Part III | Expanded Analysis
Category B | Principles
Topic 8 | Distinguishing secularism and secularity
Secularism takes many forms, but it often represents an ideology that promotes a secular state and the formation of secular citizens. Secularity, in contrast, is a more modest concept that is designed to provide a framework for pluralism. While secularism can degenerate into its own type of rigid fundamentalism, secularity can help create the constitutional space for individuals and groups to live together, even with deep differences with respect to religious or other systems of belief.254
Introduction
By 2050, researchers predict that the percentage of people worldwide who identify as unaffiliated with religion will increase significantly, and many religions will see little or no increase in involvement.255 As religious activity in many regions of the world is declining, the ideology of secularism is gaining traction in the public sphere. Even as percentages of “the religious” decline, however, secularity remains the preferable approach to religion-state relations; it maximizes the right to freedom of religion, thought, and conscience for all and allows multiple ideals of “the good” to flourish alongside each other, reflecting and enriching a pluralistic society.
While the terms secularism and secularity may have different meanings to different people and in different contexts,256 the following definitions and concepts serve as a helpful framework for understanding the ideological forces that shape political, legal, and social orders.
Key aspects and consequences of secularism and secularity
Generally speaking, secularism is a positive ideology257 committed to maintaining separate state-religion spheres by promoting a secular political, legal, and even social order. Secularism is often framed as freedom from religion, and it is likely to manifest in a form of French laïcité. More specifically, it may manifest itself through hostility to religion in public life, opposition to religiously based or religiously motivated reasons by political actors, or an insistence that religious manifestations, reasons, or even beliefs be relegated to an ever-shrinking sphere of private life. At its most extreme, secularism can become an aggressive form of fundamentalism that shares negative features of other intolerant fundamentalisms.
Secularism aims to cultivate social unity, equality, and harmony. However, one paradoxical downside is that, in relegating religion to the private sphere, secularism actually increases rather than decreases the importance of religious identity in a way that “solidif[ies] religious divisions and emphasiz[es] differences” in a society.258
In valuing social unity, equality, and harmony over individual rights of religious exercise, secularism can also facilitate religious discrimination. For example, in 2019 the Quebec provincial government in Canada passed the Quebec Laicity Act, which banned some government workers from wearing religious symbols, such as the hijab, while at work.259 The European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights have upheld similar bans instituted by states that impose secularism in public schools and public offices.260
Secularity is an approach to religion-state relations, rather than a positive ideology. It aims to provide a neutral framework capable of accommodating a broad range of religions and beliefs, thus avoiding state identification with any particular religion or ideology (including secularism itself). Whereas secularism is closer to French laïcité, secularity is closer to U.S. separationism. While secularism aims to facilitate freedom from religion, secularity is more likely to facilitate freedom of, and freedom for, religion.
In its most positive form, secularity is a “principle of respect for all religious beliefs and not an opposition towards religious feeling as such.”261 Moreover, it recognizes and encourages the significant beneficial role religion can play in political and social contexts.262
Other differences between secularism and secularity
Scope. As a concept, secularism is ambitious: “[I]t posits a comprehensive doctrine and insists that anyone who resists it is irrational or in the grip of self-deception[;] it seeks to impose rather than develop consensus.”263
Secularity is more modest, committed to creating a broad realm of “constitutional space” in which competing conceptions of the good (some religious, some not) may be worked out in theory and lived in practice by their respective adherents, supporters, and critics.264
Multiple values. Secularism is inclined toward value monism, the belief that all values can be reduced to and measured by a single, universally applicable metric, determined and imposed by the state.
Secularity is more accepting of the plurality, irreconcilability, and incommensurability of certain values. As philosopher Isaiah Berlin explains, “To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle perform.”265 Secularity respects and benefits from plurality by allowing space for incommensurable values to coexist.
Positive and negative freedom. Secularism more closely aligns with what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “positive freedom” ideals.266 Positive freedom is described as freedom to— freedom to act rather than be acted upon. But Berlin warns that positive freedom can ultimately lead individuals to submit to a collectively determined, rather than an individually decided, self-direction.267 True freedom is thus ceded to secularism, which “posits a set of attitudes and beliefs that are best and true, and is willing to marshal the coercive means of the state to help citizens along to becoming genuinely rational and virtuous, as the ideal defines and envisions those terms.”268
Secularity is more closely aligned with “negative freedom” ideals. Negative freedom is described as freedom from—freedom “from being interfered with, from being coerced.”269 Berlin asserts that secularity, “with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty it entails, seems to be a truer and more humane ideal” because it gives individuals in a pluralistic society the space to hold individual—even competing—goals and values.270 The individual’s goals and values are not assumed to be subordinate to the state’s.
Conclusion
While secularism’s aims of social unity, equality, and harmony are appealing, secularism ultimately does not maintain the space necessary for individuals to hold and act on deeply held beliefs and values in a pluralistic society. This can result in deeper social divisions and severe limitations on religious exercise, imposed for the “collective good.” In contrast, secularity’s neutral framework facilitates a wide and safe constitutional space for expression and exercise based on deeply held individual beliefs. Ultimately, those in a pluralistic society who share such a space—even in their deep differences—are more likely to enjoy greater social unity, equality, and harmony.271
References
254. The principal source for Topic 8 (Distinguishing secularism and secularity) is Brett G. Scharffs, Four Views of the Citadel: The Consequential Distinction Between Secularity and Secularism, 6 RELIGION & HUMAN RIGHTS 109 (2011). Some direct quotes from this source are not indicated with quotation marks.
255. The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050, PEW RESEARCH CENTER (Apr. 2, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050; see also PEW RESEARCH CENTER, MODELING THE FUTURE OF RELIGION IN AMERICA (Sept. 13, 2022), https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/09/US-Religious-Projections_FOR-PRODUCTION-9.13.22.pdf.
256. See Steve Kettell, Secularism and Religion, OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POLITICS (Jan. 25, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.898.
257. Here, positive ideology means a blueprint for social order that prescribes acceptable actions, behavior, or even belief.
258. Sophie Chamas, The Problem with Secularism, THE CAIRO REVIEW OF GLOBAL AFFAIRS (2016), https://www.thecairoreview.com/book-reviews/the-problem-with-secularism (reviewing SABA MAHMOOD, RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE IN A SECULAR AGE: A MINORITY REPORT (2015)).
259. An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State, CQLR ch. L-0.3 (2019), https://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/document/cs/l-0.3.
260. See, e.g., Mikyas & Others v. Belgium, App. No. 50681/20 (ECtHR Apr. 9, 2024) (upholding Belgium’s ban on the wearing of visible religious symbols in public schools); OP v. Commune d’Ans, Case C-148/22 (ECJ Grand Chamber Nov. 28, 2023) (upholding bans by EU member states on the wearing of religious symbols by employees in public administrative offices).
261. Scharffs, supra, at 126 (quoting Fr. Evaldo Xavier Gomes, Church-State Relations from a Catholic Perspective: General Considerations on Nicholas Sarkozy’s New Concept of Laïcité Positive, 48 JOURNAL OF CATHOLIC LEGAL STUDIES 201, 216 (2009)).
262. Id. (quoting Gomes, supra, at 217).
263. Id. at 121.
264. Id. at 111.
265. CLAUDE J. GALIPEAU, ISAIAH BERLIN'S LIBERALISM 107 (1994).
266. Scharffs, supra, at 112–14.
267. Id. at 112.
268. Id. at 114.
269. Id. at 112.
270. Id. at 118.
271. See Toolkit Topic 5 (Civil sphere versus religious sphere) for a discussion of John Locke’s theory that plurality leads to social stability.