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01 Jun 2007 04:18 pm

Defining Secularism

Ross makes an essential point:

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 conflation of secularism with atheism in the popular vernacular is one of the more corrosive abuses of the English language today. It is perfectly possible to be devoutly religious and aggressively secular. Yes, that combo is rarer than it was, but its possibility is a lynchpin of liberal democracy.

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