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by Charles Taylor
Harvard University Press, 2007 874 pp $39.95
RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights—a commitment that does not follow from atheism as such.
Taylor is Catholic, and he is clearly trying to make the case for theisms like his own. Taylor’s history refutes what he calls the “subtraction view” of the movement towa...
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