How (Not) to Be Secular

Metadata

Author: James K. A. Smith
Full Title: How (Not) to Be Secular
Category: #books

Highlights

“Living in the enchanted, porous world of our ancestors was inherently living socially”
a premium is placed on consensus, and “turning ‘heretic’ ” is “not just a personal matter.”
As long as the common weal is bound up in collectives rites, devotions, allegiances, it couldn’t be seen just as an individual’s own business that he break ranks, even less that he blaspheme or try to desecrate the rite. There was immense common motivation to bring him back into line”
So if there is going to be room to not believe (or believe in exclusive humanism), then this very sociality or communitarianism has to be removed as yet another obstacle.
The buffered self is essentially the self which is aware of the possibility of disengagement”
The spiritual disciplines of the saint are a lot to ask of the nursemaid or the peasant laborer who is pressed by more immediate concerns. This equates to a tension between “the demands of the total transformation which the faith calls to” and “the requirements of ordinary ongoing human life” (p. 44).2 In Christendom this tension is not resolved, but inhabited. First, the social body makes room for
Rhythms and seasons create opportunities to live the tension (this can be as simple as no meat on Fridays or during Lent).
Carnival is a sanctioned way to blow off the steam that builds up from the pressure of living under the requirements of eternity.
Together these commitments begin to propel a kind of perfectionism about society that wouldn’t have been imagined earlier. Any gap between the ideal and the real is going to be less and less tolerated, either because more is going to be expected of society in terms of general sanctification, or because less is going to be expected and self-transcendence will be simply eclipsed.
high expectations of sanctification now spill beyond the walls of the monastery.
By railing against vice and “crank[ing] up the terrifying visions of damnation,” Protestant preachers effectively prepared “the desertion of a goodly part of their flock to humanism”
- Tags: #favorite
- Note: With the rest lapsing into “ain’t it awful”-ism Actually not, if this is referring to the New England/Calvinist style …
it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.
Taylor is interested in the ways that, in the Latin West, Christianity was both an unwitting progenitor and a reflector of the new modern social imaginary, even as it was trying to resist it.
Such an active God would violate the buffer zone we have created to protect ourselves from such incursions.
Taylor sees Christianity summed up in the theme of communion: “the central concept which makes sense of the whole is communion, or love, defining both the nature of God, and our relation to him” (p. 279).
the war is constantly running out of steam in modern civilization, in spite of the efforts of zealous minorities”
So religion isn’t just about a set of propositional beliefs regarding certain kinds of supernatural entities; religion isn’t merely an epistemology and a metaphysics. It is more fundamentally about a way of life — and a “religious” way of life, on Taylor’s account, is one that calls us to more than the merely worldly, more than just “human flourishing.”
“the heart of ‘secularization’ ” is precisely “a decline in the transformation perspective”
It’s not just that belief in supernatural entities becomes implausible; it’s that pursuing a way of life that values something beyond human flourishing becomes unimaginable.
And so we get the ironic reality: we choose to renounce the priority of individual choice; our quest leads us back to the ancien régime. That is what it means to live in a secular3 age.
Why do some not recognize that their construal of the frame as open or closed is just that — a construal, a “take” on things? In particular, why do secularists so confidently assume that this is just “the way things are” — the “obvious” and only thing to conclude?
isn’t it ironic that so many Christian apologists are committed to a foundationalist conception of reason and hence a “classical” apologetics? Such Christian responses already cede ground to a “closed” take.
Rather what happened is that experience was carved into shape by a powerful theory which posited the primacy of the individual, the neutral, the intra-mental as the locus of certainty”
those believers who strenuously seek to defend the “supernatural” and the “intervention” of transcendence are already conceding the paradigm of the immanent frame