How (Not) to Be Secular

What How (Not) to Be Secular is

How (Not) to Be Secular is a compact reader’s guide to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), written by philosopher James K. A. Smith and published by Eerdmans in 2014. At roughly 140 pages, it walks chapter by chapter through Taylor’s much larger argument, restating his core ideas in plainer language, supplying a glossary of his coined terms, and illustrating his abstractions with examples from contemporary culture. It is explicitly a "small field guide" to a big book — a bridge, not a replacement.

Taylor’s question is historical: how did the West move, in roughly five centuries, from a society in which not believing in God was nearly impossible to one in which belief is simply one option among many, and often not the easiest one? Smith’s book carries that question to a wider audience. He writes as a Christian reader, and says so, but the secular condition Taylor describes belongs to believers and unbelievers alike — which is why the guide is read across that whole spectrum rather than only inside the church.

Why readers reach for Smith before reaching for Taylor

A Secular Age is one of the most admired and least-finished works of recent philosophy — 900 pages, dense with intellectual history, written in Taylor’s long looping sentences. Most people who own it have not read it through. Smith’s book exists for exactly that reader: someone who keeps hearing about Taylor’s argument, suspects it explains something true about their own moment, and needs a way in that does not require a semester. The genius of the guide is that it respects the difficulty of the original while making its payoff portable.

The reframing it carries is the reason readers keep returning to it. The ordinary assumption is that "secular" means a world with less religion — fewer believers, emptier churches, subtraction. Taylor, by way of Smith, reorganizes that: the deeper change is not how many people believe but the conditions of belief itself. In a secular age, belief and unbelief are both contestable, both haunted by the other. The believer feels the pull of doubt; the unbeliever feels the pull of transcendence. That diagnosis — that we are all living inside the same "cross-pressured" condition rather than on opposite sides of a wall — is what readers carry out of the book and cannot stop seeing afterward.

Three "stories" of secularization: the move the whole guide turns on

Smith opens by laying out Taylor’s central distinction, the hinge the rest of the book swings on. There are, Taylor says, different things people mean by "secular." One sense is the retreat of religion from public institutions — the courtroom and the classroom no longer run on theology. A second sense is the simple decline of belief and practice — fewer people in the pews. But Taylor is after a third sense: secularity as a change in the very conditions of belief, such that faith becomes one contestable option among many rather than the unquestioned background. Smith names the dominant account of how this happened the "subtraction story" — the idea that modernity simply stripped away superstition to reveal the secular world underneath, the way you might wipe fog off a window.

The reason this section matters is that Taylor, through Smith, rejects the subtraction story and replaces it with something richer. The secular age was not produced by merely removing belief; it was constructed — built out of new ideas about the self, nature, time, and meaning that had to be invented before unbelief could even become thinkable. That reframing is the book’s first gift to readers: it turns "secularization" from an inevitability into a contingent human story with a beginning, a sequence, and an author’s fingerprints all over it. Once you stop reading the modern world as the natural default and start reading it as a thing that was made, you cannot un-see the seams.

The immanent frame and the buffered self: Taylor’s vocabulary, made usable

The middle of the guide is where Smith earns his keep, because it is where he translates Taylor’s coined terms into language a reader can hold. The "immanent frame" is Taylor’s name for the taken-for-granted world most moderns now inhabit: a closed natural order that runs by its own laws and does not obviously require anything beyond itself. The "buffered self" is the kind of person that frame produces — an individual sealed off from outside spiritual forces, no longer "porous" to enchantment the way a medieval villager was, but protected, bounded, the master of meaning inside their own head. Smith pairs these with "the malaise of immanence" — Taylor’s term for the nagging sense, even inside a comfortable secular life, that something is flattened or missing.

What makes this section so durable is that the vocabulary does real work after you close the book. Readers describe suddenly being able to name experiences they had only felt: the way a stunning piece of music or a death in the family can make the closed immanent frame feel, for a moment, like it has a crack in it; the way a thoughtful believer can be visited by doubt and a thoughtful atheist by a sense of transcendence, each "cross-pressured" by the other’s world. Smith’s gift is not to resolve any of this. It is to give a believer and a skeptic the same words for the same weather, so they can finally describe to each other what living in a secular age is actually like.

