Charles Taylor on “What It Means to Be Secular”

Not­ed philos­pher Charles Tay­lor (who seems to be a Chris­t­ian) has just been inter­viewed in Books and Cul­ture on What It Means to Be Sec­u­lar.

It’s pret­ty inter­est­ing stuff. For exam­ple

To say we live in a sec­u­lar civ­i­liza­tion is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It does­n’t mean that we live in a soci­ety from which God has been expelled. I don’t think we ever will live in such a soci­ety for very long; the Com­mu­nists tried that. But the nature of this mod­ern sec­u­lar soci­ety is that it’s deeply plur­al. We have to accept that the ulti­mate ground­ing of the civ­i­liza­tion we share in com­mon is up for grabs.

and lat­er on

There is an alter­na­tive reading—namely, that we’re mov­ing to a soci­ety where more and more the con­sen­sus will be around an unbe­liev­ing vari­ant of the mod­ern social imag­i­nary. But to me this seems to be just a dream. It’s a dream that aris­es among those who are deeply into an athe­ist or non-believ­ing posi­tion and are con­vinced as a mat­ter of faith that reli­gion will grad­u­al­ly dis­ap­pear and every­one will think as they do. For them, the sec­u­lar world is one in which we all end up agree­ing fun­da­men­tal­ly that there’s no God, and that agree­ment is the basis of every­thing. That’s an impos­si­ble sce­nario, and the more they think like that, the worse it’s going to be.