52 Chapter 1 (1989), a ‘crucial stage’ in the shared story of modernity and Protestantism is ‘the fusion of the ethic of ordinary life and the philosophy of disengaged freedom and rationality’ (p. 234). In both modernity and Protestantism, it is not the sacred space of the cathedral and the church liturgy where the good life is learned and practiced; rather, it is the ordinary, daily life in which (spiritual) good is practically learned. Thus, Protestant opposition to magic was one of the most powerful sources of the modern disenchantment of the world (Taylor, 1989, p. 191), which underlies the disengaged subject as an independent individual being (p. 192). Grace is, in the Protestant conception, a highly individual gift of God to His elect, which can lead to the disengagement of the person from the vicinity, the neighbourhood and even the family (Taylor, 1989, p. 194). Signs of grace can, however, be found in the sanctification of the ordinary life, ‘both earnest and detached’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 223). At this point, Taylor’s (1989) analysis moved close to the Weberian evaluation of Calvinism and, at the same time, started to show more coherence with MacIntyre’s (2007) critique of Protestantism. It is precisely this attachment to Weber that renders their philosophical evaluation of Protestantism unsatisfactory from a Protestant insider’s perspective. In the first place, history shows how Protestantism does not autimatically leads via Deism to the radical Enlightenment. Nowadays, there are many Christians in the Protestant tradition who in the midst of their secular contexts do exactly what Taylor (1989) observed that the first Reformers did: ‘Only drawing the radical consequences from a very old theme in Christendom’ (p. 218), believing in a spiritually loaded cosmos and dedicating the whole of their (ordinary) lives to the service of God. This brings to the second argument, which is that their sanctification of ordinary life does definitely not exclude old conceptions of meaningful order based on an ontic logos, as Taylor suggests (p. 232). From the Reformation on, Protestant theologians have been approximating God’s creation as filled with the order of God’s law, which only via a modernistic epistemology led to a certain disenchantment, while it otherwise led to a fundamental respect for creation as a place to serve God and the neighbour. Kuiper (2014) uses these two arguments—although in reversed order—to underpin his statement that the Weberian and therefore the Taylorian evaluation of Protestantism are not completely fair (p. 111). A more convincing explication of the interconnectedness of Protestantism and modernity was presented by van de Beek (2022) in his cultural analysis of the ego. Van de Beek (2022) did not, in the first place, look for a dogmatic or social explication, as MacIntyre and Taylor did, but for an epistemological explication. The modern turn to the subject has epistemological implications,
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