Much of the contemporary debate about the place of religion in the West revolves around levels of belief and practice. Church leaders, academics and the media ask: What do people believe today compared with five years ago? And how is this change expressed in current religious practice? Various theories are offered in response, predominantly theories of decline — for example, that the rise of science has refuted faith.
In A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that in the long run, this focus on trends in belief and practice does not adequately account for the secularity of the West. What has changed is far broader — the whole context of understanding in which our moral and religious lives take place; what he calls 'the conditions of belief'.
Several times he asks the reader how it is that in less than 500 years we have moved 'from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others'. His argument is that the framework of human self-understanding has changed during that time and both believers and non-believers now understand themselves differently than their ancestors did.
Taylor devotes a large part of A Secular Age to telling the story of the journey to the present. He covers the path from the 'enchanted' medieval age through the Enlightenment and on to the expressivist culture that emerged in the West in the 1960s.
A critical transition in this journey is the emergence of an 'exclusive humanism' in the 18th century, whereby it was possible for the first time for masses of people to conceive of a flourishing human life without reference to the divine. But this is a complex story: the emergence of exclusive humanism has Christian roots, and today exclusive humanism is simply one alternative among others.
So, where does Taylor's story end? What are the conditions of belief today? He sees us as 'cross-pressured' between extreme positions — orthodox religious belief (Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism etc.) on the one hand and hard-line materialist atheism on the other.
Not that everyone in our culture feels torn between these positions. Rather, we define ourselves in relation to these poles. They come to bear on a range of common human dilemmas, for example the tension between the aspiration to transcendence on the one hand and the