Contemporary Political Theory, 2006, 5, (163–175)

r 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1470-8914/06 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt

Turning or Spinning? Charles Taylor’s

Catholicism: A Reply to Ian Fraser
Ruth Abbey
Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA.
E-mail: ruth.m.abbey.2@nd.edu

Charles Taylor’s work has recently taken a religious turn, with Taylor becoming
more explicit about his own religious faith and its influence on his thinking. Ian
Fraser offers a systematic, critical exploration of the nature of Taylor’s Catholicism
as it appears in his writings. This reply to Fraser endorses his belief in the
importance of looking carefully at Taylor’s religious views. However, it raises
doubts about some of Fraser’s particular arguments and conclusions, and aims to
foster a clearer understanding of Taylor’s religious beliefs. It poses questions for
Fraser about (i) what Taylor is setting out to do in A Catholic Modernity?; (ii) why
he invokes the figure of Matteo Ricci; (iii) whether he believes that acts of practical
benevolence are impossible without a religious foundation; and (iv) whether his
religiously-inspired pluralism suffers an inherent contradiction.
Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 163–175. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300262

Keywords: Fraser; Taylor; Catholicism; modernity; pluralism; practical benevolence

Introduction
In the last 15 years or so, Charles Taylor’s work has taken something of a
religious turn.1 The phrase ‘religious turn’ refers not only to an interest in
religion as a social or historical force but also to the fact that Taylor has
become more explicit about his own religious faith and the ways in which it
influences his thinking. The first manifestation of this religious turn comes at
the end of Taylor’s 1989 work, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern
Identity. While the book as a whole demonstrates a scholarly interest in religion
and underlines the importance of theism as a source of the modern self, at the
end of Sources Taylor worries about the future of one of the major strands of
the modern identity — the ethic of practical benevolence. This ethic is a belief
that modern people should do as much as they can to minimize or relieve
unnecessary human suffering wherever and whenever it occurs.2 By its very
nature, the ethic of practical benevolence is insatiable, and Taylor doubts
whether purely secular formulations of the good involved in this ethic, such as
the belief in universal human equality and the dignity of each individual, can
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suffice to motivate people to go on striving to meet its massive demands. He

suspects that the strongest source for this ethic is a religious one. According to
the doctrine of divine affirmation, as creatures of an all-loving God, all humans
are worthy of respect, and in evincing respect for our fellow human beings, we
are participating in God’s unconditional love for them (Taylor, 1989, 515–518).
Both the role Taylor accords to theism in the shaping of the modern identity
and his more confessional remarks about religion have proven to be very
controversial aspects of his work. Some commentators discern in them a thinly-
veiled ambition to vindicate religious belief and reinstate it to a central place in
moral life. Taylor responds by reminding his readers that his remarks about
theism’s unrivalled power as a moral source are put forward as a ‘hunch’,
tendered as a suspicion rather than a fully-fledged argument (Taylor, 1989;
517–518). However, he has had to re-issue this reminder (Taylor, 1991a, 240:
1994, 125) and given the way some have interpreted his theism, this more
tentative expression of his views does not seem to have been entirely persuasive.
Taylor’s religious turn was consolidated with the publication of A Catholic
Modernity? in 1999. This short work provides the basis for what Ian Fraser
offers as the first systematic exploration of the nature of Taylor’s Catholicism
as it appears in his writings. From that work Fraser extracts four main tenets
which he takes to define Taylor’s Catholicism. These are: (i) Catholicism as
difference; (ii) the need for transcendence; (iii) the necessity for acts of
unconditional love; and (iv) Matteo Ricci as a model for Catholics today
(Fraser, 2005, 231). Fraser subjects each of these tenets to critical examination
and concludes that ‘Taylor has severe weaknesses in all these themes which cast
great doubts on the viability of his Catholic vision for offering an orientation
towards the good’ (Fraser, 2005, 231. cf. 232).
I endorse Fraser’s belief in the importance of looking carefully at Taylor’s
religious views and considering how they might shape both some of the questions
he poses for social and political theory, and the answers he offers. Yet while
endorsing Fraser’s general project, I raise doubts about some of his particular
arguments and conclusions. My aim is not to defend Taylor’s religious beliefs3
but simply to foster a clearer understanding of them, so that any criticism that is
advanced can engage more directly with what Taylor actually says.4 To this end I
raise questions about (i) what Taylor is setting out to do in ACM?; (ii) why he
invokes the figure of Matteo Ricci; (iii) whether he believes that acts of practical
benevolence are possible without a religious foundation; and (iv) whether his
religiously-inspired pluralism suffers an inherent contradiction.

