This article is about secularity in the sense of being unrelated to religion. For clergy who are not monks, see Secular clergy. For the legal status of countries in relation to religion, see Secular state.
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin saeculum, "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Origins of secularity can be traced to the Bible itself and fleshed out through Christian history into the modern era.[1] In the medieval period there were even secular clergy.[2][3][4] Furthermore, secular and religious entities were not separated in the medieval period, but coexisted and interacted naturally.[5][6]
Today, anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negatively or positively, may be considered secular.[7] Secularity is best understood, not as being "anti-religious", but as being "religiously neutral" since many activities in religious bodies are secular themselves, and though there are multiple types of secularity or secularization, most do not lead to irreligiosity.[8] Linguistically, a process by which anything becomes secular is named secularization, though the term is mainly reserved for the secularization of society; and any concept or ideology promoting the secular may be termed secularism, a term generally applied to the ideology dictating no religious influence on the public sphere. Scholars recognize that secularity is structured by Protestant models of Christianity, shares a parallel language to religion, and intensifies Protestant features such as iconoclasm, skepticism towards rituals, and emphasizes beliefs.[9] In doing so, secularism perpetuates Christian traits under a different name.[9]
Most cultures around the world do not have tension or dichotomous views of religion and secularity.[10] Since religion and secular are both Western concepts that were formed under the influence of Christian theology, other cultures do not necessarily have words or concepts that resemble or are equivalent to them.[11]
^Berlinerblau, Jacques (2022). Secularism: The Basics. Routledge. ISBN 9780367691585. In the first part of this book we will chart the slow, unsteady development of political secularism (Set 2) across time and space. You might be surprised to see that we'll trace its origins to the Bible. From there we will watch how secularism's core principles emerged, in dribs and drabs, during the Christian Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Secularism, some might be surprised to learn, has a religious genealogy.
^Thomas, Hugh M. (2014). The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198702566.
^Eller, Jack David (2022). Introducing Anthropology of Religion : Culture to the Ultimate (Third ed.). Routledge. p. 282. ISBN 9781032023045.
^"Secular Priest". Religion Past and Present Online. Brill. April 2011. doi:10.1163/1877-5888_rpp_SIM_124156. Archived from the original on December 28, 2019.
^Tierney, Brian (1988). The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 : With Selected Documents. Toronto: Published by University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America. ISBN 9780802067012.
^Strayer, Joseph R. (2016). On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691169330.
^Lee 2015, pp. 31–37.
^Eller, Jack (2010). "What is Atheism?". In Zuckerman, Phil (ed.). Atheism and Secularity. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9780313351839. The point is that the sacred/secular dichotomy is, like most dichotomies, false. "Secular" certainly does not mean "atheistic" or without religion, definitely not anti-religion; in fact, as I illustrate in a chapter in the second volume of this collection, there is a proud tradition of "Islamic secularism." Despite the predictions of the "secularization theorists" like Marx and Weber, "modern" or secular processes have not meant the demise of religion and have actually proved to be quite compatible with religion—have even led, at least in the short term, to a surprising revival of religion. The problem with earlier secularization theories is that they presumed that secularization was a single, all-encompassing, and unidirectional phenomenon. However, as Peter Glasner has more recently shown, "secular" and "secularization" embrace a variety of diverse processes and responses, not all of which—indeed, few of which—are inherently antithetical to religion, Glasner identifies ten different versions of secularization, organized in terms of whether their thrust is primarily institutional, nonnative, or cognitive... The upshot of this analysis is that secularism most assuredly does not translate simply and directly into atheism. Many good theists support the secularization of the American government in the form of the "separation of church and state," and all of them go about at least part of their day without doing religion.
^ abBlankholm, Joseph (2022). The Secular Paradox : On the Religiosity of the Not Religious. New York: New York University Press. p. 8. ISBN 9781479809509.
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