XX

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 Table of Contents

Table of Figures.................................................................................................i

Preface............................................................................................................ iii
Eileen Barker

Introduction:
Contemporary Secularity and Secularism..................................................1
Barry A. Kosmin

I. Secular Populations
1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion.................................17
Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin

2. Putting Secularity in Context..........................................................27

Bruce A. Phillips

3. Who Are America’s Atheists and Agnostics?.....................................33

Ariela Keysar

4. The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest..............................41

Frank L. Pasquale

5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular?..........................................................59

William A. Stahl

6. The North American Pacific Rim:

A Response to Frank Pasquale and William Stahl............................73
Patricia O’Connell Killen

7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image”:

A Contemporary Overview of Secular Australians...........................83
Andrew Singleton

8. Secularity in Great Britain...............................................................95

David Voas and Abby Day
II. Varieties of Secularism
9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France..........................................113
Nathalie Caron

10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark:

From Emancipation to Ethnocentrism?.........................................125
Lars Dencik

11. Secularism in Iran:

A Hidden Agenda?........................................................................139
Nastaran Moossavi

12. Secularism in India........................................................................149

Ashgar Ali Engineer

13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity:

An Impossible Dream?...................................................................157
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

Contributors................................................................................................167
 Preface

F or decades commentators assumed that secularization was inevitable. By the

latter part of the 20th century, however, it was being argued that religion
was changing rather than declining. Yet just as there are many ways of being
religious, so there are many ways of not being religious. What is becoming
abundantly clear is not only that religiosity but also that both secularity (as
a description of individual orientations) and secularism (as a description of
society) are far more complicated, even paradoxical, than had been recognized.
While more than 80% of Danes are formally members of the established state
religion, less than 5% attend church on a weekly basis—and there are fewer
official members of the Church of England (26%) than non-members who feel
they belong (29%). Depending on what is understood by the concept, between
one and 46% of the population of the United States can be defined as “secular,”
yet 67% of Americans who say they have no religion believe in the existence of
God—and, at the same time, there are self-identifying Lutherans and Roman
Catholics professing that they do not believe in God.
This book presents a fascinating account of the inconsistent evidence as
it valiantly struggles to chart the diversity to be found among the neglected
variables of disbelief and unbelief. We have recently become familiar with the
category “spiritual but not religious” without really knowing what this means
to those who identify themselves as such. We are less familiar with the range
of beliefs that include ideologically inspired atheism, agnosticism, apathy,
indifference and what Voas calls the muddled middle between the religious and
the secular.
At the social level, comparative analyses reveal even more variation than
we find at the individual level. One widely accepted definition of secularization
has been “a process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose
social significance.”1 This can happen almost absent-mindedly, as in England.
In countries such as Canada, Australia and most of Western Europe, individuals
may engage in religious and/or spiritual practices, but this is as a private, leisure
pursuit; institutionalised churches no longer play the central role they once did
in education, welfare or politics, and secular values of maximization of profit or
consumerism have been replacing concerns about salvation. But few processes
are irreversible—and desecularization can also appear in a variety of forms, one

iii
 Secularism & Secularity

apparently being revivals of dormant Christian consciousness in parts of Europe

as a result of growing immigrant Muslim populations.
Sometimes secularization has been the result of state-imposition. There is,
however, a world of difference between Albania during the rule of Enver Hoxha
when no religious observance whatsoever was permitted, and the laïcité of France
where a variety of religious and secular worldviews may flourish. India’s secular
position has been described as more of a political arrangement than a secular
philosophy—and in Israel, an avowedly secular state, marriage and divorce are
possible only within a recognised religion.
Important issues are broached: To what extent, for example, does our
unprecedented globalization result in the fear of loss of identity and, hence, the
strengthening of national or local religions? Can secular (enlightenment) values
be incorporated into the sort of theocratic regime that Iran has experienced since
its 1979 revolution? When the 3Bs (belonging, belief and behavior) cease to be
religious, does nothing—or anything—fill the gap?
This book may not give us a definitive picture of what the situation is in
the contemporary world but it offers us a much fuller one than most of us had
before—and if it raises more questions than it answers, that is not a bad thing.

