It's the motivation that's missing!

But there is also a more radical critique of such code fixation that Taylor’s really after: codes don’t make people care for their neighbor. In other words, codes are inadequate as moral sources precisely because they do not touch on the dynamics of moral motivation. It was not a code or a rule that produced forgiveness in Nelson Mandela. This points up precisely what's missing in modern moral philosophy: attention to motivation. “For clearly moving higher in the dimension of reconciliation and trust involves a kind of motivational conversion” (p. 707) — and no code can bring that about. So the “nomolatry” and “code fetishism” of modern liberal society are an inadequate source for morality. In other words, modernity can't have what it wants on its own terms.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 128–29 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
That's the end of this book. Not sure that having read it will make tackling Taylor's massive book any easier! But hopefully you learned something. I know I did. Next up will be Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah.
</idle musing>

Whence violence?

And so the impulsion to violence cannot be effaced from our genes or our hormones or what have you.

But for Taylor, “this seems radically insufficient. It’s not that body chemistry is not a crucial factor, but that it never operates alone in human life, but only through the meanings that things have for us. The hormonal explanation doesn’t tell us why people are susceptible to certain meanings” (p. 659, emphasis added). So the merely biological account is insufficient; we need a “meta-biological” account, a cultural account that explains how violence means in our secular age. If a purely biological account is what’s left to us in a “closed” take, then Taylor is scoring an apologetic point: maybe a “closed” take doesn’t really have the resources to make sense of our secular age; and maybe that opens the door for a closer consideration of an “open” take.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 118 (all emphasis by Smith)

The anthropological turn in theology

Indeed, if one makes the “anthropological turn” and begins to affirm that all God really cares about is our flourishing, then aspects of Christianity begin to look untenable: “If the good that God wills for us doesn’t just include, but consists entirely in human flourishing, what sense does it make to sacrifice some part of this in order to serve God?” Sacrifice becomes untenable, even unthinkable (hence the rejection of traditional theories of the atonement). There is no room left in our plausibility structures to make sense of divine violence — which again undercuts any notion of “atonement” (p. 649). Indeed, the penal substitutionary account of the atonement can only look “monstrous.” Which is why the cross drops out; what becomes important is the life of Christ — what he says or teaches (p. 650). We're on our way to Unitarianism.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 115 (all emphasis by Smith)

<idle musing>
OK, I'm no fan of penal substitutionary atonement, especially as popularly understood, but he has a very good point here. As Simon Gathercole pointed out, there is some kind of substition in the atonement. My issue is w/the penal part. Scot McKnight is correct that there is no single theory of atonement that covers all aspects of atonement, so there is a place for substitionary atonement.
</idle musing>

Lay on the pressure!

In some sense, the challenge is actually intensified for exclusive humanism, precisely because it can only admit the immanent: if the maximal demand is going to be met, it has to be met by us and in “the here and now” (or at least within “secular” time). And if we don’t reach it, we have only ourselves to blame. Christianity, on the other hand, can be ambivalent, or even a tad pessimistic about the maximal demand being realized by us in the here and now because the transformationist perspective is also eschatological. For Christianity, “this is a transformation which cannot be completed in history” (p. 643). This is why “Christians don’t really ‘have the solution’ to the dilemma” either: because “the direction they point to cannot be demonstrated as right; it must be taken on faith”; and because “we can't exhibit fully what it means, lay it out in a code or a fully-specified life-form, but only point to the exemplary lives of certain trail-blazing people and communities” (p. 643, emphasis added). You might say Christian eschatology buys time to meet the maximal demand — time exclusive humanism doesn't (can’t) have.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 112–13 (all emphasis by Smith)

Beyond humanism

If Enlightenment humanism is itself a mode of “transcending” humanity, then it’s not surprising to see in modernity a reaction to this internal to immanence — that is, reactions that have no interest in affirming transcendence but are nonetheless responding to the pressures of humanism. So, Taylor suggests, this is not simply a binary debate between belief and unbelief; it is a triangular debate between (1) secular humanists, (2) neo-Nietzschean antihumanists, and (3) “those who acknowledge some good beyond life” (p. 636).—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 110 (emphasis original)

Just a change of masters (no, not a political post!)

