Based on a single unidentified survey, writer David Klinghoffer helps Christianity Today redefine “secularist” as irreligious and unethical.
Secularism, as I see it, is a separation of church and state that acts as religious Americans’ single strongest shield against one religious sect or denomination using government to suppress all other faiths — as well as science. Secularism is not a religion. It is a defense of religions — more specifically, a defense of religious expression that differs from that of one’s neighbor. It is a defense of each individual person or group’s relationship with God.
Secularism, as the self-deluded religious right sees it, is atheism. It is evolution. It is reason. It is honest moral disagreement and ambiguity. It is an admission of the faint possibility that one’s own faith, while perhaps better for me than my neighbor’s faith would be, is neither perfect nor absolute.
More on secularism and American liberty from…
“secularism” is as often improperly defined and misrepresented by evangelicals as is “feminism / feminist.”
*cough* Dobson *cough*
The reason why they complain is because they feel they are being repressed, as in the old Monty Phyton skit. The truth is they don’t see how it helps them. It is sort like the old prayer in public schools bit. None of the people for it seem to think that if a Christian prayer were allowed it could be something they disagreed with such as Hail Mary. They also have a faith that can not stand up to outside questions. They seem to have tied their place in the universe into a faith system and when the universe turns out to be different than what their faith system allows all is lost.
What is needed here is some medieval-style scholasticism. That is the making of distinctions. When an -ism is added to a word it changes the intensity — if not the root meaning — of the word. Secularism is no different. It is different from secular where Mike’s definitions are operative. Namely, secular being defined as religious liberty in a plural society. Secularism takes the base concept of secular and adds an anti-supernatural bias. For example, the average scientist who believes that evolution is true doesn’t have the zeal that the late Richard Dawkins had.
The Religious Right tends to conflate the secular and secularist. All who believe in evolution are de facto secularists. All who believe in religous liberty are likewise. That being said, when critiquing the Religious Right, you ought not dismiss the proper analysis of secularism. In that more narrow sense, the CT article was pretty much on target.
I think Richard Dawkins is still very much alive: do you mean Darwin?
Does anyone know what happened to the “Focus/Family honors group accused of felonies” thread?
Steve, it’s here.
No, for some reason I thought Dawkins recently died. My bad. Darwin would not qualify as a secularist, at least according to my definition.
It seems as if ‘secular’ is something like ‘accepts the Enlightenment’. FOTF is working from a Medieval view of things. Like the last 4 centuries have all been a horrible mistake.
My point is that FotF is not Medieval enough! What marked Medieval Scholastic thought was its attention to fine-grained distinctions. Such distinctions are simply too subtle for a screaming fund raising letter.
Rich,
I appreciate your distinction between “secular” and anti-supernatural.
At the same time, though, it sounds as though you agree with the anti-secular movement’s redefinition of “secularism” (the noun corresponding to the adjective “secular”) to mean atheism.
Are you arguing that some atheists and agnostics have (wrongly) claimed to own the label “secularism”?
A Dec. 23 article in The Washington Post reported on the religious right’s exploitation of an imaginary “secular” attack on Christmas to raise funds. The article, by Dana Milbank, makes excellent points:
No one has documented any increase in efforts to remove Christmas displays from public property. On the contrary, some religious right groups acknowledge that the only increase has been in their exploitation of Christmas to fuel political activism.
If there is a threat to Christmas, it is not from an antireligious branch of secularism, but rather from pluralism — the need for public property to reflect taxpayers’ increasingly diverse religious perspectives, especially during holidays shared by multiple religions.
Dispatches from the Culture Wars comments further.