The Unmaking of Sacred Order: Reform, Discipline, and the Birth of the Secular Self (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798243059749)

Why did modern secularity emerge-not as a rejection of God, but as the unintended outcome of religious devotion itself?

In The Unmaking of Sacred Order, Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad offers a powerful and original reconstruction of modern secularity by entering deeply into the philosophical genealogy of Charles Taylor-and then moving decisively beyond it.

This book argues that secularity did not arise from disbelief, rationalism, or the decline of faith. Instead, it was forged from within Christianity itself: through reform, moral intensification, discipline, and the transformation of the human self. What began as a quest for purity and sincerity ultimately reshaped the structure of the world-and the structure of subjectivity.

Drawing critically on A Secular Age and Sources of the Self, this volume traces how the collapse of sacred mediation, the rise of disciplinary Christianity, and the transition from the porous self to the buffered self produced a world that no longer requires transcendence in order to function. Secularity, in this account, is not an ideology-it is a condition.

Unlike introductory or secondary commentaries on Charles Taylor, this book:

• Writes from within Taylor's philosophical architecture, rather than merely explaining it

• Offers a sustained, chapter-by-chapter genealogy of reform, discipline, mediation, and subjectivity

• Positions secularity as an achievement, not a loss-while exposing its hidden psychological and existential costs

• Bridges philosophy, anthropology, theology, and moral psychology in a single, coherent argument

• Advances an original voice, treating Charles Taylor not as an untouchable authority, but as a critical interlocutor

This is not a summary of Taylor. It is a Taylorian work with its own argument, structure, and stakes.

• How religious reform intensified faith and moral seriousness

• Why discipline became the infrastructure of modern moral life

• How saints, rituals, and sacred distance collapsed under demands for immediacy

• Why the world stopped "carrying" transcendence

• How the buffered self emerged as the default subject of modernity

• Why secularity feels inevitable-and where its cracks begin to show

The book culminates in a sober, reflective conclusion: secularity is not our failure, nor our triumph-it is our situation.

The Unmaking of Sacred Order is Volume 2 in the Charles Taylor Studies series, a scholarly project dedicated to rigorous, critical, and original engagement with Taylor's thought on modern identity, morality, and secularity.

Each volume in this series is designed not only to interpret Charles Taylor, but to extend his work into new conceptual and cultural terrains.