Believing in a secular age: Anthropology, sociology and religious experience¹

Abstract

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age generated a great deal of attention-and has stimulated important debates-among a diverse range of scholars in sociology, history, politics, religious studies and to a lesser extent, anthropologists. Much of the debate has focused on the implications of Taylor's work for the so-called secularisation thesis and the place (or non-place) of religion in the so-called public sphere. The essays in this volume arise less out of such concerns and more from Taylor's discussion of secularism in a third, 'experiential' sense. Each paper addresses the question of what it is like to 'believe' (or not 'believe') in the modern world. Among other things the authors of the essays published in this Special Issue are concerned to develop better understandings of the conditions under which belief and unbelief may be experienced as open, rather than closed, to the possibility of other ontological construals, thereby building on Taylor's insights into the phenomenology of modern secularism.

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“…In A secular age Taylor (2007) argues that Western secularity is built upon a transition from ‘porous’ (enchanted) to ‘buffered’ (disenchanted) ways of experiencing selfhood. As such, argues Baldacchino and Kahn (2011: 5), secularity needs to be conceptualised in terms of individualised and rationalised ways of experiencing selfhood, ‘a sense of being “thrown” into a disenchanted world and of occupying a narrowly delimited and a temporally delimited lifespan’ (Baldacchino & Kahn, 2011: 5). A self, to Taylor, exists in a space bounded by moral horizons against which the limits of self can be tested.…”