Faith's fate

What Hobbes saw as the solution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau later saw as the problem. For Rousseau, the state of nature was morally neutral but perfectible and basically benevolent. As for politics, it was the source of human corruption rather than a remedy for it. Remarkably, the path forward for Rousseau and Hobbes alike was (to quote the title of Rousseau's landmark work of 1762) the "social contract." Whereas Hobbes had believed such a contract was needed to suppress human evil, Rousseau believed that it was indispensable to restore and preserve human goodness.

Hobbes and Rousseau wrote, respectively, during and after a sea change in European politics that to a point anticipated their contractual vision. Exhausted by the wars of religion, the rulers of Europe agreed in 1648, in the Peace of Westphalia, that when it came to religion, might would thenceforth make right within the borders of a given state -- though, crucially, not beyond them. Religion would now be, instead of the source of a government's legitimacy, merely one of its regulatory responsibilities. Rather than a separation of church and state, Westphalia was Theodosius redux: a new subordination of church to state.

Hobbes and Rousseau were both part of Westphalia's after-the-fact rationalization, the Wiltshireman tilting toward pessimistic authoritarianism, the Genevan toward optimistic liberalism. In the founding of the United States, the gloomy Anglophile John Adams owed something to Hobbes, and the sunny Francophile Thomas Jefferson owed rather more to Rousseau. In our day, the partisans of Hobbes might be expected to favor the unitary executive, the preemptive use of military force and careful state monitoring of religion; the partisans of Rousseau would likely favor a limited executive, diplomacy over military engagement and a benign indulgence of religion.

Political secularization, however, is just one of three kinds of secularization that Taylor addresses in "A Secular Age," his voluminous, impressively researched and often fascinating social and intellectual history. The second kind is the decline of subjective religious practice, a decline Westphalia need not have entailed -- and, indeed, for another two centuries, scarcely did. The third kind of secularization, about which Taylor has most to say, is that of today (the Secular Age of the title), in which neither belief nor unbelief is a given and one's identity (even including one's gender) is constructed rather than immutably assigned at birth.