Eerdmans, 2014; 160 pages (paperback), $16.00
In graduate school, one of my professors made a connection between two mythological figures who encounter the sirens on separate occasions. When passing the sirens on his voyage home, Odysseus has his crew plug their ears and tie him to the mast, thereby avoiding the enchanting song. Orpheus, however, is a musician, and instead of struggling against the sirens’ music, he simply sings a better song, thereby enchanting them.
Songs are stories put to music, and James Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular, a 2014 guidebook to Charles Taylor’s 2007 A Secular Age, highlights the importance that Taylor places on storytelling. Smith notes that even non-Christians have observed that Christianity’s influence has lasted so long because of its narrative quality (9). What has happened, according to Taylor, is that certain movements over the past five hundred years have set the stage for other narratives to emerge, weakening the plausibility structures surrounding not only the Christian story but also theism itself. Taylor’s project tells this story of the shift in “conditions of belief,” and Smith’s project prepares us not only to read this story of secularism, but also to develop ways to tell our culture a better story.
Smith’s book, the result of reading A Secular Age with hearty philosophy majors at Calvin College in 2011, won Christianity Today’s 2015 Book Award for Christianity and Culture. One reason why this book deserves the award is that now many can benefit from Taylor’s ideas without having to read the nine-hundred-page beast. Having read every word, endnotes included, of both A Secular Age and How (Not) to Be Secular, I suggest reading Smith first and reading Taylor only if one has a scholarly interest in secularization theory. Smith says that his book is for a wide audience of “practitioners” who feel the cross-pressures of this age (x), but he also calls his book “a doctor of ministry program between two covers” (viii) and repeatedly mentions pastors and church planters. My guess is that more Christians will read it than non-Christians.
I say “Christians” instead of “believers” because Taylor argues that even in our secular age, belief is still widespread. One belief of contemporary folks is that meaning and significance (not to mention objective ethics) are still possible without a transcendent God. This is one of Taylor’s most important points: modern “exclusive humanism” is not the result of growing up and shedding our dependence on God (a “subtraction story”), but it is rather an addition story in that traditional beliefs are still strong, although Christianity is not the only plausible story available. Somehow we have gained seemingly legitimate worldviews that purport to provide significance to living in this world. We have options now, and this is what Taylor usually means by secular (“secular3”). (“Secular1” refers to the medieval distinction between “secular” and “sacred,” and “secular2” refers to a-religiosity.)
Smith clarifies Taylor’s claim that everyone is secular3, by which Taylor means that we are all caught in the cross-pressures of our longings for transcendence on the one hand, and the secular2 drive for immanentization on the other. Despite the addition of belief options, we moderns are still haunted with what we have left behind. Many people feel the “malaise of modernity,” partly in their awareness that the transcendence they long for is not as readily available in a rationalistic world. And so postmodernity rejects the triumphal answers of modernism, privileging many narratives over one metanarrative. Ironically, this is where postmodernity may be less of an enemy to Christianity than modernity (98), because postmodernity must allow a place for the Christian narrative. On what basis could postmodernity exclude it? Certainly not on the basis of absolute truth. Christianity has not disappeared in our postmodern world, to the chagrin of the thoroughly modern New Atheists.
Smith insists that Christians should not match modernist atheism with modernist apologetics by trying to explain everything rationally (that is, the problem of evil, God’s existence, and so on). Sometimes Smith’s affirmation of the imagination seems to diminish the importance of the intellect, for he appears to despise classical apologetics (51-53, 98-99). Nevertheless, Smith is right to stress the tremendous role of the imagination in persuading people to consider Christianity.
By far, my favorite part of Smith’s book is that he purposefully tries to avoid objections to Taylor’s loose Roman Catholicism. Smith is clear that his “primary purpose is to lay out Taylor’s argument” (106, 19n), but at times Smith cannot help himself, and it is valuable to see him question Taylor on important issues (although Smith does not go as far as I wish he would). A Secular Age often sounds like Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation in its narrative of “blame the Reformation” (for the contemporary rejection of mystery). But Zwingli’s alleged disenchantment regarding the Lord’s Supper does not represent all Reformed theology, and Smith argues that many of Taylor’s concerns are actually answered in traditional readings of Augustine and Calvin.
Smith’s glossary is immensely useful in deciphering Taylorisms, and intermittent callout boxes include challenging questions such as, “Might nonfoundationalism in epistemology already testify to an ‘opening’ in the immanent frame?” (98). Despite its deficiencies, Taylor’s story of the West’s movement toward exclusive humanism is extremely insightful, and Smith’s field guide provides access to Taylor’s sprawling work. Christians need such a guide to navigate our secular age ”and as helpful a guide as Taylor is, Smith is much better.
Jeremy Larson is a PhD student in English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