Dr. Eileen Barker

Professor Emeritus of Sociology with Special Reference to the Study of Religion
London School of Economics

Endnotes
1. Bryan R. Wilson, 1966. Religion in Secular Society. London: Watts p. 14

iv
 Introduction

Contemporary Secularity and Secularism

Barry A. Kosmin

S ecularism and its variants are terms much bandied about today, paradoxically,
as a consequence of religion seeming to have become more pervasive and
influential in public life and society worldwide. This situation poses a number
of questions.
First, a definitional question: What are the spheres of secularity and
secularism today? According to our understanding in this volume, secularity
refers to individuals and their social and psychological characteristics while
secularism refers to the realm of social institutions.
Then some sociological questions: Who is secular today? How much of the
American or other national population is secular? What do those people who
are secular believe? How is a secular preference manifested on the personal level
by individuals in their ways of belonging, their personal beliefs, and their social
behaviors?
These are the questions the authors in this volume attempt in different ways
to answer for a number of diverse, contemporary societies.
Since Secularity, the first category in the binary typology, involves individual
actors’ personal behavior and identification with secular ideas and traditions
as a mode of consciousness, it lends itself to empirical analysis. Secularity’s
manifestations in terms of general trends can be measured and compared, as our
authors demonstrate in the first half of this volume, with regard to the larger
English-speaking nations—Britain, Canada, Australia and the U.S.
Secularism, the second category, involves organizations and legal constructs
that reflect the institutional expressions of the secular in a nation’s political realm
and public life. By their nature, these variables are much harder to quantify,
especially when viewed globally. Forms of secularism can be expected to vary
with the religious configuration in which they develop. This volume’s authors,
and consequently its readers, face the difficult task of qualitatively evaluating


 Secularism & Secularity

the symbolic and cultural encoding of the religious legacies of Hinduism

(India), Judaism (Israel), Islam (Iran), Catholicism (France), and Protestantism
(Denmark, U.S. and British Commonwealth countries) in national public
institutions and mentalities.
Another distinction must be offered, between “hard” and “soft” forms
of secularity and secularism. This relates to attitudes towards modes of
separation of the secular from the religious and the resulting relation­ship
between them. In what follows, a typology is presented (Figure 1) that
combines these two sets of distinctions. This typology may be used for analysis
and policy formulation.

The Secular Tradition

The terms “secular,” “secularism,” and “secularization” have a range of meanings.
The words derive from the Latin, saeculum, which means both this age and
this world, and combines a spatial sense and a temporal sense. In the Middle
Ages, secular referred to priests who worked out in the world of local parishes,
as opposed to priests who took vows of poverty and secluded themselves in
monastic communities. These latter priests were called “religious.” During
the Reformation, secularization denoted the seizure of Catholic ecclesiastical
properties by the state and their conversion to non-religious use. In all of these
instances, the secular indicates a distancing from the sacred, the eternal, and the
otherworldly.
In the centuries that followed the secular began to separate itself from
religious authority. But has the world now gone further in creating an
autonomous existence for the secular? Since the 1780s, on the reverse of the
U.S. national seal, and since the 1930s, on the reverse of the one-dollar bill, the
phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum has appeared. My interpretation of the adoption
of that Latin phrase is that the founders of the American Republic viewed the
“new order of the ages” quite deliberately as a new era in which the old order of
King and Church was to be displaced from authority over public life by a secular
republican order.
The two revolutions of the 18th century, the American and the French,
produced two intellectual and constitutional traditions of secularism. One,
associated with the French Jacobin tradition, was unreservedly antagonistic
to religion, and promoted atheism. This situation arose from the historical
reality of the revolutionary experience, which involved a joint struggle against
despotism and religion, the monarchy, and the Roman Catholic Church. This
essentially political construction continues under the regime of laïcité bound up
with La Loi de 1905 (see chapter 9). This tradition has only a marginal place in
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 

American public life. The reason, of course, is that the United States was heir
to the Protestant heritage of the Reformation, whereby religious individualism
and autonomy predated any concept of political autonomy. The result was that
the Americans adopted a more moderate approach, characterized by indifference
towards religion or encouragement of religious pluralism as promoted by the
Deists and Liberal Protestants of the early republic.

