¹ Charles Taylor’s writings span numerous genres, engaging as he does social, political, and moral philosophical questions in variously historical, linguistic, epistemological, phenomenological, and hermeneutical veins. To sample the breadth and depth of his learning as he treats these topics, one could consult any of his four volumes of collected essays: Human Agency and Language, Philosophical Papers vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). At present, Taylor is best known as an intellectual historian whose moral, social, political, and philosophical genealogical work, as well as his existential cartography of “secularity,” are unparalleled in scope, rigor, and acuity. This is particularly evinced in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), the latter of which will be the focus of the present work. Were one to search for a thread tying Taylor’s vast corpus together, anthropology—philosophical and otherwise—might be the best candidate, and Taylor describes himself as “monomaniacal” about the topic in Human Agency and Language, 1. James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University. His philosophical and theological work ranges from the acutely academic (hermeneutics and phenomenology; the relationship between Christianity and postmodern philosophy; philosophical and theological anthropology) to the more popular and pastoral, but his diverse scholarship on liturgy, culture, temporality, political theology, and even hermeneutics fundamentally pertains to the question of what it means to be human. Similar to Taylor, Smith has an affinity for linguistic philosophy and hermeneutical thought, though he is apt to draw from more “postmodern” sources than Taylor (especially Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard). Smith’s best-known work is his three-volume Cultural Liturgies series: Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009); Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013); Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).

² Though treating similar subject matters, the two thinkers generally differ in both approach and intended audience, with Taylor writing in a comparatively more descriptive and explanatory mode as a philosopher and philosophical historian and Smith in a more confessional and prescriptive mode as a philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic with the express intention of serving the present needs of the church, particularly his own Reformed tradition. Granted, as evinced by Taylor’s lecture “A Catholic Modernity?,” in A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, ed. Heft, James L. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the closing chapters of A Secular Age, Taylor by no means wholly prescinds from addressing mission, the state of the church, and what Christian life and praxis should look like today. See, for example, Taylor, Charles, “Benedict XVI,” Public Culture 18 (2006): 7–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Taylor, Charles, “Magisterial Authority,” in The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, ed. Lacey, Michael J. and Oakley, Francis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Google Scholar.

³ Regarding the relationship between the two thinkers, it is worth noting that Smith engages with Taylor as more than a prominent thinker to quote and footnote. For Smith, Taylor is an intellectual guide in whose methodology lies something of essential import for the church today. Thus, James, K. A. Smith authored How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014)Google Scholar as a companion volume to Taylor’s A Secular Age. See also, Taylor, Imagining the Kingdom, 13: “Philosophically I locate my project in the vein of Charles Taylor’s call to ‘overcome epistemology”; see also 109n12.

⁴ To name a few examples: MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar; Bethke Elshtain, Jean, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008)Google Scholar; Gregory, Brad S., The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pfau, Thomas, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Trueman, Carl R., The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020)Google Scholar. Examples of relevant genealogical histories more delimited in scope to particular topics would be Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Jacob, Alan, Original Sin: A Cultural History (New York: HarperOne, 2008)Google Scholar; Eire, Carlos, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schindler, D. C., Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ In A Secular Age, Taylor defines “secularity” neither in terms of the compartmentalization or evacuation of religion from social and political spaces, nor in terms of decreased religious belief and practice, but rather in terms of the “conditions of belief”: “The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (3). Smith uses the term “secular” in its more commonly understood adjectival sense to mean “non-religious,” “a-religious,” or, occasionally, “neutral [towards ends].” This paper will generally use the term in this second sense.

⁶ Before moving to the body of the work, two preliminary notes are in order. They refer to the threat—and in certain ways the regrettable reality—of a twofold occlusion: (1) that of internal diversity and difference within what will be termed the “secular West” and (2) that of the (non-North-Atlantic Western) “other” in Taylor’s story of secularization. Regarding (1): the “we” of secularity, modernity, and the West (each term meriting scare quotes of their own right) is notoriously difficult to identify and circumscribe, and Taylor alludes to as much on the first page of A Secular Age. Such terms are heuristic and a concession endemic to any project of such geographical and temporal scope, and Taylor’s broad definition of secularity in terms of the conditions of belief rather than in terms of political structures or of belief-sets mitigates the blurring incurred by his broad brush. Regarding (2): Mahmood, Saba, “Can Secularism Be Other-wise?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, and Calhoun, Craig (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Google Scholar, is right when observing that Taylor neglects to discuss the role in which the (non-Latin-Christian) other historically played in the creation of the modern Western “self’s” identity. Even so, such a criticism does not thereby wholly negate the reality of secularity as Taylor describes it, the broader direction and structure of his narrative, the anthropology implied in his work (e.g., the reality of the social imaginary), or the elucidative acumen with which Taylor depicts the buffered self, immanent frame, excarnation, and so forth.

