a secular age

Charles Taylor’s 2007 Templeton Prize winner has fostered an exceptionally vibrant intellectual debate on secularism and on the conditions of belief under modernity.

Social theorists such as Marx & Weber rely on the idea of a secular state, which separates governmental and religious institutions, & bases its authority on man-made law rather than religious doctrine.

It's often missed that secular is a Christian idea, straight out of Augustine, who coined the word 'saeculum' to mean the present age where the two cities (of God and of man) always interpenetrate until the eschaton. Brian Hamilton explains:

Augustine secularizes the world and the church alike, divesting them of the absolute or final significance which either has only eschatologically. The Roman Empire is not identical with the earthly city, and the Church, though it can be identified with the heavenly city in a special way, remains a corpus permixtum while on pilgrimage here on earth, the tares growing up alongside the wheat until they are sorted out at the final judgment.

As I hinted at once, it's no cheap thing that secular expectations should flow out of a Christian view of history. That is something very precious indeed. Hamilton goes on

Indeed, according to Markus, Augustine broke ranks with many of his contemporaries by secularizing history itself: outside the total interpretation given to salvation history in the biblical canon, no history can possess ultimate significance; since the Incarnation and until Christ returns, history is homogeneous, always ambiguous as to the final end of what comes to pass and always a mystery as to where and how God may be working. This, in short, is Augustine’s theology of the saeculum

Admittedly, that's been corrupted into the Secularisaton Thesis, that progress in society would be characterised by religion becoming increasingly private and marginal, but like most political theory after Hegel, at its roots it's parasitical on a Christian view of history (see John Gray, Black Mass). (The thesis is now widely discredited)

So for instance, in Religion in Secular Society (1966), Brian Wilson defined secularisation as “the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance”, and he illustrated how industrialisation, urbanisation, rationalisation, bureaucratisation and societalisation have undermined religious institutions; how the economy, welfare, education, health, the law and other public spheres no longer depend on religious values, practices or institutions.

Wilson conflates religious values & religious institutions under one head: 'public religion'. While it's pretty obvious that civil life can be ordered by institutions other than wholly religious ones, it's not at all obvious that civil life can be ordered apart from religious values. I think Tony's spot on (HT: Tom).
What I find strange is that religious practice & institutions seem to be rife (defying the secularisation thesis), yet the crisis in our culture is one of values. I would have thought it'd be the other way round.

Reminds me of Chesterton, who nailed it (as usual) in Orthodoxy:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.