The Impacts of modernity upon religion and spirituality: A critical review of Charles Taylor

Secularization and related concepts, such as desecularization and resacralization play important roles in debates about religion and modernity. Charles Taylor, however, believes that they are neither sufficient for an understanding of modernity nor are they accurate descriptions of it; hence he starts his voluminous account of how the modern world emerged with a critical account of the secular. He discusses different events, schools and social movements in Latin Christendom in order to address the issue of religion and modernity. To answer the important question: Why were people predominantly believers in the pre-modern era while in the modern era they cannot be presumed to be believers? To answer this question, Taylor turns his attention to what he calls conditions of belief. His answer to the question is that conditions of belief have changed from the pre-modern era to Modern age. In this thesis, the impacts of modernity upon religion and spirituality are discussed based on the account of Taylor. In his view, modernity led to a circumstance in which religion became just one option among others; and anthropocentric interpretations of religion emerge. On the other hand, Modernity helped to revive some of the original teachings of religion. On the whole, the outcome of modernity for religion includes both positive and negative results. Regarding spirituality, modernity was the cause of the independence of spirituality from religion. Presently, spirituality not only is not a part of religion, but it has become a strong rival to religion. Taylor also believes that spirituality, under the influence of modernity, has experienced a great shift toward the inner life. The great diversity of spiritual options is another impact of modernity for spirituality. Although Taylor’s account is capable of explaining many religious and spiritual phenomena in the modern world, some problems remain: for example, the descriptive account is used as a basis for prescriptive ideas. Discussing the identity of modern man, Taylor fails to study factors outside of Latin Christendom. Other critical points about his view of religion include: his essentialist view of religion, his neglect of religious fundamentalism, his unhelpful dichotomy of believer/non-believer, and the lack of a clear hermeneutical basis for interpreting religion. Taylor’s view of spirituality is criticized because of impossibility to differentiate between religion and spirituality, it obscures the differences between transcendent and immanent spiritualties and it offers a concept of a transcendental spirituality within the immanent frame which is not possible. The method of the research is content analysis.