Taylor’s Purposes
Fraser describes ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ (henceforth ACM?) as Taylor’s ‘first
full and explicit enunciation of the nature of his Catholicism’ (Fraser, 2005,
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249). This is partly true: it certainly provides the fullest and most explicit
statement of Taylor’s religious beliefs to date (cf. Grimm, 2001, 247). But this is
a brief work: Taylor’s essay, based on a lecture delivered in 1996, is 24 pages
long. His replies to his commentators occupy 20 pages. As such, it seems hasty
to infer that it represents a full statement of something as potentially complex
and nuanced as an individual’s religious beliefs.5 Were Taylor to explicate his
views more fully, Fraser (and others) might find them just as problematic —
perhaps more so — but it seems premature to accept ACM? as providing a
complete statement of these views.
However, even if we concluded that ACM? did provide a complete guide to
Taylor’s beliefs, there is no basis for Fraser’s claim that Taylor sees his
Catholicism as being encapsulated in the phrase ‘Go ye and teach all nations’
(Fraser, 2005, 232). Rather than providing the cornerstone of his personal
beliefs, this injunction is depicted as problematic, or at least ambiguous by
Taylor when he asks ‘How to understand this injunction?’ (Taylor 1999a, 14).
It can easily be (and often has been) read as an exhortation to evangelize and
make the world over in Catholicism’s own image. In finding this homogenizing
interpretation problematic, and in offering an alternative rendering of this
injunction, Taylor begins his portrayal of Catholicism as an inherently pluralist
doctrine.
Taylor observes that the etymology of the term Catholic embraces
universality and wholeness (Taylor, 1999a, 14), even though practising
Catholics have often failed to promote this diversity and have opted instead
for a model of sameness, giving a single meaning to the idea of what it means to
be a good Catholic. He suggests that Catholics worthy of the name will share
his pluralist perspective, and support the principle that there can be ‘no
widening of the faith without an increase in the variety of devotions and
spiritualities and liturgical forms and responses to Incarnation’ (Taylor, 1999a,
15. cf.; Fraser, 2005, 232). Here he is staking out a position that would be
resisted and contested from many quarters within the Catholic tradition, let
alone those outside it. Nonetheless, one of the major purposes of ACM? is to
persuade Catholics (and others) that Catholicism should cherish pluralism.
Fraser describes this as Taylor’s ‘Catholicism as difference’ tenet (Fraser,
2005, 232, 233) and exposes a number of ways in which Taylor fails to practise
what he preaches. Fraser claims, for example, that Taylor minimizes the
differences between Catholicism and Buddhism, and in doing so ‘contradicts
his own edicts on relating different belief systems to one another’ (Fraser, 2005,
234). Fraser identifies a number of Taylor’s failures to fully acknowledge the
differences between Buddhism and Catholicism, but the fact that Taylor might
exaggerate similarities between these two forms of spirituality does not on its
own justify Fraser’s more general claim that Taylor subsumes ‘other belief
systems under the Catholic banner’ (2005, 233).
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One of Fraser’s hypotheses about the ways in which Taylor would not live
up to the pluralism he espouses is unconvincing. His claim that if Taylor’s
account of Catholicism managed to persuade a Protestant to convert to
Catholicism, this would see a narrowing of the faith, not its widening (Fraser,
2005, 244). It seems that Fraser is confusing numbers with diversity here — one
Catholic or Protestant more or less is not the real issue for religious pluralism.
What is important is Taylor’s claim that one of the advantages of the diversity
of Christian forms of life visible in modernity is that they provide a window on
human wholeness by showing the multiple ways in which people can interpret
and express their religious beliefs (Taylor, 1999a, 15).
In Varieties of Religion Today, Taylor conveys a deep sense of the diversity of
contemporary spiritual positions and experiences in westernized societies.
Looking at these societies, he sees not simply the theistic/non-theistic or
believing/non-believing alternative but rather a proliferation of spiritual views.
To complicate this further, he suggests that occupants of one spiritual position
need not feel confined within this: they do not find themselves immune to the
attractions of the other spiritual possibilities around them. Rather, many
individuals feel cross-pressured — inhabiting a particular spiritual stance, but
imagining themselves migrating to another, or at least able to see why some of the
others might be attractive (Taylor, 2002 106–107). Taylor is not simply observing
and describing this phenomenon, but is also excited by it and the challenges and
possibilities it poses (for a fuller discussion of this, see Abbey, 2004, 21–22).
In ACM? Taylor continues his reflections on the mixed bag of modernity. He
reiterates his claim, familiar from The Malaise of Modernity (Taylor, 1991b)
(aka The Ethics of Authenticity), that modernity is not simply loss, as some of
its critics or knockers suggest; nor is it simply gain, as some of its proponents,
or boosters insist (Taylor, 1999a, b, 36; 106). In ACM? he offers this nuanced
perspective on modernity to a specifically Catholic audience, asking how
Christians in general and Catholics in particular should react to and assess
Western modernity.6 However, Taylor isn’t just speaking as a believer to
believers: the extension of the pronoun ‘we’ shifts throughout the text, usually
without warning or even acknowledgement on Taylor’s part. Thus sometimes
‘we’ are Catholic intellectuals or academics (1999b, 123), sometimes ‘we’ are
Catholics in general; sometimes ‘we’ are Christians (1999a, 14); sometimes ‘we’
are those who, unlike exclusive humanists, believe that there is a transcendent
dimension to life (1999a, 27); and sometimes ‘we’ are miscellaneous modern
individuals inquiring about the nature of our world (1999a, 23, 26).7 This
polysemic ‘we’ illustrates what a porous text this is, replete with doubts and
hesitations. It seems clear that, for Taylor at least, the question mark in the
work’s title is not a rhetorical one. Indeed, in reply to his commentators, he
recalls ‘the sense of doubt and uncertainty with which I wrote ‘A Catholic
Modernity?’ (Taylor, 1999b, 105)
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Taylor contends that there are certain ways in which modernity has served
religious faith — the separation of church from state being one; the
pluralisation of religious beliefs another (Taylor, 1999a, 15–18). Yet he is
not saying that all manifestations of difference are necessarily good; instead, he
issues his audience an invitation to figure out how developments within the
modern era, such as its rights culture and the affirmation of ordinary life, have
developed religious faith and how they might have stunted it (Taylor, 1999a,
16). At a couple of points in ACM? he touches on more difficult questions for
his religiously inspired pluralism, such as whether the spread of unbelief has
been fruitful for Christianity, and other religions, and how Christians should
receive such developments as rights for non-heterosexual people (Taylor,
1999a, 17). Ultimately, Taylor doesn’t seem to come out clearly in favour of
these things, but the logic of his position seems to be not just toleration, but
even a sense that these developments add to the rich expression of human
diversity. This is, admittedly, a contestable reading of his stance, so that the full
reach of his pluralism remains on open question. However, to acknowledge in
this way that the ramifications of Taylor’s religiously inspired pluralism remain
to be explicated is quite different from Fraser’s implication that Taylor’s
religious beliefs militate against his pluralism.

