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Pondering a bit the posts so far in Notes from the field—those focused on the theoretical side of the secularization question, anyhow—it is not clear to me how much daylight there actually is between, say, Justin Reynolds’s position and my own. My interest in my initial foray was not so much to liberate secularization or the secular for an appropriately contextualized present (i.e., one that has taken on board both the historical dynamics of modern religious transformation and the critiques of secular reason that abound in our contemporary moment). Rather, it was to offer some kind of hope for something else “after secularization,” something other than the repetition of the same.

That may be an eschatological hope. Or not. It doesn’t much matter to me. In fact, the point of this exercise would be precisely not to care whether or not our concepts and ideals have “religious origins” (whatever that might mean, as if religion were something homogeneous and transparent to itself, as if it even could be an origin in some absolute sense). At a place of indifference like this, the discovery that, to take Reynolds’s example, Christianity might also be able to generate the sense of a contingent future would mean something different than it does now.

But it seems to me quite difficult to get to this equipoise. And that, I think, is because the war for conceptual primacy has been running hot for the greater part of the last four centuries. It is not just that the so-called secular has historically insisted on the need for some kind of autonomous intellectual vision, insisted that it can create its own concepts, free from the inherited baggage of religious tradition. It is also that the so-called religious has, with equal vehemence, insisted that anything good in this world was generated from out of its own intellectual vision, and everything else is merely a distorted refraction of that.

This is an essentially ideological conflict, and one that has been fought at least since the Reformation (though it was likely a vigorous one already in antiquity). It has been fought on the desks of academics eager to prove their bona fides by purging themselves of a perceivedly theological past. And it has been fought by theologians eager to show that their discipline remains the (often secret) foundation for contemporary thought. I see very little likelihood that one could, with one great final surge, end this conflict by “reclaiming” the secular or secularization in some new form—not least because it has been precisely this hope of ending the battle that has been the engine of the conflict all along.

So I’d like to put my hopes in something more mundane, if perhaps romantic, for all that. Namely, that we—all of us together here in this research group, but also in that wider community of interested scholars and thinkers—might create something new, a language and practice of analysis that moves orthogonally to these older conflicts. An immanent critique, as it were, that begins in the stuff of things: historical, anthropological, political, and so on. One that does not begin with a vision of how things should be for them to ultimately come out right, whatever that means. One that does not seek to “prove” the secularization thesis, however understood, or disprove it. But rather, one that is generative of new possibilities for understanding both religion and our own modernity.

I don’t know if a concept of secularization (or the secular) will prove useful in this new analytical stance. I have my doubts. But I have no doubt that, were it to be useful at all, its uses would emerge only at the end of research. No longer, I think, does it make sense to take it up as a foundational first principle, either as that which must be proved, or, just as importantly, that which must be disproved.

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In the spirit of a blog, I don’t want to provide anything like a definitive statement about our workshop or its results, but rather offer an opening for questions that, it seems to me, are outstanding.

In his earlier post, Vincent Pecora suggests an “unfinished project” approach to secularization. He also hints that the difference between secularization and secularism may well lie in a certain openness to a contingent future. Precisely as an ideal—whether a good one or a bad one does not matter—secularism seems to foreclose on this contingency. In fact, its normative claims demand just this closure. Things should be like this (and not like that) in some future moment, which allows us to decide in the present between right and wrong. A courthouse lawn in Georgia should not have a statue of the Ten Commandments on it, even if every person who now goes to court is a believing Christian, presumably because (in part) some future litigant could well find their liberties infringed.

Secularization, as a theory, need not make these normative claims, although often, in practice, it does make them or at least it has. That is, it is a rare version of secularization that actually opens itself to future contingency. If secularization were simply a descriptive project whose sole charge were neutrally to determine the various functions that religion plays in modern social, cultural, and political life, that would be one thing. But secularization, again as theory, has historically been tied to specific beliefs about trend lines in the reorganization of religious functions in the shadow of modernity. It has stipulated a direction of development that is, shall we say, less than contingent.

Three things stand out for me, as a historian. First, classical secularization theory seems to carry a set of claims, implicit and explicit, about what religion was like before modernity. In fact, it is exactly these claims that make secularization into a problem at all. If, for example, we believe that the first generation of colonists came to America out of religious idealism—John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” for example—then it becomes a problem to explain why, in subsequent generations, religious goals appear to drastically lose their potency. Whole generations of scholars cut their teeth on this now classic dilemma. But, the question should be asked, were those Puritans so pure after all? The city on the hill may well have been as much about commerce as anything else, and if that’s true, then the issue of “decline” is as much a figment of the model, as of real social, political, religious factors.

