Theological Journal – January 25 Authenticity

Charles Taylor (A Secular Age), and building on his work, Andrew Root (Faith Formation in a Secular Age), detail the rise and significance of the “Age of Authenticity” in their respective works. We live fully immersed in that age so unless we are of sufficient age we cannot remember or imagine the age of conformity, civility, and obedience that preceded it. The Age of Authenticity began in earnest with the Youth and Countercultural movements of the 1960’s (though it had earlier precedents).


The central tenet of this age is that the conformity, civility, and expectation of obedience of the previous era was repressive and oppressive in hindering us from realizing our true selves. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the youth culture revolted against the inauthenticity of the previous epoch and set out to “find themselves.” And we’ve been doing it ever since.


There are plusses and minuses to this as with every shift of culture. The primary minus is that it centers everything firmly in the self. The search for authenticity is self-initiated, self-driven, self-expressed, and self-evaluated. What God or anyone else might want for us are suspect as at least potentially repressive of our true selves. Taylor offers what seems to me a judicious assessment.

“This shift has often been seen in an exclusively negative light . . . The turn was seen as one to self-indulgence, and self-absorption. But I think we have to recognize an ethic here, which has come to be called the ethic of ‘authenticity.’ The spread of this ethic was indeed accompanied by a number of trivializing developments. And it is particularly fateful that it advanced pari passu with the spread of consumer capitalism. This has meant that the search for authenticity can be coded in very trivial registers, like the choice of brands of running shoes. There are in short many problems with this new phase of our culture, which we haven’t got time to go into here. But I want to affirm two features here: the change represents no passing fad, and second, it does have a serious ethical dimension” (Charles Taylor, “The Church Speaks—to Whom?,” in Church and People: Disjunctions in a Secular Age, ed. Charles Taylor, José Casanova, George F. McLean, Christian Philosophical Studies 1 (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2012), 17–18.)

Andrew Root, again building on Taylor, writes, “I think it is only through authenticity (and its ethic) that we can reimagine ways of speaking about divine action as ministry” (Root, Kindle loc.142).



Why is that? Because the search for authenticity has serious ethical potential, on the one hand. And, from a Christian perspective, any serious search for one’s authentic self has the potential to make contact with the self’s gracious createdness by God. And all sorts of unexpected and even unsought discoveries and consequences might result from that!



And that possibility keeps the search for authenticity from devolving into mere reflection on human experience or mere abstract theologizing. This is how deep our attention to God must run. Right into the depths our creatureliness.



That we will turn to next time.