A Typology
In light of this sketch of the historical background it is possible to devise a
typology based on a binary model of hard and soft secularism. Bifurcation of
secular perspectives on religion comprises only one dimension of this typology.
The second dimension is based on the distinction between individuals
and institutions. Here the individual aspect primarily pertains to states of
consciousness while the institutional aspect relates to social structures and their
cultural systems.
The typology based on these two dimensions is presented in Figure 1. In
actual fact these are not closed cells but ranges stretched between the polarities
of the dimensions. There can exist between soft-soft and hard-hard secularism a
range of intermediate positions.

Figure 1
A Typology of Secularism

Khomeini; Locke; Jefferson; Hobbes; Marx, Dawkins;

Theocracy Liberal Religionists Deists Agnostics Atheists
INDIVIDUAL STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

NO SOFT HARD
SECULARISM
SECULARISM SECULARISM

National Institutions & Structures

Iran UK Canada USA FRANCE USSR

Denmark Australia TURKEY CHINA
ISRAEL INDIA
 Secularism & Secularity

Various thinkers and their associated ideologies are listed in the top row
to illustrate these gradations. In the bottom row, countries are listed in a hierarchy
that relates to their approximate degree of constitutional or institutional
secularism.
In addition, the boundary between the individual and the institutions
is not firm in real life. There is an interplay that involves social expectations
and constraints originating from institutions on the one hand and extreme
subjective mental states that are individually based on the other. For example,
the sociological concept of role refers to both structural constraints and personal
sentiments and beliefs.
With Figure 1 as a model or guide, it is possible to classify and examine
whether and how the various secular traditions operate in different realms of
life—society, economics, politics, education, and culture. Who are today’s
proponents of the two different traditions stemming from the revolutions of
the 18th century? Where do they have influence in the contemporary world?
How should such questions be investigated in the 21st century, in a much more
integrated and compacted world? A contemporary cross-cultural analysis of
secularism poses particular challenges, as the essays on India, Israel, and Iran
illustrate, since Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam vary not only in their theologies
and traditions with respect to the state, but also in their approaches to how they
perceive the role of the individual in society.

Secularization
In modern sociological theory, secularization is associated with differentiation.
Differentiation describes the growing division of labor in modern society
as life goes through a process of fragmentation into numerous spheres, each
operating according to its own laws and principles. As a result, there is no master,
integrating principle or narrative that holds social life, institutions, ideas, and
ideals together.
Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a growing recognition
among students of religion that the theologies and institutions embodying
religion have been transformed by the process of secularization. Max Weber
described secularization as the “disenchantment of the world”1—a characterization
of the process of rationalization he adopted from the poet Friedrich Schiller. By
this process, Weber sought to capture the psychic and cultural transformation in
which magical elements of thought and symbolism are progressively displaced
by empiricism and rationality. Harvey Cox described secularization as the
“deliverance of man ‘first from religious and then from metaphysical control
over his reasons and his language’… the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the
breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.”2 On the wider societal
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 

level, Peter Berger defined secularization as “the process by which sectors of society
are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”3
It is now widely recognized that the process of secularization is dialectic: the
more that hearts and minds become “disenchanted,” the more institutions that
have specialized in the promotion of the “enchantment” process lose plausibility
and authority. The more such institutions lose plausibility and authority, the
less the psycho-emotional processes of “enchantment” are inculcated in the
hearts and minds of individuals. How far the process of secularization has
progressed in different societies since the end of the 19th century, whether
the process is unidirectional or not, and what its consequences are for social
and political organization and human welfare, is the subject of ongoing debate
among sociologists and theologians, as well as politicians and social planners. In
fact, the current state of the debate for the nations of the English-speaking world
is well represented in this volume.