Second, models tend to generate the need for more models.  The question of a possible religious “resurgence” has leapt into prominence in the past 15-20 years, and apparently demands new heroic efforts in model building to figure out why society in the age of globalization suddenly seems more religious than ever before. New theories are developed—(“desecularization”?)—to address phenomena that look problematic in light of previous orthodoxies.  But what if “resurgence” appears only as a kind of spandrel in a sociological and historical picture of how things ought to have been? What exactly needs to be explained, in other words? The return of religion? Its decline? Its persistence? Its metamorphosis?

Third, the efforts of the past twenty years to address these issues of secularism and secularization in terms theoretical have mostly run out of steam. The study of religion and modernity has traced the same arc as so many other humanistic disciplines, ending in a kind of genealogical or deconstructive cul-de-sac, where we can see the problems (secularism as governance, say) without being able to imagine any alternative. Are scholars really willing to give up on secular norms of truth seeking? At this moment, I doubt it—not least because the alternatives seem so impossible to inhabit intellectually or ethically. Struggles to force ourselves beyond either tie the knots tighter or become so frantic as to seem altogether irresponsible. What results is a version of Dipesh Chakarabarty’s “politics of despair,” where our conceptual armature seems too crude and yet impossible to abandon.

It seems to me that it is precisely at this moment that empirical study—of past and present—might play a creative role in generating possibilities “after secularization.”

All of our fellows are, I think, working toward just these ends. On the one hand, all of them know the critiques, whether of secularization as sociological norm or of secularism as political one. They are alert, in other words, to the ways that these normative projects have shaped, not just scholarly work, but also the world that we inhabit. On the other, all of them are just as alert to the empirical contingencies of things. People are creative makers of their environments, religious and secular, and their makings cycle between local needs and ideal commitments.

Laws enforcing secularism, for example, reveal only part of the actual working mechanisms of state-religion relations. This was true in early modern Europe, where local communities routinely violated apparently strict cuius regio, eius religio principles in order to reach workable, if often unstable, accommodations to religious pluralism (here see the excellent new book by Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith). And it is true now, in places as various as the US, Turkey, and Egypt. When Winnifred Sullivan writes about Salazar v. Buono, the most recent Supreme Court religious-establishment case, in this blog, she asks:

Why do crosses continue to present themselves publicly and to present such a difficulty for the modern, secular nation-state?… Haven’t the myths and symbols of religions been supplanted by the myths and symbols of nationalism? Has secularization failed? Or, has the cross been secularized?

It is too easy, her article implies, to simply insist that the cross is, in fact, an essentially Christian symbol (Justice Steven’s position). It is equally too easy to insist that it is universal—that is, that it can be a symbol for all faiths—even when what one means by that seems to be a version of a Christian universal (Justice Alito’s position).

It is too easy, not because these positions are unsophisticated, but because they are effectively ideological. Neither Stevens, the secular apologist, nor Alito, the religious apologist, has, in fact, the least idea of how this symbol functions, how it is read, how it has changed and is changing. Has the cross become more Christian in the past 50 years? Or less? Hard to say without actual research. How facts have changed would seem crucial to understanding how norms should be understood and applied, now and in the future.

Scholars like Sullivan and our SSRC fellows are doing just this research. They are working in the past and present. They are working with various media and various methods. Their actors are diverse, from religious organizations to local healers, from television programmers to television audiences, and more. Most importantly, all are open to the exigencies of explanation. It seems to me that we may not know, yet, precisely what comes “after secularization” for a very good reason: we are still figuring out what things we need to explain. Discovering what these things are, even in tentative terms, is the first order of business for a group like this. At the very least, it will set directions for future research open to Pecora’s ideals of contingency.

But the wrangle is, of course, just prolegomena to a vaunted Christian move, one that has been a primal reflex of apologists for the past three centuries. For it turns out, not only is Christianity amenable to modern concepts of inherent rights, it has, since the beginning, been the main vehicle of their elaboration. And by the beginning, Wolterstorff means across the entire Scriptural tradition, from the Old Testament, in Isaiah’s impassioned pleas for justice, to the New, in Christ’s expansion of rights claims to the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind. Even here, though, I’m not sure how much I have at stake. Any modern agnostic, atheist, secularist, humanist, or what-have-you, would have no problem with discovering rights-talk (or even theory) in the Bible. After all, just because the Bible said it, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.

Now, though, we can see the expansion coming. Not satisfied with the discovery—pace MacIntyre—that the Bible is a source of rights, he needs to make the point—pace Martha Nussbaum—that it is the only source of rights from the ancient world, and then—pace “secularists” more generally—indeed the only source anywhere able to provide an account of human dignity sufficient to ground any modern concept of human rights.

