Charles Taylor's A Secular Age Explained: Were Christians the First Secularists?

Prof Jason Blakely explains philosopher Charles Taylor's view that both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation helped destroy the enchanted social imaginary of the Medieval world. This includes a brief sketch of Taylor's genealogical starting point with the "porous self" of the Medieval cosmos. This is an excerpt from a series of lecture remarks delivered in the Spring of 2020 for an undergraduate course in political theology.
Texts discussed:
Charles Taylor, "Future of the Religious Past"
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

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Nice! Thank you!

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So interesting! Thank you!

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There is a sense in which Jesus and early Christianity created a kind of secularism: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, unto God what is God's." And then of course, Jesus does NOT take secular/political power or encourage His followers to do so. This kind of secularism is founded in the separation of Church and State, with the Church on a higher level than the State, which came to be seen as the servant of the Church. Protestantism, however, proposes a different kind of secularism where the material world is no longer a channel of God's grace. The sacramentalism of water, oil, bread, wine, relics, blessed objects, etc. is rejected. God's incarnational presence in the material world is denied. Combined with the theological (and moral) relativism that comes with a rejection of any infallible authority or certainty, the de-sanctification of the world led to the rise of a secularism where atheism and statolatry/political authoritarianism logically follow. The State was now on top and with religion becoming a political tool. There were certainly already strands of this relativist and unholy secularism already in Catholicism because Protestant leaders were all Catholics once. However, they were always minor strands in Catholicism and likely would have continued to be, if not for the secular political powers that supported Protestantism. It would be disingenuous to give anything close to equal responsibility for secularism to Catholicism. Protestantism was born out of minor heretical philosophies, chief among them being nominalism/Ockhamism, that never gained authoritative standing in the Catholic Church.