63 pages • 2 hours read
Charles TaylorA Secular Age
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Turning Point”
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Providential Deism”
Chapter 6 examines how the transition from traditional religious beliefs to Deism facilitated the emergence of exclusive humanism. Understanding God’s role in the world underwent significant changes during the late 17th and 18th centuries.
During this time, the concept of divine purpose became more focused on human flourishing, reducing the broader, inscrutable purposes traditionally attributed to God. Thinkers like Matthew Tindal argued that God’s primary concern was humanity’s mutual happiness and benefit rather than demanding worship or love beyond this.
Another significant change was the diminished role of divine grace. Deism proposed that human reason alone could understand and adhere to the rational order of the universe without the need for divine intervention. Even those who maintained traditional beliefs in grace found it becoming less central to the spiritual outlook of the time.
This period also saw a decline in the sense of mystery in religion. The mysteries of faith, such as the problem of evil or divine intervention, were increasingly downplayed or dismissed by Deist thinkers. God’s providence was now a clear, rational order humans could comprehend and follow without requiring supernatural insight.
Furthermore, there were diminished expectations of transformation in human beings beyond their current condition. The traditional Christian belief that humans partake in divine life was increasingly confined to the afterlife, losing its relevance to everyday religious life.
These shifts are due to various historical and social factors, including a decline in religious fervor, a turn toward reason-based religion, and the success of elites in imposing order and discipline on society. This growing confidence in human reason and morality eventually created a cultural space where exclusive humanism, a worldview that sees human flourishing as achievable without divine reference, could take root.
Next, the chapter explores the “immanentization” of moral power, focusing on how different thinkers reinterpreted moral inspiration as something that arises from within human beings rather than a divine source. This is related to Kant’s concept of the universal will, in which the capacity to act according to universal laws is an awe-inspiring inner power. This power, capable of lifting individuals to the demands of justice and benevolence, represents a new form of moral inspiration that is human-centered rather than divine.
Rousseau’s concept of universal sympathy, states that moral power is an inherent part of human emotional makeup that historical distortions have suppressed. This perspective views moral inspiration as stemming from deep emotional instincts aligned with selfless love rather than from reason or universal principles.
The chapter also discusses Feuerbach’s vision, which suggests that the powers attributed to God are human potentialities and that one can rediscover moral inspiration and strength within oneself. These shifts represent genuinely new modes of moral experience and life rather than just new explanations for existing moral feelings. Modern secular humanism did not emerge by discarding religious and metaphysical beliefs, instead, it was a significant cultural and intellectual achievement involving discovering new moral sources within humanity.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Impersonal Order”
Chapter 7 discusses the shift in understanding God from an active agent interacting with humanity to a more distant, deistic conception where God is the architect of a universe governed by unchanging laws. This change represents a move along a continuum—from seeing God as a personal, interactive being to viewing the universe as operating independently, with God either indifferent or non-existent. This shift is significant in the development of modern secularism, as it reflects the movement from traditional religious beliefs toward Deism and, eventually, atheism.
This shift was not purely driven by reason, which oversimplifies the complex interplay of factors that led to the rise of Deism. Rather, the decline of a cosmos filled with spirits and meaningful causal powers, replaced by a universe governed by impersonal laws, was both a cause and effect of disenchantment. Natural science and historiography developments reinforced this new view, which began to treat historical and religious narratives with skepticism, applying the same critical standards to sacred and secular histories.
Deism reduced God’s role in the world but did not eliminate religious sentiment or the belief in God’s moral governance. Instead, it reframed these beliefs in a way that aligned with the emerging scientific worldview, where God’s role was limited to creating the universe and its laws rather than active intervention in daily human affairs.
The chapter also explores how this impersonal order influenced ethics and social organization. Modern society, emphasizing rational, law-governed structures, moved away from the personal relationships and communal ties that characterized earlier religious communities. This shift contributed to developing an ethic based on rules and laws rather than virtues or personal relationships, aligning with the modern moral order.
The chapter concludes that the impersonal order, driven by scientific progress and a moral distaste for the old religion, significantly contributed to the secularization of society. This shift laid the groundwork for the modern tension between belief and unbelief and the struggle to reconcile personal religious experience with a world increasingly understood through the lens of impersonal, rational structures.
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 argues that secularization shifted from a framework where divine authority was central to one where human reason and autonomy became primary. The examination of Deism and the Enlightenment’s reimagining of God’s role—from an active agent to a distant architect—illustrates a key step in secularism’s historical and philosophical development. This shift is not about the outright rejection of religion but a significant restructuring that reduced God’s direct involvement in human affairs, aligning religious belief with emerging rational and scientific paradigms. This reconfiguration allowed belief in God to coexist with a secular order but in a diminished capacity. This process created a space for exclusive humanism, which centers on human flourishing without recourse to the divine.
The immanentization of moral power moves moral authority from divine to human-centered sources. This shift marks a new understanding of moral action founded on human reason, emotion, and will. By highlighting figures like Kant and Rousseau, Part 2 underscores how these shifts reflect the Impact of Secularization on Society. The emphasis on internal moral sources suggests a new way of grounding ethical behavior that does not rely on external divine authority but on the human capacity for rational self-legislation and empathy.
The shift to a deistic or atheistic worldview was not simply a logical consequence of scientific advancement but part of a broader cultural reimagining of reality. The challenges of religious belief and unbelief in a secular age come from this reordering of the world, which reshapes ethical and social life around principles no longer inherently tied to a divine source. This is key to Taylor’s argument that modernity involves new tension between belief and unbelief, where both must navigate a landscape dominated by rational, secular norms.
At this stage, ethics shifted from being based on virtues and communal bonds to rule-based, rational systems. Modern secular society, while moving away from traditional, religiously grounded ethics, still grapples with foundational questions about meaning, morality, and human purpose. This highlights the importance of The Search for Meaning and Moral Order. A Secular Age is less about recounting historical events and more about exploring an understanding of how the secular age redefines the possibilities of belief. Its ideological stance is that secularism represents a significant philosophical shift that reshapes belief and the frameworks in which belief is possible.
This is important because it challenges the idea that secularism is the inevitable victory of reason over faith. Western society’s identification with the Industrial Age, which is considered the height of the modern era, has enshrined the idea that progress equals scientific and economic advancement. This mirrors the Enlightenment values of reason over religion and quantitative over qualitative analysis. Because the West associates science and innovation with progress toward humanity fulfilling its potential, religion and spirituality are often seen as forces that hold society back. The text emphasizes that, on the contrary, secularization evolved from religion rather than replaced it.
