Pastor John Wright

Over the weekend I began Charles Taylor's new book. Secularity obviously cuts across my concerns and life. I was profoundly shaped by the positivism of the 1950s and 60s. To work in the academy or the church one must deal with secularity. To work in both at the same time one must come to an understanding of its insidious nature. It was the post-structuralists, such as Foucault and Baudrillard, who helped break the disciplinary chain of the secular so that I was able to see the disciplinary powers at work underneath it that belied its supposedly emanciatory claims. Of course, the emancipatory claims of the secular still continue today -- the books by Dawkins and Hitchens show the popularity of this mythology. But it was the work of persons like Hauerwas, Barth, Milbank, MacIntyre, Lindbeck and their friends and students who have helped me think the secular without reifying it. Of course, they have taught me that the ultimately capitulation to the secular would be to attempt to take control of the "secular apparatus" of the state as a Christian -- the futility of this strategy is seen in the utter moral, political, and intellectual wastage of the American political religious right at the end of the Bush administration. Instead of a strategy of control of the secular by making it 'sacred', the church must learn tactics of resistance to not let our life be colonialized by these forces. This colonial power runs straight through my body, the bodies of my students, and the bodies of my parishioners. I literally feel this in struggles of faith and doubt, allegiance to various groups, that we experience, all of us, because we live "in a secular age."

We must always remember that the "saeculum" is the time between the times of Christ's coming when the authority of a coercive "street gangs", the city of man in Augustinian terms, exists alongside the city of God. One of the key movements in modernist secularity is when this chronological understanding of the secular becomes a "space" so that a distinction might be drawn between the "secular" and the "sacred." The state becomes responsible for the secular, and grants, in its beneficence, a temporal amnesty over the "sacred" as long as the "sacred" capitulates ultimately to the power of the state. As a San Diego policemen once told me after arresting a person in one of our church services, "the church is ultimately just like K-Mart."

Part of what I try to do is in teaching and scholarship is to de-naturalize the "secular" by arguing that its counterpart, "the religious," does not exist except in imaginary projections shaped by contemporary interests of power. If "the religious" does not exist except nominally, then, of course, neither can the "secular" and its generator, the modernist liberal state (and its Marxist inversion) exist except nominally. It is with intellectual and pastoral interest that I began reading Charles Taylor's new book.

Taylor takes an interesting approach to the issue of our contemporary context. He asks, "What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?" (p. 1). He records three interrelated senses of what is means to live "in a secular age":

(1) Whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. . . . . Religion or its absence is largely a private matter. (p. 1)

(2) secularity consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church. (p. 2)

(3) I believe that an examination of this age as secular is worth taking up in a third sense, closely related to the second, and not without connection to the first. This would focus on the conditions of belief. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace. . . . The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. (p. 3)

As a pastor and theologian, the lack of reference to God in the state does not bother me at all for the God of the state, at least in the United States, is an idol, not the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. What is a concern, however, is the totalitarian claims of the state that generates a "private realm" where faith is relegated to "value" rather than a commitment to Reality, to what is True, Good, and Beautiful, as revealed by the Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is that privatization of the life of the church that I have argued results in the secularity of #2 -- the falling off of participation in the life of the church. I have argued in my books that it is precisely the attempt to accommodate to secularity #1 that results in secularity #2.

Yet Taylor's distinctions helps me see that the real issue is secularity #3. Who can deny that we live in a society "in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others" (p. 3)? To ask the question of the conditions for belief, particularly conditions for belief in the Triune God in the historic evangelical, orthodox, and catholic tradition of the church catholic, takes us right to the core of the witness and mission of the church catholic -- and the church catholic does not exist except in local congregations -- today.

Taylor rightfully states that "All beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated. This is what philosophers, influenced by Wittgenstein, Heidegger or Polyani, have called the â€˜backgroundâ€™" (p. 13). This helps us understand that faith always comes to us as gift, what from human perspective is nothing less than the presence of the Holy Spirit. Yet it also reminds us that it is in the fullness of the gift of this tacit context where evangelism takes place, where the Spirit's sanctification occurs, and in its diminishing, where personal struggles with and even abandonment of faith occurs. When the tacit background of the "secular" overwhelms the tacit background that is the name of the Spirit's bringing forth the holy witness of the church in its good order, the falling away, secular #2, is bound to occur. Christians call that "God's judgment" -- or as Stan Hauerwas likes to say, "God is killing the church."

Taylor writes as a philosopher -- and therefore has limitations that are evident in his refusal to acknowledge as a philosopher God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Yet I am looking forward to his analysis, and even hope to share more his insights from the introduction as I work through the book.