⁷ Taylor, A Secular Age, viv.

⁸ This list is not intended to be exhaustive, and I am aware that “language” has been omitted. References to the individually and communally constitutive function of language is muted in A Secular Age in comparison to Taylor’s other works, as is the case in Smith’s Cultural Liturgies series when compared to his other works.

⁹ Taylor, A Secular Age, 558. See also Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” in Philosophical Arguments, 1–19. Taylor considers “epistemology” to be the “Hydra” with whose “heads” he constantly contends, the three most important of which are the derivation of ontology from epistemology, the framing of morality in rationalistic and epistemic terms, and a subject-object dualism into which the body as object is subsumed. He sees Descartes as the most influential—because hyperbolic—articulator of these views. See also “Preface,” in Philosophical Arguments, vii–viv.

¹⁰ First introduced in Taylor, A Secular Age, 27, and elaborated on 37–43.

¹¹ First introduced in Taylor, A Secular Age, 288, and elaborated on 554–56, 613–15.

¹² In A Secular Age, Reform is a capacious term referring to the pluriform efforts to overcome a perceived “two-tiered” or “dual system” of religious practice wherein clergy and laity were hierarchically related both ecclesiastically and spiritually (63). He argues that, along with—because a driver of—the Protestant Reformation, Reform’s attempt at “producing for the first time a true uniformity of believers, a levelling up which left no further room for different speeds” gave rise to “the disciplinary society,” an ethic of disengaged and rational self-control, and a greater uniformity, homogenization, and “purification” of religious practice (77). See 25–218. Here is his concluding summation of the term: “Briefly summed up, Reform demanded that everyone be a real, 100 percent Christian. Reform not only disenchants, but disciplines and re-orders life and society. Along with civility, this makes for a notion of moral order which gives a new sense to Christianity, and the demands of the faith” (774, emphasis in original).

¹³ See Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 149–56. The “valuational” of onto-valuational designates a filtering of an ontological substance dualism through an evaluative screen: not only is there a real distinction between body and soul, but the soul is good, powerful, and compliant, and the body is bad, weak, and recalcitrant.

¹⁴ The “buffered self” as Taylor uses it encompasses more than “disengagement” or “disengaged reason,” but disengagement is what concerns us most here.

¹⁵ See Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 7.

¹⁶ For a relevant discussion that incorporates Taylor’s emphasis on the constitutive and hermeneutical function of language—an important aspect of Taylor’s work to which this article cannot adequately attend—see Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language, 45–76.

¹⁷ Taylor, A Secular Age, 554.

¹⁸ See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 41–73.

¹⁹ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 13. He describes this “overcoming” on 10: “The liturgical anthropology at the heart of my project entails a critique of worldview because it relativizes ‘thinking’ and re-situates ‘intellect.’”

²⁰ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 29. Smith uses “kinaesthetic” as opposed to “kinesthetic” to denote to “the bodily basis of meaning” in all its imaginative and textured richness, since our bodily comportment incarnates an “aesthetics” and a “poetics” (23).

²¹ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 50.

²² Smith offers examples of bodily knowledge that comes by way of perception and without “conscious” theorizing or “intellectual” aversion thereto. These include the way in which we “know” what spaces we can walk or fit through, relate to objects as pragmata (Heidegger’s term), and can sense when someone flirts with us (termed “erotic comprehension”). See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 49–66.

²³ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 71.

²⁴ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 94. Smith, wary of accusations of biological or kinaesthetic determinism and of relativism, frequently refers the reader back to the fact that, first, “perception” and “kinaesthetics” occupy a unique and hard to define space between instinct and intellect (and therefore are not simply preprogrammed reactions), and, second, embodied perception by no means negates or militates against intellection and volition but rather are the condition for their possibility.