Out the window it is with that so-called liberalism. Along with it, too, those inadequate secular accounts of human worth, from Kant to Dworkin, which only pretend to found modern concepts of universal human rights, while actually excluding from their magic circle those marginal figures most deserving protection, “those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, those in a permanent coma, the severely brain-injured” and so on. Only the idea of “being loved by God” is adequate to assign all human beings dignity enough to distinguish them as bearers of rights (versus, say, dolphins—God just doesn’t love them that way). Christianity reigns triumphant, alpha and omega. She stands at the origins of the modern world, implicated in all of her virtues, and none of her sins. And look, there she is again at the end, binding up wounds and nursing us back to health. The cake just gets better each time you eat it, I guess.

Even two cakes don’t satisfy the Christian appetite, however, as the patient reader will discover. Christianity gets to reclaim her “birthright” from those who “lack the resources for safeguarding it,” sure, but even this is not enough. A coup de grace awaits, secreted away at the end of chapter 16, the final touch without which a good apology would not be complete. Here, our author concludes, the “theist” (whom are we kidding now?) finally gets to hoist those secular rascals on their own petards. Because, as Wolterstorff says, if you do believe in natural inherent human rights—and yet find yourself unable to ground these rights in a secular fashion—then you must, ipso facto, ground them in God. And lo! God has appeared, summoned into existence out of the very structure of belief itself. Anselm would be proud, I suspect. We are all Christians now.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This book conducts its arguments with sustained attention, and its labors over the concept of rights, I found, as a naïve and impatient reader of philosophical thought experiments, persuasive. It is also filled with compelling exegetical work on Scripture, an area that I know and enjoy much better. I could not quite see, however, how these two projects stood in relation to one another. I wonder, for example, if and how the Bible can yet be made the object of aggressive philosophical inquiry. The first step would seem to be an adequate hermeneutics. Certainly something more is needed than just a blanket affirmation that the Bible can be treated as a philosophical unity (for this, let me refer you to Spinoza). Without it, Wolterstorff’s shifts in register between philosophical critique and textual exegesis are startling. The most striking example, for me, comes as he moves from his treatment of the Stoics—where he indicts their eudaimonism as philosophically incoherent—to that of Augustine, whose ethics of love Wolterstorff stresses, while passing lightly over the saint’s rapturous yet (to me) morally horrifying visions of our world as one gigantic colony of punishment and pain. The “Church of Christ…persecutes in the spirit of love,” our Bishop of Hippo was wont to say, which does put this love-thing in a slightly different light.

Maybe these odd juxtapositions come with the territory, though. As a non-philosopher, I readily confess that I don’t know whether it is necessary to prove that “no human being has a price” in order to come up with an adequate pragmatics of inherent rights. More precisely, I don’t know whether the affirmation of pricelessness needs a foundation or not, or what a foundation would even look like if it were found.

Philosophical praxis has not always been foundationalist, for starters, whatever Heidegger might say. But even if it were, I can’t imagine that foundations can be magically conjured by assertion, let alone authoritative Scriptural citation. Call me a sneaky secularist—and you won’t be the first—but I don’t see how the proposition “God loves us” can do extended philosophical work without establishing the predicates of God (benevolence? justice?) in a consistent idiom. The predicate of existence—”God is”—seems especially important. Certainly the medievals thought so, and one would expect, in a book like this, some of those good Anselmian proofs at the outset, rather than the end, of the argument. Clearly the relationship between theology and philosophy—strained at best since Spinoza’s day—still needs to be worked out, and Wolterstorff’s book might be more widely understood as an effort to do this. But it won’t do simply to insist on “dialogic pluralism,” as if the very language in which we conduct foundational disputes were not the crucial problem itself.

Here is what I do know, as a historian: there simply has never been a universalism—whether Christian or Kantian—that did not have a limit-case where its sphere of application grew fuzzy, where the Alzheimer’s patient (or the Jew) might not be summoned up as its bad conscience. And these universalisms have managed to muddle along, doing much good and much evil, critiqued from within and without all along the way. So what’s the big deal? Why do we need these foundations at all?

Wolterstorff anticipates this mundane and ad hoc response. As his book winds down, he waxes both melancholy and apocalyptic about the future of the so-called “West” (so interesting how this figure always comes back in moments of prophecy). What must we in the West expect to happen, he asks, when “the religious framework that gave rise to our moral subculture of rights gradually erodes”? No surprise: the disaster that hides in the shadows is the same one that prophets have always seen. But here we can respond as Pierre Bayle did to the apologetic doomsayers of his day, that a well-ordered society of atheists might well be a virtuous one. Or maybe not. It all depends.

