(Re-) Doing Christianity In Secular America
For the past 25 years or so I have been pondering the future of Christianity in America. Since childhood I’ve been involved with Lutheran, Episcopal, Evangelical, and Restoration Movement churches — with occasional sojourns in spiritual renewal gatherings hosted by the Jesuits and Benedictine monks. As I moved through this spectrum of Christian theology, expression, and worship, my faith journey was accompanied by the decline of churchgoing and religious affiliation across America. Congregations were aging and professed religious orders for men and women had fewer applicants. How to explain this disheartening phenomenon?
In 2014, the family of the late artist Karen Laub-Novak asked me to write an essay on her work and curate an exhibition for display at religiously affiliated college galleries around the country. Karen Laub-Novak was also the wife of her better-known husband, the Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat Michael Novak. While working at the Novak home, a book on their coffee table caught my attention. It was curiously titled, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. The subject’s pensive visage filled the front cover.
Who was this Charles Taylor and why would one need instruction in not being secular? Why such a book at this time? As I skimmed this study authored by James K. A. Smith, I learned that Taylor, a Canadian Roman Catholic, is one of the most important religious philosophers of the past 40 years. His 2007 magnum opus, simply titled A Secular Age, deeply surveyed 500 years of human history and ideas - a period that begins with a universal belief in God and His presence in the cosmos He created, and arriving at our present era, where belief in God and participation in religious life had become just one human option among many, even a lifestyle choice. Welcome to our own secular age.
Smith, himself a philosopher, provided me a gateway into Taylor’s thought where I began to see a connection between my personal anxiety about a Christian future and how our culture had become so thoroughly secularized — and, more importantly, what it feels like to live in it. My curiosity piqued, I ordered Taylor’s book on Amazon. What arrived in our mailbox was a 3-pound tome, two and a half inches thick, numbering 875 pages. (Confession: I am still working through A Secular Age after nearly 10 years!)
On October 19, I will have the humbling honor to preach/teach/proclaim from my years of long “apprenticeship” under Charles Taylor, in my view, the most profound prophet of our times. Heeding his rich chronicle of the growth of secularism over the centuries, I will attempt to open a new horizon for Hope Lutheran and America’s Christian churches to enter into. In so doing I want us to recover our lost sense of the sacred and holy, igniting a fire of love and justice in our hearts, sending us into a broken, contentious, and materialistic world with trust and confidence in God’s gracious guidance.