Will secularism survive? The answer, of course, depends on what you mean by secularism. If we associate it with a political and social order in which no particular religious, or irreligious, outlook is established, and in which the expressive and associative liberty of believers and nonbelievers alike is protected, then secularism will survive, and deserves to. This “soft” or “negative” secularism is merely the secularism of the First Amendment.
If, however, we associate it with an order in which religious expression is rigorously banished from public life and in which proscription of all but the most private expressions of religion becomes codified in law and enshrined in public policy—in short, if you mean a “hard” or “positive” secularism, which offers itself as a truth superseding all others—then it won’t survive. And that would be unfortunate, even calamitous, since the testimony of history suggests that secularism and religion need one another.
People of faith should acknowledge that the countervailing force of secular thought has been an important corrective to the excesses and blindnesses of religious believers. But “hard” secularists have their own blindnesses, among which is their failure to see how much their own conceptions of justice and human dignity rely upon the very religious traditions they reject. When even a figure like Jürgen Habermas acknowledges that secularism alone cannot suffice to address the largest questions about human existence, it’s clear that the force of historical correction has begun operating in a new direction.
Accordingly, secularists should aim at a reasonable modus vivendi with the believers around them, rather than to invest themselves in pointlessly polarizing struggles over the Pledge of Allegiance or faith-based initiatives and in complaining, absurdly, that America is becoming a theocracy. If they save their criticisms for the things that matter, they will be heard.
Wilfred M. McClay is SunTrust Chair of
Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga and the editor of Religion Returns to the Public Square:
Faith and Policy in America (Johns Hopkins, 2003).
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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