Cross-Pressured Spaces

Why Charles Taylor's critique of William James is important today

“There are certain emotions you can have in solidarity that you can’t have alone; the experience mutates into something else by the fact that it is shared.”

— Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited has been on my mind as of late. The work itself is a commentary on James’s classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience and what it means for us today. Taylor’s engagement with James is fascinating precisely because it helps us understand both the prescience and the limitations of James’s emphasis on individual religious experience.

What strikes me most is how James simultaneously anticipated our contemporary spiritual landscape—with its emphasis on personal authenticity and individual seeking, in Taylor’s words—while missing something crucial about the collective dimension of religious life. It’s this lack that Taylor picks up in his work.

What emerges from Taylor’s analysis is not just a critique of James, but a deeper understanding of our own existential moment and its challenges. At the heart of this narrative lies James’s pronounced emphasis on the personal and experiential dimensions of religion. Taylor draws James out on the latter’s own definition of religious experience. For James, “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude” constitute the primary locus of religious life, while institutions and collective practices take on a decidedly secondary role. 

In what follows, I trace three key aspects of Taylor’s engagement with James. First, I examine his critique of James’s emphasis on personal experience, showing how this individualistic framework shapes modern spirituality. Second, I explore what Taylor calls the “malaise of modernity”—how our emphasis on individual autonomy creates both freedom and a crisis of meaning. Finally, I consider Taylor’s notion of “cross-pressured spaces,” which can helps us understand how we might navigate between individual and collective forms of religious life in our secular age.

These questions matter deeply today.

My view is that we need to understand both the gains and losses of this shift. James’s celebration of individual experience captured something vital about spiritual and religious experience in their modern forms, but Taylor helps us see what we might be missing—and what we might need to recover—in our relentless drive toward individual practice and the atomism that comes downstream from this emphasis.

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I. Critique of Personal Experience

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On Taylor’s account, James’s way of thinking about religious life is always and foremost the outgrowth of a particular individual’s feeling. In other words, it is rooted, first, in what we could call a phenomenological encounter, a meeting of the person with the transcendent. Second, it is primarily from this person that a religious orthodoxy develops, and it is here where we see James’s religious preferences most pronounced. On his telling, the legislative architecture that grows out from this initial primacy of feeling is a derivative thing. Churches, for example, “play at best a secondary role, in transmitting and communicating the original inspiration.”

Here the general pattern takes shape:

For James, says Taylor, “The full intensity of experience is always to some extent blunted as the pattern of spirituality comes to be adopted by large groups. The intense heat of the original feeling cools; what was ‘acute fever’ becomes ‘dull habit.’”

And it’s here where we see that James’s text, first published in 1902, is quite precisely contemporary with our own moment of religious and spiritual seeking—the emphasis is on the individual, on feeling, and moves away from comprehensive theory and corporate belonging. This emphasis amounts to what Taylor sees as a problematic focus on religious feelings over religious ideas—a primacy of the felt sense of ultimacy as opposed to the theology of reason. As Taylor notes, earlier incarnations of Christian religion in the West would have found strange this bifurcation between personal inward commitment and the collective ritual life of the religious community.

Three aspects of Taylor’s critique seem particularly important: his historical analysis of how we moved from traditional to modern forms of religious life (centered on the rise of nominalism and voluntarism), his insight into how religious experience is fundamentally shaped by its social dimension, and his suggestion that we need new ways of bridging individual spiritual authenticity with collective religious practice.

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This tension feels especially relevant now, as we navigate between the undeniable gains in personal freedoms that modern political life has brought us and the crisis of meaning that this same individualism has helped create. It’s also worth noting that, in being a widespread phenomena among large groups of people today, the emphasis on the individual becomes its own doctrine—the doctrine of the individual, we could say.

And this is Taylor’s point: James, for all his depth of understanding, misses this communal element of religious life. Here’s Taylor:

What James can’t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn’t got place for a collective connection through a common way of being. 

This privileging of individual experience emerges from and speaks to distinctly modern developments in religious consciousness. It manifests in what Taylor identifies as a polarization between following religious laws or commands without examination, and devotional practices that open one to inner divine guidance.

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II. The Malaise of Modernity

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While Taylor suggests these approaches need not be antagonistic, their separation becomes particularly apparent in the divide between religious experience and theology proper, which, as we just noted must, on James’s account, take a backseat to the primacy of personal encounter. This insight opens up a crucial question about the very nature of religious experience itself. As Taylor pointedly asks, “There are certain emotions you can have in solidarity that you can’t have alone; the experience mutates into something else by the fact that it is shared. How much of what James thinks of as individual experience is socially enhanced or affected in this way?”

This double movement in Taylor’s critique—identifying both the constitutive role of collective religious life and the transformative power of shared experience—reveals how James’s framework misses something essential about religious life. The question is not simply whether religious experience can occur in isolation or requires a social context; rather, it’s about how the collective dimension fundamentally shapes and transforms the nature of religious experience itself.

