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A few conversations about contemporary secularism, prompted by my new review of John Compton that I just posted, has prompted me to post on SSRN another book review I wrote for Dissent a few years ago, of Charles Taylor's important book, A Secular Age. Some of the arguments I made there are evidently still relevant.
Taylor offers an invaluable map of
how the modern religious-secular divide came
into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in
Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common
ancestry in their shared commitment
to human rights—a commitment that does
not follow from atheism as such.
Taylor’s
history refutes what he calls the “subtraction view” of the movement toward secularism, according to which the
decline of religious belief is simply the result of the falling away of superstition
and the growth of knowledge.Rather,
modern secularism is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing
and redemption, and shares the vulnerabilities of such views. The news that
secularists also live in glass houses has implications for ongoing
stone-throwing operations.