest are  
unfair to individuals, but how does he counter the wider societal claim? 
He could very well point to the democratic states of Western Europe 
and Canada, but, to borrow a phrase from Chinese premiere Zhou  
Enlai when asked about the French Revolution, “it’s too soon to tell.” 
one need not be an alarmist to note that Western Europe’s demo-
graphic reality does not bode well for the future of a secular Europe. 
Barring a tremendous reversal of cultural mores and birthrates, the sec-
ular phase of Europe’s history will be sandwiched between her Chris-
tian past and her Islamic future. Perhaps there is a connection after all 
between religion and the societal cohesion.

Taylor does address the religious “exception” of America given its 
modernity and resilient religious identity, though he acknowledges 
that Europe may very well be the exception (522–529). Taylor follows 
Tocqueville in part by attributing America’s religious flourishing to the 
separation of church and state and robust religious freedom. While this 



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is true so far as it goes, there is another complementary explanation 
latent in his work.

Taylor persuasively argues that the “buffered self ” previously men-
tioned is now the norm for some Western societies. The buffered self is 
autonomous; the self chooses what goods, spiritual or otherwise, it will 
make part of its life, and denies the power of external forces to violate  
its autonomy by impacting its life without its consent. While I have 
questioned just how widespread this self-understanding is, at least in 
the United States, there does seem to be something to it with regard to 
more secular citizens.

But what does this have to do with religion and childbearing? If I 
might take a page from Taylor’s own approach, it seems to me that 
childrearing is one modern exception to the secularist’s buffered  
understanding. For as Stephen Macedo has noted, the modern demo-
cratic citizen does not spring up from the ground fully grown, liberal, 
and secular. Raising children means, almost by definition, inculcat-
ing beliefs, virtues, character, and an appreciation of human goods in 
the children under one’s care. Children are not autonomous (yet) and 
cannot choose the goods that will give their life meaning. They are 
vulnerable to the imposition of external values from actors other than 
themselves. 

But if the buffered self living in a disenchanted world is the norm 
for secular Western societies, then raising the next generation creates a 
tension in that the secularist must engage in the sort of external impo-
sition of value that she rejects as a possibility for her (adult) self. The 
secularist buffered self does not believe that angels and demons, or the 
Holy Spirit, can intervene in her life without her permission; indeed, 
such a possibility is demeaning to the dignity of human choice, and 
those who still cling to such a view are misguided. Perhaps it is not 
surprising, then, that secular societies populated by buffered selves will 
hold rather ambiguous views about childrearing.

This is admittedly speculative, and there are undoubtedly other factors  
involved.3 Regardless of the underlying reason, the traumatic decline in 
birthrates among industrialized Western welfare states should give us pause 
about Taylor’s too easy dismissal of the necessity of religious transcendence 
for the health and continued survival of Western nation-states.



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Charles Taylor has done us all an inestimable service by working 
through this project. He invites us to join him as he considers one of 
the most interesting and important questions of our time. His man-
ner is learned, but inviting and conversational. Whether agreeing or 
disagreeing—perhaps especially in disagreeing—one cannot help but 
come away from his book better informed about the various beliefs 
that animate our lives together and the underlying conditions that 
make those beliefs possible.

Notes

1. He has kind things to say about Hinduism in particular as it provides a pyramid 
structure for society. It’s hard to appreciate those strong spirits who can breathe 
the mountain air unless one has the deluded masses for comparison.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2000), Volume II, Part 1, Chapter 5:

When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the high-
est portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each 
becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions 
about matters that most interest those like him and himself; one de-
fends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of 
being able to resolve by oneself that greatest problems that human 
destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about 
them at all. Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the 
springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.

3. Almost by definition, a secularist is not going to put much stock in an afterlife. 
Given this, one understandable read is that one must make as much of this life as 
possible. While children can be seen by religious believer and secularist alike as an 
integral component to a flourishing life, taking care of children properly also re-
quires an incredible amount of work and closes off many other life possibilities.

References

Hobbes, Thomas

1994  Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. 

Locke, John

1983 A Letter Concerning Toleration.  Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.



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MacIntyre, Alasdair

1984   After Virtue. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Macedo, Stephen

2000  Diversity and Distrust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.  

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

2003  The Social Contract and other later political writings. Edited by Victor 
Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spinoza, Benedict de

2004  A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Translated by 
R.H.M. Elwes. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Tocqueville, Alexis de

2000 Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Win-
throp. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.


