II. Seven Mini Meditations For Your Lenten Reflection: What Should Christians Be Up To Today?
Welcome to this series of seven short meditations for the seven weeks of Lent – these Mini Meditations. This represents a departure from my practice of several years now: issuing occasional blogs. I plan, the Lord willing, to return to that practice after Easter.
Here, in a Lenten mode, I’m attempting to do something orderly – and something that anyone can handle, however busy you may perceive yourself to be this Lenten season. A once-a-week reading!
Thank you for tuning in – and I look forward to hearing from you in response, should the Spirit so move you. If things work out as I hope they will, you will be receiving one of these Mini Meditations each week in Lent.
—Paul Santmire, Ash Wednesday, 2025
I. Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
II. Understanding Our Post-Christian World
III. Attending to the Signs of These Times
IV. Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
V. Reclaiming the Child Within
VI. Revisiting Your Local Church
VII. Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
Mini Meditation Two: Understanding Our Post-Christian World
Just because a book is thick and heavy doesn’t make it true. But for many weeks now, I have been lugging such a book around with me, and I have concluded that it offers a cornucopia of historical insights, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 874pp.[!]. A number of reviewers have concluded that this is one of the most important studies of its kind in our era (see, for example, the long, but accessible discussion by the former NY Times reporter, Peter Steinfels, in Commonweal, May 9, 2008, pp. 14ff.).
If we’re going to try to understand our post-Christian world, as I think we must, if we’re going to grasp the mission that God is giving to our American churches today, familiarity with the argument of this challenging volume, I believe, could be critically important. So I’m going to tell you about it here briefly, in case you haven’t already read it. With this interpretive principle from a poem by Alexander Pope and a novel by E. M. Forster constantly in mind: where angels fear to tread.
Here are a few representative thoughts from Taylor’s insightful tome [see p. 532]. The outcome of cultural pluralism in our era often has been a “retreat of religion from the public square. In one way this is inevitable and in the circumstances good. Justice requires that a modern democracy keep an equal distance from different faith positions.” In a word, the era of established religion, whether by law or by default, in particular WASP religion, is over.
On the other hand, perhaps paradoxically, this cultural pressure on religious communities to retreat from any quest to dominate the society frees them up to get engaged in a variety of ways: “As the sense of living Christendom fades, and we recognize that no spiritual family is in charge, or speaks for the whole, there will be a greater sense of freedom to speak our own minds, and in some cases these will inescapably be formulated in religious discourse.” That, in short compass, is what’s developed religiously, especially in North America, in this our secular age.
Meanwhile, Christianity itself has not been static: “Here what springs out is the long-term vector in [Western] Christendom, moving steadily over a half millennium towards more personal, committed forms of religious devotion and practice.” The spirituality of quest that we see today can be understood as the form that this movement takes in what Taylor call an Age of Authenticity: “The same long-term trend which produced the disciplined, conscious, committed individual believer, Calvinist, Jansenist, devout humanist, Methodist; which later gives us the ‘born again’ Christian, now has brought forth today’s pilgrim seeker, attempting to discern and follow his/her own path.”
Over all, then: “The future of North Atlantic religion depends for one part on the concatenated outcomes of a whole host of such quests; and for another, on the relations, hostile, indifferent, or (hopefully) symbiotic, which will develop between modes of quest and centres of traditional religious authority, between [what has been called] dwellers and seekers.”
As I continue this series, I will step in, again, where angels fear to tread, to make a particular proposal about what I believe the mission of the American church is, or could be, in this our – secular age.
(to be continued)
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