²⁵ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 108.

²⁶ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 94.

²⁷ This is the title of Smith’s popularized summation of the first two volumes of his Cultural Liturgies series: Smith, James K. A., You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing, 2016)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Ward, Graham, “History, Belief, and Imagination in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ward might be overstating the matter when calling Taylor’s “conviction” in this reality “unproven” (341). Might the content of Taylor’s story itself—the ceaseless reshuffling of the theological, philosophical, and political deck to facilitate a means of human flourishing based on some vision of fulfillment, however understood—be a sort of meta-proof rather than simply an assumption or “unproven conviction”?

²⁹ Some would argue that the veil between description and proselytizing was torn asunder nearly twenty years earlier in Taylor’s Sources of the Self. Such is the criticism leveled by Stephen Mulhall in “Sources of the Self’s Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity,” in Can Religion Be Explained Away?, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 131–60. Yet, consider Carolyn A. Chau’s articulation of the matter in Solidarity with the World: Charles Taylor and Hans Urs von Balthasar on Faith, Modernity, and Catholic Mission, Theopolitical Visions 19 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016): “While Taylor does not expressly claim to seek to retrieve homo religiosus, in many ways, this is the effective consequence of his work on modern malaise and modern selfhood in general, when refracted through his opus on modern secularity” (76).

³⁰ See Taylor, A Secular Age, 609–17.

³¹ Taylor, A Secular Age, 444.

³² For Smith, “erotic” is a term that can be, but is not constitutively, related to sex. Smith uses it interchangeably with “love” and “desire.” See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 51n20: “In this book, I basically make no distinction between love and desire, eschewing any distinction between eros and agapē. As will become clear [in the following], agapē is rightly directed eros.”

³³ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 37, 15.

³⁴ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 49, emphasis added. This insight was previously affirmed (but not elaborated upon) in Smith, James K. A., Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), Google Scholar. See also Smith, James K. A., “‘Confessions’ of an Existentialist: Reading Augustine after Heidegger: Part I,” New Blackfriars 82, no. 964 (2001): Google Scholar.

³⁵ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 24.

³⁶ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 40. For another articulation of this fundamentally Augustinian insight, see Scheler, Max, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. Latcherman, David R. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 98–135.Google Scholar

³⁷ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 80.

³⁸ Smith, Awaiting the King, 22.

³⁹ See Taylor, A Secular Age, 773–76, for Taylor’s comparison of his “Reform Master Narrative” and social-imaginary-based approach with what he terms “Intellectual Deviation” or “trickle-down” theories of secularization (of which he chooses Radical Orthodoxy as an example). Of essential importance to Taylor is the “we” of the social imaginary: the presupposition of humanity’s constitutive intersubjectivity predominating A Secular Age finds ample and more explicit expression elsewhere in Taylor’s writings. See, for example, Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, “Irreducibly Social Goods” and “To Follow a Rule,” in Philosophical Arguments; The Malaise of Modernity; part 1 of Sources of the Self; Taylor, Charles, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chau, Solidarity with the World, 43–49.

⁴⁰ Baum, Gregory, “The Response of a Theologian to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also describes Taylor’s work as “a detailed phenomenology of the rise of secular modernity” (363). José Casanova uses similar language in “A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 265–81. This is his opening sentence: “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers the best analytical, phenomenological, and genealogical account we have of our modern, secular condition” (265). Eric Gregory and Leah Hunt-Hendrix helpfully term it an “existential genealogy” in “Enfleshment and the Time of Ethics: Taylor and Illich on the Parable of the Good Samaritan,” in Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor, ed. Carlos Colorado and Justin D. Klassen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 217–39, at 218.

⁴¹ See Taylor, A Secular Age, 364–68, for Taylor’s treatment of the rise and staying power of a certain strain of atheistic materialism (understood as a form of intellectual “manliness”).

⁴² See Taylor, A Secular Age, 745–65. Aware that he focuses on literary figures, Taylor notes that “there are also those who have found new paths of prayer or action, like Charles de Foucauld, John Maine, Jean Vanier, Mother Teresa, and Thérèse de Lisieux” (765). Given the anthropological priority Taylor gives to the aesthetic, his selection of Péguy and Hopkins is as unsurprising as it is fitting.

