Western Secularity Charles Taylor

This is evident in the case of the word secular. We think of secularization

as a selfsame process that can occur anywhere (and, according to some
people, is occurring everywhere). And we think of secularist regimes as an
option for any country, whether or not they are actually adopted. And certainly,
these words crop up everywhere. But do they really mean the same thing
in each iteration? Are there not, rather, subtle differences, which can bedevil
cross-cultural discussions of these matters? p. 31
The
clear separation of an immanent from a transcendent order is one of the inventions
(for better or worse) of Latin Christendom. P. 33
The new understanding of the secular that I have been describing builds on
this separation. It affi rms, in effect, that the lower, immanent or secular, order
is all that there is and that the higher, or transcendent, is a human invention.
Obviously, the prior invention of a clear-cut distinction between these levels
prepared the ground for the declaration of independence of the immanent.
At fi rst, the independence claimed on the part of the immanent was limited
and partial. In the Deist version of this claim, widespread in the eighteenth
century, God was seen as the artifi cer of the immanent order. Since he is the
creator, the natural order stands as a proof of his existence; and since the proper
human order of mutual benefi t is one that he designs and recommends, we
follow his will in building it. P. 33
And so the history of this term secular in the West is complex and ambiguous.
It starts off as one term in a dyad that distinguishes two dimensions of
existence, identifying them by the particular type of time that is essential to
each. But from the foundation of this clear distinction between the immanent
and the transcendent, there develops another dyad, in which secular refers to
what pertains to a self-suffi cient, immanent sphere and is contrasted with what
relates to the transcendent realm (often identifi ed as religious). This binary
can then undergo a further mutation, via a denial of the transcendent level, into
a dyad in which one term refers to the real (secular), and the other refers to
what is merely invented (religious); or where secular refers to the institutions
we really require to live in this world, and religious or ecclesial refers
to optional accessories, which often disturb the course of this-worldly life. P. 34
Through this double mutation, the dyad itself is profoundly transformed; in
the fi rst case, both sides are real and indispensable dimensions of life and
society. The dyad is thus internal, in the sense that each term is impossible
without the other, like right and left or up and down. After the mutations, the
dyad becomes external; secular and religious are opposed as true and false or
necessary and superfl uous. The goal of policy becomes, in many cases, to abolish
one while conserving the other. P. 34
What do we mean when we speak of Western modernity as secular? There
are all sorts of ways of describing it: the separation of religion from public life,
the decline of religious belief and practice. But while one cannot avoid touching
on these, my main interest here lies in another facet of our age: belief in
God, or in the transcendent in any form, is contested; it is an option among
many; it is therefore fragile; for some people in some milieus, it is very diffi cult,
even weird. Five hundred years ago in Western civilization, this wasnt so.
50 Rethinking Secularism

Unbelief was off the map, close to inconceivable, for most people. But that
description also applies to the whole of human history outside the modern
West.
What had to happen for this kind of secular climate to come about? First,
there had to develop a culture that marks a clear division between the natural

and the supernatural, and second, it had to come to seem possible to live
entirely within the natural. The fi rst condition was something striven for, but
the second came about at fi rst quite inadvertently.
Very briefl y, I believe that it came about as the by-product of the series of
actions in the vector that I have called reform. Its attempt was to make individuals
and their society over so as to conform to the demands of the Gospel.
Allied with a neo-Stoical outlook, this became the charter for a series of
attempts to establish new forms of social order, drawing on new disciplines
(Foucault enters the story here), which helped to reduce violence and disorder
and to create populations of relatively pacifi c and productive artisans and peasants,
who were increasingly induced, or forced, into the new forms of devotional
practice and moral behavior, whether this was in Protestant England,
Holland, Counter-Reformation France, or, later, the American colonies and
the Germany of the Polizeistaat . p. 49-50
In other words, the crucial change here could be described as the possibility
of living within a purely immanent order; that is, the possibility of really conceiving
of, or imagining, ourselves within such an order, one that could be
accounted for on its own terms, which thus leaves belief in the transcendent as
a kind of optional extrasomething it had never been before in any human
society. This presupposed the clear separation of natural and supernatural as a
necessary condition, but it needed more than that. There had to develop a
Western Secularity 51

social order, sustained by a social imaginary that had a purely immanent

character, which we see arising, for instance, in the modern forms of public
sphere, market economy, and citizen state. 50-51