As I finished my first draft, lousy from start to finish, I learned that Charles Taylor—a professor whose name I’d learned two years before, when I overheard Bernard Williams tell a friend that he was among the more exciting philosophers of his generation—had written a masterly book on Hegel. I soon met Taylor and nervously asked him if he would have a quick look at my very patchy tract, which ridiculously didn’t even mention him. He showed such compassion and balance of judgment that I was instantly drawn both to the man and the scholar. I later read the first chapter of his 1975 book Hegel, in my view one of the best ever in the history of philosophical ideas. It changed my life. I knew I had found my guru.

The next time I met Taylor was in India in 1981. He had come to deliver a set of three lectures on social theory as practice, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The Centre had long been a critic of western modernity. Some fellows there searched for an alternative “Indian” modernity. Taylor was excited and challenged by the atmosphere and his lectures were brilliant, original, and delivered with mastery.

At that time, I was at the other end of the political spectrum, teaching Taylor’s Hegel in Jawaharlal Nehru University, home to every shade of left group, vehemently critical of capitalism but deep in the throes of the western modernist project of Marx. At JNU the name of CSDS was unmentionable; the scholars there were denounced as “reactionary” for using Indian cultural traditions for the study of Indian politics and society.

I took Taylor away to teach Hegel to my students, subconsciously hoping I was also disconnecting him from the ‘conservative’ CSDS. But, ironically, his very presence at the Centre lifted it in my eyes (and perhaps eventually led me to quit JNU and join the CSDS decades later).

At the same time, the Centre revived Taylor’s interest in India. Over the years India’s rich diversity tremendously impacted him, and quite definitely shaped his appreciation of diversity, and that in turn had an enormous impact on Indian scholars like myself.

In order to understand this story of trans-hemispheric intellectual exchange, you have to go back quite a long ways. In the 1940s, a Marxist named Wilfred Cantwell Smith lived in Aligarh and Lahore studying Islam but also throwing himself wide open to the world of ancient Hindu traditions with their mind-boggling diversity. Cantwell Smith found that ordinary Hindus do not aspire to unity and are content to cherish their diversity as it is. Himself a Protestant, Cantwell Smith perfected the art of looking at religious traditions from the perspective of those who lived them, from the inside. Years later in the mid-1990s, when I was studying the ways that Indian secularism differs from European and American secularism, I was stunned by the insights of Cantwell Smith’s masterpiece, The Meaning and End of Religion. I was even more stunned when I excitedly began telling Charles Taylor about my discovery. Not only did he know the book well, but Cantwell Smith had been one of his more influential teachers.

This discovery came amidst decades of discussion of the issue of secularism in India beginning in the late 1980s. I published two long pieces on the subject in 1990-1991. After that, Taylor and I began discussing it regularly. Around 1994, we met with sociologist Nilüfer Göle and a little later the religion sociologist José Casanova to discuss the issue in other countries and contexts. In 1997, I edited and published a collection of essays called Secularism and Its Critics, which was when Taylor wrote on secularism for the first time in an essay called “Modes of Secularism.” At that time, the issue of secularism was important predominantly in India and Turkey, but after 9/11 its importance elsewhere shot through the roof. In 2007, Taylor published A Secular Age, which completely transformed the terms of the debate by taking us to an altogether different level of secularity, one presupposed by western secularization and political secularism.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith at Harvard University.

It took a true exchange of ideas between scholars and traditions to move this important philosophical conversation forward. Taylor always generously claims that his understanding of political secularism is influenced by my work on the diversity-oriented Indian secularism. But without Taylor’s theoretical work, a conception of distinctive Indian secularism as, among other things, a response to religious diversity rather than as born out of battles with the church could not have emerged. All of these ideas came into play when I wrote The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy in 2010.

So how did this happen? I think that India’s rich diversity originally had an impact on Taylor via Cantwell Smith. And he in turn has influenced innumerable people like myself in understanding the meaning and significance of diversity. What Smith received from India, he passed on to Taylor, and what Taylor received from Smith, he passed on to Indians like me. And so on. These intellectual circles are much larger than we imagine!

Our exchange was also deeply personal. For some Indians, like myself, intimacy and learning are closely related. If we had only exchanged ideas, I would have learned less than half of what I have from Taylor. He has given me a framework with which to think, shaped my most foundational ideas, and taught me how to understand human beings. None of this would have been possible, I have to say, if we were not close personal friends.

