What we do learn (eventually on page 437) is that Taylor’s ‘own view of “secularisation” has been shaped by my own perspective as a believer’. This is not at any point allowed to detract from the admirable objectivity he shows in presenting differing viewpoints. This is a book that can be relied on for fair judgment. The problem remains the historical holes. In the second half of the survey, dealing with the modern world, they recur thick and fast. The growth of secularisation in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, is plotted mostly in relation to the ideas of thinkers. But it was, in the western societies with which Taylor is exclusively concerned, as much the product of changes in the practice of government — its causes are historical. The rise of the collectivist state simply took over responsibility for areas like education, welfare and social planning, which had formerly been the preserve of the Church. And in ideas terms, for every cocky atheist there were very many more whose regret at the loss of faith around them was far greater than any sense of personal liberation from the thrall of religious custom. A partial presentation of historical reality in the schools, combined with the social romanticism lined up for the cameras of television docudrama producers, are the present conveyances of secularisation in only a limited sense: far more decisive, in the construction of a secular world, is the collapse of authority in morality and individual choice in matters which once were determined by traditional wisdom.

Taylor’s important study ends with a brief and rather Delphic epilogue. ‘My case,’ he concludes, ‘is not only that RMN [Reform Master Narrative] is clearly important, and obviously provided the framework for 18th-century break-out; but also that ID [Intellectual Deviation] by itself wasn’t enough.’ It needs to be repeated that the writing is sometimes dense.

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