By DAVID BROOKS Published: July 8, 2013 on NYTimes.com
I might as well tell you upfront that this column is a book report. Since 2007, when it was published, academics have been raving to me about Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age.” Courses, conferences and symposia have been organized around it, but it is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.
As someone who tries to report on the world of ideas, I’m going to try to summarize Taylor’s description of what it feels like to live in an age like ours, without, I hope, totally butchering it.
Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?
This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.
Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.
Advances in human understanding — not only in science but also in art, literature, manners, philosophy and, yes, theology and religious practice — give us a richer understanding of our natures. Shakespeare helped us see character in more intricate ways. An improvement in mores means we take less pleasure from bear-baiting, hanging and other forms of public cruelty. We have a greater understanding of how nature works.
These achievements did make it possible to construct a purely humanistic account of the meaningful life. It became possible for people to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge.
But, Taylor continues, these achievements also led to more morally demanding lives for everybody, believer and nonbeliever. Instead of just fitting docilely into a place in the cosmos, the good person in secular society is called upon to construct a life in the universe. She’s called on to exercise all her strength.
People are called to greater activism, to engage in more reform. Religious faith or nonfaith becomes more a matter of personal choice as part of a quest for personal development.
This shift in consciousness leads to some serious downsides. When faith is a matter of personal choice, even believers experience much more doubt. As James K.A. Smith of Comment Magazine, who was generous enough to share his superb manuscript of a book on Taylor, put it, “We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.”
Individuals don’t live embedded in tight social orders; they live in buffered worlds of private choices. Common action, Taylor writes, gives way to mutual display. Many people suffer from a malaise. They remember that many people used to feel connected to an enchanted, transcendent order, but they feel trapped in a flat landscape, with diminished dignity: Is this all there is?
But these downsides are more than made up for by the upsides. Taylor can be extremely critical of our society, but he is grateful and upbeat. We are not moving to a spiritually dead wasteland as, say, the fundamentalists imagine. Most people, he observes, are incapable of being indifferent to the transcendent realm. “The yearning for eternity is not the trivial and childish thing it is painted as,” Taylor writes.
People are now able to pursue fullness in an amazing diversity of different ways. But Taylor observes a general pattern. They tend not to want to live in a world closed off from the transcendent, reliant exclusively on the material world. We are not, Taylor suggests, sliding toward pure materialism.
We are, instead, moving toward what he calls a galloping spiritual pluralism. People in search of fullness are able to harvest the intellectual, cultural and spiritual gains of the past 500 years. Poetry and music can alert people to the realms beyond the ordinary.
Orthodox believers now live with a different tension: how to combine the masterpieces of humanism with the central mysteries of their own faiths. This pluralism can produce fragmentations and shallow options, and Taylor can eviscerate them, but, over all, this secular age beats the conformity and stultification of the age of fundamentalism, and it allows for magnificent spiritual achievement.
I’m vastly oversimplifying a rich, complex book, but what I most appreciate is his vision of a “secular” future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.
The New Zealand Herald has recently highlighted the on-going debate about religious instruction in classes. Specifically, Bible in Schools.
Nicholas Jones, NZ Herald journalist, states that, “One in three state primary and intermediate schools teaches religious instruction, according to a survey which has triggered a debate over what children are being taught – and the value of it.
The survey, sent to more than 1800 schools, reveals 578 have religious instruction classes.
Of these, 56 say they do not know the content of those lessons.”
Please read his stories here and participate on survey if it is still active:
Following are some of the reader’s views submitted to the NZ Herald website:
• Richard Clark: “Religion is a personal choice – it has no place in state-funded schools. Simple really.”
• Christine Richardson: “While some kids already will get some of this education at home, some kids aren’t and this is a positive input into their lives and can only be a good thing.”
• Brian Lehtonen: “Children do not need supernatural instruction in school. The values that the church sees as their own are not. These are universal human values. The world needs more adults who do not indulge in make-believe.”
• Stefan Nogaj: “The content being taught is always positive and if anything instils beneficial life skills. And remember, the mention of God is in our national anthem so naturally children have the right to understand the context of God’s inclusion.”
• Andrew Robson: “The issue as I see it is they teach the Bible as fact. This leads to major confusion when my kids get home and I try and tell them that the Bible is a story that some people believe and some don’t. If they are going to teach Bible in class they should teach it hand in hand with evolution and Darwin’s theory.”
The announcement came in an Executive Response to a review conducted by the BBC Trust into the breadth of opinion that is permitted to be heard on the BBC. This included a review of the BBC’s religious output.
It’s simply unbelievable how unreasonable some secularists can be
NZCN director, Glyn Carpenter
“By my reckoning 3 minutes amounts to 0.2% of the day’s airtime – and this for a viewpoint reflecting the belief of significant sized groups of the population of most Western countries.
“That means that predominantly secular or “non-religious” comment, articles, programmes, etc already account pretty much for 99.8% of airtime. And these secularists are not happy with that. They want to either eradicate the last 0.2% or else have their views included within that 0.2%, when they already dominate virtually all of the airtime.
“Doesn’t seem very tolerant to me. Good on the BBC for standing up to this sort of bigotry”.
In fact, perhaps we should start a campaign for half of the programming to be religious comment, including half of the reporters, etc, based on simple population numbers?
PROFESSOR JOHN LENNOX, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY, SPEAKS AT THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST IN WESTMINSTER HALL, 25TH JUNE 2013. PHOTO BY CLARE KENDALL.
(republished from EAUK 25 June 2013)
Christians need to have courage to talk about the Bible in public life, a leading academic told a gathering in the British parliament this morning.
Professor John Lennox from Oxford University was addressing around 600 people in the Houses of Parliament at the annual National Prayer Breakfast organised by the Bible Society.
Professor Lennox described atheism as a “delusion” and a “fairy tale for those afraid of the light”.
He urged Christians to have the courage to speak out about their faith in the public sphere and cited the example of Tyndale’s translation of the Bible into English 400 years ago.
Professor Lennox regularly speaks out against an atheistic worldview, calling Richard Dawkins “wrong”. He blamed new atheism for “the moral drift” in today’s society and rebutted claims that science and religion are opposed to each other.
“God is not the same kind of explanation as science is,” he said. “God is the explanation of why there is a universe at all in which science can be done.”
He added: “The playing field is not level since atheism has become so dominant – and is often regarded as the default position in the media.
“If we teach people that morality is an illusion, they will begin to believe it. Many already have with the result that our institutions are awash with scandal, families are increasingly fractured, people are lonelier than ever and trust is at an all-time low.
The Evangelical Alliance’s (UK) general director Steve Clifford, who attended the prayer breakfast, praised the organisers for another sterling event and added: “It was fantastic to be there in Westminster with hundreds of people. The highlight for me was hearing John Lennox’s unapologetic defence of the Christian faith. It was one of the best talks of its kind I have ever heard.”
Earlier this morning, in a statement, prime minister David Cameron, said: “It is encouraging that Christianity still plays such a vital role in our national life. We are a country with a Christian heritage and we should not be afraid to say so.”
Matthew van Duyvenbode, head of campaigns, advocacy and media at Bible Society, said: “In a society searching for deeper meaning, a compelling witness to hope is required. Within the Scriptures, we find a tantalising vision of hope one which stimulates, provokes and invites us to become the signs of hope for others.”
John Anderson’s message at the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Annual Breakfast highlights the significance of the Christian faith in Australia (much the same as it is in New Zealand) and exposes a reluctance by the media to reporting on the faith of high-profile Christians