I think our experience has been typical of the way that Taylor works, as a philosopher and a friend. He is committed to deep pluralism, always marked by a lack of finality. He is suspicious of doctrines driven by a single principle. And, very importantly, he reaches out not only to the specialist, to people in his own philosophical circles, but to the wider public. His thoughts are constantly evolving, and he always manages to change the terms of debates in which he intervenes. Taylor is Catholic in his own way. He understands that profound divergences of religious beliefs and practices coexist with equally profound similarities in faiths. To have a particular faith, for him, is to be simultaneously open to other faiths, including faith in the human spirit and human reason. And finally, particularly at least in the last two decades, he has constantly attempted to escape Eurocentricity, not by superficial leaping toward other cultures but by slowly shrinking the centrality and significance of his own, by putting his own world in its place.

Taylor is a remarkable thinker not least because there are few ideas that he completely rejects or for that matter wholly embraces. He is able to do so because though he stands on one side, he helps us to imagine what it is like to be on the other. Taylor almost always helps us to see from both sides of the fence.

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We began working through Taylor’s dense argument, and I worried that we’d soon lose each other in the dark forest of his prose. Reading Taylor requires that, like Hansel and Gretel, you bring breadcrumbs to trace an argument that has you bouncing from late medieval monasticism to German philosophy to lyrics from torch singer Peggy Lee.

But to my students’ astonishment (and mine), as they made their way through the book, lights went on for them, illuminating the world they live in in a new way. “It’s like he’s reading our mail,” one student said. If you’ve grown up in post-1960s North America, A Secular Age, which was published in 2007, is like an episode of “This is Your Life” or “Finding Your Roots”: It’s the backstory to the fractured world in which we find ourselves. For people who have strong beliefs, as many of my students do, living in a world that is secular is to experience belief haunted by doubt, almost daily. And then that doubt is itself haunted by an enduring longing for something more—what Taylor, a practicing Roman Catholic, calls a “fullness,” a sense of significance that has the punch of transcendence about it, even if we believe this world is all we’ve got.

What did this octogenarian philosopher help my millennial students see, and what did they see in him?

Well, for starters, he helped explain why their generation considers “authenticity” the predominant virtue. In Taylor’s telling, the way humans see and imagine the world—what he calls our “social imaginary”—shifted in modernity from being religious and largely Christian to become “the modern moral order.” Rather than being obligated to God or “higher” eternal norms, today our obligations are for the mutual benefit of society. My moral obligations are to my neighbor, and everyone is my neighbor—so my obligations are universal. While we might no longer be haunted by God or eternity, in a sense the stakes are raised even higher: I’m responsible for everyone, all the time. There is no end to my obligation, no parameters for my responsibility. In a sense, we have to fill the vacuum left by God’s death. Those are big shoes to fill.

But there is a flip side to this: If we’re all we’ve got, Taylor says, it means we’re always “on” not only because we are always responsible but also because everybody’s watching. So we live in what Taylor calls an age of “mutual display” in which we show our individualism and virtue by making sure others see it. If God is dead, the only audience left to confirm our virtue is one another. David Foster Wallace got at this dynamic in a famous essay on television that is only more true in our internet age. What television did to us, Wallace argued, was turn us into watchers who expected to be watched. He, too, told a philosophical story about this, asking readers to imagine a “universe in which God is Nielsen.” Today, as my students explained, everyone is Nielsen, rating you.

Taylor helped them make sense of the almost paralyzing self-consciousness that has descended upon them with the constant display/watch dynamic that attends social media. They know the exhaustion of what it means to always be “on,” and they are well aware of the judgmentalism they experience when they don’t “display” the right things in the right way. And they start to wonder if the all-seeing God might not have been a little more forgiving than the non-stop monitoring of Snapchat and Instagram.

But Taylor also helped them understand a spiritual dynamic they experience. What makes ours a “secular” age, writes Taylor, is not that it is defined by unbelief but rather that belief is contestable and contested. Belief of every sort is “fragilized,” as Taylor puts it, destabilized by rival accounts and doubts. For more traditional “believers,” this means their faith is attended by doubt as a constant companion. “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) is a prayer they understand well.

