Erik Hammar

The few of you who frequent this space may remember that I’ve written about some of my experiences at mass at the Swedish Church in London. Like most Swedes, I grew up with the cultural trappings of organised religion, including Sunday school and confirmation. But, again like for most Swedes, religion was ultimately peripheral and faith even more so. At 18 I left the Swedish Church after my standard dose of teenage-reading of Dawkins, Hitchens and the other ‘new atheists’. My basic skepticism remains, though my atheist fervour has gone. I now quite enjoy it (and rejoined the Church at 25, when my anti-clerical rebellion had run its course).

Lately I have been thinking more and more about religion. I think that part of my curiosity derives from an growing interest in the political theory of social cohesion, associative ties and particularistic virtues and duties. But there is also a more metaphysical aspect to it. It is to explore this aspect that I have just started reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Taylor deals with one particular metaphysical aspect of religious experience. This is not the old chestnut – Does God exist? or anything like it. Rather, he seeks to explain how it comes that certain kinds of religious experience are not available to modern Westerners. The kind of experience he has in mind is the unquestioned, unquestionable, if you will naive, religious disposition that characterised believers in earlier epochs. Though there are clearly religious people in the West today, they are generally aware that there are other, non-religious options on the table. Options, that is, for trying to live a fulfilled life. This very optionality, Taylor argues, disposseses us of access to the kinds of experiences that were available prior to our contemporary, as Weber puts it, disenchanted world. The pre-secular age was enchanted. Taylor tries to answer how this happened (and if I persist, I might find out).

It is quite an exciting idea that our historical situation delimits the range of experience available to us. Of course, in a mundane sense this is trivially the case. Cavemen did not (luckily? regrettably?) have access to the experience of commercial television. But this means only that a certain experience was not available, not a certain kind of experience. The colour blind person who somehow regains sight or the child raised by wolves who is introduced into human society gains access to new kinds of experiences.

Though these are metaphysical questions, attending to them doesn’t require metaphysical extravagance. In other words, they are fascinating in their own right, independent of whether one is religious or not, a believer or not. They concern, it seems to me, two questions: How and by what are experiences formed and limited? and second, What does that imply for our ethical and political life? Perhaps Taylor can help give some pointers on where to start with these imposing questions.

London, 6 April 2018