John Challenor reviews Varieties of Religion Today:
William James Revisited by Charles Taylor Harvard University Press, 2002, pp.144, £13.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-674-00760-3 Listed by Richard Rorty as ‘among the dozen most important philosophers writing today, anywhere in the world’, Taylor is Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, a leading theorist of communitarianism, and a Catholic.
This short but dense and very well written book applauds James for his foresight and for the continuing relevance of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and goes on to give a commentary interpreting what is happening to religious belief in Europe and North America today.
As a philosopher, James is said to have taken Bergson's advice, ‘dive back into the flux’. He took real religion to be, not doctrine received at second hand, but actual feelings experienced at first hand, and acted upon. He is classified as a pragmatist.
Taylor admires James, but not uncritically. He asks, does James do justice to the public role of religion?
Can private experience bear all the weight? Surely there must be a place for mediated religion?
Of the familiar contrast between private devotion and public observance, Taylor writes, ‘nothing prevents these two combining...one W. James’s Varieties of might even claim that they ought ideally to complement each other. I Religious Experience myself certainly lean in this reissued by Penguin Books, | 983, pp.576, £8.99, ISBN: 0140390340 direction, if I may step for a minute beyond the role of neutral commentator’. And James ‘stands within a Protestant tradition, ...so he has trouble getting his mind around Catholicism’.
In the section "Religion Today", Taylor reflects on the relationship of Church and State, religion and society. He intervenes in effect in the ongoing debate on secularisation, making the point (a point for James) that religion is withdrawing from partnership with governments, and even from the official churches - but thriving in the private sector. And this may be a point for Grace Davie, who suggests that Europeans may be not less religious than others, but religious in a different way.
Taylor concedes that James’s position ‘emerges from the broad sweep of Latin Christendom over recent centuries’.
At the official level, the Lateran Council of 1215 required personal confession and communion once a year; at ground level, popular devotional movements proliferated. The Reformation (salvation by faith, not works) accentuated the trend. Since the 17th century religious wars, religion has been progressively de-coupled from political allegiance.
Church and State have been separated (mostly), and government and society secularised. Now, ‘coercion comes to seem not only wrong, but absurd and thus obscene’ (p. 94). ‘Something has happened in the last half century, perhaps even less, which has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies’. Taylor is thinking of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, of expressive individualism, of personal and sexual liberation, of consumer choice, of people sitting loose to churches and exploring freely among world spiritualities. Readers of Don Cupitt will be on known ground.
But there is a dark side to this story of ever-increasing personal liberation - the backlash. The path to liberty never ran smooth. Henry of Navarre's Edict of Nantes, tolerating Huguenots, was revoked by Louis XIV. The lay Republic of France is still contested. In the USA, in what Taylor calls ‘the contemporary American Kulturkampf’, the Moral Majority / Religious Right aspires to bring God back into national life, and prayer into the schools, in a civil religion able to cleanse the world of evil. The Vatican doggedly prolongs old policies on sex and reproduction, and quietly re-couples Church and State through concordats. Though his book is mainly about the "West", Taylor notes the problem further afield, in Muslim attempts to impose shar'ia law and Hindu (BJP) abuse of religion to boost nationalism.
But Taylor is optimistic. Of efforts to put the clock back, he writes, ‘the very embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation. This shift goes a long way to explain the conditions of belief in our day’, (p. 98). He nowhere mentions Zionism or the IsraeliPalestinian problem. The lectures that became this book were given in 2000, and though the book itself was published in April 2002, it seems to date from before 11 September 2001 and reflects a more tranquil world than the one we have. I hope Taylor's optimism proves to be well judged.
John Challenor is the member of the network and Editor-in-Chief of Renew, the Quarterly newsletter of ‘Catholics for a Changing Church’. (www. c-c-c.freeserve.co.uk) "A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE" Diversity & Division within religious traditions A day conference hosted by the London SoF group on Saturday 29 March 2003, 10:00 to 16:30 Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London with guest speakers: