Secularism, Secularization, and John Dewey

Introduction

There seems to be an unwritten agreement among most Americans that there are three topics (perhaps four, if you include sex) that are best avoided in polite company: politics, personal finances, and religion. The American reluctance to discuss religion with acquaintances at a dinner party or picnic may be a part of a larger phenomenon: a manifestation of the secularism that emerged from the disastrous European religious wars and the Enlightenment, and that is arguably, as a consequence of those experiences, enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It is worth noting in this connection that some observers have taken pains to distinguish secularism from secularization. Secularism, as it has generally come to be understood, is the ascendency of political control over the public activities of religious institutions (which has in many quarters had the effect of rendering religion a matter of individual choice rather than social conscription). Secularism means that no religion is to be privileged over any other in the sphere of political life, including education. Although there are notable exceptions, in the United States, secularism generally means that religious organizations must compete on all fours with publics of other sorts. But secularism is by no means identical with an assault on religion. On the contrary. By legislating the place of religion in society, secularism in fact provides a safe harbor for religious diversity.

Secularization, on the other hand, is now generally understood as a condition in which religious considerations cease to function as central factors in the lives of individuals, even though those individuals may still represent themselves as religious, and may even continue their affiliation with religious institutions. As we shall see, secularization, like secularism, is matter of degree.

These terms, as they are now employed among sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers, depart somewhat from what one finds in the Oxford English Dictionary. The first definition of secularism in the OED, for example, is “the doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state.” The OED’s second definition of secularization, which is perhaps more relevant to this essay than its first one, is “the giving of a secular or non-sacred character or direction to (art, studies, etc.); the placing (of morals) on a secular basis; the restricting (of education) to secular subjects.”

Beyond the provinces of polite company, of course, within political circles in the United States and the European Union, and especially at political conventions and on talk radio in the United States, both secularism and secularization have become topics of heated discussion. In the United States, attacks on secularism have in large measure come from the Christian fundamentalist or evangelical wing of the Republican Party. Although Christian fundamentalists or evangelicals were a key constituent of the coalition that succeeded in capturing the executive branch of the government in the elections of 2000 and 2004, significantly extending their reach into the legislative and judicial branches as well, their influence now (as I write, in the fall of 2008, after the election of President Barak Obama) appears to have reached its high water mark. In Europe, secularism appears to be under attack not from indigenous sources, but from religiously dogmatic immigrants who wish to roll back the hard-won commitment to separation of church and state that characterizes the political situation in most of the countries of Western Europe.

Increased attention to the issues associated with secularism may also be due to the increasing pull of globalizing tendencies that are in turn the effect of rapidly developing techniques of communication across national and cultural borders that until recently have remained relatively impermeable. As we come to know more about our neighbors around the world, it is probable that we will begin to see attractive alternatives to traditional ways of organizing ourselves, including alternatives to religious organizations as traditionally conceived.

With respect to both the theoretical issues associated with theology and the philosophy of religion, and the practical ones associated with quotidian religious...