Secularism

As a named program, in mid-19th-century Britain — George Holyoake coined 'secularism' in 1851. Its roots are older: Locke's argument for toleration (1689) and the American and French separations of church and state.

Europe's wars of religion, which pressed the case for a state neutral between faiths; Enlightenment arguments for toleration; the US First Amendment (1791); the French separation law (1905); and the spread of these constitutional models through the colonial and post-colonial world.

Locke and Voltaire; Jefferson and Madison in America; Holyoake and Bradlaugh in Britain; Jules Ferry and the French republicans. In the 20th century its carriers were mostly jurists, teachers, and constitution-writers rather than preachers.

Through constitutions, courts, and public schooling rather than conversion — exported with European legal models and adopted in different forms: American accommodation, French strictness (laïcité), Indian 'principled distance,' Turkish laiklik.

It is not counted in adherents but in states: most of the world's constitutions today declare some form of state neutrality toward religion, though what is practiced varies enormously from country to country.

The Peace of Westphalia ending Europe's religious wars (1648); the First Amendment (1791); the French separation (1905); the secular constitutions of Turkey and India in the 20th century; and the late-20th-century religious revivals that put the model under strain.

Secularist thinkers name a political problem, not a cosmic one: when state power and religious authority merge, the result is persecution, civil strife, and corrupted religion. Locke argued that rulers who enforce belief produce fear and hypocrisy, never sincere faith.

Secularism offers no full theory of evil. The evil it targets is specific: the suffering produced when rulers impose belief and majorities turn the law against religious minorities, as in Europe's wars of religion; deeper accounts of evil are left to the worldviews citizens hold.

The broken thing it names is political and social: the standing temptation of rulers to compel conscience, and of religious majorities to use the law against dissenters — what Mill called the tyranny of the majority.

State neutrality: government neither establishes, funds, nor forbids any religion, and treats citizens equally whatever they believe. Religious life is set free in society; political life rests on reasons all citizens can share.

Constitutional guarantees enforced by independent courts: no established religion, freedom of conscience and worship, equal citizenship without religious tests, and public institutions — schools, courts, government offices — kept religiously neutral.

Partly, and continuously. Secularists say the settlement is never finished — each generation re-fights the boundary over symbols, schools, dress, and funding — but they count a fair framework for that dispute as the achievement itself.

The person gains freedom to believe, change belief, or disbelieve without civil penalty; society gains peace between communities that once fought over religion; and the model, carried into most modern constitutions, reshaped how states worldwide relate to religion.

For public decisions: public reason — evidence and arguments any citizen can weigh regardless of creed, as Rawls formulated it. On ultimate truth it deliberately names no final source; that question is left to each citizen.

Reason and shared experience for the business of the state. Holyoake defined secular knowledge as knowledge founded in this life and testable in it; revelation is neither denied nor adopted — it is left free, outside the state's reach.

Because it is checkable by everyone: a law justified by public evidence can be examined by believer and unbeliever alike, while a law justified by one group's revelation can only be obeyed or resisted by everyone else. That shareability, secularists argue, is what makes state power legitimate in a plural society.

In public matters: open evidence, argument, and courts that must give reasons. In religious matters the state refuses to judge at all — Locke argued the magistrate has no competence over souls — so testing truth there belongs to citizens and their communities.

Secularism as such does not settle whether morality is fixed or made. In practice it anchors public right and wrong in constitutional rights and human dignity, and lets citizens ground those norms in God, reason, or tradition as they judge best — Rawls called this an overlapping consensus.

It takes no position — and treats that restraint as the point: whether humans can know realities beyond the physical is exactly the kind of question a neutral state must never answer on its citizens' behalf.

Open by design. Its arrangements are ordinary law — the French statute of 1905 has been amended, court doctrines shift — while the core principle, equal citizenship without religious coercion, is defended by its advocates as a durable achievement, not a revealed truth.

