How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

It’s odd that a few centuries ago it would have been unheard of to be unaffiliated with a church. Today, nearly the opposite is true. How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor isn’t a book that explains this transition from scratch. Instead, it’s a summary of the much larger Charles Taylor book, A Secular Age. Taylor’s tome weighs in at just short of 900 pages, while James Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular is a much more manageable 161 pages. My friend, Tom Kapostasy, posted his review back in August of 2024. My review takes a different approach but is, obviously, a summary of the same work – itself a summary.

Taylor’s Secular Types

Taylor explains that he sees not just one kind of secularism but, instead, three:

Secular1 – Distinguishes between scared and non-sacred (secular) vocations.
Secular2 – No religions affiliation and no religious beliefs.
Secular3 – Belief in God is only one possible belief, others are possible and therefore beliefs in God are contestable and contested.

We’ve had secular1 for a long time. Most major religious beliefs hold some things to be sacred. That isn’t to say that everyone believes in separation. Jesuits, for instance, insisted on living their lives in their mission fields. (See Heroic Leadership.) For Buddhist monks, there is a saying, “After enlightenment, draw water, chop wood.” (See Collaborating with the Enemy, Advice Not Given, and Altered Traits for more.) It’s a reminder that we all share the same work.

Secular2 is the space and prediction where it is proposed that, as societies advance, there will be no need to believe in God any longer. Marx famously said that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” That is, he believed some people would block out the negative of the world with opiates, but the masses, not having money for such things, used religion in the same way – to numb the pain of existence. Secular2 is a space of apathy, where God has little place in the day to day lives of people.

Secular3 is a further move where society believes that God is just one option among others and thus is contestable and is contested. The hidden statement here is that there is no foundational truth upon which things are built. We are like a ship without an anchor trying to survive the storms of life. This is the world that Taylor fears that we inhabit today.

Societal Trends

Before digging into details, it’s important to expose the societal trends that have shaped America. Robert Putnam wrote the best seller, Bowling Alone, about the decline of social capital in America. Our Kids follows up to explain why some children do better than others due to their support systems. The Upswing broadens this from the decades of statistics to support Putnam’s claim about the decline in society; in doing so, it exposes both some limitations to Bowling Alone and some new insights. The results show that we were a more individualistic society in the 1920s and moved to a more community focus that peaked in the 1960s. Since then, the pendulum has been swinging back towards more individualism.

Putnam’s Bowling Alone used, as a measure of social capital, the number of people who were considered members and those who attend church. Both measures showed moderate declines. Unfortunately, there’s a hidden problem in these numbers, as The Great Evangelical Recession explains. The biggest churches were growing, while smaller churches were losing membership, attendance, and tithing. The number of churches was declining as churches were dying.

Taylor’s view is much longer, into several centuries, and with less precision and clarity than Putnam manages, yet he exposes the shifting sands that have led us to where we are. Some of the changes are driven by our relative affluence compared to our grandparents and parents. All but the absolute poorest today enjoy conveniences that our great-grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of in their day. The broad-brush strokes are that we’ve developed the technologies and tools that allow us to need each other less for our physical survival.

These drive us to have less need for any external party – community, God, superstition, or luck – to survive.

Significance without Transcendence

Who needs God anyway? If we’re able to harness rivers, heat our homes, and heal diseases, why do we need God? These questions are at the heart of a sense of significance without transcendence. If we can feel significant and important without God, do we need Him? Humanism, existentialism, and other frameworks offer a chance to find meaning apart from God.

While some of what is encapsulated inside of significance without transcendence is good and valuable, one must ask how far is too far? Reportedly, Dr. Spock, who wrote the runaway best seller, Baby and Child Care, was concerned about how far things had gone. (See The Coddling of the American Mind.) Certainly, the concept of intrinsic value is a good thing – but not when taken to the logical extreme of narcissism. (See Compassion and Self-Hate for more of this continuum.)

Another core concept, ethical living, doesn’t diverge much from the concept of universalism. That is, the relationship with God isn’t important. What’s important is that you’re a “good” person. Here, the water is murkier, because in the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ came to save all. But does “all” really mean all?

Doubt

Smith’s summary of Taylor’s work doesn’t focus on the arguments against God – perhaps because there is no need. The argument isn’t that there is a reason to not believe in God as much as it is that we no longer depend on our belief in God to sustain us. In my review of Doubt, I summarized the key arguments against the existence of God – one of which, “God is irrelevant,” is what Smith focuses on in Taylor’s work.

When considering why more people don’t believe in God today, we may be asking the wrong question. Perhaps the question is better asked, “What do you believe about God?” Even today, people are often willing to answer that they’re spiritual if not religious. What that means isn’t always clear.

Pascal’s Wager

One of the curious things about the discussion are the number of people who are unclear whether God exists or not. They’re unable to reach a clear answer. Even Steve Jobs, famous for his leadership at Apple, is reported by his biographer Walter Isaacson as saying, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” Of course, when we say we’re fifty-fifty, it means we don’t have any idea. (See Superforecasting.)

