Secularity (adjective form
secular) is the state of being separate from
religion.
For instance, eating and bathing may be regarded as examples of secular activities, because there may not be anything inherently religious about them. Nevertheless, both eating and bathing are regarded as
sacraments in some religious traditions, and therefore would be religious activities in those
worldviews. Saying a
prayer derived from religious text or doctrine,
worshipping through the context of a religion, and attending a
religious school are examples of religious (non-secular) activities. Prayer and meditation are not
necessarily non-secular, since the concept of
spirituality and higher consciousness are not married solely to any religion but are practiced and arose independently across a continuum of
cultures, however it may be argued that these practices have arisen as a result of religious (non-secular) influence.
Most businesses and
corporations, and some
governments, are secular organizations. All
state universities in the
United States are secular organizations (due to the
First Amendment of the United States Constitution) while some private universities are
church-related; among many, six church-related examples are
Brigham Young University,
Boston College,
University of Notre Dame,
Baylor University,
Mercer University, and
The Catholic University of America.
The public university systems in the
United Kingdom and
Australia are also secular, although many public primary and secondary schools are religiously aligned.
Origin of term
This word derives from a
Latin word meaning "
of the age". The
Christian doctrine that God exists
outside time led
medieval Western culture to use
secular to indicate separation from religious affairs and involvement in worldly (or time-related) ones. This meaning has been extended to apply to separation from any
religion, regardless of whether it has a similar doctrine.
Modern usage
Examples of
secular used in this way include:
- Secular authority, which involves legal and military authority as opposed to clerical authority, or matters the church controls.
- Secular music, composed for general use, as opposed to Sacred music which is composed for church use. Secular sonatas, in the 17th century, were those which were not composed to be used in church services.
Related concepts
- Laïcité is a French concept related to the separation of state and religion, sometimes rendered by the English cognate neologism laicity and also translated by the words secularity and secularization. The word laïcité is sometimes characterized as having no exact English equivalent; it is similar to the more moderate definition of secularism, but is not as ambiguous as that word.
- Secularism is an assertion or belief that religious issues should not be the basis of politics, a movement that promotes those ideas or an ideology that holds that religion has no place in public life. Secularist organizations are distinguished from merely secular ones by their political advocacy of such positions.
- Laïcisme is the French word that most resembles secularism, especially in the latter's extreme definition, as it is understood by the Catholic Church, which sets laïcisme in opposition to the allegedly far milder concept of laïcité. The correspondent word laicism (also spelled laïcism) is sometimes used in English as a synonym for secularism.
See also
