Charles Taylor and the conditions of secularity

In the opening pages of The Secular Age Charles Taylor outlines something rather interesting about the contemporary shift to a culture of secularity - meaning specifically, an age in which religion has become very much an option.

It goes something like this:

Every society and every person lives with some conception of what human flourishing constitutes, or what a fulfilled life resembles. In religions, the best human living includes aiming at a final goal somewhat beyond ordinary human flourishing. In Christianity, loving and worshipping God is the ultimate end; though of course it is true that God wills human flourishing in Christianity. But, writes Taylor: the believer...is called upon to make a profound inner break with the goals of floursihing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of..renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God...

This isn't just masochism (as it might be with the Stoics): for Christians, renunciation is only meaningful if the thing renounced (ie life itself) is worth having in the first place:

God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose afflictions he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good...

So: flourishing is good, but not the ultimate goal of human life.

What Taylor is describing in his book is a humanism in which there are no final goals beyond human flourishing, 'nor allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing'. Never before in human history has this 'self-sufficing humanism' become a widely available option. 'A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people'.

This is an entirely new context: there is now no naive acknowledgement of the transcendent, or of goals that go beyond ordinary human flourishing. 'Naivete' says Taylor 'is now unavailable to anyone, believer, or unbeliever alike.'

The implications of what Taylor is saying for Christian missions are enormous. We live in a completely new context of believing/unbelieving. Arguably, in Australia this has been a development only since the 1960s! The is no precedent (if Taylor is right) for missions to a society in which, en masse, people do not see belief in some transcedent other as a necessity. Believing is entirely contigent for Mr and Mrs Average living in their cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The temptation of course will be to cast Christianity entirely in terms of human flourishing - and there are left and right-wing versions of this...