I'm now over 250 pages into Charles Taylor's A Secular Age which tells a long, complex story of how exclusive humanist (non-religious), blueprint worldviews have gradually risen throughout Western history to now dominate the contemporary world.
Overall, Taylor discusses a complex myriad of factors that have helped to bring about modern secularisation process that originate in medieval times, and at the moment, I'm at the point in the book where he focuses on how 17th and 18th century Enlightenment thinking provides significant roots of disenchantment which prompt secularisation in the future.
From the book, the following four interrelated roots of disenchantment from the Enlightenment stick out for me:
(i) The creation of a meta-topical public sphere which gave people many more ways of viewing and interpreting the world
(ii) A pursuit of mutual benefit in commercial activity which started to outweigh the value of religious/ transcendental truth
(iii) A movement away from heroic, warrior type behaviour towards more diplomatic and civil/polite communication process
(iv) A revolutionary sense that human beings themselves (rather than the grace of God) provide the motivation for seeking universal justice and benevolence in the world.
However, my own interest in religious conversion shows me that many modern people want to transcend the disenchantment of our secular age, and do this through religious-seeking. Thus, I can't wait to reach the part of the book when Taylor deals with this fascinating phenomenon.
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