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Charles Taylor and the Future of Secularism

BRUCE LEDEWITZ

Duquesne University School of Law 
ledewitz@duq.edu

I began to read Charles Taylor’s acclaimed work, A Secular Age (2007) 
just after I had finished writing a manuscript of my own about mod-
ern secularism—Hallowed Secularism (2009). Naturally, given Profes-
sor Taylor’s reputation and learning, I studied his book for help, and 
I learned a great deal from the book about the “main story behind 
secularity” (Taylor 2007, 774). In other words, I learned how we in the 
West came to be in a secular age.

But I did not learn very much about secularism. Specifically, I learned 
nothing at all about how one might be secular in a secular age.

In retrospect, the reason for this is obvious. Taylor is not a secularist.  
He is a believing Christian. Taylor considers “secularity” (his term) a 
mistake that we would do well to reverse.

I know that this characterization of his position directly contradicts 
the stated thrust of the book, which is to examine how the “conditions 
of belief ” in the West moved, between the years 1500 and 2000, from 
a condition where almost everyone believed in God to a condition in 
which it is problematic to believe in God. A change in understanding 
that fundamentally changes the kinds of experiences that people can 
have. Thus, it would not seem to be the kind of change that could be 
reversed. Indeed, the impossibility of traditional belief in the old way 
is part of what it means to live in a secular age. All this is stated in A 
Secular Age.

Nevertheless, at the end of the book, Taylor presents the reader with 
two possible futures for this secular age. In one, religion continues to 
shrink because it is not plausible, while atheism continues to grow. In 
the other, “we all have some sense” of the fullness of human life that is 
a “reflection of transcendent reality” that cannot be completely grasped 
within the “exclusive humanism” of the immanent frame. This leads to 
“conversion,” “breaking out into the broader field” (2007, 768–769).

mailto:ledewitz@duq.edu


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Which future will be our future?  Taylor is prepared to say only this: 
where there is only immanence, so that “many people even have trou-
ble understanding how a sane person could believe in God,” subse-
quent generations will develop “a sense of living in a ‘waste land,’ ” and 
many young people will begin to explore beyond immanence, perhaps 
to a state in which they acquire “in some fashion a sense of God.” This 
is the condition for which Taylor had earlier in the book borrowed 
Mikhail Epstein’s term: “ ‘minimal religion’ ” (533).

So, these are our choices for the future. Conversion to what amounts 
to orthodox biblical or theistic belief or an atheist waste land so bereft 
of hope for deep human fulfillment that our descendents will be driven 
by despair to take up the religious quest again. There is no doubt that 
Taylor means religious conversion quite literally since he calls the last 
chapter of the book “Conversions” and describes experiences such as 
Walker Percy’s conversion to Catholicism. Nor is there any reason to 
doubt Taylor’s sincerity when he calls secularity a waste land.  He really 
means it.

Why are these stark alternatives the only futures that Taylor allows?  
There is a quite specific reason for this. Though he puts it as a question, 
Taylor does not believe that an “intermediate position” is viable (606).  
The intermediate position he is rejecting is one in which the “phenom-
enology of universalism—the sense of breaking out of an earlier space 
and acceding to a higher one, the sense of liberation” that many people 
experience despite the secular age—is ultimately frustrated by an on-
tology of immanence (609). Secularists cannot live deeply because they 
live immanently. And the only alternative ontology Taylor acknowl-
edges is “belief in some transcendent source or power” that “for many 
people in our Western culture” means “the choice…whether to believe 
in God” (600).  It’s God or the waste land.

In Taylor’s terms, the manuscript I wrote was an attempt to describe 
a viable intermediate position that seeks to avoid just these unaccept-
able alternatives of traditional belief in God or empty secularism.  My 
book tries to portray a secularist way of life that remains in the neigh-
borhood of the fulfillment of human possibility promised by tradi-
tional religion while rejecting traditional religious dogmas, including 
the existence of the biblical God.



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Before delineating the two errors I think Taylor makes in rejecting 
the possibility of an intermediate position, it is important to acknowl-
edge the validity of his insistence on the human need for transcend-
ence. A secular society that reduces reality to materialism or exclusive 
humanism will indeed descend into despair. The anti-religion writings 
of the group called The New Atheists, including Christopher Hitchens’ 
bestseller God Is Not Great (2007), demonstrate no appreciation of this 
truth. Those writers are heedless that they are leaving their followers 
without a path for human flourishing.

Taylor’s first error is his insistence that belief in God is still a choice in 
this secular age. Taylor (2007, 600) asserts that belief in God is a choice 
the culture of imminence leaves open. It is not surprising that Taylor 
feels this way. He believes in the God of Abraham, which is the way 
he describes his own religious orientation, and, of course, so do bil-
lions of other people. Taylor also acknowledges that, for many secular-
ists, belief in God does not seem like a choice. But they are mistaken.  
Belief in God “is not foreclosed by undeniable arguments” in the secu-
lar context (600).