But Taylor explains that it’s not only believers who suffer from doubt. In our secular age the unbeliever can find herself tempted to believe. She may take up yoga, or sacrificially devote herself to causes of justice, or find herself strangely attracted to the Dominican nuns down the street who keep inviting her to spiritual retreats. The doubter’s doubt is faith. (As the novelist Julian Barnes admitted in his memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”)

Unlike the world described to my students by religious fundamentalists, this is a world that they recognize. Taylor did justice to the complexity of their experience and the messiness of their spiritual lives, giving voice to their doubts, to be sure, but also giving them permission to admit they also still wanted to believe something more. There is a kind of sincerity about Taylor’s philosophical analysis that allowed them to step out of the cage of ironic cynicism.

Taylor is the first to admit that A Secular Age is an heir to Romanticism: He is trying to offer a philosophy that gives due attention to what it feels like to live in the world—a theoretical account that acknowledges the importance of our affections, our embodiment, all the visceral ways that we grope through the dizzying existence of our late modern world.

My students found in Taylor’s work a kind of “hitchhiker’s guide” to a secular age. But not everyone has the luxury of spending four months working through it. Which is why I decided, after that semester, to write a book about a book in an attempt at bringing Taylor’s insights to a wider audience. The response has been quite overwhelming—people from all sorts of walks of life have told me that Taylor’s analysis gave them their bearings in the confusion of a secular age. Some religious believers told me it gave them permission to voice their doubts, to be honest about how hard it is to believe. Skeptics and atheists tell me Taylor puts a finger on the rumbling spirituality they can’t shake. So this big philosophical tome ends up doing what David Foster Wallace used to say a good novel is supposed to do: Give us a sense that we aren’t alone. Someone understands us and has given names to the landscape we live in.

Taylor’s book makes me think of an image by the Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich called Monastery Graveyard in the Snow. Stark, skeleton-like trees frame the ruins of a cloistered community. You can feel the chill of north winds blowing across the scene like the gales of enlightened disbelief blowing across Europe. The gravestones point to the dead who used to believe. (Fittingly, all we have is a black-and-white image of the painting, which was destroyed during World War II.)

But then, when I look closer at this image, I notice that amidst those grave markers is a tiny band of monks, obstinate but haunted, still looking for something. Is it force of habit that propels them? Or has the enlightenment they were promised proven unfulfilling? Better to pray in the ruins than settle for disenchantment. Charles Taylor suggests that many of us are like this band of seekers: We see the ruins, we know the world has changed, we know there’s no going back. But we also can’t shake a hunger, a longing, a haunting that we welcome.

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For example: Let’s say someone thinks her boss is a suck-up to her supervisor and not especially helpful to those she supervises. The employee describes the boss as a “kiss up, kick down” kind of manager. This statement is full of implicit philosophy: Assumptions about how we ought to relate to those above and below us in status, expectations about workplace behavior, as well as models of what a good person is and how this particular manager doesn’t live up to it. Social life contains philosophical assumptions about what it means to be a good person and what the good life entails, and we are always tapping into those deep connections even when we don’t realize it. Charles Taylor calls these underlying assumptions our “social imaginaries.” This concept is key to my work.

I study religion and schools. My first book, which is forthcoming, is an analysis of the year and a half I spent observing four high schools in the New York City area: two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. My second book project looks at how school reform and old-fashioned American individualism shape how public schools think about “success.” I spent time observing six public high schools across the country, two each in San Diego, New York City, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Taylor’s work helps me make the case that my two books are not as different as they appear. Both public schools and religious schools talk about what it means to be a good person, what it means to be a success, and what it means to be responsible to someone other than yourself. While secular and religious visions of the good person might vary, Taylor’s way of analyzing them based on their underlying philosophical assumptions (social imaginaries) helps me to explore how they’re ultimately united by the kinds of questions they ask. Everyone wants to know what it means to be a good person, and most people have a pretty good sense of who such a person might be, rooting their answer in a narrative about a community of people. That community could be the global network of Muslims, or North American conservative Christians, or liberal secularists committed to the necessity of reason. The content changes, but the form’s the same.

Part of the reason I study schools and religion is because comparing religious and secular organizations can help us get a better sense of how moral life works. Why are certain issues extremely important to communities while others are ignored? How do morals work at both an individual and community level? I’m also interested in the similarities between religious and secular communities, which are greater than you might expect.