Matteo Ricci
As Fraser sees it, Taylor advances the figure of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest
who went as a missionary to China in the 16th century, as exemplifying a form
of Catholic evangelization that respects difference (Fraser, 2005, 232, 247). He
criticizes Taylor for providing no historical evidence to support his claims
about Ricci and suggests that the historical evidence shows that Ricci was no
lover of difference (Fraser, 2005, 244–249).
While Fraser is correct in saying that for Taylor Ricci embodies a style of
Catholic evangelization that respects difference (Taylor, 1999a, 15), this is not
the only role Ricci plays. Ricci also represents the sort of outsider’s standpoint
that Catholics should occupy with regard to modernity when trying to assess its
benefits and disadvantages. As Taylor says, ‘the Ricci project involves the
difficult task of making new discriminations: what in the culture represents a
valid human difference and what is incompatible with Christian faith?’ (Taylor,
1999a, 16) Thus an important purpose of Taylor’s invocations of Ricci is linked
directly with the invitation he issues to his audience to reflect on the mixed bag
of modernity. One of the reasons why Taylor invokes Ricci is to shake his
audience out of their complacent assumptions that they already understand
modernity and to encourage them to look at it with fresh eyes. ‘Imitating Ricci
would involve taking ourselves a distance from our time, feeling as strange in it
as he felt when he was arriving in China.’ (Taylor, 1999a, b 36. cf., 106–107)8
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Fraser’s findings about Ricci’s actual behaviour in China seem less relevant to
Ricci’s second function in Taylor’s text — as the emblematic outsider facing a
new and mysterious culture — than to its first — as the difference-loving
missionary. Fraser is not insensible to Ricci’s function as a metaphor for the
outsider facing a foreign culture but insists that this was not part of Taylor’s
original argument. Rather, Taylor is said to raise this in response to his
discussants and is ‘backtracking’ on his original claim that Ricci represented a
missionary who strove for unity-across-difference rather than unity-through-
identity (Fraser, 2005, 244, 247, 249). It seems clear to me, by contrast, that the
Ricci figure functions in both ways in the original lecture.
When Fraser examines this idea of Ricci as metaphor for an outsider, he
takes Taylor to be saying that Catholics should, like Ricci, face the world
without preconceptions. This enables Fraser to chastize Taylor for being
contradictory, for he identifies some of the a priori assumptions built into the
Catholic worldview — that God exists, that he created the world, that the
world is good and so on. Fraser concludes that ‘It is y difficult to see how
Taylor can say he can look at the world without preconceptions given these
pretty large and questionable assumptions.’ (Fraser, 2005, 248, cf. 247).
However, there is nothing in the text to support Fraser’s interpretation that for
Taylor ‘looking at modernity without preconceptions’ is synonymous with
‘facing the world without any ideas about it at all’. The issue of preconceptions
belongs to Taylor’s general aim, discussed above, of encouraging his audience
to adopt a more open-minded attitude toward modernity and not to assume
that they know the ways in which it has been harmful to religion. Taylor
summarizes what could be called the Catholic view of modernity with
preconceptions as follows: ‘things are already neatly sorted out: whatever is in
continuity with our past is legitimate Christian culture, and the novel,
secularist twist to things is simply incompatible. No further inquiry seems
necessary.’ Yet he articulates this approach only to reject it — ‘this double
reaction, which we are easily tempted to go along with, is quite wrong’ — and
entertains the possibility that some of modernity’s developments ‘carried
certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken or could have
been taken within Christendom’ (Taylor, 1999a, 16). He invites his audience to
accompany him on this journey of considering modernity ‘without preconcep-
tions’ (Taylor, 1999b, 107), although Fraser seems to be correct that this
particular locution does not appear until he replies to his commentators.
Were Taylor advocating that individuals face the world without any
preconceptions at all, this would amount to a major departure from the rest of
his thought about epistemology. While there is not space to elaborate his
notion of engaged, embodied agency, it suffices to say that rather than seeing
the human mind as a tabula rasa, Taylor develops an approach to knowledge
that underlines the fact that humans are always situated in a meaning-filled
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world.9 While Fraser is correct to challenge the idea that Ricci, Catholics, or
any other group of humans, could look at the world without preconceptions,
he is incorrect to see this as a contradiction in Taylor’s thought.