No scripture. Its canon is a shelf of arguments and laws: Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Mill's On Liberty (1859), Holyoake's English Secularism (1896), Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) — and constitutional texts such as the First Amendment (1791) and the French law of 1905.

As ordinary published books and public legal documents: printed, debated, amended, and taught in faculties of law and politics. Nothing was memorized or canonized; everything remains open to citation and challenge.

No divine claim is made for any of these texts, so nothing rests on miraculous preservation. Their authority is human and twofold: the arguments persuade or fail on their merits, and the constitutional texts bind because peoples ratified them and courts enforce them.

Argumentative prose and terse legal articles. The recurring themes are toleration, the limits of state power, freedom of conscience, and equal citizenship; the style is a case argued before a reader, not a proclamation.

That the state may neither establish a religion nor prevent its free exercise (First Amendment); that the republic ensures freedom of conscience but neither recognizes nor funds any religion (French law of 1905, articles 1–2); and that no religious test may ever be required for public office (US Constitution, article VI).

As law and argument, not as sacred text. Courts read the legal texts through precedent and context; scholars read Locke or Mill critically and are free to reject them — no doctrine of literal versus symbolic reading exists, because no text is above revision.

Constitutional case law is its nearest equivalent of commentary: US Establishment Clause jurisprudence from Everson v. Board of Education (1947) onward, French Conseil d'État rulings on laïcité, and Indian Supreme Court doctrine. In the academy, Rawlsian public-reason liberalism and Bhargava's 'principled distance' work as rival schools of interpretation.

Yes, openly and without embarrassment, since no text claims a perfect original. Jefferson's 'wall of separation' metaphor (1802) is still fought over in American courts, and the French law of 1905 has been amended many times; revision is treated as the system working, not failing.

They present themselves as human instruments: the First Amendment speaks as a restraint on government addressed to all citizens, and Locke's Letter offers itself as an argument any reader may test. None claims divine origin or immunity from criticism.

Secularism takes no position on God — deliberately. Holyoake insisted from the beginning that secularism is not atheism: it neither affirms nor denies God, but removes the question from the state's jurisdiction and leaves every citizen free to answer it. That neutrality is its answer.

No position. Whether reality has a spiritual side is exactly the kind of question secularism assigns to citizens, houses of worship, and philosophy — not to governments.

It makes no claim about the soul. Locke's founding argument was precisely that the care of souls is not the magistrate's business — the state cannot compel inward belief and should not try.

It has no doctrine of consciousness, and defers the question entirely to science and philosophy — inquiries a secular state is bound to leave free.

No metaphysical answer. The identity secularism protects is legal: you remain the same citizen, with the same rights, whether you keep your faith, change it, or leave it across a lifetime.

It teaches no doctrine of human nature, but its institutions assume people are capable of both fairness and the abuse of power. Madison's remark that if men were angels no government would be necessary is the working assumption behind its checks and balances.

No position on the metaphysics of free will. Practically it presupposes enough freedom for two things: responsibility before the law, and the meaningful choice of one's own belief — which is why coerced faith struck Locke as worthless.

No position. The mind–body question is left to citizens and to free scientific and philosophical inquiry; Holyoake's program confined itself to the duties of this life.

It offers no answer; why anything exists at all lies wholly outside its scope. Secularism insists only that the state impose no single answer on citizens who disagree.

It has no doctrine of its own. In practice, secular states teach the scientific account — cosmology, evolution — in public schools as science, while protecting every family's right to hold and teach its own religious account at home and in worship; the US Supreme Court struck down a ban on teaching evolution on exactly these grounds.

For public life: equal citizenship, human rights, and Mill's harm principle — the state may coerce only to prevent harm to others, never to enforce virtue or creed. The deeper grounding of right and wrong is left to each citizen's own worldview.

Civic virtues: tolerance, fairness, honesty in public argument, the discipline of defending rights for people you disagree with, and what Rawls called civility — giving fellow citizens reasons they can actually share.

It mainly forbids the state, not the citizen: no established religion, no religious tests for office, no compulsion of conscience, no discrimination by creed. Citizens are forbidden only what protects others — coercion and violence over belief.