As part of a longer definition of the “social imaginary” in his book A Secular Age, Taylor explains: “The social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and widely shared sense of legitimacy.”

“Understanding” in this sense doesn’t have to be conscious. If I say that someone is a “man” to you, you’ll probably imagine him in shoes, a shirt, and pants. At another time in history you’d have imagined a hat or a beard. These are “understandings” that are rarely articulated and usually aren’t even conscious, and they relate to “practices” (wearing a hat, wearing shoes) that are not actually necessary in any sort of biological or physical sense.

Yet these social imaginaries can relate to much more than just what we wear. In A Secular Age, Taylor relates how it became possible to imagine (or conceive of) a world without God, and for such an imagining to coexist alongside those who continue to imagine a God-filled world.

Taylor is a devout Catholic, so when he talks about religions imaginaries, he is certainly not claiming that God is “imaginary” in the sense of not real. He is shifting the focus of the question from “Does God exist?” to “How do people think about (that is, imagine) God? That shift allows him to show how certain ways of imagining allow for certain ways of acting and relating to each other. What makes Taylor’s work exciting is that he has shown how changing the way we imagine can change the way we live.

I use the idea of a social imaginary to challenge the commonly perceived chasm between religious and secular thought. In fact, they have a lot in common. Taylor has written about the historical relationships between things we now think of as utterly separate: science and religion, church and state, the religious and the secular. Believing in the scientific method is obviously not the same thing as believing in God, but insisting on the primacy of a social thing called “science” is as much a product of a social imaginary as insisting on the primacy of a social thing called “church.” Of course, a rock will still fall whether or not there is a human to describe it. However, in that world without humans, the force pulling a rock to earth will not be called gravity; neither will it interact with social imaginaries called physics, measurement, and the scientific method. All that stuff exists because humans imagined it. More importantly, humans imagined a moral impetus behind science and from that we got certainties: Truth is better than falsehood, scientific curiosity is good for everyone, and innovation trumps tradition.

And this is where Taylor’s argument helps me unpack modern secularism. Secularist scientists like Richard Dawkins present the new atheist as courageous, committed to truth, and eager to liberate others from error. Taylor shows that the secular social world is just as “imagined” as any religious person’s: There is a vision of a good person and a good life that is by no means self-evidently true, and both are maintained by their communities. A new atheist’s dogged pursuit of truth is just as much a “social imaginary” as a celibate monk’s quiet pursuit of holiness. Taylor describes the new atheist attack on religion as a “subtraction story”—the assumption that if you just take away all the religious superstition, you’ll somehow get down to the really real human existence. But, Taylor shows, all human existence is imagined. If you subtract imagination, all we are is bones.

But Taylor doesn’t just challenge secularists; he also challenges the faithful, who, he says, are almost certainly secular in the West. By secular, he doesn’t mean not-believing: He just means that they recognize how it’s possible another might not believe. That possibility comes from centuries of changes in how Europeans thought about themselves and their relation to the universe, gradually making it easier to believe it’s the individual in this world, rather than the God in another, who’s at the center of it all.

When I’m talking about my work with my secular friends, they sometimes ask me why many Evangelicals deny macro-evolution, or why certain Muslims separate genders and wear the hijab. Taylor’s analysis has helped to give me a philosophical language to articulate how Evangelical and Muslim moral imaginaries are not all that different from those of secular people.

Imagine an atheist with an impressive commitment to physical fitness who comes from a community of fitness freaks (perhaps in Southern California). This person feels that physical fitness matters in a profound way. But that’s not more obviously true than the idea that a woman has to cover her hair because it matters in showing her religious devotion. The same logic is in play when some Evangelicals deny evolution. Rather than thinking of scientific denial as a specifically religious problem, it’s a much more human story of what scholars call motivated reasoning, which can affect secular people as easily as religious ones. That realization makes bigger problems with scientific denial—things like climate change and vaccines—much easier to deal with. Despite new atheist claims, science is not an all-or-nothing deal. If it’s a human problem and not a religious one, then if you can show creationists why it doesn’t go against their religion to accept climate change, it’s entirely possible to convince them to accept one part of science without convincing them to accept all of it.

And that’s really what speaks to me in Taylor’s work: He helps me to show that my work on religious people is much more about people than it is about religion. And that’s something both the religious and the not-religious ought to hear.

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