bad conscience and resentiment that Nietzsche chronicles in the second essay of the
Genealogy of Morals.
How then, given the challenges illuminated by Nietzschean anti-humanism can
one develop a secularism adequate to the moral landscape of the present? The answer for
Taylor lies in constructing a model that gives theistic practices a central though not
dominant place within it. Taylor’s model is distinctly pluralistic. Given his
understanding of life in the spiritual fragile world of our necessarily secular age, Taylor
understands that “my spiritual path has to respect those of others; it must be abide by the
harm principle. With this restriction, one’s path can range through those which require
some community to live out, even national communities or would be state churches, but it
can also range beyond to those which require only the loosest of affinity groups, or just
some servicing agency, like a source of advice and literature.”
Within this contemporary framework for belief, individuals choose the church in
which they feel most comfortable. “But this means that my place in the broader ‘church’
may not be relevant for me, and along with this, my placing in the ‘people under god’ or
other such political agency with a providential role. In the new expressivist dispensation,
there is no necessary embedding of our link to the sacred in any particular broader
framework, whether ‘church’ or state.”
Hence the sacred becomes uncoupled from our
political allegiances but it does not disappear from the public realm. God is still very
much a part of the modern social imaginary, only now access to her transpires in an
increasingly pluralistic and often distinctly individualistic manner. However older
collective practices of religion, and the comprehensive visions of the good associated
with them, still have a vital place in the modern social imaginary, even if –contra
Macintyre – there is no rationally authoritative independent moral vocabulary at work as
well.
52
Varieties of Religion Today p. 102.
53
Ibid. p. 95.
19
Convention