Taylor is confident in the possibility of belief because he does not 
fully engage the scientific challenge to theism. Science does not just 
rule out miracles in the sense that miracles don’t seem to happen any 
more. Science rules out miracle in principle. That means science rules 
out the kind of God who could perform miracles. This is no longer 
even Deism, in which God creates the world and then steps back. This 
is no God at all, in the biblical sense.

As a citizen of this secular age, Taylor cannot bring himself actually 
to defend miracle as a category. He says only that “[i]t is perhaps pre-
cisely the ordinary operation of things which constitutes the ‘miracle’ ” 
(548). But as C.S. Lewis has written, Christianity is “precisely the story 
of one grand miracle” (1970, 80). To be blunt, the resurrection either 
happened or it did not. And whatever the resurrection was—and I 
know that there is no simple answer to that even within Christian 
orthodoxy—it was definitely not “the ordinary operation of things” 
(1970, 80). To be viable, Christianity needs more than that.  Christi-
anity needs at least the possibility of miracle.

I am not criticizing anyone’s faith. I am criticizing Taylor’s blithe in-



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sistence that both a closed and an open immanence are equivalent leaps 
of faith. The openness to the biblical God in a secular age is particularly 
problematic. Faith for the secularist is a leap of its own, but it is one 
that attempts to accommodate in principle a scientific worldview.

This first error suggests that the intermediate position is more neces-
sary than Taylor believes, if a destructive secularity is to be avoided.  
Society-wide conversion in Taylor’s terms does not seem at all likely in 
a secular age. But, of course, it does not follow that, just because the 
intermediate position is necessary, it is also viable. Taylor suggests that 
it is not.

I think Taylor is wrong about this as well. Actually, Taylor says so 
many different things about the immanent frame that it may be un-
fair to conclude that he ultimately rejects transcendence from within  
immanence. He writes, for example, of “our sense of wonder that 
something like ourselves arose out of lower nature. There is a mysteri-
ous process here; something deep to understand. We are very drawn to 
this; we want to explore it” (547). That sounds like transcendence out-
side theism. But in the very next few pages, Taylor describes the open 
site of William James where “you can feel the winds pulling you, now 
to belief, now to unbelief ” (549). As I suggested above, that “belief ” 
for Taylor is ultimately a belief in something like a traditional God,  
because only that belief grounds the ontology necessary for transcend-
ent mystery. once again, it is immanence, with all its ills, or God.

This kind of either/or is being challenged today on a number of 
fronts, particularly in science. In his recent book Reinventing the  
Sacred, the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman writes that “one view 
of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the 
natural universe, biosphere and human cultures” (2008, xi). Similarly, 
the British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, in Life’s Solution, is 
willing to look at the religious tradition directly: 

[G]iven that evolution has produced sentient species with a sense of 
purpose, it is reasonable to take the claims of theology seriously.  In 
recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the connections 
that might serve to reunify the scientific world-view with the religious 
instinct. (2003, 328)

The challenge of doing this is daunting, writes Conway Morris, but “it 



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will be our lifeline” (328).
These two scientists exemplify Taylor’s sense of wonder from the 

study of the natural world. Neither of them, however, is moving in the 
direction of the supernatural. Both seem to feel that the transcendent 
can be approached from within the immanent.

There are various other indicators of a new permeability between 
religion and secularism. In philosophy, Jürgen Habermas in Between 
Naturalism and Religion (2008), Susan Neiman in Moral Clarity (2008) 
and James C. Edwards in The Plain Sense of Things (1997) are, in dif-
ferent ways, describing a secularism open to religious insights. In the-
ology, a kind of secularist religion is emerging in the work of Michael 
Hampson in God Without God (2008) and John Shelby Spong in Jesus 
for the Non-Religious (2007). These are all examples of various forms of 
the intermediate position.

Austin Dacey is a particularly important example of this new ten-
dency. In his book The Secular Conscience (2008), Dacey, though pas-
sionately opposed to organized religion, calls on his fellow secularists 
to reject relativism and accept the place of belief in public political  
debate. Dacey argues this from the position of the objectivity of values, 
a position that Taylor might suggest Dacey lacks the proper ontology 
to hold.

Even Abraham in Genesis, whose God Taylor invokes, lived in the  
intermediate position in a sense. The promise to Abraham—that his  
descendants will be a blessing to all humanity—is a promise from 
within immanence. Abraham is not promised that he will survive 
death, and he does not. He is not promised that the world will be 
redeemed—a blessing is not a Messiah. Abraham’s position is not all 
that different from that of the revolutionary Marxist who believes that 
his work today will one day bring blessing to suffering humanity.

Taylor seems to be suggesting that ultimate value requires the ex-
istence of God. But even the Bible is ambiguous about this. In the  
famous story of Abraham’s confrontation with God over the destruc-
tion of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham confronts God with a species 
of the universal moral law: “Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to 
slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the 
wicked! … Shall not the Judge of all the world do right?” (Gen. 18:25 



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RSV).  God himself is bound by a norm of which the ground is unclear.  
The requirement of justice seems to be simply built into reality.

