James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
Why in 1500 was unbelief in God all but unthinkable, whereas today unbelief is not only possible but inevitable for many people? This is the central question explored by Charles Taylor in his monumental work A Secular Age. Taylor traces the historical origins of secularism with a penetrating, though often impressionistic, existential diagnosis of the changing conditions of belief—from an enchanted, meaningful cosmos to a disenchanted, impersonal universe. Taylor invites the reader to “feel” the tensions of each age, the precarious beauty of medieval hierarchical complementarity, the mournful nostalgia of the Romantics, the flatness of homogenized time, the malaise of a world closed to transcendence. This combined intellectual and impressionistic approach reflects Taylor’s most significant contribution to secularization theory: secularization is not a subtraction story—the stripping away of superstition and irrational beliefs to reveal a pure scientific account of reality—but rather it entails the success of what Taylor terms an “agape-replacement,” an alternative moral order, a vision of human dignity stripped of any transcendent cause, leaving us in a “cross-pressured” and malaise-inducing “immanent frame.” Taylor’s ability to narrate the origins of our secular age by immersing the reader in a shifting field of social and cosmic “imaginaries” is what makes his 900-page work so compelling and yet so difficult to condense, distill, and make accessible to the average reader.
Enter James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular. In 140 engaging pages, the professor of philosophy at Calvin College has accomplished this near impossible task. Smith distills the essence of Taylor’s thesis, presenting the full scope of Taylor’s project without sacrificing the literary quality of Taylor’s work, which resonates with deep and widely shared intuitions about our present age. In Smith’s words, his book is first “a commentary on a book that provides a commentary on postmodern culture,” but importantly it is also “a kind of how-to manual—guidance on how (not) to live in a secular age. It is ultimately an adventure in self-understanding, a way to get our bearings in a ‘secular age’—whoever ‘we’ might be: believers or skeptics, devout or doubting” (ix).
As a commentary on A Secular Age, Smith’s book is divided into five chapters which mirror the five major parts of Taylor’s work and, further, into sections which closely reflect Taylor’s chapters. In his introduction, Smith uses the writings of Flannery O’Connor and Julian Barnes to great effect in illustrating the condition of secularity as considered by Taylor. For Taylor, the secular which defines our age is not an absence of belief but rather a condition of belief, namely, the condition of holding beliefs not naively but reflectively as beliefs chosen among many plausible and attractive options. The first three chapters trace Taylor’s account of the historical development of these conditions: First, exclusive humanism becomes possible only after the bulwarks of belief are leveled as an incarnational (or sacramental) imaginary of nature, social relations, and the self gives way to a mechanized, individualistic, and excarnated social imaginary. Second, with the bulwarks of belief razed, exclusive humanism becomes a live option as the impersonal orders of Deism clear the way for a new moral order of this-worldly flourishing, eclipsing the need for the transcendent. Third, the eclipse of the transcendent gives rise to various “axes of malaise,” causing the immanent counter-enlightenment, an explosion of Romantic attempts to recover something felt to be lost, an explosion of options which Taylor calls the “nova effect.”
In the fourth chapter, Smith presents Taylor’s critique of standard accounts of secularization, as well as Taylor’s account of how elite unbelief became a mass movement of expressive individualism through the cultural revolution of the 1960s, facilitated especially by post-war affluence, new methods of marketing, and the consumer revolution. In the fifth chapter, Smith outlines the most apologetic part of Taylor’s work, in which Taylor argues that whether one takes the “immanent frame” to be open or closed to transcendence depends upon one’s prior construal of transcendence itself, and that believer and unbelievers alike face similar dilemmas surrounding a realistic account of human nature, its dignity, and its transformability, as well as perennial questions surrounding man’s drive toward sex and violence. Here Taylor modestly suggests that Christianity may provide a better response to these inescapable dilemmas. Finally in his conclusion, Smith comments on Taylor’s concluding chapter on converts, noting that there are many cracks in the secular through which the transcendent breaks through and transforms those open to such transformation.
As Smith sees it, and here I agree, Taylor’s work is important today, for it offers us “an existential relief map,” an atlas of our age which can aid us in our existential orientation and help us minister to those suffocating under the malaise of immanence. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular unfurls Taylor’s map for any and all who live in this secular age “who feel the cross-pressures and malaise and ‘fragilization’ that [Taylor] identifies” (x).
With a glossary of Taylor’s many neologisms (and they are legion) and several simple illustrations, Smith brings Taylor’s tome within reach of the non-specialist. But as “a kind of how-to manual—guidance on how (not) to live in a secular age,” Smith leaves the reader hungry for more. To be fair, such practical guidance is secondary to the book’s primary purpose, and Smith does utilize call boxes and footnotes to highlight practical implications of Taylor’s narrative. But a concluding chapter summarizing and synthesizing these practical implications would have been a welcome addition to an excellent text. How (Not) to Be Secular succeeds notably as an accessible, entertaining, and lively exposition of and reading guide to A Secular Age. Smith has a remarkable talent for getting at the heart of an argument and tracing the essential thread of a sometimes meandering narrative. Using contemporary literary and musical examples to supplement those provided by Taylor, Smith is able to retell Taylor’s story in a convincing and dynamic manner. I would readily recommend the book as a helpful resource for anyone interested in studying A Secular Age.
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