There is a certain irony, however: while the therapeutic was meant to throw off the guilt and burden of spiritual responsibility, and hence the scowl of the clergy and confessor, “now we are forced to go to new experts, therapists, doctors, who exercise the kind of control that is appropriate over blind and compulsive mechanisms” (p. 620). In the name of securing our freedom, we swap submission to the priest for submission to the therapist.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 107

<idle musing>
Always looking for freedom in the wrong places… As The Who sang, "Get down on my knees and pray that I won't get fooled again." But we do.
</idle musing>

The move to victimhood

Consider, for example, two very different ways to account for evil. If we’re going to affirm ordinary life, then that needs to translate into some affirmation of the goodness of embodied, material life. But if we’re going to talk about the goodness of ordinary life, we also need some account of what goes — or has gone — wrong, some account of evil and brokenness. Taylor is interested in the significant cultural shifts in how we talk about this — from talking about sin to talking about sickness. These are two very different hermeneutics, two different ways of construing our current condition: the “spiritual” versus the “therapeutic.” “What was formerly sin is often now seen as sickness” (p. 618). The moral is transferred to a therapeutic register; in doing so we move from responsibility to victimhood.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 106–7

Self-sufficient…

We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence. Indeed, Taylor emphasizes the ubiquity of the immanent frame: it is “common to all of us in the modern West” (p. 543). So the question isn’t whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but how. Some inhabit it as a closed frame with a brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open frame with skylights open to transcendence.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 93 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
I don't know about you, but I'm dwelling in one with the skylights open!
</idle musing>

Consumer culture, the new church

What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture — the “stronger form of magic found in the ever-new glow of consumer products (p. 490). As a result, the expressivist revolution (1) “undermined some of the large-scale religious forms of the Age of Mobilization” and (2) “undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order” (p. 492). In fact, “where the link between disciplines and civilizational order is broken, but that between Christian faith and the disciplines remains unchallenged, expressivism and the conjoined sexual revolution has alienated many people from the churches” (p. 493).—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 89

The fences are down

Indeed, the MMO [modern moral order] is the “ethical base” for the soft relativism of the expressivist imaginary: Do your own thing, who am I to judge? The only sin is intolerance. Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-'60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values that were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic; p. 484). What erodes in the last half century is precisely these limits on individual fulfillment (p. 485).—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 87

It's the storyline!

Taylor suggests that those who convert to unbelief “because of science” are less convinced by data and more moved by the form of the story that science tells and the self-image that comes with it (rationality = maturity). Moreover, the faith that they left was often worth leaving. If Taylor is right, it seems to suggest that the Christian response to such converts to unbelief is not to have an argument about the data or “evidences” but rather to offer an alternative story that offers a more robust, complex understanding of the Christian faith. The goal of such witness would not be the minimal establishment of some vague theism but the invitation to historic, sacramental Christianity.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 77 (emphasis original)

Getting significance

The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?” (p. 355). Nevertheless, we can't quite shake our feeling that “there must be an object.” And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art “trades on resonances of the cosmic in us” (p. 356). And conveniently, art is never going to ask of you anything you wouldn’t want to do. So we get significance without any ascetic moral burden.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 75

Two sides of the same battle

Even believers end up defending a theistic universe rather than the biblical cosmos. Eliminating mystery as a consequence of Protestant critiques of allegorization (p. 330),“ even believers end up reading the Bible as if it were a treatise on such a universe; in short, you get the emergence of young earth creationism (p. 330). Indeed, we only get the so-called war between science and religion once the modern cosmic imaginary has seeped into both believers and unbelievers; at that point, “these defenders of the faith share a temper with its most implacable enemies” (p. 331). In other words, no one is more modern than a fundamentalist. This is why the “face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ ” has a “strangely intra-mural quality” (p. 331). But this supposed “pure face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a chimaera, or rather, an ideological construct. In reality, there is a struggle between thinkers with complex, many-levelled agendas” (p. 332).—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 72

No place to hide!

