Interpreting Charles Taylor’s Social Theory on Religion and Secularization: A Comparative Study

214 Pages·2017·3.45 MB·English

by  Germán McKenzie (auth.)

Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures 20
Germán McKenzie
Interpreting Charles
Taylor’s Social
Theory on Religion
and Secularization
A Comparative Study
Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures
Volume 20
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Germán McKenzie
Interpreting Charles Taylor’s
Social Theory on Religion
and Secularization
A Comparative Study
Germán McKenzie
St. Mark’s & Corpus Christi Colleges at
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
ISSN 2211-1107 ISSN 2211-1115 (electronic)
Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures
ISBN 978-3-319-47698-8 ISBN 978-3-319-47700-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47700-8
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To Giuliana,
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My Parents
Preface
My first conscious encounter with secularization occurred when I was a teenager
while living in Lima, Peru. Being part of an urban and educated middle-class fam-
ily, I was a member of a fortunate, by then reduced, number of people who enjoyed
much better opportunities for personal and professional development than the
majority of Peruvians. During the 1970s, my peers and I were strongly influenced
by pop culture imported from the United States and the United Kingdom through
the media with its criticisms against the establishment of the time. Later, when I
became a university student, I encountered Soviet/Maoist socialist ideology, was
very much impacted by expressivism, and found a stronger critique of religion. This
clearly caught my attention, and, while triggering a process of analyzing the reasons
and consequences of the challenges they presented, it also made me think about the
stark contrast between secularized elites and deeply religious masses.
I should say that my interest in secularization never waned but, on the contrary,
did become a source of questions I dealt with through my philosophical and theo-
logical studies up until the present. My decision to enroll into a doctoral program in
religion and culture was directly motivated by it. To this, however, I added a grow-
ing interest in the intersection between theology and the social sciences, particularly
sociology, through my own assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of libera-
tion theology, God’s death theology, and political theology, all of them related with
the phenomenon of Western secularization in one way or the other.
The study of secularization has been carried out mainly in sociological terms.
Beginning in the 1960s, a corpus of scholarly texts was developed that understood
such a process as the decline of religion, which was seen as endogenous to modern-
ization. Among the more important proponents of this view were Bryan Wilson,
Steve Bruce, and Peter Berger in his early thought. This characterization of the
process, which I call the “orthodox” model, was predominant in academia until the
1990s, although there were always voices who called into question its assumptions
and methodology. Around that time, a new paradigm emerged that proposed a com-
pletely different (and strongly contrasting) view of secularization. Scholars like
Roger Finke, Rodney Stark, and William Sims Bainbridge are among the most
important advocates of this approach. The “counter-orthodox” model or rational
vii
viii Preface
choice theory (RCT) as applied to the study of religion affirmed that secularization
was an ongoing and self-limiting process. Moreover, it gave a new interpretation of
the role modern religious pluralism plays in religious vitality, finding the former to
be encouraging the latter, in opposition to “orthodox” theorists who claimed exactly
the contrary. After that time, an intense debate ensued between the two positions,
although an increasing number of empirical studies eroded the validity of the
“orthodox” model. Since then, RCT has become predominant in scholarship in the
matter, particularly in the United States. However, this position has also been chal-
lenged by both quantitative and qualitative studies.
A number of scholars, whom I call “revisionists,” would still search for alterna-
tive explanations for secularization in the West. Among them, one should mention
David Martin, Mark Chaves, and Jose Casanova. To these, one must now add that of
Charles Taylor, one of the more important philosophers in the English-speaking
world, who had proposed a hermeneutic method for the sciences of man based on
his own philosophical anthropology and epistemology. In 2007, Taylor published
his book A Secular Age, a massive tome in which he gives his own account of secu-
larization by way of a meta-narrative. Although I come from a different philosophi-
cal tradition than Taylor, the thickness of the theoretical background of his account
and my own sympathy for hermeneutic philosophy motivated my interest. To this, I
would add the vivid realization, as a Latin American living and studying in North
America, of how much of contemporary sociological research is strongly condi-
tioned by culture through both Western modern and postmodern narratives.
Taylor’s book, while making a lengthy, multilayered, and complex argument,
does indeed offer a “sociological” account which is contained in about one third of
its pages. In such account, he aims at explaining the social processes in Western
secularization as well as the social agents that made it possible. Taylor’s argument
draws from the thought of sociologists, both classical and contemporary. Among
them, he chooses those whose views he finds amenable of being incorporated into
his thoroughly hermeneutical approach to secularization. The names of Max Weber,
along with the above mentioned Martin and Casanova, as well as Robert Bellah,
Hans Joas, Robert Wuthnow, Danièlle Hervieu-Lèger, Grace Davie, and Wade Clark
Roof are among the more important of them.
Taylor’s resulting narrative offers two difficulties to properly engaging in a con-
versation with other sociological theories of secularization: it supposes a particular
view of how to carry out studies in the social sciences, and it constitutes a blend of
history, sociology, and philosophy. However, because of the perspicuity of Taylor’s
views, they also appeared to me as having the potential for contributing, along with
other recent scholarship, in moving the secularization debate forward. The proxi-
mate motivation of my research is to allow the just mentioned conversation to
improve by elucidating the social theory operative in Taylor’s account and make it
accessible to the academia, something that has not been done before. It is not that
Taylor has proposed a social theory of the kind, but that I have elaborated one on the