Unconditional Love
Another way in which Taylor is said to fail to live up to the pluralism he
professes comes in what Fraser calls the necessity of unconditional love. In
ACM? Taylor returns to the question raised at the end of Sources (as
mentioned above) to ask whether secular formulations of the good involved in
the ethic of practical benevolence can motivate people to continue to try to
meet its stringent demands. He proposes again that the strongest source for this
ethic is a religious one (Taylor, 1999a, 30–35). Fraser advances several
criticisms of this stance. One criticism is that Taylor adopts a one-sided and
uncritical interpretation of those whose actions fit his thesis about the value of
religiously grounded action for others - such as Mother Theresa. Taylor is
accused of giving a religious spin to the material he presents (Fraser, 2005, 241,
243). Another problem is that just as his account of Matteo Ricci lacked
historical grounding, so his thesis about what motivates generosity lacks
empirical support. When consulted, the evidence suggests that people engage in
acts of generosity for a range of reasons, but love of God is not paramount
among them (Fraser, 2005, 242, 243). Fraser also detects an air of superiority
in Taylor’s approach, for religiously motivated actions are deemed worthier
than those emanating from more secular or humanist inspirations. This leads
Fraser to second William Connolly’s criticism that Taylor fails to really respect
non-theistic sources of the good (Fraser, 2005, 242–244).
Fraser characterizes this aspect of Taylor’s Catholicism as extreme (Fraser,
2005, 241, 243) and the contentions ‘that a truly benevolent act is only possible if
you open yourself up to God’ and that ‘non-theists are incapable of unconditional
love’ (Fraser, 2005, 242) do indeed express an extreme position.10 But this
position is not Taylor’s, as evidence furnished by Fraser himself indicates. Firstly,
Taylor recognizes that there can be a secular basis to practical benevolence —
indeed, for much of the modern era, this has been the case. As he recounts,
this habit of mobilizing for the redress of injustice and the relief of suffering
worldwide becomes part of our political culture. Somewhere along the road, this
culture ceases to be simply Christian-inspired. Moreover, it needed this breach
with the culture of Christendom for the impulse of solidarity to transcend the
frontier of Christendom itself (Taylor, 1999a, 26; cf. Smith, 2002, 236).
Far from asserting that universal benevolence is impossible without religious
foundations, Taylor underlines the quantum leap that this ethic took when
freed from its Christian moorings. As Fraser himself points out, ‘Taylor praises
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the unprecedented levels of solidarity and benevolence that pervade modernity

