Secularization, in other words, is not merely the waxing of the secular and the waning of the religious in the West; secularization is the very invention of the religious/secular binary and the process by which certain things got labeled religious and other things did not. And that process is a matter of the redistribution of power in the West, including the transfer of power from the church to the state. Indeed, the word “secularization” was originally used in the early modern period to denote the transfer of goods from ecclesiastical to civil control. What the church was left with in this process is “religion,” which comes to be seen as inherently private; the state, being secular, is public.

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The key question, again, is not whether or not our society is enchanted or secular but what kind of work those terms are doing when they are used. To say that we live in a secular age is really to say that we live in an age in which we use the religious/secular distinction the way we do, along with the other binaries Taylor employs. In a “secular” society these binaries are used to separate two “races” of people, believers and nonbelievers, when the real question is Belief in what? Everyone believes in something; you tell me what you believe, I’ll tell you what I believe, and then let’s have a conversation. It is not belief that has declined in the modern West, but belief in the biblical God. It is not religion that has declined in the modern West, but Christianity (and maybe Judaism as well). These are real and important changes, but they are not adequately described as shifts from belief to unbelief, from naïveté to reflectivity, from enchantment to disenchantment, from transcendence to immanence.

William T. Kavanagh, The Uses of Idolatry