The Troublesome Term, ‘Secular’

A wide chasm yawns between the two terms “secular” and “secularism.” By contrast with modern terms such as “secularism,” “secularization,” and “secular humanism,” the term “secular” is actually a Latin Christian word, following up on Christ’s rebuke to the Pharisees: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Mt 22:21). Not everything belongs to Caesar. The same text further suggests that neither the state nor the Church is a total institution, embracing everything. Each is limited. Each has its own habits, practices, institutions, and realms of discourse.

This teaching is the first great barrier to the totalitarian tendency of states, since not everything belongs to Caesar. It is also a barrier to the Church, since not everything comes under the jurisdiction of religious authorities. In secular things, as St. Thomas Aquinas writes in Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, it is better to obey the secular authorities than religious authorities.

John Finnis suggests three different meanings for “secularism,” which I will restate in my own words: (1) The belief that there is no God; (2) the belief that there may be a God, but he is utterly indifferent to humans, their destiny, and their actions; (3) the belief that God’s concern for humans is easily appeased, so that no demanding reform of human morals is required. In this third version, no ultimate divine judgment is to be feared, and having liberal opinions on social policy pretty much exhausts the obligations of religion. Briefly stated, these are three variants of atheism — an intellectual and willful atheism in the strict sense, a pallid deism, and not necessarily an intellectual but, rather, a practical atheism.

Some secularists in America today prefer to call themselves agnostics rather than atheists, on the grounds that no one can prove, one way or another, the existence of God. Yet it soon becomes apparent that, in practice, no one can act agnostically. Action implies a choice. Either one acts as if God exists, or one acts as if God does not exist. In practice, agnostics usually act like atheists. Some agnostics, however, are quite opposed to atheism and would like to believe in God, but simply feel they have not been given that insight, that gift, that privileged way of seeing.

Secularism in all of these senses is an ancient, a medieval, an Elizabethan, and indeed a perennial system of belief. Plato was moved to argue against it, as were philosophers and moralists in every subsequent era.

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