None for individuals — it prescribes no prayer, fast, or ritual. Its practices are institutional: religiously neutral schools, courts, and public offices, plus the ordinary habits of citizenship — voting, serving, debating.

It is deliberately silent on relationships, work, and hardship; the silence is the design. Citizens draw guidance from their own religions and philosophies, and secularism's job is to guarantee the freedom to do so and to keep the law's protection equal when communities differ.

The fair citizen: a person of real convictions who still defends a neighbor's right to opposite ones, argues in public with reasons others can weigh, and refuses to reach for state power to settle questions of faith.

Crimes are met by courts, with punishment defined by law and applied equally whatever the offender believes. Sin, repentance, and forgiveness are left to each person's conscience and community of faith — the state deliberately holds no view.

It gives no answer, and holds that this is exactly what a state must never do: define the meaning of its citizens' lives. Rawls framed it as neutrality among conceptions of the good — the framework protects each person's pursuit of an answer without endorsing any.

It makes no claim about death or what follows. The question belongs wholly to religions and philosophies, whose freedom to answer it — in worship, print, and teaching — the secular state is bound to protect.

A framework, not a salvation: civil peace between rival faiths, equal citizenship, and the freedom of conscience to seek salvation, enlightenment, or meaning wherever one judges they lie. Holyoake added a positive aim — improving this present life by human effort.

For the individual it names no destination. For societies its hoped-for end is political: a stable pluralist peace in which no one's citizenship ever depends on anyone's creed.

None of these. It teaches no final judgment, no cosmic cycles, and no doctrine of the self's end — and its advocates count that restraint as honesty about the limits of politics.

When it works it is nearly invisible — felt as the ordinary freedom to worship, change faith, or ignore religion without cost. It becomes vivid only in disputes: religious minorities often experience it as shelter, while some devout majorities experience the same rules as exile from public life.

Its branches are national models: American accommodation (non-establishment plus free exercise), French laïcité (strict separation), Indian 'principled distance' (even-handed engagement, including reform of religious practice), and Turkish laiklik (state supervision of religion). Scholars group them roughly as soft and hard secularism.

Deeply — the same principle yields opposite rulings. A headscarf unremarkable in an American public school has been banned in a French one since the 2004 law, and India's courts intervene inside religious practice in ways Paris and Washington would both refuse.

Their disputes: funding religious schools, exemptions from general laws, religious symbols on public employees and in public buildings, and the deepest one — whether neutrality means keeping religion out of public space or admitting all religions even-handedly.

The commonest misunderstanding is that secularism is atheism — Holyoake denied it from the start, and believers helped build several secular states. The real disagreements: religious critics deny that law can be legitimate without divine grounding, and philosophers such as Taylor and Asad argue that neutrality itself carries a substantive worldview.

It makes religious belonging voluntary, and that changes its texture: Taylor describes how belief becomes one option among others rather than the unquestioned background of life. Publicly, identity becomes layered — citizen first before the law, believer or unbeliever freely everywhere else.

There is little to balance — modern science and secular institutions grew up together, and neutral states leave research free. The strain now runs the other way: worldwide religious revival has tested the model, prompting 'post-secular' rethinking of religion's place in public debate (Habermas).

A constitutional democracy whose laws come from elected legislatures and independent courts, justified by public reasons rather than any scripture. The models differ in method: America forbids establishment while freeing exercise, France removes religion from state space, and India keeps a principled distance that lets the state engage every religion even-handedly.

Limiting power is the system's whole method: separation of powers, independent courts, elections, and entrenched rights no majority may vote away. Against an unjust ruler citizens have courts, the ballot, a free press, and lawful protest — and Locke, at the tradition's root, defended even revolution when a government destroys the rights it exists to protect.

Equal citizens with the same rights, offices, and votes; secularism as such assigns no roles to the sexes. Its main historical effect on this question was replacing religious courts with civil family law in many countries — and where religious personal law survives inside a secular state, as in India, the tension is still being argued and litigated.

