It has been more than a decade since the publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in 2007. Along with equally pathbreaking works like Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003), Taylor’s magnum opus forced scholars in the humanities and social sciences to address more rigorously the categories of “the religious” and “the secular” and their relation to each other. In Taylor’s account, secularity named not what was opposed to religiosity but the very conditions for belief—religious and otherwise—in modernity. A secular age, therefore, did not herald the twilight of religion but made possible the rapid pluralization of nominally religious and nonreligious belief systems. Two recent books reveal the stark differences in method yielded by writing about religion after Taylor: Christopher Douglas’s If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right and Finbarr Curtis’s The Production of American Religious Freedom.
Douglas’s volume is a...