and which he admits are also a part of exclusive humanism’ (Fraser, 2005, 240,
citing Taylor, 1999a, 31).
Secondly, as Fraser notes, Taylor concedes that religiously based sources of
practical benevolence face the same danger as nonreligious ones — viz. of
flipping over into their opposite and fuelling contempt for the unworthy
recipients of such beneficence (Fraser, 2005, 240, citing Taylor, 1999a, 32–34).
This recognition that both religious and non-religious funds of benevolence can
turn inside out and transmogrify into contempt for one’s fellow human beings
should mitigate Fraser’s claim that Taylor takes religiously based practical
benevolence to be superior to its humanist counterparts. Thirdly, as Fraser
relays, Taylor freely admits that unconditional love for one’s fellow humans
has greater staying power when based on religious belief is an article of faith,
not certainty (Fraser, 2005, 239, cf. Taylor, 1999a, 35). So from evidence
supplied by Fraser himself, we see that Taylor’s position is neither as extreme
nor as superior as Fraser portrays it, for it does not posit a radical difference
between religious and non-religious motivations for practical benevolence. In
so far as it suggests that the former might, in the long term, prove more robust,
this is advanced, as it was in Sources, more as a suspicion than a firm
conclusion. Of course, the more one repeats a claim, the less convincing it
becomes to present it as a hunch.
Fraser also criticizes Taylor’s position on unconditional love for being self-
contradictory. He argues that if one loves one’s fellow humans because of their
status as creatures of an all-loving God, this love cannot be unconditional.
Humans are loved not for their own sakes or on their own terms; instead, this
love is conditional upon one’s love for God (Fraser, 2005, 243). However, this
seems to misconstrue what is unconditional in the ideal of unconditional love.
When Taylor describes love for one’s fellow human beings as unconditional, he
means that it is accorded not because of individual desert or attainment but
simply because they are human beings. Love or compassion is unconditional
when it is ‘not based on what you the recipient have made of yourself — [but]
... on what you are most profoundly ...’ When that unconditional love is
religiously inspired, what you are most profoundly is ‘a being in the image of
God’ (Taylor, 1999a, 35). So it is true, tautologically so, that for Taylor when
unconditional love for human beings is religiously inspired, it is conditional
upon loving God. What is not a condition of that love is how much any
particular individual has achieved, attained or earned. Individuals are worthy
of love or compassion simply by virtue of being humans.
However, Taylor’s use of unconditional love here is not as paradoxical or
contradictory as Fraser maintains. This can be illustrated by analogy with
parents, as parents’ love for their children is often described as unconditional.
By analogy with Fraser’s critique of Taylor, it would be contradictory for
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parents to proclaim unconditional love for their children, because that love is
conditional upon the individuals being the parents’ children. Yet, in both cases
the ‘unconditional’ is not meant to describe the source of the love; rather, it
describes its extent. Parents who love their children unconditionally do so
irrespective of the child’s achievements or failures, talents or deficiencies. A
parent’s love for his or her child is not conditioned by the child’s achievements
but is given simply by virtue of who the child is. However, it is conditional on
the child belonging to the particular parent or parents in some specific way —
either being their biological offspring or being adopted.
Another area of contradiction in Taylor’s thought emerges for Fraser from
the belief that seeing beneficence as having religious motives undermines the
autonomy of the benefactors. Fraser charges Taylor with ‘subordinating the
lives and actions of individuals to serving God and at one stroke undermining
any notion of an autonomous self. If our good actions are evidence of God’s
love in the world then those actions are being directed by another and not by
the person carrying them out’ (Fraser, 2005, 248, cf. 249). In writings before
ACM?, Taylor has gone to some lengths to reflect on the social and political
conditions necessary for the realization of individual autonomy (Taylor
(1985b) is probably the best-known example of this). It would, once again, be
radically discontinuous with the rest of Taylor’s work were he now to exclude
all those whose actions are religiously motivated from pursuing the good of
autonomy. At one point Fraser implies that Taylor does not fully appreciate
what the logic of his position commits him to and that Fraser is spelling this
out — viz. that if one accepts that some people’s actions are motivated by the
love of their god, then those people cannot be considered autonomous (Fraser,
2005, 249). However, if Fraser can describe Taylor as arrogating a position of
superiority to himself because of his putative belief that religious motivations
for the relief of human suffering are inherently superior to non-religious ones,
what does it mean to condemn all those who believe their actions to be inspired
by love of their god to lives devoid of autonomy as Fraser seems to be doing?
From St Augustine onwards, Catholics, Christians and others (such as
Nietzsche) have debated what it could mean for humans to have free will if
there is an omnipotent, omniscient God. Yet Fraser’s assertion that the belief
that human action is inspired by love of God is equivalent to denying those
actors’ autonomy fails to engage at any level with any of this long-standing and
complex debate. A much fuller exploration of this issue is required before this
criticism can gain any purchase.
Of course it could be that I have misunderstood Fraser’s claim here, which is
not that (a) religious belief renders autonomy impossible, but rather (b)
Taylor’s arguments about religiously motivated benevolence are inconsistent
with Taylor’s earlier claims about autonomy. However, I interpret Fraser as
holding (b) because he holds (a). If one did not think that (a) were true, then
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it’s not clear to me whence Taylor’s inconsistency would derive. This

