The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
anthropology’ of Charles Taylor is important in this regard. 2 Taylor argues
that in the mediaeval and early-modern worlds, religious beliefs ‘sank into
the background’. He writes: ‘In our public and private life of prayer,
penance, devotion, religious discipline, we lean on God’s existence, use it as
the pivot of our action, even when we aren’t formulating our belief, as I use
the stairs or banister in the course of my focal action’. Taylor proposes that
one of the fundamental changes wrought by modernism in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries was the movement of Christian
faith from the background to the foreground of the individual’s identity;
‘theology comes indexed to a personal vision, or refracted through a particular
sensibility’. However, he says, this place of religion in personal life was
fundamentally and permanently changed in the twentieth century:
Virtually nothing in the domain of mythology, metaphysics, or
theology stands in this fashion as publicly available background today.
But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing in any of those domains
that poets may not want to reach out to in order to say what they
want to say, nor moral sources they descry there that they want to
open for us. What it does mean is their opening [of] these domains,
in default of being a move against a firm background, is an articulation
of personal vision. It is one that we might come to partake in as
well, as a personal vision; but it can never become again an invoking
of public references, short of an almost unimaginable return – some
might say ‘regression’ – to a new age of faith. 3
Though Taylor’s language is different, and at the risk of being mistaken
and committing a disservice, there seems to me in his crafting of religious
change a notion of pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity, following
similar contours to those outlined in this book. The last change Taylor
ascribes to ‘modernism’, a timing which he locates in literature and the
arts to the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries, and the causes to
the ‘internalizing move of modern humanism, which recognises no more
constitutive goods external to us’. The articulation of good – the very
speaking of it – becomes less, he says, since as humanists we are fearful
of formulaic responses, historical sham, and a ‘moral assurance . . . which
actually insulates us from the energy of true moral sources’. We also fall
silent about ‘the narrative construction of our lives’ – in other words, we
no longer articulate our lives as moral stories. As a moral philosopher,
he says that whilst ‘[t]here are good reasons to keep silent’, he urges us
not to be, and to abjure modern (post-modern?) relativism about the
absence of absolute good and ‘hypergoods’. 4 What Taylor may seem to be
describing is post-modernity, but he calls it modernity.
Indeed, what divides analysis within the academy is the virtue of postmodernism
as a theory and method of analysis, and post-modernity as an
historical period. The cynics of post-modernity rely on the belief that in
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