Taylor’s post and Cox’s response show that, not only is it difficult (if not impossible) to “separate people’s purely secular interests from their religious ones” on the religious side of the divide, it is also difficult to do so on the secular side. That is, Taylor’s book helps us see that the “ideology of ‘secularization’” to which he refers in the above post is on all fours with religious commitment when it comes to its perspectival character and attendant lack of neutrality. And Cox’s response helps us see how this ideology, like the religious outlook it seeks to displace, can, just as easily as religion, become “a menace, yet another closed system with little capacity for self-criticism.”

I find Taylor’s book most helpful in getting us to come to terms with the impasse many now see occurring between such extreme expressions of religion and what David Novak has recently called “radical secularity.” In this effort, Taylor joins other authors like Novak, Jeffrey Stout, and Jürgen Habermas. These thinkers also distinguish between ‘secularization’, understood as a pluralization that requires “some ‘neutrality’ of the state in face of different spiritual options, or ‘principled distance’ of the state from these,” and a more radical secularism that entails, in Stout’s words “the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere” altogether.

In opening some space between these extremes, Taylor et. al. are able to point Western society, not only to the existence and emergence of different forms of spiritual comportment between these (strangely similar) extremes, but also to the room for conversation and mutual learning that can still occur between groups adhering to these differing spiritual forms. Perhaps there is yet hope that the religious and the secular can avoid the menace of becoming closed systems with little capacity for self-criticism, and so not silently bypass one another. To paraphrase Habermas, this can only happen if both the religious and the secular remain sensitive to “the force of articulation” inherent in each other’s languages. This will not be easy, and Taylor’s book shows just how difficult (and lengthy!) a task it is to pull off successfully.

Some of this sounds a bit like “déjà vu all over again” but Taylor’s work and the comments produce some new issues and raise some fresh questions. Some may remember that 42 years ago I wrote a book called The Secular City. It was – alas – sometimes tossed into the bin with the “death-of-God” fad even though my last chapter was an attack on that idea.

I made the distinction in The Secular City between secularization, “the secular” and “secularism.” I built on the original idea the secularization meant turning over ecclesial properties (hospitals, etc.) to the state or another non-ecclesial institution. I welcomed at least some secularization in that respect because I believed it allowed the churches, in fact freed them, to play the prophetic, pastoral and critical role biblical faith mandates. Therefore I suggested that religious people should not hang too much crepe because of secularization.

I was interested in the theological ramifications of the secularization process. I probably over-stated my case a bit, but I still hold to it. By the way, one title I had in mind for The Secular City was “God in the Secular City” but the publisher thought I should use the shorter title. I should have used it because it suggests the presence of the transcendent and the mystery in a range of different aspects of life.

I warned that secularism was a menace, yet another closed system with little capacity for self-criticism.

When I wrote The Secular City I had been reading Weber (under Bob Bellah and Talcott Parsons) and immersing myself in Bonhoeffer (who wrote about a “non-religious” interpretation of the Gospel) while I lived for a year in Berlin.

Taylor has done us all the service of sorting out the usages of the “S words” and locating the historical parameters in which the very possibility emerged….a fabulous achievement. It seems to me that “Secular” in current usage is always a mirror word, defined in large measure by the “religion:” it is not. But that only reminds us – for the 1000th time – that religion is not easily definable. A few years ago (in a festschrift for Bob Bellah) I wrote an article on how belief in “The Market” is a Religion. If it is, then American society today is indeed pious.