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Introduction: The Story About Unbelief
The story we tell ourselves about our modern secular world is simple and straightforward: science advanced, reason prevailed, and the old world of religious belief slowly receded like a tide going out. In this common narrative, science and rational thought simply crowded out faith, leaving us with the disenchanted, secular reality we inhabit today. It seems obvious.
But what if that story is wrong? In his monumental work, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor challenges this simple narrative at its foundations. He argues that the shift to our secular age was not a matter of losing old beliefs, but of inventing entirely new ways of experiencing the world and ourselves. This blog will distill four of the most surprising and impactful ideas from Taylor's work. This is a journey into the hidden architecture of the modern self, revealing how we often unwittingly constructed the very walls and windows of our secular age.
II
Sublimation of Religion
One of the most common ways we think about modernity is what Charles Taylor calls a "subtraction story." This is the idea that our modern, secular world is simply what's left over when you remove religion, illusions, and superstition. In this view, we didn't add anything new; we just cleared away the old clutter to reveal the rational, scientific human that was there all along. Taylor argues this is fundamentally backward. Secularity is not a loss, but a new invention. The crucial change in the last 500 years was not in what people believe, but in the very conditions of belief. We moved from a world where belief in God was the unquestioned, default setting—a "naïve" framework where faith was simply part of the world’s furniture to our current, "reflective" one. Today, as Taylor puts it, "we all shunt between stances," and "everyone's construal shows up as such." This means that belief is just one option among many, and even the most fervent believer understands their faith as a faith, a stance they hold in a world of other available stances. This is the core of what Taylor calls “secularity.” The conditions have changed so profoundly that unbelief has become a major default option for many, not because of a void left by religion, but because we constructed an entirely new framework for experience. Against this kind of story, it may be steadily
argued that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.
III
Porous to Buffered Self
Among Taylor's most vivid concepts is the distinction between the pre-modern "porous self" and the modern "buffered self." This isn't just a change in ideas; it's a profound transformation in the lived experience of being a person. The world of the porous self was an "enchanted" one, where the boundary between one's mind and the outer world was permeable. Spirits, demons, moral forces, and sacred energy weren't just "in your head"; they were "out there" in the world. Charged objects like relics, curses from an enemy, or blessed candles could directly influence your inner state, your health, and your fortune. The fear of demonic possession was real, because the self was open to invasion from the outside. Crucially, the line between personal agents and impersonal forces was blurred. The healing power of a saint's relic was understood as both a property of the object itself and an act of will by the saint. A curse wasn't just an ill-wish; it was a tangible force sent to do harm. The modern "buffered self," by contrast, has a firm boundary. We understand our thoughts and feelings to be "inside" our minds, safely separated from a neutral, external world of objects. The meanings of things are generated within us. This self has the power to "disengage" from the world, to take a step back and establish an inner space of rational control, safe from outside spiritual forces. This buffered self is the protagonist of the modern age; its creation was a necessary step for science, individualism, and the very "subtraction stories" Taylor critiques. This shift helps explain why the world of our ancestors can seem so alien. For them, the spiritual was a constant, tangible reality. For us, it is a matter of belief located within the individual mind. Taylor notes that this transformation is so complete that we now feel a certain nostalgia for the lost porousness, seeking a "frisson" in horror movies, an experience our ancestors, for whom such forces were genuinely terrifying, would have considered insane. Perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation in our world is that today many people look back to the world of the porous self with nostalgia. As though the creation of a thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos were now lived as a loss. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can’t get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.
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Disenchantment to Enchantment of the World
Here is one of Taylor's most counter-intuitive arguments: the drive toward a secular, "disenchanted" world was powerfully fueled by developments within Christianity. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, a "rage for order" took hold in Latin Christendom. This was a growing drive to reform all of society to meet the highest demands of the Gospel. The goal was to raise the standards of devotion and discipline for everyone, not just for a clerical elite in monasteries. The Protestant Reformation dramatically intensified this impulse. Reformers launched a full-scale attack on the "enchanted" elements of the faith not because they thought the magic didn't work, but because they believed it was the wrong kind of power. For them, any spirit or force not emanating directly from God was demonic. All magic, therefore, was black magic. Treating sacraments or relics as automatically powerful objects was a form of idolatry that sought to contain and control God's sovereign power. By abolishing the distinction between the sacred vocations of monks and the ordinary life of the laity, the Reformers insisted that all of life was to be lived to the highest standard of disciplined devotion. This "inner-worldly asceticism," as Max Weber would later call it, was a crucial step in rationalizing and ordering the world. In its furious effort to purify faith, the Reformation became a primary engine of disenchantment, systematically dismantling the enchanted cosmos that had sustained the porous self and clearing the ground on which the modern buffered identity could be built. The Reformation as Reform is central to the story to tell, that of the abolition of the enchanted cosmos, and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith.
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Humanism as New Religion
It's tempting to think that modern secular humanism, the belief that humans can be good and live flourishing lives without God, it is just a return to the ethics of the ancient, pre-Christian world, like the philosophy of the Epicureans. Taylor argues this is a profound mistake. What he calls "exclusive humanism" is a distinctly modern invention that could only have arisen from within a Christian context. But Taylor shows why ancient philosophies like Epicureanism were insufficient models. Their goal was often ataraxia, a serene detachment achieved by withdrawing from the world's troubles. Modern humanism is the opposite: it is defined by an activist, interventionist impulse to re-order society for the sake of universal beneficence. Where did this powerful, universal ethic come from? Taylor's answer is that it is a secularized version of the Christian ideal of agape—the selfless, universal, and transformative love that God has for humanity and which Christians are called to share. For exclusive humanism to become a compelling alternative to Christianity, it had to offer a powerful moral vision of its own. It couldn't just tell people to pursue their own pleasure; it had to invent a substitute for agape, transposing the Christian ethic of universal love and care into a purely immanent framework.
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Conclusion: Living in a Constructed World
The secular age, as Charles Taylor presents it, is not a void left by the departure of religion. It is a complex, constructed reality with its own unique ways of understanding the self, society, and the cosmos—a new worldview we invented, not one we simply discovered by subtracting faith. The porous self didn't simply erode; it was paved over by a new, buffered identity forged in a disenchanted world. This disenchantment wasn't an accident, but a project driven by the religious "rage for order." And the very humanism that defines our age is not a default state, but a creative substitute for the Christian love it sought to replace. Each idea reveals another layer of our own artifice. In one of history's great ironies, many of the tools used to build this new secular home were forged in the very religious traditions they would eventually displace. This leaves us with a thought-provoking question. Now that we live within the walls of this new worldview, what have we gained, and what might we have unknowingly lost?
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