Secularity

Secular states   States with state religions   Ambiguous or without data

"Secular" redirects here. For other uses, see Secular (disambiguation).

Secularity (adjective form secular) is the state of being separate from religion, or not being exclusively allied to any particular 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 world views. 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.

Most businesses and corporations, and some governments, are secular organizations. All of the state universities in the United States are secular organizations (especially because of the combined effect of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution) while some private universities are connected with the Christian or Jewish religions. Among many of these, some prominent examples are Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Boston College, Emory University, the University of Notre Dame, Duquesne University, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, and Yeshiva College.

The public university systems of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan are also secular, although some government-funded primary and secondary schools may be religiously aligned in some countries.

Etymology

Secular and secularity derive from the Latin word saecularis meaning of a generation, belonging to an age. The Christian doctrine that God exists outside time led medieval Western culture to use secular to indicate separation from specifically religious affairs and involvement in temporal ones. This meaning has been extended to mean separation from any religion, regardless of whether it has a similar doctrine.

This does not necessarily imply hostility to God or religion, though some use the term this way (see "secularism", below); Martin Luther used to speak of "secular work" as a vocation from God for most Christians^{[citation needed]}

Modern usage

Examples of secular used in this way include:

• Secular authority, which involves legal, police, and military authority, as distinct from clerical authority, or matters under church control.
• Secular clergy in the Roman Catholic Church, who, traditionally, do not live the monastic lives of the regular clergy and are therefore, in a sense, more engaged with the temporal world. For a related Roman Catholic reference, see secular institute.
• Secular education, schools that are not run by churches, synagogues, or other religious organizations.
• Secular states with secular governments that follow civil laws—as distinct from religious authorities like the Islamic Sharia, Catholic Canon law, or Jewish Halakha—and that do not favor or disfavor any particular religion.
• Secular Jewish culture, cultural manifestations of Jewishness that are not specifically religious.
• Secular music, composed for general use, as distinct from sacred music which is composed for church use. Secular sonatas, in the 17th century, were those not composed for church services.
• Secular Organizations for Sobriety, a secular alternative to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) organization which is a loosely religious one although nondenominational.
• Secular society refers to aspects of society that are not mosque-, church-, synagogue-, or temple-affiliated.
• Secular spirituality, the pursuit of spirituality without a formal affiliation with a church, or other religious organization, or the pursuit of spirituality specifically in the context of temporal affairs.
• Secular peers, in reference to the Peers of the House of Lords that are not connected to the Church.

Related concepts

A Laicite parade in Beirut Central District, Lebanon

• 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, and it is a movement that promotes those ideas (or an ideology) which hold 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

• Separation of church and state
• List of state-established religions
• Anti-clericalism
• Secularism
• Islam and secularism
• Secular Student Alliance

External links

• Conference: Secularity and Religious Vitality
• Iain Benson:"Notes Towards a (Re)Definition of the 'Secular'", University of British Columbia Law Review, Vol. 33, p. 520, 2000
• Research Project: Multiple Secularities