One thing seems certain to me, though. It won’t depend on a philosophically complete theory of universal human rights—across our globe, people have lived and died for millennia without this—but on the way people actually treat each other. And if it takes Christianity to persuade you that human beings should be treated with respect, then, by all means, embrace Anselm. But if not, then I doubt that Wolterstorff is going to convince you to change your mind, one way or another.

From the opening pages, my historical antennae quickly began to quiver. Taylor’s book works in a space far removed from what I understand (speaking perhaps parochially) as proper historical argument. I say this with due caution: Taylor has always believed in the importance of a historical setting for his arguments. And from the outset of A Secular Age, he specifically addresses the issue of history. “Who needs all this detail, this history?” he asks, to insist that indeed “our past is sedimented in our present.” The movement between the analytical and the historical is thus essential to the entire argument, Taylor makes clear. The origins of the secular age lie, after all, in what he calls “Reform,” an urge to purify and renovate a past unacceptable to the modern moment. In a sense, then, the secular age as he understands it is defined historically: it is a “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged…to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.” It is as an exercise in historical contrast, too, that Taylor sets into relief the characteristics of our immanent frame. Before, “people lived naively within a theistic construal.” Now they are reflective in their belief. Before, the self was “porous,” open to the influences of demonic and angelic forces alike. Now it is buffered. Before, religion was incarnated in bodily practices. Now it has been excarnated, has been removed from the corporeal, the ritual, and the practical. And so on. Disenchantment needs a prior state. It is an essentially contrastive category.

But as Simon During notes in a previous post, this is conjectural history, a history built around a mobile, at times heuristic distinction between yesterday and today. Conjectural history in the Enlightenment deployed a set of labile chronologies, which slipped along at different rates depending on the culture, people, nation, or what have you. In this way, empirical questions—was it really true that all or even most people in medieval Europe assigned meaning to extra-human subjects? What kind of data set would give us good information about this? What percentage translates into “most”?—were (and are) made irrelevant. Instead, the empirical counterexample is transformed into the “not yet” or the “not here.” So, for example, the fact that the quintessential reformer, John Calvin, worked stupendously hard not to excarnate Christianity—struggled long with the nature and mystery of Christ’s body—is not a counterexample to the Reform narrative. Rather it represents the “not yet” of a story. The Middle Ages in Europe look, on this account, much like primitive societies the world over, stadially defined along a stream from earlier to later. For this reason, it is very hard to chart Taylor’s chronologies: they metamorphose into vague befores and afters that slide from the dawn of the post-neolithic age to the Treaty of Westphalia, and beyond.

Now this is, I admit, a bit unfair to Taylor. He consistently marks the world’s plural developments, the heterogeneity of religious cultures, and the specificity of his claims about what he calls Latin Christendom. Moreover, his depiction of the various subject positions available inside this secular age is simply beautiful: to be secular, for Taylor, is never just one thing, but an immensely variegated experience, marbled with difference. And yet his “before,” that “old enchanted cosmos,” is as homogeneous as the modern is various, and the evidence for this is suspiciously thin, more anthropology than history. Pre-modern Europeans look quite a bit like Durkheim’s primitive Australians, who also look like so-called “pre-Axial Age” religious peoples. The fit between the theoretical claim—that to be modern is to be differentiated and plural—and the historical narrative is suspiciously close, so much so that the latter looks like an excuse for the former.

What does this matter? Maybe not much, I thought: Taylor is a philosopher, after all, and need be subject to none of my guild demands. But as I read on, it became clear that what I at first mentally called the anthropological a priori was in fact crucial to this project. The book in fact begins with such an a priori: that “we all see our lives… as having a certain moral/spiritual shape” that is governed by a sense of “fullness, a richness.” What supplies this shape distinguishes between believers and non-believers. Believers find this shape in a “beyond,” a transcendent something. Non-believers look downwards, to society, law, human relations, the here-and-now. Fullness defines the very possibilities of ethical, political, and social life. Its origin, not its facticity, creates the conditions of, and possibilities for, belief, and in turn creates the distinctions between the various subject positions enabled by a secular age.

