Secularization isn't subtraction — it's a substitution of frameworks

Taylor's most important polemical target is what he calls the "subtraction story": the assumption, common in Enlightenment-inflected accounts, that secular modernity emerged simply by peeling away religious superstition to reveal a rational human core that had been there all along, temporarily obscured by ignorance and dogma.

He argues this story is historically false and philosophically misleading, because it treats secular humanism as the default, natural state of human reasoning rather than as its own constructed worldview with a specific, traceable history — one that had to be built, argued for, and normalized over centuries, largely from resources internal to Christian thought itself.

His alternative is a substitution story: one entire framework of meaning (an enchanted cosmos saturated with divine and spiritual presence) was gradually replaced by another equally constructed framework (a self-sufficient, immanent order explicable without reference to the transcendent), neither of which is more "natural" than the other.

Takeaway: secularism isn't what's left after religion is stripped away — it's an alternative worldview that had to be built, just as religious worldviews were.