The Fate of Christian Culture

Charles Taylor is the 2007 Templeton Prize laureate, named after the British entrepreneur, who likes “big ideas” in the manner of fellow plutocrat philanthropist George Soros. The Templeton Prize is awarded for research into “spiritual realities,” though with a purse of $1.5 million, the material realities have scarcely been neglected.An Oxford-trained Canadian philosopher, Mr. Taylor believes that the pugnacious exclusion of moral and spiritual inquiry from hard physical sciences and the softer social sciences disabled our fullest humanity. At a time when hardly a week passes without the publication of a new anti-religious tract, Mr. Taylor’s “A Secular Age” (Harvard University Press, 776 pages, $39.95) is a salutary and sophisticated defense of how life was lived before the daring views of a tiny secular elite inspired mass indifference, and how it might be lived in the future. There are even faint signs that our contemporaries are beginning to pose the question from the old Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?”The historical two thirds of Mr. Taylor’s book are less original than his prognostications for our near future. “A Secular Age” follows several recent books, notably those of Hugh MacLeod, in rejecting a simple, linear, account of a secularization that is emphatically not apparent in much of the developing world. Mr. Taylor’s focus is on the gradual and fitful “disenchantment” of what was once called Western Christendom, to the present point where indifference, and outright hostility to religion is growing apace in America and especially Western Europe. The recent books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens appeal partly because their iconoclasm excites, but mainly because they justify the way many people in the West live now.The changes Mr. Taylor charts were truly secular in the sense of moving slowly and ineluctably like a glacier. In early modern Europe, religion protected men from circumambient evil, which was real enough to assume the form of a bat or a toad. Religion was also necessary for the social and political order, both legitimizing and limiting power in subtle ways. A society without religion was inconceivable in purely moral terms because, without an appeal to the absolute, everything was permitted.These supporting social matrices eroded in the supervening years, though religion often derived a second wind from, say, the Catholic nationalisms of Ireland and Poland, or, dare one say it, the “one nation under God” credo that sustains America, arguably the most religious society on earth. In both Ireland and Poland, however, the success of Catholic nationalism contributed to its downfall and was replaced with materialism and a preoccupation with property values. A return to religion became impossible amid a growing nebula of competing possibilities.The book’s message is that there are no rational grounds for ruling out the possibility that religion may undergo the sort of revivals that occurred in Europe and America in the 19th century, or are taking place in Africa and Latin America today, not to speak of those convulsing contemporary Islam. He points to peoples’ need for mysterious congregation, whether at a rock concert or the funeral of Princess Diana, in scenes that have reminded many of my medievalist friends of events that might have occurred in the 11th century. As Michael Novak and others have said, secularism offers few consolations to those facing, whether directly or indirectly, life’s end.In speaking of a return to religion, however, Mr. Taylor neglects the legacy of the 1960s, notably the collapse, during that decade, in how women once replicated religious belief within the family, and the simultaneous waning of the clerical vocations that further sustained it. It is all very well for Mr. Taylor to talk of the immanence of “a new age of religious searching,” but what forms might that searching assume if people are theologically illiterate and wholly ignorant of their own religious traditions?Along with classical mythology, the old master paintings of saints are almost as indecipherable to many young people as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In so far as there are episodic revivals of Christianity, they are more about personal development than transcendental experience. The words “new age of religious searching” could equally apply to the dreary candles and crystals of cults whose memberships rarely last for more than a generation. What might more realistically give a small fillip to Christianity in Western Europe is a cultural or nativist reaction to the dynamism of the continent’s 20 million Muslims, and the sillier efforts of multicultural and secularist bureaucrats to accommodate them while expunging anything — such as Santa Claus — that might give them offence.By omitting any mention of what some call “cultural Christianity,” Mr. Taylor inadvertently fails to discuss the one form of religion that seems set to grow as people search for a secure identity in the 21st century. In other words, while many may laud the estimable sentiments contained in Mr. Taylor’s book, his own liberal politics have blinded him to the one thing that may indeed result in a religious revival, though one that neither he, Sir John Templeton, nor many thoughtful Christians may approve.Mr. Burleigh’s books include “Earthly Powers” and “Sacred Causes,” both published by Harper Collins.

The Fate of Christian Culture

The Fate of Christian Culture

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