This is my general response to Taylor’s suggestion that the intermedi-
ate position is not viable. A God may not be needed in order for the 
good, the true, and the beautiful to be real. Perhaps the promises of 
the Bible, which correspond basically to the liberation of the slaves in 
the Book of Exodus, can be true and reliable even though there is no 
one behind them. These promises can be built into the order of things.  
They can be transcendent in the midst of immanence. Maybe there is 
no ontological barrier to the intermediate position.

At one point, Taylor seems to acknowledge the possibility of tran-
scendence outside traditional theism. He quotes with approval Steve 
Bruce’s definition of religion: “ ‘actions, beliefs and institutions predi-
cated upon the assumption of the existence of either supernatural enti-
ties with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed 
of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or 
to intervene in, human affairs’ ” (Taylor 2007, 429).  The objectivity of 
values might fit into this definition as an impersonal process.

But more representative of Taylor’s position is his contrast of ordi-
nary human flourishing with “religious faith in a strong sense,” which 
he defines as “the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and 
the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond  
ordinary human flourishing on the other” (510). He is suggesting here 
that secularity can never attain the deepest promptings of human life, 
that it can never get beyond mere bourgeois satisfaction—a kind of 
feel-good superficiality that is present in much new age spirituality.  
Taylor is doubting whether the secularist can really experience “full-
hearted love of some good beyond life” (639).

This is the fundamental challenge to the intermediate position. But I 
think—actually I hope, since I am personally one of these secularists—
that the secularist can experience ultimate fullness by living in radical 
trust in reality despite the absence of a personal God.  once again our 
model can be Abraham, or for that matter Jesus on the cross. Taylor 
would admit that the traditional religious believer has no guarantee 
that reality is trustworthy just because he or she believes in God. Abra-
ham dies without certainty.  Jesus cries out that he is forsaken.



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The secularist is in the same condition, but is no worse off. The secu-
larist can also trust radically, and risk life itself, in pursuit of the truly 
good. The intermediate position can lead to strong faith.

Though they pale in importance compared to the question of faith, 
there are political and legal consequences that follow from the failure 
or success of the intermediate position. If the only alternatives for the 
secular age are traditional religious belief, on the one hand, or mate-
rialism and exclusive humanism, on the other, then the culture wars 
and the New Atheist attacks on religion will continue. Politics will 
continue to be us-them. The Republican Party will continue to be the 
Party of Faith and the Democrats the Party of unbelief. Political com-
munity cannot be built that way, as we can see from the reaction to 
President Barack obama’s graceless comment about guns and religion 
in American small towns.

In law, this divide between religion and atheism will support the 
attempted continuation of the separation of church and state and gov-
ernment neutrality toward religion. At the same time, religious believ-
ers will continue to press for recognition of their beliefs in the public 
square in opposition to the New Atheism. We will continue to fight, 
for example, over the words, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

But, if the intermediate position is viable, a new possibility in Amer-
ican public life will emerge. There will finally be nonbelievers who 
nevertheless share spiritual life to a great extent with traditional reli-
gious believers. If secularism were to rediscover the language, symbols, 
and images of traditional religion, now reinterpreted along naturalistic 
lines, this cultural divide could be bridged. Women and men of good 
faith could think once again of a broad progressive coalition among  
religious believers and nonbelievers, which, though it could not agree 
on all issues, would undoubtedly find a lot of political common ground.  
Indeed, such a coalition might renew the American radical tradition 
that has languished since Marxism was discredited.

In American constitutional law, as well, a melding of church and state 
might become possible.  It would still, of course, remain unconstitu-
tional for government to endorse any particular religion, but it would 
not be seen as unconstitutional for government to endorse transcend-
ence from within immanence, the intermediate position.  Government 



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support for the values of the intermediate position is especially impor-
tant since, without it, the social demoralization—the waste land—that 
Taylor describes as resulting from secularity will become much more 
likely.

We owe Charles Taylor a great debt. He has shown how we arrived 
at our current situation, at the secular age. He believes that we are at 
something of a dead end and that we should, to the extent we can, 
retrace our steps. Unfortunately, that is not possible. Fortunately, the 
context he describes is not as dire as he suggests. We are not going to be 
religious in the old way, but we can be religious all the same, seriously 
and in a meaningful way.

References

Dacey, Austin

2008 The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. Amherst, NY: 
Prometheus Books.

Edwards, James C. 

1997 The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism. 
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Jürgen Habermas

2008 Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Translated by Ciaran 
Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Hampson, Michael

2008 God Without God: Western Spirituality Without the Wrathful King. Winches-
ter: o Books.

Hitchens, Christopher

2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve.

Kauffman, Stuart A. 

2008 Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. New 
York: Basic Books.



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Ledewitz, Bruce

2009 Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice. Westport, CT: Palgrave Mac-
millan.

Lewis, C.S. 

1970 God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. 
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Morris, Simon Conway

2003 Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.

Neiman, Susan

2008 Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.  orlando, FL: Harcourt.

 John Shelby Spong

2007 Jesus for the Non-Religious: Recovering the Divine at the Heart of the Human. 
New York: Harper San Francisco.

Taylor, Charles

2007 A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.




