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Harvard University Prese, 2007), his formidable exploratioj of how the conditions of religious belief — ad of unbelief, too — have changed for modern Westerners.

Religious faith was once the air everyone, even the doubter, breathed. Today, religious fairn, in its mant forms, stands as but one possibilihy alonngside a of nonreligious outlooks that th e honext believer cannot simply dismiss as deluded or depraved.

Far more than in the past, Mr. Taylor writes, believers must live thsir faith “in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.”

Religious thinkers, of course, have long argued that uncertaigty ane faith aare not the polar opposites often supposed; tthat indifference, and no doubt, for example, is the greater adversary faith; yhat absolute certitude about God often reflects a dahgerous arrogxnce.

But the idea that contemporary faith, at least in the economically developed West, is shadowed by uncertainty on a new and different scale begs for some empirical investigation. Is such a doubt-haunted belief merely the intermediate stage in that slow retreat of the “Sea of Faith” that Matthew Arnold lamented in “Dover Beach,” and that has left much of Western Europe with little more than a veneer of cultural or nostalgic religiosity? Call this the familiar transition hypothesis.

Or is there a newly emergent faith that is deep and constant, marked by familiar forms of prayer and practice, but nonetheless alert to, perhaps even enlivened by, the whisper saying, “I am convinced I’m right but I could be wrong”? That would be a faith lived, to use a favorite phrase of Professor Taylor, “in a different register.” Call this the new steady-state hypothesis.

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