⁴³ Smith is particularly struck by these portraits, not only for their content but also for their form. See Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 132–33, emphasis in original: “Taylor gravitates to those whose conversion was on the order of ‘sense.’ And the ‘story’ of A Secular Age is intended to work in the same way, appealing to something like a ‘gut feeling’ … The portraits are the apologetic.” In which case, and considering various criticisms of Taylor’s work, Kerr, Fergus, “How Much Can a Philosopher Do?,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): Google Scholar, asks: “To what extent is A Secular Age not just a phenomenology of the decline of the ‘social imaginary’ of the sacred but a lamentation and a follow-up ‘retrieval’?” (332). With a similar question in mind, Ward, “History, Belief, and Imagination,” goes so far as to call Taylor’s text “a new genre of theological inquiry”—an “apologetic” via narrative (338; see also 343, 348n1).

⁴⁴ Duns, Ryan G., Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God, foreword by Desmond, William (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), Google Scholar. See also Chau, Solidarity with the World, 8–10.

⁴⁵ From Henry Newman, John, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), Google Scholar: “If any one starts from any other principles but ours, I have not the power to change his principles, or the conclusion which he draws from them, any more than I can make a crooked man straight.”

⁴⁶ From Taylor, A Secular Age, 549: “In general, we have here what Wittgenstein calls a ‘picture,’ a background to our thinking, within whose terms it is carried on, but which is often largely unformulated, and to which we can frequently, just for this reason, imagine no alternative.”

⁴⁷ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 8–9. “Inescapable Frameworks,” the tellingly titled first chapter of Sources of the Self, characterizes that undertaking as an attempt to “explore the background picture of our spiritual nature and predicament which lies behind some of the moral and spiritual intuitions of our contemporaries” (3–4). As Smith intends to broaden the scope of what “liturgy” is and of what it means to be “religious,” so in Sources of the Self Taylor intends to broaden the scope of what “morality” or “moral reasoning” entails.

⁴⁸ Taylor, A Secular Age, 549. As evinced by his voluminous authorial output and quasi-apologetic ends, Taylor also affirms the transformative power of articulating this background. Thus, he can characterize Sources of the Self as a work “of liberation … of retrieval, an attempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulation—and thereby to make these sources again empower” (520).

⁴⁹ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 17–18, emphasis in original.

⁵⁰ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 54–55.

⁵¹ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.

⁵² James K. A. Smith’s recent How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2022), offers his vision of a Christian temporality within which the acknowledgment of one’s historicity is vital. Consider the following from the introduction: “I’m thinking of a kind of temporal disorientation that is unrecognized because it’s buried and hidden by the illusion of being above the fray, immune to history, surfing time rather than being immersed and battered by its waves. Such temporal disorientation stems from the delusion of being ‘nowhen,’ unconditioned by time. Those who imagine they inhabit nowhen imagine themselves wholly governed by timeless principles, unchanging convictions, expressing an idealism that assumes they are wholly governed by eternal ideas untainted by history” (4). A Taylorian point indeed.

⁵³ The distinction crucial to this point is occasionally blurred by what appears to be lexical variability stemming from Smith’s repeatedly emphasizing a similar constellation of theses while attempting to avoid repetitiveness. He hopes to articulate that the way in which we intend, experience, and engage in and with the world occurs on an affective, erotic register, while the way in which our world and meaning are constituted and construed occurs on a fundamentally aesthetic, imaginative register. See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 14–20, 103–37.

⁵⁴ Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 224–25, emphasis added.

⁵⁵ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 127, 127n44.

⁵⁶ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 17.

⁵⁷ See Taylor, A Secular Age, 61–145.

⁵⁸ Taylor, A Secular Age, 766–67, emphasis added.

⁵⁹ Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 41.

⁶⁰ Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 80.

⁶¹ Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 80.

⁶² Smith loosely draws from Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of practice in After Virtue, 187–94.

⁶³ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 86. See 85–88 for his typologizing. Smith occasionally blurs these distinctions and uses the terms interchangeably rather than consistently or technically. The precise boundaries among rituals, practices, and liturgies are fuzzy and open to variation by individuals. What is a practice for one person might be a liturgy for another.

⁶⁴ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 87.

⁶⁵ See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 17–35.

⁶⁶ See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 139.

⁶⁷ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 40.

⁶⁸ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 109.

