Editing Secularity (section)

===Taylorian secularity===

Philosopher [[Charles Taylor (philosopher)|Charles Taylor]] in his 2007 book ''[[A Secular Age]]'' understands and discusses the secularity of Western societies less in terms of how much of a role religion plays in public life (''secularity 1''), or how religious a society's individual members are (''secularity 2''), than as a "backdrop" or social context in which religious belief is no longer taken as a given (''secularity 3''). For Taylor, this third sense of secularity is the unique historical condition in which virtually all individuals – religious or not – have to contend with the fact that their [[Value (ethics and social sciences)|values]], [[morality]], or [[meaning of life|sense of life's meaning]] are no longer underpinned by communally-accepted religious facts. All religious beliefs or irreligious philosophical positions are, in a secular society, held with an awareness that there are a wide range of other contradictory positions available to any individual; belief in general becomes a different type of experience when all particular beliefs are optional. A plethora of competing religious and irreligious worldviews open up, each rendering the other more "fragile". This condition in turn entails for Taylor that even clearly religious beliefs and practices are experienced in a qualitatively different way when they occur in a secular social context. In Taylor's sense of the term, a society could in theory be highly "secular" even if nearly all of its members believed in a deity or even subscribed to a particular religious creed; secularity here has to do with the conditions, not the prevalence, of belief, and these conditions are understood to be shared across a given society, irrespective of belief or lack thereof.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Taylor |first1=Charles |title=A Secular Age |date=2007 |publisher=Belknap Press |location=Cambridge, MA |pages=1–24}}</ref>

Taylor's thorough account of secularity as a socio-historical condition, rather than the absence or diminished importance of religion, has been highly influential in subsequent [[philosophy of religion]] and [[sociology of religion]], particularly as older sociological narratives about [[secularisation]], [[desecularisation]], and [[disenchantment]] have come under increased criticism.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Calhoun |first1=Craig |last2=Jeurgensmeyer |first2=Mark |last3=Van Antwerpen |first3=Jonathan |title=Rethinking Secularism |date=2011 |publisher=Oxford UP |location=Oxford |page=21}}</ref>