Rejecting secularism is itself protected by secularism: believers who oppose it keep full citizenship and may vote, publish, and organize against it openly. The line is drawn at capture, not conviction — arguing for a religious state is lawful, while making one faith compulsory is what the constitution resists; Rawls held that even the intolerant are owed toleration until they actually endanger free institutions.

Force belongs to the state alone, under law, for defense and law enforcement — never for belief. Locke's founding argument was that force cannot produce sincere faith, only hypocrisy; by the same logic, mainstream secularists condemn forced secularization — closing houses of worship, banning practice — as a betrayal of the principle rather than an application of it.

Leaving any religion is protected as a core right: freedom of conscience includes the freedom to change it, as Article 18 of the Universal Declaration states, and secular law attaches no penalty to leaving any faith. Leaving secularism itself is ordinary political dissent, carrying no legal consequence at all.

Its strongest case is historical: after centuries of religious war, European states that stopped enforcing belief achieved a durable religious peace, and since Locke the standing argument is that coerced faith is worthless anyway. Its second pillar is freedom — including for believers: religious minorities have generally been safer under neutral states than under someone else's confessional state. Advocates point to modern data on government restrictions of religion in support.

The deepest objection is that neutrality is impossible: Taylor argues in A Secular Age that the secular frame is itself a substantive way of experiencing the world, and Asad's Formations of the Secular contends that 'the secular' defines and disciplines what religion is allowed to be. Religious critics add that laïcité becomes coercion in practice, as in France's 2004 ban on headscarves in public schools. Secularism's best answers: Rawls conceded the state cannot be neutral in effect but can be neutral in aim, privileging no group's doctrine in law; Bhargava replies that flawed French practice does not define the principle, offering India's principled distance as a fairer model; and secularists themselves have opposed the coercive cases as violations.

Mostly, with one live strain — whether neutrality itself can be neutral. Deciding what counts as 'religious,' what counts as 'public,' and where the boundary sits is not a viewless act, so critics call the framework covertly substantive. Defenders answer that the claim was never to stand nowhere, but to give no citizen's creed legal power over another's — a procedural fairness that need not pretend to be a view from nowhere. Whether that answer fully succeeds remains one of the sharpest open debates in political philosophy.

Where applied, its core prediction has held: neutral states have generally delivered religious peace and freer minorities. What failed was the broader 'secularization thesis' that religion would fade with modernity — Berger, once its leading proponent, publicly reversed himself as religion revived worldwide. Secularists respond that the political principle never depended on religion's decline; it is a settlement for religious societies, not a prophecy of irreligious ones.

Officials can and do live it in role — judging, teaching, and legislating without invoking their creeds. The harder question is citizens: people cannot fully bracket their deepest convictions when voting on life, death, and family, and Rawls himself loosened his rule to admit religious reasons into public debate provided public reasons follow in due course (the 'proviso'). Honest secularists also grant that the framework runs on moral energies — dignity, conscience — that it did not itself generate.

Achievements: religious peace after Europe's wars, the end of blasphemy prosecutions and religious tests across much of the world, and legal shelter for minorities and dissenters of every faith. Harms done in its name: the French Revolution's dechristianization campaign, Kemalist Turkey's coercion of religious practice, and Soviet state atheism's persecution of believers — closed churches and mosques, imprisoned clergy. The mainstream secularist answer is that these were betrayals, not applications: a state that enforces irreligion has established a creed, which is exactly what the principle forbids. Critics reply that the ease with which neutrality slid into hostility is itself part of the record.

Its advocates treat it as an empirical wager, and say so: if states with neutral institutions systematically produced worse religious peace, less freedom, and more persecution than confessional states, the case for secularism would fail. It would also count against it if fair neutral institutions proved impossible in practice — if every secular state inevitably slid into either religious capture or anti-religious coercion. Since the claim is political rather than metaphysical, secularists accept that history, not faith, is the judge.