Table of Contents
Secularism
Secularism refers broadly to the principle that religious institutions, doctrines, and authorities should be separate from civil governance, public education, and other shared social institutions. The term encompasses both a political doctrine-the separation of church and state-and a wider cultural disposition toward organizing collective life without reference to religious premises. What precisely secularism requires, permits, or excludes is itself a matter of ongoing scholarly and political debate; some definitions focus narrowly on institutional arrangements while others extend to questions of epistemology, ethics, and cultural identity. For competing framings of the concept, see secularism-definition-debate and secularism-concept-viewpoint-debate.
Current State of Knowledge and Debate
Scholars generally distinguish between several overlapping senses of secularism. Political secularism concerns the formal separation of religious authority from state power, as embodied in constitutional arrangements such as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or the French principle of laïcité. Procedural secularism holds that public deliberation and lawmaking should rely on reasons accessible to all citizens regardless of religious commitment, a position associated with liberal political philosophy following John Rawls. Ideological secularism (sometimes called secularism as a worldview) describes the positive affirmation of non-religious frameworks as a basis for ethics, meaning, and public life-a position that shades into humanism and atheism.
These distinctions matter because critics and defenders of secularism often argue past one another by addressing different senses of the term. Defenders of political secularism frequently do not endorse ideological secularism, and vice versa.
Historians trace the concept's modern development to the European Enlightenment, when thinkers including John Locke, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant argued for limiting ecclesiastical authority over civil affairs. The word “secularism” itself was coined in 1851 by British writer George Jacob Holyoake to describe a social philosophy grounded in empirical reasoning rather than theology.1) Earlier antecedents appear in classical antiquity and in medieval jurisprudential debates-including within Jewish Talmudic reasoning, which developed a tradition of civil-law reasoning partially independent of theological authority-but the systematic political doctrine is largely a product of post-Enlightenment Western thought. For fuller historical treatment, see secularism-history.
The relationship between secularism and Christianity is particularly complex. Scholars including Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor have argued that certain features of Western secularism are distinctively shaped by the Christian theological tradition-particularly the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, and the Protestant Reformation's fragmentation of ecclesiastical authority. On this account, secularism is not simply the absence of Christianity but partly its product. Others contest this genealogy as parochial or overstated. See secularism-christian-origins-debate.
Contemporary debate includes whether secular frameworks can be genuinely neutral among religious and nonreligious worldviews, whether secularism as practiced in Western democracies is culturally specific and therefore inappropriate as a universal norm, and how secular states should handle religious expression in public spaces, schools, and law.
Consensus Status
No broad independent consensus exists among researchers on the normative questions surrounding secularism-whether it is preferable, what it requires, or whether it is achievable. Descriptive and historical claims-such as that modern Western states have substantially reduced formal church authority over civil law since the seventeenth century-are not seriously contested, but these do not constitute a normative consensus. No consensus page is warranted at this time.
Viewpoints
Secularism as a necessary condition for liberal democracy. A widely held position in liberal political philosophy holds that only a secular state can treat citizens of all faiths-and of none-as equals. Religious authority in lawmaking, on this view, privileges one community's metaphysical commitments at others' expense. See secularism-liberal-democracy-viewpoint.
Secularism as a neutral framework for religious pluralism. A related but distinct position holds that secular governance is not anti-religious but rather the fair umpire among competing religions and worldviews. Secularism protects religion by keeping the state out of it. See secularism-pluralism-neutral-viewpoint.
Religious traditionalist critique. Many religious communities-Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Jewish Orthodox, and others-argue that a fully secular public order is neither possible nor desirable. All governance rests on some substantive vision of the good; the secular vision is not neutral but is itself a rival worldview. Public life, on this account, should remain open to religiously grounded reasoning. See secularism-religious-traditionalist-viewpoint.
Post-secular and communitarian critique. Thinkers including Jürgen Habermas (in his later work), Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre argue that strong secularism underestimates religion's ongoing contribution to public reasoning, solidarity, and moral vocabulary. A post-secular society should engage religious and secular voices on more symmetrical terms. See secularism-post-secular-viewpoint.
Anti-colonial and non-Western critique. Scholars including Talal Asad argue that secularism as historically practiced is a specifically Western-and often specifically Protestant-cultural formation that has been exported through colonialism and cultural hegemony. Its claim to universality conceals a particular civilizational standpoint. See secularism-anti-colonial-viewpoint.
Secularism as incomplete without positive humanism. Some secular humanists argue that political church-state separation is necessary but not sufficient; a properly secular society also requires the affirmative cultivation of non-religious ethics, education, and culture. See secularism-humanist-positive-viewpoint.
Controversies
Laïcité and religious symbols in France. French bans on conspicuous religious symbols in public schools and, later, on full-face coverings have generated sustained legal and political controversy, with critics arguing the measures disproportionately target Muslim women. See secularism-france-laicite-controversy.
School prayer and public religious expression in the United States. A series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings beginning with Engel v. Vitale (1962) prohibited state-sponsored prayer in public schools, generating enduring political conflict over the boundaries of the Establishment Clause. See secularism-us-school-prayer-controversy.
Secular governance and Islamic law. In several Muslim-majority countries, debates over whether constitutional frameworks should incorporate sharia have produced significant political and sometimes violent conflict, raising questions about the cross-cultural applicability of secular models. See secularism-sharia-secular-law-controversy.
Related Pages
Footnotes
1. Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791-1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 154-157. Royle documents Holyoake's introduction of the term in 1851. For Holyoake's developed position, see also George Jacob Holyoake, The Principles of Secularism (London: Austin & Co., 1871). 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 3. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 6. Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2008): 17-29. 7. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). 8. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Casanova's work on “deprivatization” of religion is a key reference for post-secular debate. 9. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).