Soft and Hard Secularism

Modernity has been the trigger for differentiation, with its attendant process
of secularization. It freed the spheres of cultural life, such as art, law, politics,
learning, science, and commerce, from their embeddedness in a comprehensive
Christian culture and allowed them to pursue their own paths of development.
Thus, the U.S. Constitution set politics on a new course by wisely prohibiting
a “religious test for public office.” This is an example of a political initiative to
establish soft secularism at the societal level of institutions that leaves matters of
conscience to individual choice.
Politics, in the modern secular understanding, now had its own immanent
principles and values. Religious principles and values were to be more or less
differentiated from political ones. This does not imply that religious principles
and values can have no role in politics and public life in American democracy.
It only implies that, in terms of the perspective of the constitution and the
law, religious institutions and governmental institutions are differentiated. The
philosophical term for this condition of differentiation is pluralism. Its opposite
is monism (i.e. theocracy and totalitarianism).
Most Americans, regardless of whether they are liberal or conservative,
Christian or Jew or other, adhere to epistemological fallibilism and so are
pluralists and, hence, soft secularists. They accept at a fundamental level that
law, politics, art, and learning should not be controlled by religious institutions
or clergy but have their own traditions, spheres, and dynamics. In the social-
structural sense, although there are evident strains, America has been and
remains a soft secular republic.
Reinhold Neibuhr, one of 20th-century America’s leading Protestant theo­
 Secularism & Secularity

logians, observed almost half a century ago that Americans are “at once the most
religious and the most secular of nations. How shall we explain this paradox?
Could it be that [Americans] are most religious partly in consequence of being
the most secular culture?”4
In his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Will Herberg wrote about the paradox
of “pervasive secularism and mounting religiosity,”5 a mind-set involving
thinking and living within a broad framework of reality that is far from one’s
professed religious beliefs. This apparent paradox still exists today because it is
part of the American cultural tradition.
As soft secularists, most Americans want government to accommodate
religious behavior, even within the ___domain of government itself. For example,
they accept that institutionalized persons or military personnel should have
access to religious services, guidance, or leadership and that these may be paid
for, as in the case of military and prison chaplains, with taxpayer dollars. They
did not balk when the law allowed for religious pacifists, such as Quakers or
Mennonites, to be conscientious objectors. The mainstream consensus is that it
is crucial to a free society to respect the religious convictions of its citizens; it is
crucial to a pluralistic, differentiated, secular political order to carve out a sphere
for freedom of religion and to let that sphere be autonomous, to the greatest
extent possible, of pressures emanating from government.
The existence of religion within its proper sphere, alongside the other
differentiated spheres of a modern pluralistic society, is an exemplification of
differentiation, not a rejection of it. This is why America can be said to subscribe
to a soft secularism. Interestingly, that other great democracy, India (see chapter
12), also has an official ideology of political secularism that is similarly inter­
preted as pluralism and tolerance of religious differences.
Hard secularism is a term that can be associated with Weber’s transfor­
mation of consciousness. It is usually more purely intellectual and personal than
social or political. A precursor can be found in the writings of Hobbes, who
claimed that those who followed the light of reason are bound to discard faith
as intellectually unreliable and therefore morally dangerous. Following Hobbes
and other like-minded philosophers, Marx suggested that faith was an ideology
in contradistinction to knowledge, which was used by regimes for the purpose
of political control. Weber saw the process of secularization as the culmination
of the process of rationalization and as the ultimate disenchantment of the world
by modern science.
In this sense, secular refers to a worldview, a system of beliefs, or a modality
of sense-making that is determinedly non-religious. A disenchanted universe is
a purely physical and material one. It gives no support to either moral ideals—
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 