⁶⁹ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 178. See also 125–27 for a dense yet concise summation of the Cultural Liturgies series’s aim.

⁷⁰ See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 19–23, for his memorable, ingenious, and frankly unsettling apocalyptic exegesis of the mall as a religious and liturgical institution.

⁷¹ For a related argument calling for Taylor to supplement or reframe his “itineraries” with more attentiveness to the “radical ordinary,” its “daily liturgical work” (Christian and otherwise), and the messy “intertwinement” of immanence and transcendence in everyday life, see Hauerwas, Stanley and Coles, Ramond, “‘Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet’: Reflections on A Secular Age,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² This is the very first of the “four crucial claims” used to characterize “Radical Orthodoxy” in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), i.

⁷³ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 112. He makes a similar point when discussing “religious” and “secular” education on page 26: “There is no such thing as a ‘secular’ education.” This is repeated when he addresses the purported distinction between “religious” and “secular” institutions, calling for Christians “to recognize the charged, religious nature of cultural institutions that we all tend to inhabit as if they were neutral sites” (23). In these instances, Smith departs from Taylor’s dominant definition of “secularity”—that is, a context in which belief is optional and contested rather than presupposed and naïve—and uses the term to mean “a-religious” (as in, neutral toward ends). He is clearer on this point in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 42: “There is no secular, if by ‘secular’ we mean ‘neutral’ or ‘uncommitted’; instead, the supposedly neutral public spaces that we inhabit—in the academy or politics—are temples of other gods that cannot be served alongside Christ.”

⁷⁴ Baum, “The Response of a Theologian to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” 374–75, makes a Smithian point in a different manner. He argues that Taylor insufficiently accounts for the formative role of “institutions”—especially “democratic” and “capitalist” ones—in the shaping of the social imaginary. Even so, Smith would be more inclined to target the rituals, practices, and liturgies by which said “institutions” incarnate and perpetuate themselves than to allude to the broader ethos they generate.

⁷⁵ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 165. Taylor often defines this concept in terms of its relationship to practices (of which Smith thinks liturgies are the most formative). Its definition is thereby uniquely amenable to supplementation by and coordination with Smith’s notion of liturgy.

⁷⁶ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 25.

⁷⁷ Smith would agree, and he provides a nuanced portrait of the hermeneutical nature of selfhood—of the work of interpretation as “essential” to our created humanity in all of its intersubjectivity, situationality, traditionality, and contingency—in James K. A. Smith. The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophic Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 159–74.

⁷⁸ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 183.

⁷⁹ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 28.

⁸⁰ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 27. In this way, the social imaginary is an important constituent of what makes a collectivity a “we.”

⁸¹ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 66.

⁸² Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 72.

⁸³ Given Smith’s expansive notion of liturgy, reading Taylor with a “liturgical lens” by no means requires an exclusive fixation on those “explicitly” religious (namely, ecclesial) liturgical developments occasionally alluded to, however fruitful such an analysis might be (e.g., to consider the evolution of liturgical spaces, such as the institution of rood screens and pews; changes in church decorum and discipline; norms for eucharistic reception; etc.). Rather, one can selectively attend to any number of social, political, economic, and religious practices using this liturgical hermeneutic. It simply asks: To what end(s) does X ritual/practice/liturgy orient participants? What vision of human flourishing and moral order is implicit and embedded therein, and how is this communicated? In what larger teleological framework is it situated? What is suggested and reinforced by one’s physical comportment and movement? And, aside from being a useful tool for historical-cultural analysis, Smith suggests that his readers undertake a personal “liturgical audit” in their own lives (see Desiring the Kingdom, 84).

⁸⁴ Taylor, A Secular Age, 79–80.

⁸⁵ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 43.

⁸⁶ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 45, 112. Taylor draws from Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69. From Discipline and Punish, 136–37: “What was so new in these projects of docility that interested the eighteenth century so much? … To begin with, there was the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale,’ as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it ‘retail,’ individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body.”

⁸⁷ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 97.

⁸⁸ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 110.

⁸⁹ By consciousness, Smith appears to mean awareness or reflective attention. His work would be strengthened by a more consistent definition and use of the word, as he vacillates between a Husserlian phenomenological definition—consciousness as intentional, as always consciousness of—and a more “popular” usage of the term—consciousness as perception, as explicit cognitive awareness.

