In 1500, it was essentially impossible not to believe in God in Western Europe. The social structures, the calendar, the explanation of natural events, the meaning of suffering and death: all of it was woven through with reference to a divine order. God was not one option among many. He was the background of everything.
In 2025, belief in God is one option among many, and it is an option that must be actively held against an ambient pressure toward unbelief. This is the shift that Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls the "nova effect": an explosion of options for meaning-making that the medieval world could not have imagined.
The Buffered Self
Taylor's most useful concept for the Christian is what he calls the "buffered self." The pre-modern self was "porous": open to influence from outside, vulnerable to spirits, enchantment, and divine action in a way that felt immediate and unmediated. The modern self has been "buffered," insulated from these influences by the assumption that the real world is a closed system of natural causes, and that the only threats to my inner life come from other natural entities, not supernatural ones.
This buffering did not happen because someone disproved God. It happened because of a shift in the background conditions of experience. The modern person does not typically feel the presence of spirits in the forest, or hear God's voice in the thunder, or sense the nearness of demonic influence. Not because they have reasoned themselves out of it, but because the default experiential setting has changed.
"The secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable, or better, comes to seem an obvious default." (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age)
The Immanent Frame
Taylor describes the modern imaginary as the "immanent frame": a horizon in which everything that matters is within the natural world, within the human. Transcendence is not disproved. It is just not in the frame. It requires a kind of deliberate reaching beyond the default setting.
This is the experience many Christians describe when they try to explain why faith feels hard. It is not that they have encountered devastating arguments against God's existence. It is that the world does not feel enchanted. Prayer feels like speaking into the air. The sense of divine presence that earlier generations described as ordinary seems, to many modern people, exceptional at best and delusional at worst.
What This Means for Christian Practice
Taylor's analysis suggests that the apologetic task for modern Christianity is not primarily intellectual. The arguments for God's existence have been made well by many people. The challenge is not argumentative. It is experiential. The modern person does not lack arguments. She lacks the thick sense of a world in which God is real and present and doing things.
This points toward the recovery of practices that cultivate what Taylor calls "fullness": the sense that life has meaning and depth that exceeds the merely natural. Liturgy, contemplative prayer, the observance of a sacred calendar, the formation of communities that embody a different vision of the good: these are not retreats from the modern world. They are ways of living in it while refusing to accept its default settings as final.
The Cross-Pressure
One of Taylor's most useful observations is that the secular age produces "cross-pressure" in both directions. The secular person who has successfully buffered herself against transcendence still experiences moments that push back against the closure: awe before beauty, moral outrage that seems to demand more than preference-satisfaction can supply, love that seems to exceed biology. The buffering is never perfect.
For the Christian, this is not a rhetorical trick. It is an observation about experience. The immanent frame does not close seamlessly. There are always gaps, always moments when the world seems to be gesturing toward something more than itself. The Christian reads these moments as what they are: the echo of the created world's origin in a Creator who has not gone away, however far away He sometimes feels.