The Future of Evangelicalism is a Secular Age

The Future of Evangelicalism is a Secular Age September 29, 2016

I’m reading through Charles Taylor’s Secular Age with the help of James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor and I was intrigued by their predictions for the future.

According to Taylor, our secular age stresses a closed order where meaning and activity are entirely immanent and this-worldly. However, because of suspicion and longing for transcendence, Taylor thinks this will change.  First, the secularization thesis will become less plausible when it is realized that other societies are not following suit and young people will begin to explore beyond the immanent boundaries searching for signals of transcendence.

In regards to those raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are fundamentalist, Smith (pp. 138-39 n. 10) thinks two options will emerge for them in this secular age. Some will:

a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarnational development of modernity, just now a few centuries later, sort of catching up with the wider culture; so under the guise of the “emerging church” or “progressive ” evangelicalism, we’ll be set on a path to something  like Protestant liberalism, or a new deism; or

b. recognize the disenchantment and excarnation of evangelical Protestantism, and also reject the Christianized subtraction stories of liberal Christianity, and feel the pull of more incarnational spiritualities, and thus move toward more “Catholic” expressions of faith – and these expressions of faith will actually exert more pull on those who have doubts about their “closed” take on the immanent frame.

I think Smith is dead right on this.


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