Part II | Outline

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.

Key ideas  

• Secularism is a positive ideology committed to promoting a secular political and legal order.

  • Secularism is often framed as freedom from religion, and it is likely to manifest itself in a form of French laïcité.
  • At its most extreme, secularism can become an aggressive form of fundamentalism that shares negative features of other intolerant fundamentalisms.
  • In relegating religion to the private sphere, secularism emphasizes differences in a society and solidifies religious differences. It also imposes laws and policies that can severely limit religious exercise in political and other public contexts.

• Secularity is an approach to religion-state relations that avoids identification of the state with any particular religion or ideology (including secularism itself) and that endeavors to provide a neutral framework capable of accommodating a broad range of religions and beliefs.

  • Secularity aims to facilitate freedom of, and freedom for, religion.
  • Secularity is manifest in religion-state regimes similar to U.S. free exercise and non- establishment principles.
  • Secularity recognizes and encourages the significant beneficial role religion can play in political and social contexts.

Other differences

• Scope. Secularism is ambitious in imposing a comprehensive doctrine and imposing, rather than developing, consensus. Secularity is a more modest concept, committed to creating what might be called 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.

• Multiple values. Secularism is more inclined toward value monism, the belief that all values can be reduced to and measured by a single metric. Secularity is more accepting of the plurality and incommensurability of values.

• Positive and negative freedom. Secularism is more easily associated with what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “positive freedom,” which can lead individuals to subordinate any individual goals and values to those of the state. Secularity is more closely linked with “negative freedom,” which allows for individuals to hold different goals and values, free from state coercion.