which are the result of evolutionary processes—or to religious beliefs—which

are the perversely lingering products of more naïve ages, eventually to be swept
away by the triumph of a properly scientific outlook.
Disenchantment refers to an emptying out of magic, mystery, hints of
transcendence, or a faith in realities, entities, or forces unseen but intuited and
believed to be essential to human welfare and flourishing. Today’s spokesmen
include Richard Dawkins and Paul Kurtz, or California’s activist doctor-lawyer,
Michael Newdow. They all take hard secularism to its logical conclusion,
Atheism—the belief in the meaninglessness and irrationality of theism. Such
hard secularists are few and far between in America, although more common in
Western and Eastern Europe.
The soft secularist individual is neither a convinced Atheist nor a principled
materialist, and may not be hostile to religious beliefs and institutions. In fact,
the majority are liberal religionists. The soft secularist is willing to take a live-
and-let-live attitude toward religion as long as it doesn’t impinge on his freedom
of choice or seek control of American public institutions. For the soft secularist,
religion is properly a private lifestyle option, which must not threaten liberty and
social harmony in a differentiated and pluralistic society.
The majority of America’s self-described identifiers with No Religion, the
so-called “religious nones,” also fit this profile of soft secularists. Their level of
secularity shows that they are by no means hard-core Atheists or even Agnostics,
who together constitute less than 1 percent of the population (see chapter 3).
Sixty-seven percent of Nones believe in the existence of God; 56 percent agree
that God intervenes personally in their lives to help them; 57 percent believe
that God performs miracles.
The upshot of such findings is that, in America, the majority of secularists
are religious in a sense. Even those who do not belong to religious institutions
or identify with religious communities have theistic beliefs and concerns. Thus,
although the self-described secular population of the U.S. has doubled since
1990, it cannot be said that American society has become more irreligious or
anti-religious, only that there is less identification with religious groups per se.

American Exceptionalism
Secularity, like religion, takes many forms in American society. Also like religion,
it varies in intensity along the trajectories of belonging, belief, and behavior.
Religion in a Free Market shows that the American public does not subscribe
to a binary system. In America, secularity is one option among many in a free-
market-oriented society. The boundaries between religion and secularity, and
between different religions, are not clearly fixed (see chapter 1). This confusion
 Secularism & Secularity

is to be expected. Secularism, like religion, has developed in various forms at

different levels and in different realms.
By way of institutional differentiation, modernization has involved a degree
of secularization. As societies modernize, their religious beliefs, behaviors, and
institutions can change in many different ways. This can include forms that are a
reaction to secularism, both hard and soft, that are embedded in modernization.
Religious fundamentalism, which must not be confused with pre-modern
traditional religion per se, is an adaptation to conditions of modern secularization
(see chapters 11 and 13).
The contemporary United States, by contrast, exhibits both high modernity
and substantial religiosity among the populace and so shows that secularization
has not been sweeping, thorough and total. This situation is just what many “soft
secularist” thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and
Thomas Jefferson, both desired and predicted.
Institutional soft secularism, combined with endeavors to revitalize religious
consciousness at the individual level, was exemplified in the American tradition of
religious liberty. Created by Roger Williams, William Penn and James Madison’s
theologically charged “Memorial and Remonstrance” it was a product of the
moral and religious imagination of dissenting Protestantism. The very phrase,
separation of church and state, which Jefferson used in his 1802 letter to the
Danbury Baptist Association, derives from Roger Williams, who sought to keep
the garden of the church separate from the politics of the world.
Religious liberty as a constitutional principle arose in a world where many
people believed that their duties to God were more primary than their duties to
the state; that the state had to make room for its citizens to conduct a higher
business than the business of citizenship. Thus the achievement of a secular
political order was in service to the religious imperative. Constitutionally,
the Establishment Clause was to serve the Free Exercise Clause, and from
this perspective social-structural secularization was not meant to further the
secularization of consciousness, but to inhibit it.
Or, to put it more sociologically, social-structural “soft secularization” was
meant to accomplish in part religious ends. The secular end was democracy as
against theocracy, as well as the unfettered progress of science. Religion was to
have an instrumental role in disciplining individual behavior and making a free
society and a democratic, federal republic a viable collective reality.
This is emphatically not the case in some other countries where separation
of church and state—in our terms, social-structural secularization—has been
instituted in order to further the secularization of consciousness. The prototype
for this hard secularism was the French Revolution in its Jacobin phase, but
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 