Living faithfully (or honestly) inside the secular condition: the closing thesis

The final movement of the guide turns from description to posture. Having shown that the secular age is a shared condition rather than a battle line, Smith draws out Taylor’s implication for how a person might actually live in it. The temptation, on the religious side, is nostalgia — to imagine you can simply step back into a pre-secular world where belief was easy, or to treat the secular as an enemy to be defeated. Taylor’s account makes both moves impossible: there is no outside to the immanent frame to retreat to. The honest options are to inhabit the condition with open eyes, neither pretending the cross-pressure away nor surrendering to flatness.

This is where Smith’s own Reformed vantage becomes most visible, and he is upfront about it: he reads Taylor partly as a diagnosis the church needs in order to understand its own people, who are buffered selves whether they like it or not. But the charge he draws out reaches past any one tradition. It is an argument that the way forward is not better proofs but a fuller imagination — a recovery of the sense that the immanent frame might be open rather than closed, held as a live possibility rather than a settled verdict. Many readers cite this closing section as the part that reframed not their arguments but their posture, the way they hold belief and doubt in the same modern hand.

Pricing

Where How (Not) to Be Secular falls behind

It is a guide, not a stand-alone work. Smith is summarizing and interpreting Taylor, which means everything you take from the book arrives through a second author’s lens. That is the point of the format and it is done well, but a reader who wants to wrestle with Taylor’s actual sentences — his hedges, his qualifications, his thousand-page accumulation — will eventually have to open A Secular Age itself. Smith is a map, and a map is not the territory.

It still demands stamina. This is the accessible version of Taylor, not an easy one. The ideas are abstract, the vocabulary is invented, and the argument moves by accumulation rather than by punchy takeaways. Readers expecting a brisk popular paperback the size of a typical Christian-living title will be surprised at how much attention even 140 distilled pages require.

More analytical than devotional or practical. There are no application steps, no prayers, no formation exercises, no "five things to do this week." The book’s entire payoff is understanding — a clearer picture of the condition you are living inside. Readers looking for something to practice, rather than something to grasp, are reading the wrong book and should reach for a formation title instead.

Light on argument with Taylor. Smith is an admiring interpreter, and the guide is mostly exposition rather than critique. Where a reader might want pushback — places A Secular Age overreaches, or claims other scholars dispute — Smith largely stays in translation mode. That keeps the book clean as an introduction, but anyone wanting a real debate about Taylor’s thesis will have to assemble the critics themselves.

A Reformed accent that goes mostly unflagged. Smith writes from a Reformed Protestant vantage and says so, but his framing of what the secular condition means for the church sometimes carries that tradition’s particular emphases without pausing to mark them. Taylor himself is Catholic, and the condition he describes is shared by everyone; readers from other traditions will occasionally feel Smith’s own lane in the applications even though the underlying diagnosis is common ground.

How (Not) to Be Secular vs. Making Sense of God vs. Total Truth

Different strengths, different angles on the same modern predicament. All three books take seriously that life in the secular West shapes how people believe, doubt, and find meaning — but they come at it differently. How (Not) to Be Secular is the descriptive one: it does not try to win the argument so much as to map the condition we are all living inside, the world where belief itself has become contestable. It is the most philosophical of the three and the most useful if your question is, "why does faith feel like one option among many now, even to me?"

Making Sense of God is Tim Keller’s account, and it does something Smith’s guide deliberately does not: it makes a case. Where Smith describes secularity as a shared condition with sympathy and restraint, Keller argues that the secular frame cannot deliver the meaning, satisfaction, freedom, and hope it promises, and that Christianity addresses those longings more coherently. It is warmer toward the doubter than a debate, but it is still aimed at persuasion. Read Smith to understand the weather; read Keller for an argument made inside it.

Total Truth is Nancy Pearcey’s worldview account, and it moves the conversation again — toward ideas and their public consequences. Pearcey’s concern is the "two-story" split that files faith under private values while secular-empirical claims get to count as public facts, and her project is to recover Christianity as a total claim about reality across academic disciplines. Read together, the three form a sequence. Smith says: see the condition you are inside, honestly. Keller says: test whether the secular story can bear the weight you put on it. Pearcey says: refuse the fact/value split and think Christianly across every field. None of them replaces the others.

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