The Many Altars of Modernity

Chapter 4: The Secular Discourse

To reiterate my point from an earlier chapter, so-called secularization theory was mistaken in the assumption that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion, which is why we need to replace it with a theory of pluralism, a project to which this book aims to make a modest contribution. However, the earlier theory was not completely wrong. Modernity has indeed produced a secular discourse, which enables people to deal with many areas of life without reference to any religious definitions of reality. Charles Taylor, in his massive book A Secular Age (2007), has carefully depicted a process in Western civilization by which life can be described and managed without any notions of transcendence. He calls ...