I can't recommend Razib's enormously intelligent post on religion, secularization, and various associated topics highly enough, and Reihan's (somewhat more personal) response is likewise thought-provoking. I'd only quibble with Razib's remark that "Europeans are post-Christian, but not predominantly 'secular,' if that means lack of belief in God and a 'spirit or life force'" - not because he's wrong that a widespread "supernaturalism" prevails even (or especially) in the absence of organized religion, but because I think that it's worth employing a definition of secularism that doesn't conflate it with atheism.
In the forthcoming, not-yet-online Atlantic, for instance, I have a short piece analyzing the rise of mass secularism in America, which draws on this paper by Michael Hout and Claude Fischer on the remarkable growth in the percentage of Americans with "no religious preference." Hout and Fischer attribute this growth, in part, to people self-defining against organized religion because of its association with conservative politics, but (like Razib) they shy away from calling this phenomenon "secularism" because many of the "no religious preference" types retain supernatural beliefs. But I tend to think that the term "secularism" is actually most useful, and exact, when applied to a political hostility to organized religion of precisely the kind that Hout and Fischer are documenting, rather than to a more general disbelief in the supernatural. "Secularist" should be synonymous with "anti-clericalist," in other words, rather than with "unbeliever." (It seems like a poor definition of secularist that excludes Deists like Thomas Paine and Voltaire - or that excludes Sam Harris, for that matter, because of his forays into Eastern mysticism.)
There are two strains of secularism, I would argue, which are usually intertwined but philosophically distinct: A soft secularism that argues for a legal separation of church and politics - no school prayer, no federal funds for churches, etc - and a hard secularism that militates for a complete separation of religion and politics, and shades easily into hostility toward organized religion in a general. But neither form precludes private belief in the supernatural. A perfectly "secular" society would be defined not by universal atheism, but by a religion-free politics in the short run, and probably a long-run "decoupling," as Razib puts it, of supernatural beliefs from religious institutions.
The dictionary, of course, tries to have it both ways, like the squish it is.
Photo by Flickr user Dhammza used under a Creative Commons license.
I agree, the Razib piece is very good. And I agree with you completely (and I've argued this with Derb and Razib before) that defining "religion" as synonymous with "supernaturalism" is incorrect on multiple levels. We are, by nature but to varying degrees, inclined to supernaturalism, and organized religion certainly makes use of that nature - but it is not synonymous with that nature nor, I think, simply derivative of that nature.
As for defining "secularism," I see a problem with making it synonymous with "anti-clerical" because "anti-clerical" is a term more appropriate to a Catholic context and America is (still) a Protestant country, and there is no institutional Protestant clergy as such. A country whose Constitution prohibited religious establishment, whose people distrusted priests, generally did not belong to a church and, if they did, switched readily between denominations, but whose people also overwhelmingly believed in God and read the Bible as God's holy word, would certainly not be accurately described as "secular" - but might well be accurately described as "anti-clerical."
"Secular" means "worldly." We may best define a "secular" outlook as one that is exclusively this-world-oriented. One could perfectly well believe in a variety of supernaturalisms while rejecting the idea of *organizing your life* around a point of reference from *outside this world* such as the will of God or the fate of one's soul.
So: here are my definitions:
A "religious" person is someone who, in organizing their own life, does so with reference to such a point outside the world. A "secular" person is someone who does not. The "religious" person might doubt the efficacy of prayer or the immortality of the soul (or what-have-you), but still live a life organized (at least in part) with reference to a tradition that affirms the efficacy of prayer or the immortality of the soul (or what-have-you). A "secular" person might believe in ghosts or reincarnation or go a-Maying each spring, but still live a life organized without such reference to an outside point - he does not organize his life around, say, tending to the needs of the spirits of his ancestors.
"Secularism" is an "ism" - an ideology. It implies some view about public life, not merely a personal orientation vis-a-vis religiosity. Presumably, that point of view is that the secular outlook should be the outlook of the state - minimally, the state should not be organized with reference to such a point outside the world; maximally, it should indoctrinate the citizenry in a secular outlook.
American anti-establishmentarianism does not necessarily imply secularism in the sense that I articulate above; it is possible (though I reject this view) to understand the American system of government as having been founded with reference to a point outside the world (being endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and all that). Nor is French laicite (which is unquestionably a species of secularism) incompatible with public funding of sectarian religious schools.
Posted by Noah Millman | June 1, 2007 12:17 PM