Almost everyone would agree that the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly over the years. This book takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Shawn Baldwin

A Secular Age

from a niche conception to widespread implementation; from theory to an accepted manifestation of society; and, in the moral order, from a status of being realizable (in theory, over time) to implementable anon, and this latter along two further axes. The SI is viewed through its strains of  The Economy ,  The Public Sphere , and  Popular Sovereignty . The first named concerns evolved understandings of the use of markets and commerce as a way of imposing order and progress upon society—God's perfection as a mechanism for disciplined and flourishing human society by means of rational outcomes of self-interest and public interest working in the dialectic. The second is the creation of the concept of a non-political, nationwide forum of human agency via discourse in some form of medium (print, radio, television, computer) in which ideas and desires for policy are debated and made known in influential ways to the political forces that are not explicitly a part of this sphere, totally unlike any previous polities. The third is the individuating meme that comes from the evolved conception, via Reform, of Natural Law that provides sovereign rights to the individual apart from any political structure or hierarchy, in  Profane Time —not the  Higher Time  of eternity, mythological origins, holy events that infused previous understandings. This Natural Law reflects the order and purpose God has endowed man with in nature, a will to foment order and progress and human flourishing, in odd paradox at times, but capable of being discerned through Reason. Whereas in past societies there was hierarchy and complementarity, where roles like King and duke and Pope carried a dual body—one the human being currently so titled, the second the function of the role that perdured no matter who held the position—now society consists of individuals who are their own agents via their unique identity endowed with rights through Natural Law.  Two modern political competitors are republic/democracy vs absolute monarchy. The French Revolution was more violent and chaotic than the American because the latter had an avowed political structure, precepts, and theory derived from Grotius/Locke that was widely accepted and grasped by the public, whereas the French was driven by Rousseau's ideas and which posited disinterested Reason as a vice, a corrupting meme; so he proclaimed the synthesis of self-interest with public good that reflected the  Virtuous Man , but which endowed the Revolution with religious imagery and tones and made the political structure imperfectly formed, with a minority of  Virtuous Republicans  attempting to glean the  Public Will  via verbose public theatre.  The moral order was also highlighted by the growing trends of  Civility ,  Courtesy  and  Self-Discipline  as part of the mode of  Civilization  that was perceived to be the  enlightened  state for man promised through the application of reason that God had inhered within his creations, natural and living. This taming of violence, disorder, chaos, and the overawing by spirits and the supernatural reflected man moving from his previous state of being unaware of God's mechanistic purpose into a modern perception that ordered living and the subduction of the passions under the cool regimen of dispassionate rationality allowed for the flourishing of man, society and world as per the unfolding, regimented plan of God. The latter would not interfere with the progression of his structured creation via the likes of miracles or blessings because it would be at cross-purposes with the plan gleaned from natural law. His  Grace  was no longer salvation as much as the unveiling of this order available to be implemented by man; and the prodding of the reward of eternal life in Heaven began to outdistance its converse, the threats of eternal punishment in Hell, as another goad to Godlike adherence and behaviour.  This evolution is not a conflict of  Idealist  as against  Materialist  interpretations of history, but rather, as Taylor stresses, an intermingling of the two in which neither can be elevated at the expense of the other. Material situations and environs influenced ideas and desires, but those same material settings came about from ideas and desires whose working out had a participatory effect. So neither side is the  truth , but Taylor is concentrating on how ideas came to influence their own furthering and material outcomes.  The mid-stage of this evolution was  Providential Deism , of which there were four driving forces:   1:  Loss of a sense of purpose—the world was ordered such as to reveal itself to our enquiry, with no transendent aims for ourselves.  2:  That God's grace was no longer a necessary component of our end, but solely our flourishing.  3:  A loss of a sense of mystery about the world.  4:  The determination that there was no transformation of ourselves as part of a teleological communion or endpoint transcendent union with God, either in this world or the afterlife.  This change, taking place in part due to exhaustion from 150 years of religious strife, saw an antagonism towards both  fundamentalism , the sureness of belief that one holds, and  enthusiasm , the belief that one has found a  superior  way to achieve God's grace or carry out his purposes, through such as monasticism, celibacy, preaching revelation, etc. There is also the growing assuredness that our immanent sense of  bienfaisance  (beneficience) would, through disinterested application of reason, drive our motive actions.  Deism is also sparked by the Enlightenment antipathy to Christianity in the form of its obscurantist and supernatural trappings, particularly in the Catholic church—wine and bread, saintly intercession, possession, etc. But the modern acceptance of  Reason suborning faith  in an inevitable manner, once science was in ascendance, cannot explain the entirety. Indeed, Taylor states that  Exclusive Humanism  could not have become so widespread via any form other than the Reform -> Deism -> Secular evolution, in which the vital elements of flourishing, order, and beneficience were morphed into God's natural plan for his created beings, lending the the ability to supplant God with mankind as both the author, actor, and enabler of these changes.  Taylor then details how this impersonal distancing arose within elites, such as Gibbon and Hume, in the seventeenth century, and which very distancing allowed them an ironical tone that seemed convincingly and superlatively set against the  hot-headed  fire of fundamentalism. The framework of  Modern Moral Order  realized through structure, discipline, commerce—the entirety of Man finding answer for his life in a mechanistic universe whose purposes, workings, and societal constructs can all be calmly reasoned from within—allowed the  stadial  shift in consciousness in which Deism could spread; and of the latter, via its conception of a Jesus stripped of all qualities but the moral and paradigmatic—and a God who cannot interfere with the  perfect  machine he has created—opened the door by means of this stadial shift to forthcoming and widespread unbelief. Taylor also does a solid job of presenting how ancient philosophy was at conflict with Christianity in several ways, and how the inhering communion with God, hierarchical relationships, oneness in a universe whose purposes could be touched and joined through Higher Time, produced a mindset whose workings became totally unconvincing, because unattainable, to the new consciousness evolved/shifted to through the Reform efforts and the new concepts of progressive society in history.

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