Secularism

:This article concerns secularism, the social ideology in which religion and supernatural beliefs are not seen as the key to understanding the world and are instead segregated from matters of governance. For other forms of being secular, and perspective on the terminology underlying the word "secularism", see secularity.

Definition

Secularism means:

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• in philosophy, the belief that life can be best lived by applying ethics, and the universe best understood, by processes of reasoning, without reference to a god or gods or other supernatural concepts. Secularism in this sense was coined by George Jacob Holyoake and is one of the precursors of modern secular humanism.
• in society, any of a range of situations where a society less automatically assumes religious beliefs to be either widely shared or a basis for conflict in various forms, than in recent generations of the same society. In this sense secularism is linked to the sociological concept of secularization and may be upheld as an academic thesis, rather than advocated as a desirable state of affairs.
• in government, a policy of avoiding entanglement between government and religion (ranging from reducing ties to a state church to promoting secularism in society), of non-discrimination among religions (providing they don't deny primacy of civil laws), and of guaranteeing human rights of all citizens, regardless of the creed (and, if conflicting with certain religious rules, by imposing priority of the universal human rights).

Secularism can also mean the practice of working to promote any of those three forms of secularism. It should not be assumed that an advocate of secularism in one sense will also be a secularist in any other sense. It is also important to remember that secularism does not necessarily equate to atheism; indeed, many secularists have counted themselves among the religious.

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Groups such as Southall Black Sisters in the UK http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/ advocate secularism because, they argue, "It is only by doing this that we have been able to prevent the use of religion to undermine the feminist, anti-racist and anti-communal principles of the organization." (Siddiqui p92)

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