⁹⁰ See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 96. To make this point, Smith draws liberally from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on habitus, practices, and social incorporation as found in Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, trans. Nice, Richard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹¹ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 110.

⁹² Taylor, A Secular Age, 162.

⁹³ Taylor, A Secular Age, 197, emphasis added.

⁹⁴ Taylor, A Secular Age, 161, emphasis added.

⁹⁵ See Taylor, A Secular Age, 161–64, 171–76, 196–97; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23–30.

⁹⁶ From Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 67n53: “Here we might quibble with Taylor a bit. While he wants to emphasize that the relationship between ‘imaginary’ and practice is ‘not one-sided’ (Modern Social Imaginaries, 25), there does seem to be some ambiguity in his account. At times he speaks as if the understanding ‘makes possible’ common practices (23), as if practices ‘express’ a pre-existent understanding (25). However, at other times, Taylor emphasizes that it is the practices that ‘carry’ the understanding. While I think he is right to honor the dynamic, dialectical relation between the two, I think it particularly important to emphasize the latter. If there is a priority in this chicken-or-egg-like question, I would think the practices precede the understanding.”

⁹⁷ See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 34. From 138–39: “It is crucial that we recall the priority of liturgy to doctrine. Doctrines, beliefs, and a Christian worldview emerge from the nexus of Christian worship practices; worship is the matrix of Christian faith, not its ‘expression’ or ‘illustration.’ Just as Taylor emphasized that ‘humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves,’ so too did Christians worship before they got around to abstract theologizing or formulating a Christian worldview.” Taylor leaves more room for causality to work either way, and A Secular Age, 175, suggests that sometimes a theory “penetrates and transforms [a] social imaginary” through spurring the innovation of new, “improvised” practices.

⁹⁸ See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 209–10.

⁹⁹ See Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?,” 25.

¹⁰⁰ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 92.

¹⁰¹ Regarding rituals of consumerism, it is worth considering the effect that the transition away from brick-and-mortar retail to online shopping—one exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has on the liturgical nature of consumption. Much of in-person shopping’s incarnate fullness and texture is lost: larger-than-life and sensuous images of “fulfillment” (that, ironically but intentionally, draw attention to the model rather than the modeled); the sounds of chatter, laughter, deliberation, and salesmanship; affable, personalized assistance; the changing room’s mirror of “what could be”; comradery (or competition); and so on.

¹⁰² Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 88.

¹⁰³ Smith, Awaiting the King, 201.

¹⁰⁴ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 88n21, emphasis in original.

¹⁰⁵ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 93n5. One might find a point of contact here between Smith and René Girard. Girard’s absence in Smith’s writings is curious given, first, Taylor’s allusions to Girard in the more theologically constructive portions of A Secular Age (456, 611–13, 685–89, 707–9), and, second, Smith’s situation of “desire” and its sociocultural mediation at the center of his anthropology. René Girard’s treatment of Satan and “powers and principalities” in I See Satan Fall like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 32–46, 95–100, would fruitfully supplement Smith’s allusions to dark forces’ operation in personal and communal life. Girard’s analysis could also concretize the unspecified agency presupposed by Smith’s language of cultural liturgies’ and institutions’ “demanding” our allegiance and “conscripting” us into “their” fold. Another fruitful dialogue partner would be Karl Barth and his treatment of “The Lordless Powers” in §78.2 of The Christian Life, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 299–327. “Lordless powers” are humankind’s capacities and endowments emancipated from and then turned against their would- and should-be “masters.” In loosing ourselves from God, our own powers were loosed from us, upon us, and so acquired a dominion over us. Smith might have something like this in mind.

¹⁰⁶ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 40.

¹⁰⁷ Charles Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4, 11, 73.

¹⁰⁸ Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 23.

¹⁰⁹ See Taylor, Charles, “Afterword,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Google Scholar: “I’m a hopeless German romantic of the 1790s.”

¹¹⁰ See Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 15–29, for Taylor’s definition and explanation.

¹¹¹ Jennifer A. Herdt, “The Authentic Individual in the Network of Agape,” in Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age, 191–216, at 194. Herdt appreciates that Taylor “refrained from demonizing all forms of individualism” and “resisted a nostalgic flight to tradition” (194). Chau, Solidarity with the World, 191–92, makes a similar point, noting that Taylor lucidly describes contours of the church’s mission field without constantly waving the alarmist’s “crisis” banner (though crises there may be).