perhaps the most radical instance was the former USSR and the remaining
Communist countries today. The Marxist-Leninist ideology was based on
the conviction that science was superior to religion from an epistemological
perspective and that the progress of science would inevitably lead to the
elimination of religious consciousness. The ensuing secularization at the social
and political levels was designed to assault and eradicate religion using the state
apparatus, often in the most brutal ways, in order to bring about a thorough and
consistently hard secular society.
Contemporary France and Turkey also separate religion and state in order to
advance a secular ideology of republicanism or laïcité. The interesting ancillary
feature in such polities is that they have developed a highly centralized, statist
trajectory particularly in the social and educational realms. The state demands
loyalty in terms of consciousness. Its goal is a standardized and homogeneous,
relatively hard secularist society. In contrast, in the U.S. and India, the polity
encourages pluralism among the people. So America is much less secularized at
the level of consciousness, as well as in the worldview and the moral sensibilities
of the majority of its citizens, than is France.
Any social configuration has its benefits and costs. The main virtue of this
constellation is undoubtedly the peaceful co-existence of diverse religious and
non-religious individuals and groups. This regime has avoided both religious
wars and theocracy.
What then are the costs or problems associated with U.S. secularism as
we enter the 21st century? The most obvious political problem in recent years
is that the public sphere has become a battlefield for those who do not accept
the status quo of soft secularism, notably the hard secularists and the radical
religious movements and theocrats. One cost is that the majority that accepts
the traditional American constellation of soft secularism lacks morale and
adequate tools, both intellectual and organizational, with which to defend and
revitalize this constellation.
A major public policy issue is that hard and soft secularism compete
particularly in the arena of jurisprudence. In the mid-20th century, strict
separation made the running and succeeded in removing the daily prayer
and Bible reading from the public schools, and set greater distance between
religious practices and governmental settings than had previously been the case
in American history. The conservative political reaction after 1970 limited the
trend towards achieving a purer standard of social-structural secularization.
Numerous court decisions since 1990 have reversed the locomotive of hard
secularization of the public square, or at least complicated the course of this
mode of secularization. The use of public monies to provide tuition vouchers at
10 Secularism & Secularity

private, predominantly religious schools; the failure of legal challenges to arrest

the progress of faith-based initiatives—federal funding for religious social service
providers; or the symbolic retention of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge
of Allegiance and the public display of the Ten Commandments under certain
circumstances, all illustrate the willingness of the present secular order to allow
an institutional intimacy with the sacred order.
Popular sovereignty and the decisions of the Supreme Court reflect the
recently enhanced religiosity of the American people and so the limits of
American hard secularism. From the point of view of the hard secular population
these legal decisions are setbacks.
An additional challenge to secular institutions in the public square is that
in the minds of most of the American public and electorate the perceived social
ills, dilemmas and challenges to family life and values brought by modernity,
science, and a free market economy have paradoxically convinced them to
desire a greater accommodation between church and state and a broader role
for religion in society such as faith-based initiatives. The trend appears towards
a “procedural secularism,” whereby religions converse in public discussions over
sensitive issues of value and the state authority takes on the job of legal mediator
or broker to balance and manage real differences.
In other nations, in countries as different as France, Israel, India, and Iran,
the tension between religion and secularism is more pronounced than it is in
the United States, where secularism and religion regularly use and redefine each
other. They lack a tradition whereby religion, as in the United States, frequently
sanctifies the goals of a basically secular society, and the secular society affects
and influences the very meaning of religious identification and association. It
is therefore not surprising that America can appear to be growing more secular
precisely at a time when religious identification is highly pronounced.
Moreover, faced with a myriad of religious options, Americans are aware
that not all religion is narrowness and fanaticism. The answer to the conundrum
of how there can be a secular state for a religious people lies in the typology
formulated in Figure 1. This can be seen throughout American history.
Two historical facts stand out. First, America was the first post-feudal
Western society and therefore a nation that had not experienced the conflict
between ecclesiastical and temporal power. Second, the U.S. was also the first
Protestant nation—ab initio a Protestant society—where the Roman Catholic
and Orthodox Churches and their hierarchies never held sway. Paradoxically,
because of the deeply religious nature of a significant proportion of the American
public, pure pragmatism suggests that they require a secularist state and public
life. Firmly held but divergent religious beliefs and ties need a neutral playing
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 11

field. Today, as much as in 1790, if there is to be an American nation and republic

there cannot be a national church or religion.

