The title and homely, checked cover of George Levine’s new volume, The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now (1), bring to mind the Joy of Cooking (2), Irma Rombauer’s kitchen guide for generations of perplexed mothers and wives (and fathers and husbands). But this wink at Rombauer’s book is never followed up by Levine and his contributors, a pity since Rombauer’s life and work evoke what the book seems to want: a fully secular life that finds its meaning and sustenance in this world, and not beyond it. Rombauer’s world was the dinner table. The point of cooking was to feed family and friends, but meals were also a means to something else important: to bring people together for conversation and company.

Levine does echo, faintly, this goal in his introduction: the book will “explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now”. Such a world “is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.” It is “a book about living: how does it feel or might it feel to be entirely secular?”

These essayists from the primatologist Frans de Waal to the novelist Rebecca Stott seek to make the case that a world bereft of God or transcendence is not a world bereft of meaning. Nearly all resort to the distinction first made by Max Weber between enchantment and disenchantment though, as the interpretations offered by the contributors reveal, there is no single definition of Weber’s elusive terms.

For Levine, the choice of words is problematic because the tenor of “disenchantment” makes the position of secularists appear unpleasing. He refuses the disappointment and nostalgia implicit in the term, and insists on a robust and unapologetic secularism. While Rombauer found these moments of fulfilment at the dinner table, Levine finds them observing birds: the complexity of species, especially in an urban setting, is for Levine the stuff of “deeply, even passionately, secular moments”.

‘Fall upward into the sundew’

Levine’s awe when watching the flight of a red-tailed hawk over an apartment building in New York (or the reader’s awe when contemplating the bœuf en daube served by Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse) are moments that fulfil, without offering the lure of transcendence: the flight of the bird or gestures of Mrs Ramsay are always pregnant with beauty and wonder. Such moments are, Levine would insist, entirely natural and explicable in naturalist terms. Levine seems continually enchanted by the world: rather than falling away from an enchanted world of spirits and purpose, we must see ourselves as “fall[ing] upward into the sundew”.

Yet Levine admits that no matter how much we embrace the here and now, we need an “up there and forever” to talk intelligibly about values. “A full secularism leaves us in a very weak position for formulating a universal value imperative,” he says, but all he wishes to do is undertake a “demonstration of possibility”. He equivocates. He declares that he does not want “to engage readers or the other contributors in such complex philosophical arguments” and leaves the heavy lifting to his contributors.

Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science, does much of this. Aware of the depth and complexity of religious belief, Kitcher does not dismiss believers as benighted or bamboozled souls. He insists they have good reasons for their beliefs, reasons not inherent to religious faith: his brief but brilliant natural history of religion puts paid to the truth claims of faiths. Yet Kitcher is impatient with critics such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, whom he dismisses as “Darwinian atheists”. It is not that their critique of the foundation to religious belief is wrong but rather that they offer nothing in its place.

This, for Kitcher, is the true “challenge for secularism”. Ridiculing believers may score points with the readers of The New York Review of Books, but it falls flat when sincerely seeking common ground with most of humankind. As Kitcher observes, “The important point is to appreciate the problem, to understand the ways in which, for many thoughtful devout people, the subtraction of literal belief about supernatural beings comes as a deep threat.”

Such common ground, Kitcher believes, exists in secular social structures that cultivate the same functions that have allowed religious communities to flourish. The most successful secular communities in America, like the Unitarian Universalists, have adopted features of religious life. Such communities need not worry that they lack a transcendental mooring for their rituals and values. Kitcher is not worried: communities based on religion, he argues, are equally flimsy. Ethics “is something we make, but we do not make it arbitrarily, for the conditions under which our ancestors made it and under which we continue to make it are determined by the species of animal to which we belong.”

For Kitcher, the greatest obstacle facing secularists is language. Not just morality, but the sense of fullness we ascribe to our lives when something greater and immanent overwhelms us, is generally framed in religious language. Churches “draw, often brilliantly, on resonant words, forms of ceremony, art and music, and the secular surrogates.” His conclusion is predictable and while not joyful, at least practical: “Secularism still needs to attend to the cultivation of this attitude, to elaborate ways in which it can become more widespread and enduring.” When offered the language of practicality rather than epiphany, even secularists are tempted to be wrong with Saint Francis than right with Philip Kitcher.

When the soul is surprised

Another contributor, Paolo Costa, makes a valiant effort at reminding the reader of the wonders inherent in the natural world. He offers a phenomenological sketch of wonder that moment, Descartes wrote, when the soul is surprised and attends to those “objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary”. For Costa, wonder seems proof that nature alone suffices to rekindle our sense of enchantment. (He cites Descartes but not the boy wonder of nature’s wonders, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.) His message to secularists is “Don’t worry, just wonder”. But not only does he fail to explain how these instances of wonder can serve as a foundation for secular humanism, but he also ignores the instances when these moments as with Rousseau point to something greater than our world.

The term “fullness”, used by nearly every contributor to this volume, reflects the impact that the philosopher Charles Taylor, another contributor, has had on the debate over secularisation. In his historical works, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age (3), Taylor employs “fullness” to describe the sentiment associated with the world of enchantment a sentiment denied us in a world that science and reason has rendered disenchanted. A practicing Roman Catholic, Taylor acknowledges that secularists can speak and act in morally consistent ways, yet also believes they are condemned to a “flattened” world. Exiled from the world of enchantment, Taylor asks: “What sense can we make of the notion that nature…is the locus of human meanings which are ‘objective’, in the sense that they are not just arbitrarily projected through choice or contingent desire?”

According to Taylor, this sense of fullness is a strong evaluation. We do not choose it; it chooses us. It invokes a response whose power and persistence cannot be denied or explained away. When it comes to, say, football teams, there are only weak evaluations: I’ve no deep basis to argue that your preference for Arsenal over Manchester United is fundamentally wrong or flawed. Yet when it comes to our abiding sense that the world and our lives cannot be reduced to materialist explanations, preference plays no role: “Someone who fails to sense this is missing something, is somehow insensitive to an object that commands admiration.”

Taylor’s critics dismiss this distinction as spurious, if not dangerous. As the title of Bruce Robbins’ combative essay declares: “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” Yet his portrayal of Taylor’s position is both unfair and irrelevant. It is unfair in part because Taylor never claims, as Robbins suggests, that there is something wrong “about secularists finding meaning by helping children with their homework or cooking good meals”. As for Robbins’s claim that Taylor reduces secular modernity to “stale Brave New World-style cliché [sic] about Hugh Hefner”, there are just two passing references in the book to the sage of the Playboy mansion.

The critique is irrelevant because the kind of meaning Taylor insists on in his work, while it encompasses cooking good meals, is also something more elusive, but real and present in our lives what, in A Secular Age, he calls “an aspiration to wholeness”. Must this sense be translated through the images and language of religion? Perhaps not, but more than one secularist will admit that this option remains more compelling more filled with joy than the well-meaning but at times snippy alternatives in this volume.