In
the public school I went to in the 1970s, "secular" was A neutral,
descriptive word. Our social-studies teacher taught us that ours was a
"secular" government, by which she meant that we lived free of any
religion established by the state. We were to be proud of this secular
government, she told us; it differentiated us from people in other
times and places where those speaking for God made the rules—rules that
sometimes were corrupt and unfair. As I understood it then, "secular"
had nothing to do with disavowing or disapproving of any particular
belief in God.
"Secular" does mean "godless," and its
neutral meaning has always fought with the more negative one; recently,
though, the word has taken on a lot more freight. Like the words
"feminist" and "liberal," "secular" and its derivatives have come to
mean extreme versions of themselves. They are code in conservative
Christian circles for "atheist" or even "God hating"—they conjure, in a
fresh way, all the demons Christian conservatives have been fighting
for more than 30 years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness and moral
lassitude. The Fox News star Bill O’Reilly frequently frames the
culture war as "traditionals versus secular-progressives." Ann Coulter
accused "the liberals and the secularists and atheists" of using
religion as a wedge. In a speech last year, Newt Gingrich decried the
"growing culture of radical secularism," and in a new book the diplomat
John Bolton critiques "the High Minded elite who worship at the altar
of the Secular Pope." In politics, where it is efficacious to unite
people against a common enemy, "secularism" has become that enemy’s new
name.
To be fair, battles in the war against secularism
have been fought for about 150 years, dating back to a time when
discoveries in science (especially those of Charles Darwin) and a
disenchantment with organized religion led a critical mass of mostly
European intellectuals to declare that one could lead a moral life
independent of God. By the middle of the 20th century, their heirs had
coined the term "secular humanism," to mean a concern with values but
not with religion, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell took particular aim at
them. In 1986, he proclaimed that secular humanists "challenge every
principle on which America was founded," including "abortion on demand,
recognition of homosexuals, free use of promography, legalizing of
prostitution and gambling, and free use of drugs." Pope Benedict XVI
speaks out frequently against the dangers of secularism.
What’s
new about the assault on secularism is how, among conservative pundits,
it’s become almost shorthand. O’Reilly doesn’t have to list
secularism’s sins as Falwell did; he has only to utter the word. And
the so-called secularists are hardly helping their own case. Aware that
no group is more reviled in America than atheists, and reeling from all
the attention atheists have gotten from recent best-selling books, some
nonbelievers prefer to wrap themselves in a safer label: "secularist."
This rhetorical deflection only makes them targets. Secularist equals
nonbeliever; nonbeliever equals immoral God-hater. "It’s red meat for
the pundits," says Greg Epstein, Harvard’s humanist chaplain. He
prefers the word "humanist."
Language evolves. "Secular"
was first used in the Middle Ages to mean things and people not
belonging to the church—as Webster’s puts it, "not overtly or
specifically religious; not ecclesiastical or clerical." This remains
its best and most important meaning. In this great experiment that is
American democracy, "secular" is the only word we have to describe the
idea, handed down by the Founders, that our leaders do not belong to
God, they belong to us.