Blaise Pascal worked out his belief in God logically. Placing four quadrants, he described four conditions: God doesn’t exist, I don’t believe; God does exist, I don’t believe; God doesn’t exist, I believe; God does exist, I believe. Ultimately, he decided that believing did him little harm, but there was a big downside if God did exist and he didn’t believe.

Not all of us are as logical as Pascal, and today, fewer people believe the odds are 50-50. In response to the suffering, struggle, pain, and anguish, people find it hard to believe that God does exist. As a result, they believe more strongly – though not completely – that God doesn’t exist, and that changes the odds on Pascal’s wager.

Behavioral Differences

It was Churchless that elevated the truth that the behavior separating Christians and non-Christians is vanishingly small. Sure, on the whole, Christians are more generous, but in their day-to-day (secular) lives, it’s hard to tell those who believe and those who do not.

Heroic Leadership describes a different approach to behavior. It describes the Jesuits’ decision to behave in a way that is different as an attractor to get people to want to know about Christ. It was their way of being Christ to the world – whether or not they ever said the name Jesus. However, their approach was and is different than most religious people. They’ve settled into at least what Taylor would call secular1. They’ve decided that they can party on Saturday night and show up to a Sunday service hung over.

Social Capital

Essential to Robert Putnam’s work is the concept of social capital. Effectively, it means the degree to which our lives are woven together such that when one person suffers, the community intervenes to support them. Are we a loose federation of pirate ships who happen to be sailing in the same direction, or are we an armada of ships who belong to the same navy? Are we aligned to the universal cause of moving forward humanity or are we opportunists seeking profit? The difference matters. Francis Fukuyama approaches the concept from the direction of Trust. He speaks of how our trust both shapes and drives societies.

Both are describing relationships. They’re describing how the way we value our relationships with others forms and shapes our behaviors – and how their relationships with us shapes theirs. Belief in God – and an ultimate instruction manual on behavior – moves the fulcrum so that you are more likely to support someone that you’re even in a weak relationship with.

Government vs. Philanthropic

It sounds like a good thing on the surface. Replace the patchwork of community organizations, religious institutions, and generous people with a more reliable government program of catchment. That is, ensure the same minimum standards for people when they’re unemployed, homeless, or struggling. Programs in the United States started in earnest in the 1930s with the New Deal and the Social Security Act. Suddenly, the government would step in to support the elderly rather than leaving the burden on their offspring or the communities in which they lived.

Certainly, there’s a massive amount of good that have been done by government programs to support the most needy, but the question that is often not asked is “At what cost?” It’s easy to measure the dollars and cents that have been spent on the programs and even to calculate a return on investment, but the kind of cost that is missed is what the presence of the government program prevents.

Governments aren’t known for efficiency. They’re known for consistency – or at least striving for consistency. Government programs often consume so many resources – financial and otherwise – that they leave little space for others to come in, operate, and innovate. The charities that were previously focused on food and shelter could move on to other needs – or could they?

The problem of government consistency is like the problem of characteristics of restaurants. The government can achieve repeatability only by setting the standard low. McDonalds has a relatively consistent experience across locations. They don’t serve gourmet items. The items that they do serve match the standard.

One of the challenges with the governments of the world meeting the basic needs of people is they no longer feel the need to seek a religious community to share struggles with.

Eliminating Stress

In our journey to the modern world, we’ve removed many of the stressors from the world. That isn’t to say there are none, but there are fewer. As Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explains, we need some stress. We, like all animals, need to have certain forms of stress at the right times. Antifragile makes the same point. We need stress – but we’ve been systematically reducing or eliminating it for hundreds of years. Government programs have reduced the stress of finding a group to support you when you’re down.

Inadvertently, we’ve removed stress to the point that we’re not creating the growth moments that we need as a society to grow.

Consequences

If we accept that we’re living in a world where most people are secular (secular2 or secular3), what are the consequences? Why should we care if we’re living in a secular world if the behavior of those who believe is not fundamentally different?

Here, any attempt to relate the reasoning to material things breaks down. It slips back into the question of whether we must live only in the world if there is something transcendent. It relies on the awareness that “there must be something more.” It relies on an awareness of our connected nature and how we deny this at our own peril. (See Alone Together.) We live in a time of intense anxiety, depression, and mental disorders. Does a belief that God is and will be in everything change that? Do we believe that God is there watching all that we do, guiding with a gentle hand like a beloved grandparent?

The consequences of where we are seems to be that too many live empty lives.

Who am I to Judge?

A final challenge to encounter when living in the secular world is addressing the degree to which we should and should not judge others. The Bible says, “Judge not, that ye not be judged” (Matt. 7:1 King James Version), but is the admonishment an absolute? The unanswered question is whether you can live as a non-secular individual in a world of secularism, when everything is allowed and the only sin is to fail to accept.

Figuring our answer to this question may just be the secret of How (Not) to be Secular.