Redemption and reform in A Secular Age: Charles Taylor's interpretation of early modern Protestantism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation presents a critical historiographical study of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), focused on his interpretation of early modern Protestantism. Its biographical research together with intellectual-historical analysis of Taylor’s writings as a New Democratic Party politician and social theorist demonstrates that his “story” is intended to function as a Gramscian-Sorelian social myth to cultivate solidarity and subvert capitalist hegemony in the tradition of socialist humanism. The dissertation then explicates how that intention causes Taylor to misrepresent Protestant theology and experience. Its analytic foci include Taylor’s phenomenological argument that John Calvin disenchanted the Lord’s Supper, his reading of Richard Baxter’s political theology as a teleological retrojection of scientific socialism and Stalinism, and the liberal pluralist philosophy of religion inherent in his interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’s experience of redemption as a kind of “fullness”. The underpinnings of Taylor’s approach are clarified from his intellectual biography: his formative engagement with Catholic Personalism, Catholic Action, Cité Libre, the Canadian Social Gospel, the Student Christian Movement, and the “Canadian Fabians” while studying History at McGill University (1949–1952); alongside an examination of his role in the post-1956 formation of the British New Left at Oxford (1952–1961), observing his familiarity with the first English edition of Gramsci’s writings, his rediscovery of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, and his appropriation of phenomenology from Merleau-Ponty. The dissertation critically elucidates how these sources (mis)guide his narrative construction by empirically falsifying Taylor’s presentation of an intrinsic causal link between Protestantism and secularization through e.g., examination of Calvin’s theology of the Supper with attention to his emphasis on the sacrality of the consecrated elements. The dissertation illustrates that an intrinsically theological, empirical ecclesiastical history committed to the ideal of historical writing as literary mimesis more accurately represents Christian experience by writing a history of redemption rather than Reform Master Narrative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".