¹¹² Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 11–12.

¹¹³ For an affable yet critical response to Taylor’s irenicism vis-à-vis the culture, see George Marsden, “Matteo Ricci and the Prodigal Culture,” in A Catholic Modernity?, 83–94.

¹¹⁴ Though, ressourcement is certainly part of Taylor’s project insofar as he uncovers the deep and often forgotten sources of modern selfhood, authenticity, and identity.

¹¹⁵ See Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?”, 13–14.

¹¹⁶ Taylor, A Secular Age, 707. He goes on to say: “There aren’t any formulae for acting as Christians in the world. Take the best code possible in today’s circumstances, or what passes for such. The question always arises: Could one, by transcending/amending/reinterpreting the code, move us all vertically? Christ is constantly doing that in the Gospel. That’s why there is something extremely troubling about the tendency of some Christian churches today to identify themselves so totally with certain codes (especially sexual norms), and institutions (liberal society)” (707).

¹¹⁷ See Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” 13–16.

¹¹⁸ Smith, Awaiting the King, xii, 34–35, 142. In these contexts and throughout the volume, he references Jeremiah 29:7: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

¹¹⁹ See the discussions of “urban monasticism” and “monastic abstention” in Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 209–11, 222–28. It’s important to note that, for Smith, cultural abstention is ultimately undergone for the sake of culture.

¹²⁰ Milbank, Theology and Social Science, 349.

¹²¹ Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 82.

¹²² Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 82.

¹²³ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 52–55. Smith makes this point about iPhones in Imagining the Kingdom, 142–45.

¹²⁴ Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 106n19, expresses his concerns bluntly: “While Taylor is sympathetic to historic, orthodox Christianity, he does not seem at all constrained by it and is willing to entertain revisions where I would not.”

¹²⁵ Chau’s complementary reading of Balthasar and Taylor in Solidarity with the World reveals the Christian tenability of Taylorian authenticity—but only when duly purged by the fires of something like Balthasar’s kenoticism and theo-dramatics of personhood. She suggests that, read together, these two thinkers teach us that “mission’s form in a secular age is to reveal that the true expression of authenticity in person and existence and the height of creative self-expression lies in personal and communal [ecclesial] relationship with God” (193–94, emphasis added).

¹²⁶ Chau, Solidarity with the World, 195. See also 192, 200.

¹²⁷ See Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, with Melinda Lundquist Denton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹²⁸ Smith, Soul Searching, 89–90, emphasis added.

¹²⁹ Smith, Soul Searching, 116, emphasis added.

¹³⁰ Smith, Soul Searching, 105, emphasis added.

¹³¹ Christian Smith does later trade in religious verbiage when describing the near-universal “thoroughgoing individualism” unearthed in their interviews: “American youth, like American adults, are nearly without exception profoundly individualistic, instinctively presuming autonomous, individual self-direction to be a universal human norm and life goal. Thoroughgoing individualism is not a contested orthodoxy for teenagers. It is an invisible and pervasive doxa, that is, an unrecognized, unquestioned, invisible premise or presupposition. U.S. teenagers’ profound individualism informs a number of issues related to religion” (Soul Searching, 143, emphasis added). Whereas Christian Smith might be using “doxa” and “orthodoxy” tongue-and-cheek, James Smith would use the terms with grave seriousness.

¹³² Smith, Soul Searching, 28, uses the language of “competition” when noting that “religious interests and values in teens’ lives typically compete against those of school, homework, television, other media, sports, romantic relationships, paid work, and more.” For similar framing, see 161, 179.

¹³³ See Christian Smith, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, with Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70–109. In this volume, Smith’s word choice is telling: “Contemporary emerging adults are either true believers or complacent conformists when it comes to mass consumerism” (72, emphasis added); “Shopping, buying, and consuming as a way of life is thus presupposed by most emerging adults, and owning some of the nicer things in life is a natural part of the purpose of life” (108, emphasis added). See also Soul Searching, 263–64.

¹³⁴ See Smith, Soul Searching, 176–79, for language anticipating that of James Smith. From 176, emphasis added: “[Mass-consumer capitalism] incarnates and promotes a particular moral order, an institutionalized normative worldview comprising and fostering particular assumptions, narratives, commitments, beliefs, values, and goals … Mass-consumer capitalism fundamentally constitutes the human self … as an individual, autonomous, rational, self-seeking, cost-benefit-calculating consumer.”

