opened to totalizing, inhumane ideologies.^10 Thus, the fatalflaw of secularism
consists in its dogmatic separation of humanflourishing from religious tran-
scendence. The importance of Taylor’s work lies in historicizing what is
often presented as the stand-off between irrational religion and fact-oriented
secular thought. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Taylor shows
that secular humanism’s exclusion of religion derives from a ‘subtraction
narrative’, a story with a plot line that requires the recession of religion
for scientific and social progress. The subtraction narrative assumes that
humanity’s maturation naturally obviates religion as reason and scientific
facts replace its‘superstitious’mindset. This narrative originated in the
Enlightenment’s shift in epistemology: the human self and reason modelled
on the verifiability of the scientific method prompted a one-sided narrative
of human emancipation from oppressive traditional authority structures,
especially ecclesial ones. Those who still adhere to this model, despite its
obvious limitations, will always experience religion as a throwback to primitive
times^11 and thus regard Christian humanism as incompatible with science,
truth, and social advancement. Taylor’s counter-narrative demonstrates that
contrary to secularists’ cherished self-image as hard-nosed, fact-oriented
debunkers of irrational religionists,‘their stance was not forced on [secularists]
by the‘facts’,butflows from a certain interpretive grid’.^12 Secularists thus
appeal to reason without the necessary hermeneutic reflection on the
historical influences and personal interests that shape it.
Corroborating Taylor’s outline of secularism’s subtraction narrative, the
sociologist José Casanova has argued that the depiction of religion as an
inherently intolerant and undemocratic force relies on an impossible abstrac-
tion of the term‘religion’that has no grounding in concrete social realities.^13
Creating this abstract straw man prevents a true understanding of religion’s
formative role in European democracies, obscures the destructive role of
atheist regimes, and legitimizes these historical blind spots through the erro-
neous conviction that any reference to religion can only be divisive and
counterproductive.^14 Even more tragically, the popular equation of religion
with intolerance prevents the much-needed opportunityfinally to ‘put to
rest the old battles about enlightenment, religion, and secularism’.^15 Getting
beyond these old battles is imperative because societal pressures show the
(^10) Taylor,A Secular Age, 769. (^11) Taylor,A Secular Age, 364–5.
(^12) Taylor,A Secular Age, 275.
(^13) José Casanova,Europas Angst vor der Religion, Berliner Reden zur Religionspolitik (Berlin:
Berlin University Press, 2009), 14.
(^14) Casanova,Europas Angst, 28. Casanova argues, for example, that the history of atheistic
regimes and the existence of democracy within religiously shaped cultures demonstrate that‘a
strict separation of church and state is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for
democracy’(Europas Angst, 17).
(^15) Casanova,Europas Angst, 29.
140 Jens Zimmermann