uncertainty simply underscores the need for Fraser to develop this point
about the relationship between autonomy and religious belief much more fully.

Pluralism
The most important thread running through Fraser’s critique of Taylor seems to
be that his religiously inspired pluralism is inherently contradictory, for Taylor’s
religious convictions make his thought more exclusive, intolerant, rigid and
extreme than it should be. Yet this underestimates the contestability that is
explicitly built into Taylor’s position. Taylor presents his account of
transcendence as ‘a best account’ explanation — that is, one that has not yet
succumbed to defeat by alternative explanations of the human condition. As he
puts it, ‘I am going to offer a perspectival reading, and in the end we have to ask
ourselves which perspective makes the most sense of human life’ (Taylor, 1999a,
26). It is clear by now that he thinks that a perspective that acknowledges the
transcendent dimension does make better sense of human life than what he calls
exclusive humanism, so this profession of openness could appear disingenuous.11
However, Taylor goes on to say that perspectives on transcendence that clash
with his also have value: ‘no position can be set aside as simply devoid of insight’
(Taylor, 1999a, 29). Taylor admits here that a theistic perspective will always
have to contend with others, and that none of the three he adduces — theism,
immanent counter-enlightenment and exclusive humanism — can prevail.
Stephen White reads Taylor’s works up to and including Sources as showing
that ‘regardless of whether one embraces theism or is thoroughly secular, the
space of late modern conversation is such that no one can play strong
ontological trump cards’ (White, 2000, 63, cf. 58, 64). This is one of the features
of Taylor’s work that leads White to classify it as having a weak ontology, for
it ‘admits its own contestable status’ (White, 2000, 45) and is cognisant of its
own limits (White, 2000, 49). While White concedes that sometimes theism
does serve as strong ontology, after some vacillation he has concluded that
Taylor is better understood as having a weak ontology. This means that
Taylor’s theism shapes and prefigures, but neither determines nor dictates, his
political and ethical values (White, 2000, 13, 43, 63, 69). I have tried to show
that this contestability is also evident in ACM? — the work which manifests
Taylor’s religious turn most forcefully.
While White’s supple analysis of the role of theism in Taylor’s thought is
highly illuminating, it seems to either overlook or accord insufficient attention
to the powerful link between Taylor’s theism and his pluralism. Once a theistic
ontology appears as the foundation for pluralism, at least in certain important
respects, we might find ourselves back in the land of strong ontology,
according to which there is a clear and direct relationship between ontological
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claims and ethical prescriptions. Perhaps what Taylor offers is a strong

ontology with important pluralist components that issues in an ethics and
politics with important pluralist components.

Conclusion
As a thinker increasingly interested in the place of religion in both the historical
and contemporary life of westernized societies, Charles Taylor has taken a bold
step in becoming more explicit about his own religious views. He has taken
perhaps an even bolder step in identifying his Catholicism as one of the sources
of his pluralism. Although there are many varieties of pluralism in political
theory today, Taylor’s is rendered unique by his claim to ground it partly in his
Catholicism. For these reasons alone, his expressions of his religious views
warrant close and careful attention. This reply applauds Ian Fraser for
contributing to that process while attempting to advance it a little further.

Date submitted: 12 May 2005

Date accepted: 12 July 2005

Notes
1 I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for helping to fund this research and to the reviewers of
this journal for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.
2 A recent example of this ethic in practice comes from the international response to the Indian
Ocean tsunami of December, 2004.
3 I was surprised to find myself defending Taylor against William Connolly’s charge that Taylor
fails to accord respect to non-theistic sources of the good (Fraser, 2005, 242–243). In the work
Fraser cites, I mention Connolly’s critique and point out that Connolly is not assuming that
Taylor’s theism prevents him from respecting non-theistic sources. ‘Connolly is pointing to
inconsistencies and weaknesses in Taylor’s practice as a pluralist and urging him to become
more consistent in this’ (Abbey, 2006). I do not see how this amounts to defending Taylor
against Connolly’s charge. As I say nothing there about unconditional love, it seems curious to
introduce it in that context, and I fail to see how it undermines my supposed defense of Taylor
(Fraser, 2005, 243). Elsewhere, I summarize Connolly’s argument and look at Taylor’s Varieties
of Religion Today to see whether ‘this work perpetuates the weakness Connolly identifies — the
absence of agonistic respect — in Taylor’s treatment of non-theistic sources of the good’
(Abbey, 2004, 20). I don’t set out to defend Taylor there either but to weigh the evidence
provided by that book. I trawl through a number of considerations that could be balanced
against Connolly’s conclusion, but conclude by saying that ‘Yet just at the point where Taylor
comes closest to manifesting something like the attitude Connolly calls agonistic respect, right at
the point where religious unbelief is not the other to be externalized, objectified or abjected but
rather embraced as an enrichment of the self, Taylor pulls away. He goes on to speculate that in
order to provide this wonderfully rich and prophetic depiction of spiritual ambivalence, James
had to be someone who ultimately situated himself on the side of faith. Taylor concedes that this
conjecture might be dismissed as ’a bit of believer’s chauvinism’ and in this seems to vindicate
some of Connolly’s critical remarks’ (Abbey, 2004, 23).

