Charles Taylor on Catholicism and Pluralism

In researching a project exploring the connection between subsidiarity and pluralism, I came across Charles Taylor's essay, A Catholic Modernity? (available in the book of the same name, published in 1999 by Oxford). It speaks directly to our conversations regarding Greg Kalscheur's paper, and contains some powerful and provocative insight:

The view I'd like to defend . . . is that in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel. The notion is that modern culture, in breaking with the structures and beliefs of Christendom, also carried certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken or could have been taken within Christendom. In relation to the earlier forms of Christian culture, we have to face the humbling realization that the breakout was a necessary condition of the development.

For instance, modern liberal political culture is characterized by an affirmation of universal human rights -- to life, freedom, citizenship, self-realization -- which are seen as radically unconditional; that is, they are not dependent on such things as gender, cultural belonging, civilizational development, or religious allegiance, which always limited them in the past. As long as we were living within the terms of Christendom -- that is, of a civilization where the structures, institutions, and culture were all supposed to reflect the Christian nature of the society (even in the nondenominational form in which this was understood in the early United States) -- we could never have obtained this radical unconditionality.

. . . . [this impossibility] doesn't lie in the Christian faith itself but in the project of Christendom: the attempt to marry the faith with a form of culture and a mode of society. There is something noble in the attempt; indeed, it is inspired by the very logic of Incarnation . . . . But as a project to be realized in history, it is doomed to frustration and even threatens to turn into its opposite.

That's because human society in history inevitably involves coercion (as political society, at least, but also in other ways); it involves the pressure of conformity; it involves inescapably some confiscation of the highest ideals for narrow interests, and a host of other imperfections. There can never be a total fusion of the faith and any particular society, and the attempt to achieve it is dangerous for the faith. . . .

Thus, to say that the fullness of rights culture couldn't have come about under Christendom is not to point to a special weakness of Christian faith. Indeed, the attempt to put some secular philosophy in the place of faith -- Jacobinism, Marxism -- has scarcely led to better results (in some cases, spectacularly worse). This culture has flourished where the casing of Christendom has been broken open and where no other single philosophy has taken its place, but the public sphere has remained the locus of competing ultimate visions.

The entire essay is worth reading, as it makes a persuasive case for a limited embrace of value pluralism in the political/legal sphere.

Rob