The new epistemic expectation that comes with enclosure in lmmanence — namely, that whatever is within the sphere of immanence should be understandable to us — means we expect an answer to such matters. Inscrutability is no longer an option; so if believers have no rationally demonstrative answer, but can only appeal to something like the “hidden” will of God, then the scales tip in favor of what we know and understand.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular,—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 65–66

<idle musing>
I realize that without a context this doesn't make a lot of sense, but this book is trying to distill a huge book and I'm trying distill it even more. But, I think you get the gist of what's going on here. At least I hope you do!
</idle musing>

Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking

Whereas historically the doctrine of providence assured a benign ultimate plan for the cosmos, with Locke and Smith we see a new emphasis: providence is primarily about ordering this world for mutual benefit, particularly economic benefit. Humans are seen as fundamentally engaged in an “exchange of services,” so the entire cosmos is seen anthropocentrically as the arena for this economy (Secular Age, p. 177). What happens in the “new Providence,” then, is a “shrinking” of God’s purposes, an “economizing” of God’s own interests: “God’s goals for us shrink to the single end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us” (p. 221). So even our theism becomes humanized, immanentized, and the telos of God’s providential concern is circumscribed within immanence.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 49

An alternate imaginary

How, in a relatively short period of time, did we go from a world where belief in God was the default assumption to our secular age in which belief in God seems, to many, unbelievable? This brave new world is not just the old world with the God-supplement lopped off; it’s not just the world that is left when we subtract the supernatural. A secular world where we have permission, even encouragement, to not believe in God is an accomplishment, not merely a remainder. Our secular age is the product of creative new options, an entire reconfiguration of meaning.

So it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise. We can’t tolerate living in a world without meaning. So if the transcendence that previously gave significance to the world is lost, we need a new account of meaning — a new “imaginary” that enables us to imagine a meaningful life within this now self-sufficient universe of gas and fire. 47 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
I found this statement to be so true: "We can’t tolerate living in a world without meaning." So we create new meanings, new imaginaries—just like the ancient world did.

Think about that for a minute and then look at the new rituals we've created. How are they different from bowing down to Anu, Marduk, or Baal?

Just an
</idle musing>

Not necessarily the real world—definitely not the only option

Taylor’s point is that this is an imaginary — not that this is all just a fiction, but rather that this is a “take” on the world. While we have come to assume that this is just “the way things are,” in fact what we take for granted is contingent and contestable.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 46 (emphasis original)

Functionally disenchanted

Once we learned to distinguish transcendent from immanent, “it eventually became possible to see the immediate surroundings of our lives as existing on this ‘natural’ plane, however much we might believe that they indicated something beyond” (p. 143). Even Christians, we might say, became functionally disenchanted.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 44 (emphasis original)

Two roads—not what you think

This version of Reform “levels” two—tiered religion by actually expecting everyone to live up to the high expectations of disciplined, monastlc life. But Taylor hints that another sort of leveling is possible: you could also solve the two-tiered problem by lifting the weight of virtue, disburdening a society of the expectations of transcendence, and thus lop off the upper tier or the eternal horizon. In fact, he seems to suggest that it was the first strategy of higher expectations that might have driven some to the latter strategy of lowered expectations. By railing against vice and “crank[ing] up the terrifying visions of damnation,” Protestant preachers effectively prepared “the desertion of a goodly part of their flock to humanism” (p. 75). One strategy of leveling the two-tier problem might occasion a very different strategy that would ultimately become exclusive humanism.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 38

Everyday holiness

The result [of the Reformation abolition of monasteries, etc.] is that “for the ordinary householder” this will require something paradoxical: living in all the practices and institutions of [‘this-worldly’] flourishing, but at the same time not fully in them. Belng in them but not of them; being in them, but yet at a distance, ready to lose them. Augustine put it: use the things of this world, but don’t enjoy them; uti, not frui. Or do it all for the glory of God, in the Loyola-Calvin formulation” (p. 81). Religious devotion — and hence expectations of holiness and virtue — is not sequestered to the monastery or the convent; rather, the high expectations of sanctification now spill beyond the walls of the monastery.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 37