......forces advancing secularism included the creation of works of art, literature and music that could be experienced independently of religious practices such as listening to a Mass in a concert hall as an aesthetic experience rather than an act of worship. Dr. Taylor says these activities helped to create what he calls “a kind of middle space, neither explicitly believing, but not atheistic either, a kind of undefined spirituality.”
What makes today’s form of secularism different from its predecessors, the scholar says, is that it is marked by an unprecedented pluralism of outlooks, both religious and nonreligious, in which the proportion of religious belief is smaller than ever before.
A SECULAR AGE
By Charles Taylor
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
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