Conversions in the secular age

The disenchanted world ostensibly closes off humanity from the outside permeations of black magic and demonic spirits. Yet, as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age, even this new world is not immune to an oppressive sense of darkness. Even after we have exorcised the vestiges of the pre-modern, we still experience “unguarded moments when we can feel the immense weight of suffering” in our world (681). The poignancy of violence and loss can still “get to us” in our modern vulnerability. When “self-stabilizing” society disintegrates into violence, some may choose to cope by disengaging from the suffering (682, 690). Perhaps empathy is not only futile, but counterproductive (697).

For Taylor, this is an unsatisfying reaction, akin to the slogan of Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries, “no one is to blame.” The disquiet is deeply unsettling for some who inhabit the immanent frame. From among these, Taylor identifies a class of individual who breaks out of exclusive immanency in a “conversion” experience. The moment of “enlightenment,” if we can call it that, varies by person. For some (Walker Percy) it is a shift of self-understanding that can take account of humanity’s perilous middle space between the animal and the divine (731). In general, the new perspective of the convert goes “beyond the limits” of the older immanent frame, occasionally requiring the invention of a “new language or literary style” (732). The break with immanency, however, does not leave the natural world behind, but rather “includes it while disrupting it.” There is the sense of relation between the immanent order and the higher order – of which conversion offers an inconclusive foretaste. Meaning must lie somewhere within the regnant order.

If conversion implies some break, Taylor recognizes the potential for a reactionary alienation from the immanent world. The nostalgic sense that we have somehow lost “a really Christian order” tends to collapse the tension between the higher order and the imperfections of social life. If it is not possible to live in the old world (as it is imagined), a feeling of alienation from the present order provides an easy retreat. Taylor makes to avoid this mistake by reaffirming the value of modern civilization. The converted prophet need not stand totally on the outside of the immanent order; she may instead stand when necessary as “modern civilization’s ‘loyal opposition’” (745). Implied is the notion that conversion can afford to deny the “illusory totality” of exclusive humanism, even as it resists its own totalizing inclinations. Rather than maintain sole citizenship in the present age, Christian may begin listening “for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn’t strained to understand it” (754). The conversation of Christian faith runs over centuries, and we are now in the position to commence the messy task of working through that long tradition, even as we surrender any easy access to timeless, propositional faith. This project should even open Christians up to the complex motives and contributions of the modern age. The “simple opposition” of contemporary polemics – on both the “modern pagan” and Christian sides – fails to take account of the complex situation (771).

Taylor is conscious of the necessary tensions in what we might call his conversion “imaginary.” By straddling two worlds, and denying ultimacy to each, the converted individual must somehow keep these cross pressures at bay while maintaining a dynamic space for agape and hope.  One imagines that this middle ground provides “space” which is both participatory and also non-ultimate. There is still a “structure of ambivalence” (cf. Eddie Glaude, Exodus, 33). The tensions of conversion remind us that modernity is worth our time and effort, and yet is not the end-game. The modern fears and appearances of false hope are not eradicated by conversion. Yet, while those fears remain immanent, we are now conceptually free to admit the half-glanced intrusion of some deeper reality. This suggests the conditions to engage society while not investing our last hope in something exclusively immediate (and so open up those moments of ultimate despair, as in Percy’s “derangement” of modern humanity). It is possible for an individual in the middle space to participate in, and beckon to, the modern order precisely because he refuses to take that order at face-value. Rather, there is hint of a deeper strand of historical meaning, and perhaps the potential to course-correct the tragic trajectory of a suffering community.