Now there is a familiar critique to make here. What looks like an anthropological a priori, after all, looks suspiciously like a theological one. That is, the ideal of “fullness” that cannot be encompassed by what During calls the mundane is not neutral in respect to belief. Taylor imagines that for “unbelievers” the ideal of fullness works in “analogous” ways to that of believers, but I am not sure this is true at all. Indeed, one might easily argue that the unbeliever makes very little use of the idea of fullness at all. It simply does not govern his or her phenomenal life the way it supposedly does the believer—the mundane, to follow During, might be the far more important category for the life of the unbeliever. In contrast, “fullness” sounds much like a generalization of the Christian religious imagination—with its insistence on a call from beyond and transcendent value, its insistence that ethical and social life demands transcendence, and its focus on the primal loss of a synthesis of man and God—to an entire people, culture, world. And Taylor knows this. The argument that “God is still a reference point for unbelievers” because even atheists need to define their rationality against him confirms it. It says that “fullness” demands transcendence, at the very least as background. As Taylor concludes, “modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are… responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it.” Real recognition comes only from the sphere of religion. And not just any religion, I suspect, but one most powerfully expressed in the Romantic and Catholic writers that Taylor finds so compelling.

But here is where my (admittedly secularist) exasperation became telling. At first I suspected that there was a kind of sleight-of-hand at work and that my job would be to show the gnome of theology at work behind sober description. But when I reached these concluding comments in the last chapters of the book, the tables turned. For in these, Taylor reveals that in fact this is a theological argument, that indeed the book is an explicit brief for a theological critique of secularism and the immanent frame. The violation of guild norms that made me so suspicious of the historical project was not accidental, but an integral part of the positive project of this book. The book ends with a moving confession of faith, something unremarked by most reviewers that I have read (see chapter 20). It is a faith in a future where depth and profundity reinvigorate and moderate a shallow, violent, and over-rationalized secular age, a future prophesied by Taylor’s admired authors, Bede Griffiths, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, Ivan Illich, Catholics to a man.

There is a name in the Christian tradition for this combination of theological argument and historical narrative. The name is apologetics, and its history is, in fact, one of the stories that Taylor recounts in this book. It is a history whose modern center lies in the seventeenth century, a century when Christians synthesized theological practice and the demands of an autonomous reason, insisting with ever more sophistication that Christianity was the religion of reasonable people. In the age of religious wars, the prime real estate lay exactly in the middle. It lay in that space of reasonableness between the extremes of atheism and heterodoxy, on one side, and ossified religious tradition, on the other. In the tradition I know best—Protestant apologetics—thinkers from Hugo Grotius to Edward Stillingfleet to John Locke placed reason in equidistance from both Catholicism and the specters of Spinozist and Hobbsian materialism. They, in turn, wielded historical argument as a weapon for carving out the middle space, for showing how modern religion (that is, Christianity) might universalize its particular history into one applicable to the entire human race. Doing this demanded a daring balancing act. Against atheists and Catholics alike, it stipulated the historical reality of church corruption, and yet promised a future Christianity in harmony with reason and universal human freedom. It assigned the historical Church responsibility for many modern evils, and revealed its Christian core as the cure for a civilization plagued by greed, violence, and tyranny.

In his own way, Taylor performs a similar rhetorical work, positioning the common experience of reasonable modern people in between “extreme” poles of “orthodox religion” and “materialist atheism”. The “cross-pressure” between these poles “defines the whole culture,” as he puts it. The poles are heuristics against which we, the Latin West, define our senses of meaning and fullness. But they also have their real partisans, whether atheists like Richard Dawkins or fundamentalists like Pat Robertson. Between these extreme “partisans” (and the list could be expanded, and also, incidentally, made isomorphic with similar partisans in the seventeenth century), lies a territory that is most consonant with the nature of human striving, experience, and insight. This territory is, no surprise, also consonant with Christianity. Indeed, Christianity provides its original map, insofar as it holds onto both transcendence and immanence, mixing them in the originary figure of its tradition, Christ himself. Christianity does not just offer resources for this territory, furthermore. In fact, it governs its historical development. “Modern civilization,” Taylor wants to argue, “is in some way the historical creation of ‘corrupted’ Christianity.” And yet it is only Christianity (or “religion,” as Taylor at times calls it) that offers an escape from the culture that its dissolute forms created. As in the seventeenth century, the balancing act is delicate here. But the balancing act is essential to the apologetic enterprise, for it is through this careful arrangement of forces that Christianity comes to occupy all of the available sites of intellectual responsibility. It is both the history and the future of the West. It serves as the origin of the secular, and the source of its overcoming. It dwells in the sphere of reason and carries the promise of incarnated passion. It critiques our past and promises a future unlike the one in which we live. Small wonder that, for an atheist, materialist, secular historian, this book was both provocative and frustrating.

[For more from Jonathan Sheehan, read his remarks at an SSRC colloquium on the varieties of secularism. —ed.]