This historical development helps explain the peculiar shape of modern religious life that both James and Taylor analyze. The emphasis on individual religious experience that James celebrates isn’t just a modern innovation—it’s the culmination of a long process by which religious life became increasingly understood in terms of voluntary choice and personal seeking rather than participation in a given cosmic order.

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When modern spiritual seekers insist that their religious practice must be individually tailored, then, they are inhabiting a conceptual space carved out by modern theological developments. Yet Taylor suggests this individualist turn has had ambiguous consequences. While it helped create space for genuine religious freedom and personal authenticity, it also contributed to the atomization of religious life and the loss of those collective forms of meaning that earlier religious traditions took for granted. Our current religious predicament reveals a profound tension at the heart of post-Enlightenment modernity. The emphasis on individual freedom and authentic self-expression—values that James both reflected and helped shape—has created unprecedented space for spiritual creativity and personal religious exploration.

This opening has enabled forms of spiritual seeking and religious hybridization that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras, leading to new forms of religious experience and expression. Yet this very emphasis on individuality has also contributed to what Taylor elsewhere calls the “malaise of modernity.” Where the modern emphasis on individual rights and autonomy has brought important freedoms, Taylor argues it has also led to a loss of larger moral horizons and shared meanings that previously gave life purpose.

This creates what Taylor calls a “flattening” of life.

The atomization of religious life, its reduction to purely personal experience, has contributed to a broader crisis of meaning and belonging that characterizes the contemporary world. This represents an inversion of the traditional relationship between religious practice and human identity. Where traditional religious life called for individuals to conform themselves to established practices, doctrines, and communal forms of life, modern spiritual seekers increasingly expect religious practices to conform to their own predetermined sense of identity and spiritual needs.

To put a finer point on the issue:

Modern people are not interested in conforming to a historical grouping of teachings that they ought to fit into; they are instead interested in conforming these teachings to their own individual needs. Ironically, the widespread nature of this emphasis on the individual leads to a surprising result:

The nonconformist is, today, the highest and most common form of conformity.  

What the earlier, more collective forms of religious tradition provided—and what James’s framework struggles to account for—was not just a set of beliefs or experiences, but a thick web of social practices, shared and transcendent meanings, and communal bonds that helped situate individual life within a larger framework of significance. The very idea that religious practice might transform us into something other than what we already are—that it might challenge rather than confirm our existing identity—becomes increasingly foreign to modern sensibilities.

We see this Jamesian emphasis clearly reflected in contemporary spiritual trends: the rise of meditation apps that promise individual transformation without community involvement (or metaphysical commitment); the popular refrain “I’m spiritual but not religious” that privileges personal experience over institutional and ontic dedication; and the growing practice of selecting elements from multiple religious traditions to create an individualized spiritual path as a solo practitioner.

We find ourselves, then, in a complex position vis-à-vis James’s legacy. On one hand, we are undeniably downstream from both Enlightenment individualism and James’s emphasis on personal, empirical religious experience. His focus on mystical and transformative experiences associated with religious practice helped carve out a space for religious life that could survive the downsides of secular modernity. Yet after more than a century of viewing the Jamesian approach as an advance on earlier corporate forms of religious tradition, we ought now consider its limitations. The very success of this individualistic turn in religious life has revealed how much we have lost in abandoning or diminishing the collective dimensions of religious practice.

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III. Cross-Pressured Spaces

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In his later work A Secular Age, Taylor would develop this analysis further through his concept of “cross-pressured” spaces, describing how modern individuals find themselves caught between competing pulls: not only between individual and collective forms of religious life, but between immanent and transcendent frameworks of meaning altogether. For Taylor, modern secular society isn’t simply defined by the absence of religion or the triumph of immanent materialism.

Rather, we live in a time where both religious and secular worldviews exert pressure on us. Even the most committed atheist might feel moments of transcendent wonder or meaning that can’t be reduced to purely materialist explanations, while devoted believers often find themselves adopting thoroughly secular ways of thinking about much of life. We are, in Taylor’s terms, cross-pressured between an “immanent frame” that focuses on natural, this-worldly explanations, and persistent intimations of transcendence that suggest something beyond this frame.

This analysis deepens Taylor’s critique of James by showing how the individualization of religious life takes place within this broader context of competing worldviews. Most of us live with multiple pressures simultaneously—we feel the appeal of individual spiritual exploration while also sensing the inadequacy of purely private forms of meaning-making; we experience moments of transcendent meaning while also being thoroughly shaped by secular, immanent ways of understanding the world. We might practice meditation alone while yearning for community, or maintain formal religious affiliations while struggling with traditional authority, all while navigating between scientific materialism and religious ways of understanding reality.

The task before us, then, is to find new ways to understand and articulate how personal religious experience relates to collective religious life within this cross-pressured space—not by simply choosing one side of these tensions, but by learning to live creatively within them. James helped us understand the power and authenticity of individual religious experience, but Taylor’s work, developed across these two books, helps us see how this individualistic turn in religious life plays out in a world where both belief and unbelief have become challenging options, where both immanent and transcendent frameworks shape our understanding, and where the search for meaning must somehow navigate these crosscurrents of modern life.

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