¹³⁵ See Smith, Awaiting the King, 191–93, 201. Might one consider performative idolatry a, if not the, primary prohibition of the second commandment?

¹³⁶ See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 142–45.

¹³⁷ Christian Smith, of course, is acutely aware of the need for both “built-in religious content” and the “structural” integration of said content in practices, routines, daily schedules, and so on. See Smith, Soul Searching, 130–31, 161–62, and Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

¹³⁸ The gradualism of this (un)conversion process is also commented upon in Stephen Bullivant, Bernadette Duncan, Catherine Knowles, and Hannah Vaughan-Spruce, Why Catholics Leave, What They Miss, and How They Might Return (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2019).

¹³⁹ Such is similar to Tara Isabella Burton’s conclusion in Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (New York: Public Affairs, 2020).

¹⁴⁰ Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 57.

¹⁴¹ Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 21.

¹⁴² See Smith, Awaiting the King, 165–208.

¹⁴³ Smith, Awaiting the King, 188.

¹⁴⁴ See Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 189.

¹⁴⁵ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 208.

¹⁴⁶ Smith, Awaiting the King, 205, emphasis added.

¹⁴⁷ Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 189, emphasis added.

¹⁴⁸ Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 81.

¹⁴⁹ This is complicated by that fact that, as noted earlier, terms such as consciousness, the intellect, and rationality are left undefined in his trilogy.

¹⁵⁰ Granted, it is important to keep in mind that his stated intention is to ameliorate the pedagogical and apologetical effects downstream of flawed, dualistic anthropological models assumed by many in his Protestant milieu that would overestimate the role of the intellect in faith-formation. He clarifies this in the face of criticism in Smith, James K. A., “Two Cheers for Worldview: A Response to Elmer John Theissen,” Journal of Christianity and Education 14, no. 1 (2010): 55–58Google Scholar.

¹⁵¹ A different but relevant concern with Smith’s relativization of the intellect is whether his thought affords sufficient resources for a critical interrogation of Christian liturgy and practices themselves. His arguments recommending “historic Christian worship” as uniquely anthropologically adequate because the bearer of centuries of embedded, Spirit-guided wisdom are compelling and well-taken. It remains unclear, though, what the source and means of intra-Christian liturgical criticism may be. If there is “no such thing as the secular” given that competing ultimacies, teloi, and their agents ceaselessly vie for our attention, how will the liturgy itself be immune to the deviations of the sociocultural setting within which it, its agents, and its practitioners are situated? To give an example: consider the fact that the emergence of pews in Reformation churches occurred in increasingly sermon-centric worship gatherings and that this coincided with (or contributed to?) a more “heady” faith, sacramental-skepticism, and the rise of regimes of physical discipline and order. Do pews constitute a liturgical reinforcement of passivity and of encroaching intellectualized and excarnational religiosity? In which case, does this development imply the “secular” cooptation of the Christian liturgy itself?

¹⁵² Leder, The Absent Body, 22.

¹⁵³ Leder, The Absent Body, 152; see also 69–99.

¹⁵⁴ Leder, The Absent Body, 127.

¹⁵⁵ Brian D. Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Herder and Herder, 2009), 135.

¹⁵⁶ Theological anthropologies centered on embodiment are uniquely compelling when correlated with a theology of—or at least theological reflections on—the experience of suffering. For example, consider M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, Innovations: African American Religious Thought (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010). There, Copeland theologically and anthropologically prioritizes human embodiment by methodologically prioritizing instances of its privation—the sufferings endured by Black women under the “slavocracy” and by the crucified Christ. If one opts to rehabilitate the body in Christian anthropology, Copeland’s method is, phenomenologically speaking, especially cogent. When it comes to theorization about and the thematization of embodied experience, those who enjoy the gift of bodily forgetfulness are most apt to require consistent, constant, and conscious aversion. And, conversely, those plagued by ailments, privations, and sufferings are painfully aware of their embodiment. It is as experientially unsurprising as it is ironic that denizens of an age of unprecedented opportunities for maintaining health and bodily integrity need to remind themselves of themselves—of their own embodiment—and go on to lay blame at the feet of the hegemonic mind.