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Taylor proposes a question which he repeats throughout the lengthy analysis: ‘how we moved from a condition in 1500 in which it was hard not to believe in God, to our present situation just after 2000, where this has become quite easy for many.’ He correctly observes, ‘Many people are happy living for goals which are purely immanent; they live in a way that takes no account of the transcendent.’ His resulting explanation is as much historical as philosophical, and the arguments deployed take the reader back to the cultures of the ancient world; the main part of the book carries us through a tightly drawn series of themes relating the various transformations of thought that have occurred. It is all extremely well accomplished. The problems are with the use of the historical data rather than the philosophical. Thus matters of historical change are sometimes judged from only a single perspective — one conducive to the identification of subsequent ‘secularisation’ — when in reality other features of the same historical phenomena could furnish evidence for other conclusions. This becomes crucial when dealing with the nature of the social transmission of ideas. Taylor is discussing the thought of elites, not of the demos, and he is conscious of this yet seemingly has no way of adjusting his analysis. How could he? The inarticulate mass of humanity, in the blessed days before electronic communication afflicted the world with mass ignorance in an apparently authoritative form, left little evidence of what they thought about religious, or any, belief. Taylor depends heavily not only on intellectual history but also on the kind of trade practices indulged in by art historians. In this unsatisfactory genre the cultural artefacts of an age are assumed to be embodiments of its essential nature and attitudes. A lot of cultural evidence, however, is simply evidence of style, of fashion, of social emulation among the predominant elites. These were, of course, the same people whose preoccupations did indeed stamp the times in which they lived. But Taylor is trying to do something more than record the evidences of their successful moulding of the intellectual culture. He is aware of the subtle ways in which elite ideas trickle down or get imposed, yet he is also seeking to quantify the degree to which the inhabitants of each age regard religion. The data are not in fact available, and Taylor usually ends up by referring to ‘people’ in an indeterminate manner, as though an inclusive category has been recognised without the formality of establishing how it is constituted. Of the 12th century, for example, he writes, ‘People begin to be interested in nature, in the life around them.’ Does he mean the peasantry in the open fields, or the feudal magnates with their bludgeoning authority, or the weedy monks scratching away at their parchments? There is an absence of historical evidence for rather a large number of the historical assessments this study wants to make.
The concepts of ‘secularisation’ and ‘the secular’ are extremely difficult ones, and for much of the long period encompassed in this book the sacred and the secular were not separated in thought or practice. Taylor restricts himself to the Latin Christianity of the West, to western Europe and North America. To make the study manageable he is wise to do so. But the history of Orthodox Christianity in eastern Europe and the Middle East discloses a quite different series of religious perceptions. They hold a mirror up to developments in the West, and it would have been ideologically useful to have had occasional cross-references to a spiritual culture, and a developing Christian understanding, which varied considerably from the West. While the Latins committed their exegesis of religious truth to scholarship, the Orthodox regarded it as deriving from the lex orandi, liturgy and the observance of rites. Orthodoxy and the other eastern Churches are arguably more faithful descendants of early Christianity, and have not, until very recent times, fallen into the swampy terrain which is claiming the western Church. Can anything be learned from a comparison? It would have been instructive to learn from one.
What we do learn (eventually on page 437) is that Taylor’s ‘own view of “secularisation” has been shaped by my own perspective as a believer’. This is not at any point allowed to detract from the admirable objectivity he shows in presenting differing viewpoints. This is a book that can be relied on for fair judgment. The problem remains the historical holes. In the second half of the survey, dealing with the modern world, they recur thick and fast. The growth of secularisation in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, is plotted mostly in relation to the ideas of thinkers. But it was, in the western societies with which Taylor is exclusively concerned, as much the product of changes in the practice of government — its causes are historical. The rise of the collectivist state simply took over responsibility for areas like education, welfare and social planning, which had formerly been the preserve of the Church. And in ideas terms, for every cocky atheist there were very many more whose regret at the loss of faith around them was far greater than any sense of personal liberation from the thrall of religious custom. A partial presentation of historical reality in the schools, combined with the social romanticism lined up for the cameras of television docudrama producers, are the present conveyances of secularisation in only a limited sense: far more decisive, in the construction of a secular world, is the collapse of authority in morality and individual choice in matters which once were determined by traditional wisdom.
Taylor’s important study ends with a brief and rather Delphic epilogue. ‘My case,’ he concludes, ‘is not only that RMN [Reform Master Narrative] is clearly important, and obviously provided the framework for 18th-century break-out; but also that ID [Intellectual Deviation] by itself wasn’t enough.’ It needs to be repeated that the writing is sometimes dense.
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