vallierojas: Mix and match secularism

Whether you're a western liberal or a God-rejector looking for converts, there is a flavour of secularism for all

The question: What is secularism?

There is a flavour of secularism to suit every taste. For the moderate democratic type there is the secularism that describes a political system wherein the state is formally separated from the church and tries as far as possible to be colourblind or at least equitable on matters of religion. This flavour is the choice of the modern western liberal. It can suit the godless, who would prefer their nation not to be governed according to principles they think are patently ridiculous, or those of the milder religious persuasions, who can see that it's a good idea for no single belief system to trump all others. Of course, a state like this is not necessarily irreligious ? as the case of the US makes clear ? but it is, according to this definition, secular.

There is quite another secular in play, in opposition to this view. Much beloved of the Islamists and evangelicals, this secularism is the handy one-word distillation for all that is wrong in the modern world. Consumerism, divorce, drugs, Harry Potter, prostitution, Twitter, relativism, Big Brother, lack of moral compass, lack of community cohesion, lack of moral values, vajazzling ? all can be lumped together and explained by the word secular, a kind of contemporary contraction of heathen and barbarian, with undertones of greed, perfidity and vulgarity. If the diagnosis is simple, so is the cure: more religion. This is the bad secular on which the pope and Osama bin Laden both, though not jointly, launched an assault.

There is still another kind of secularism, more to the taste of proper God-rejectors, and more faithful to the original coinage, that denotes a life lived without recourse to the supernatural. This is the view that (as usefully pointed out in the comments on a previous article) animates the first point in the declaration of general principles of the organisation which claims to be "the leading British pressure group speaking out for the rights of atheists, agnostics and all other nonbelievers":

"The National Secular Society affirms that this life is the only one of which we have any knowledge and human effort should be directed wholly towards its improvement. It asserts that supernaturalism is based upon ignorance and assails it as the historic enemy of progress."

A mere technical separation of church and state is not enough for those who take this view. For them, the world is divided into religious people and secular people, and we would all be better off if the religious recognised their mistake and came over to the secular side. This is thoroughly in keeping with the original intentions of George Jacob Holyoake, who coined the term in 1846 (or 1851, depending on whether you are a follower of the National Secular Society or Wikipedia). Holyoake identified the secular as "the province of the real, the known, the useful and the affirmative", and placed it in contrast to the then dominant and all-but-compulsory Christianity.

Yet Holyoake was mild compared with his successor as president of the London Secular Society, the firebrand freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, who then became the president of the National Secular Society in 1866. Bradlaugh took Holyoake's definition and ran with it, toward what he hoped would be the founding of a completely secular British state (read all about it in Ferdinand Mount's excellent review of a new biography of Bradlaugh by Bryan Niblet in the current London Review of Books). This kind of secular arises from a very particular context ? and one which, as Humeira Iqtadar points out points out, is very specific to the west, perhaps even to Britain alone. It arose, as sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau (whose forthcoming book is called How to be Secular) argues, "in antagonistic dialectic with the most potent and intractable forms of human collective representations, that which is commonly referred to as religion," and is therefore partly constituted by its adversary.

There is certainly a job of work to be done, as Lois Lee recommends, in understanding how modern secular people actually live out their nonbelief and of what a nonreligious life consists. Many secularists like to believe that they live entirely free of religion, untainted by its irrationalities.

The president of the National Secular Society Terry Sanderson himself said he "couldn't care less if there is a God or not" ? he's just completely indifferent to religion of any kind. It would be interesting to hear more about this secular life as lived, and see how removed from religion it is actually possible to be; whether secular people have in fact established the secular society for which Holyoake and Bradlaugh fought. But Berlinerblau, in his most recent book The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, strikes a note of caution in this regard: "The secular hope of achieving a total and decisive break with religion is as realistic as trying to eradicate the air. Better to try and understand how religion works ? if only to grasp the manner in which it forges even the most secular self, if only to resist and subvert it, just a bit."

This, then, is one last flavour of secularism. It is not a political program, a philosophy or a "lifestance".

It doesn't come with libertines or Absinthe either, more's the pity. It's really more of a mind-stance. This secularism Berlinerblau asserts rather fetchingly, is undertaken in a "curmudgeonly spirit". He writes:

"Secularism, at its essence, and at its absolute best, comprises an unrelenting commitment to judicious and self-correcting critique. Secularism's 'job' consists of criticising all collective representations. Its analytic energies should be inflicted on all types of mass belief or empowered orthodoxy, whether it's religious, political, scientific [or] aesthetic."

In the struggles against religious power and dogma, Berlinerblau argues, the philosophies of the Enlightenment and the freethinkers of the 19th century developed a precious critical tradition, one that we secularists should be humble enough and honest enough to apply to all dogmas, orthodoxies and scared cows, including our own.

Caspar Melville

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