Secularism

Secularism may indicate a nonreligious world-view, an ideology, a political doctrine, a form of political governance, a type of moral philosophy, or a belief that the scientific method is solely sufficient to understand the world in which we live. While George Jacob Holyoke introduced the term secularism only in 1851, the structural reality of secularism has a longer history and has always embraced a spectrum of ideas: the emphasis on what is moral as opposed to what is miraculous in religion (Immanuel Kant); the view that the church is the caretaker of souls and ought to be separated from the state that is concerned with worldly matters (John Locke); the anticipation (often inseparable from advocacy) of a radical transformation of religions with progress (Thomas Jefferson); the call for replacing traditional religions with the new religion of humanity (Auguste Comte); the critique or rejection of traditional religions, especially Christianity, as obstacles to human freedom and power (Friedrich Nietzsche); the predictions as well as concerns about the disenchantment of modern societies (Émile Durkheim and Max Weber); and the prophecies about the disappearance of religion at the end of history (Karl Marx).

Secularism has been a source of marginalization and sometimes even a hostile negation of religions, but it cannot be reduced to antireligiousness. It is also a moral orientation toward the world and in the world, often guided by a vision of a just society for all or developed as a strategy that should mitigate the challenges of religious pluralism. For both theoretical and empirical purposes, therefore, secularism should be thought of in the plural rather than in the singular. Defining secularism is additionally complicated because of its proximity to the notion of secularization. These terms have distinct analytic meanings and purposes but are also closely related. Secularization refers to processes that accompany modernization—gradual decline of religious contents and institutions or their sudden (and at times state-enforced) removal from the political, educational, or economic realms. But secularization is not some neutral and unavoidable progression toward less religious societies. It involves the intellectual and social history that brings together variables and actors as diverse as the unintended consequences of the medieval religious reforms and the Protestant Reformation, the birth of the modern nation-state, Enlightenment philosophy, and agents whose goal was to institutionalize secularity and the ideas of secularism in law, education, politics, and economics.

While secularism has origins in the West, it has long ceased to be its property. This is today a global phenomenon with an equally global crisis. Political secularism, which refers to the separation between politics and religion and between the state and religious institutions, faces challenges in almost every corner of the globe. The most immediate among these challenges are empirical—the revival of public religions, the strength of religious fundamentalisms, and the religious pluralization that accompanies new waves of immigration. They give rise to important questions about the relationship between secularisms and democracies: Is some type of secularism a necessary precondition for democratic pluralistic societies? If political secularism is [Page 1142]not a universal paradigm but a fragile doctrine that needs constant renegotiation, how are we to institutionalize the porous and changing boundaries between the religious and the secular? Indeed, despite an important democratic impulse of many political secularisms—the creation of a public sphere open to all individuals as equal citizens, regardless of their particular identities—the meanings, goals, and forms of institutionalization of secularism reveal much less democratic features as well. From the societies of western Europe to the United States, India, Syria, and Turkey, one traces the importance of secularism for the creation of powerful nation-states that are both homogeneous and homogenizing, for example, or the attempts to marginalize and control religions and religious institutions.

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