A Secular Age

A very long study, growing out of Taylor's Gifford Lectures of 1999, of what it means to live in a secular age. His guiding question is why it was almost impossible not to believe in God in Western society around 1500, while by 2000 many find unbelief easy or even inescapable. He distinguishes three senses of secularity: religion's withdrawal from public institutions, the decline of belief and practice, and a change in the conditions of belief, so that faith becomes one option among others. The book is about the third. Taylor rejects "subtraction stories", in which secularity is simply what remains when religion is removed. Instead he traces positive changes: the drive for Reform, disenchantment, the shift from a "porous" to a "buffered" self, a new moral order of mutual benefit, and the rise of exclusive humanism. Today, he argues, all live within an "immanent frame", amid a "nova" of options and cross-pressures, in an "age of authenticity".

It is the most influential modern account of secularisation, useful to believers and unbelievers alike, and it gives a vocabulary for how belief feels today.