basis of his meta-narrative, his sources, and others. Although the result is an inter-
pretation of my own, I have taken care of drawing from Taylor’s sources both socio-
logical and philosophical. In particular, I have tried to make the most of his
Preface ix
philosophical views on the methodology of the social sciences and on the human
person as both a self-interpreting and ethically bound being. However, Taylor’s
scholarship is very well respected; I am also aware of the many criticisms A Secular
Age and other works by Taylor have provoked. In this book, I will only take into
account those that directly affect the interpretation I develop.
My thesis is that it is possible to interpret a consistent Taylorean “social theory”
that explains Western secularization. The meaning of this concept goes beyond the
kind of theoretical thinking that, in sociology, guides empirical research, usually
validated through statistical methods, and constitutes the framework of its interpre-
tation. It refers to an understanding of the social processes and social agents involved
in secularization on the basis of Taylor’s philosophical views. Speaking of Taylorean
social theory does not refer to a theory that is, in a subsequent stage, applied to the
study of a given social fact, but to a set of concepts, guidelines, and criteria which
allow a hermeneutic understanding of such a fact in a very particularized manner,
which pays particular attention to the meanings that social facts always carry, as
well as to the self-understandings shared by social agents with their society at large
and to those under which the social scientist abides.
Particularly important, in this context, is Taylor’s position on the problem of
human agency in relation to social structures and his affirmation of the inextricable
linkage between the social and cultural realms. In this light, secularization in the
West is better understood as religious change due to social movement dynamics, a
kind of change only made possible by the appearance of a thoroughly immanent
view on human flourishing which was made available to all. This change has relo-
cated the place of religion in society and in individual experience, provoking the
decline of some religious forms and the appearance of new ones, a process which is
not linear but zigzag-shaped, the future of which can only be predicted under strict
conditions.
As developed in this book, my interpretation of Taylor’s meta-narrative in terms
of social theory provides an analytical framework to the study of Western secular-
ization, which is a macro-social process. I believe, however, that it offers the prom-
ise of being applicable to a wider number of social phenomena, including
micro-social analysis, in Western and non-Western contexts.
The methodology I have used is that of textual analysis of three kinds of sources:
first, the most important works by sociologists on secularization in the West; sec-
ond, all the publications by Taylor on the same topic, particularly A Secular Age, as
well as those referred to the social sciences; and, third, I read all Taylor’s important
sociological sources, both classical and contemporary.
In the course of this research, I had to face a number of difficulties. With the
passing of time, it became clear to me that the hypothesis with which I started was
very much in need of change. Reformulating the hypothesis was just a natural thing
to happen, since a deeper assessment of Taylor’s philosophical views and of the
social theory elements of his meta-narrative of secularization allowed me to be more
precise about what he was bringing to the debate and how his views would compare
with those of “orthodox” and “counter-orthodox” theorists. Other difficulties were
the complexity and nuances in Taylor’s arguments, the variety of topics covered,
x Preface
and the length of his meta-narrative. As a consequence of this, I was required to
carefully distinguish and follow the narrative’s intertwined stories in order to avoid
misrepresentation of Taylor’s thought. This allowed me, I think, to give an interpre-
tation of “Taylorean social theory” that profits from his philosophical and sociologi-
cal sources. In this last task, I also found great help from the works by Margaret
Archer, a British sociologist, particularly those in which she theoretically studies
the relationship between human agency and social structures.
This book is mainly aimed at philosophers and social scientists—particularly
sociologists—as well as anyone interested in secularization in the West. It has three
parts. The first one, called “Meta-Narrative,” contains a literature review of theories
of secularization, as well as a balance of the debate on the topic (Chap. 1). It also
gives an account of Taylor’s meta-narrative in which, along with the representation
of the different stories he offers, particular topics that are important to the secular-
ization debate are more closely studied (Chaps. 2 and 3). While providing a neces-
sary context for the book, they are mostly descriptive. Those already familiar with
the secularization debate may want to skip the first chapter, while those conversant
about A Secular Age and other related works by Taylor may want to do the same
with the following two.
The second part, “Sources,” is composed by the study of aspects of Taylor’s
philosophical thinking that are pertinent to my interpretation, specifically his views
on the human person, knowledge, and the methodology of the social sciences.
Besides, this part also analyzes the relationship between Taylor’s meta-narrative and
those by classical sociologists: Weber, Durkheim, and Marx (Chap. 4). Lastly, I
carry out an overview of Taylor’s contemporary sociological sources by revisiting
the topics of his meta-narrative in the same order in which I had explained them
before (Chap. 5). All this provided me with materials for elaborating a Taylorean
social theory.
The third part, “Taylorean Social Theory,” locates it in the landscape of social
theory by analyzing how it fares in regard to the problem of human agency and
structure, the link between the social and cultural realms, its view of social change
and social stability, its understanding of the relationship between sociology and his-
tory, and its use of qualitative and quantitative methods. After doing this, I explain
what Taylorean social theory looks like and recast Taylor’s meta-narrative in such
theoretical framework (Chap. 6). The last section in this part (Chap. 7) consists of
the comparison between Taylorean social theory and the “orthodox” and “counter-
orthodox” models, as well as of a critical assessment of the former, which does not
pretend to be exhaustive.
Chapter 8 summarizes my findings and what is new and important in them, as
well as gives information on where additional scholarship might go.
Vancouver, BC, Canada Germán McKenzie