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4 Taylor could, for example, be criticized for declaring that ‘We all — believers and unbelievers
alike — spend a lot of energy resisting God’ (Taylor 1999b, 124). In this, as in some of the
criticisms Fraser makes, Taylor is susceptible to an immanent critique. He falls short of his own
interpretive standards, for elsewhere he argues that self-understandings are crucial in explaining
human action (Taylor, 1985a, passim.). I can’t imagine many non-believers accepting this as a
valid depiction of their condition — why resist an entity that they don’t take to exist?
5 It took Gary Wills (2002), for example, nearly 400 pages to expound his Catholicism.
6 Cf. Grimm, 2001, 247–248. This aspect of Taylor’s work is underscored in William Shea’s
response (Shea, 1999). Jeffrey Stout finds that Taylor’s ‘charitable, humble spirit makes
his cultural criticism both subtler and less shrill than that of the modernity ‘bashers’’ (Stout,
2001, 426).
7 George Marsden, by contrast, hears only a univocal ‘we’ which ‘refers to Catholics who face the
question of how to speak to the modern world’ (Marsden, 1999, 87). Stout also hears Taylor
‘speaking as a Catholic to a Catholic audience’ (Stout, 2001, 425).
8 Cf. Grimm, 2001, 248; Stout, 2001, 425. Marsden (1999, 85–86) picks up on the metaphorical
function of Taylor’ s allusions to Ricci but, as the title of his essay indicates, he thinks that the
parable of the prodigal son offers a more suitable comparison.
9 See Abbey (2000, 178–190), White (2000, 44–49) or Smith (2002) for a choice of descriptions of
Taylor’s position on this topic.
10 Stephen Grimm (2001, 248) also takes Taylor to be advancing the first claim, and finds this
‘extraordinary’ .
11 Although in his latest book, Taylor is still presenting his belief that humans have an ineradicable
bent toward the transcendent as a ‘hunch’ (Taylor, 2004, 51).

References

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Abbey, R. (ed.) (2004) Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Charles Taylor, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Abbey, R. (2006) ‘The Primary Enemy? Monotheism and Pluralism’, in J. Boyd White (ed.)
How Should We Talk About Religion?, South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
pp. 211–229.
Fraser, I. (2005) ‘Charles Taylor’s Catholicism’, Contemporary Political Theory 4: 231–252.
Grimm, S.R. (2001) ‘Review of A Catholic Modernity?’, International Philosophical Quarterly 41:
247–249.
Marsden, G. (1999) ‘Matteo Ricci and the Prodigal Culture’, in J.L. Heft (ed.) A Catholic
Modernity?, Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, pp. 83–93.
Shea, W. (1999) ‘A vote of thanks to Voltaire,’, in J.L. Heft (ed.) A Catholic Modernity?, Oxford:
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Smith,, N. (2002) Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 285pp.
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Taylor, C. (1994) ‘Reply to Braybrooke and de Sousa’, Dialogue 33: 125–131.

Taylor, C. (1999a) ‘A Catholic Modernity?’, in J.L. Heft (ed.) A Catholic Modernity?, Oxford:
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Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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