An International Perspective
Since secularism and secularization developed differently in America from
Europe, and of course Asia, some cross-cultural variation must be expected
in how terms are interpreted. In the U.S. secularism means opposition to an
established religion and religious hegemony in the political or public arena. Yet
even where constitutionally there are still established churches, as in Britain
(chapter 10) and Denmark (chapter 12), the secularism that has emerged clearly
rejects their total authority over society and its collective institutions.
Opening up a new field like the study of secularism, which lacks common
language or tools of analysis, is a learning process. This volume provides an
opportunity to explore Inglehart and Wenzel’s recent thesis6 that national values
and cultures have a direct impact on political institutions and so on the emergence
of democracy or pluralism. Since secular values are closely associated with this
process and, as can be observed, differ across cultures, it can be expected that
variant forms of secularism will emerge.
The validity of the claim that secular values are part of the heritage of
freedom, tolerance and democracy is amply illustrated in the negative by
the essay in this volume on the Islamic Republic of Iran. This contemporary
example of a “fundamentalist” theocratic state demonstrates the importance
of the achievement of the American and French revolutions, whereby political
autonomy was affirmed in relation to the authority of any religious standard
imposed from above. These revolutions forced religion’s exit from government
and led to the invention of political sovereignty, giving rise to a set of standards
governing collective life that was dictated by the people.
Secularism in this regard can thus be thought of as a political project in a
broad sense that deploys the concept of the secular. The cases of India and the
U.S. demonstrate that this can occur regardless of the distribution of religious
beliefs among the citizenry—the actual level of secularity exhibited by the public.
This non-linear relationship also operates in reverse so that a high degree of
secularization and levels of secularity among the public can occur alongside a low
degree of secularism (i.e. an established state religion as for example in Denmark
[chapter 10] and Israel [chapter 12]). However, church-state separation is only
one aspect of secularism.
Though it is difficult, and perhaps unwise, to define secularism in one
sentence, there appears to be a consensus among the authors in this volume
about the common characteristics and principles of the phenomenon they
12 Secularism & Secularity

investigate. The commonality of the secularism they unravel involves legal

recognition of individual liberty and autonomy, freedom of thought and
religion, peaceful coexistence of social groups, aspiration for consensus in
much of the public space, respect for the social contract, and a general acceptance
that religious laws should not take precedence over civil ones.
This model or definition of secularism suggests that not only is there a
theoretical boundary with theocracy at the edge of soft secularism but also one
at the edge of hard secularism. The latter excludes states that construct monist
conceptions of political institutions via dogmatic, totalitarian ideologies such
as Marxist-Leninism. Such communist regimes demand that both individuals
and social institutions (both rows in Figure 1) subscribe to an anti-religious
viewpoint and propound atheism. Such policies of state-enforced secularization
reflect a rejection of the values that many would maintain are part of the essence
of secularism.
Society and culture in every continent are constantly evolving, yet alongside
new issues, old questions return. The fact is that even the United States is not a
finished product because American society and the Constitution are both works
in progress that continue to evolve. This truism applies in every nation. Thus,
the understanding of the role of secular values and the process of secularization
needs continually to be re-defined. The task of ISSSC and its prime motivation
in publishing this collection of essays is to study secularism in all its forms in the
21st century, not as the mirror image of religion but as an intellectual and social
force in its own right. This volume’s ultimate goal is to insure that secularism per
se does not go unstudied and under-researched in academia.
 Introduction Contemporary Secularity and Secularism 13

Endnotes
1. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Trans. Talcott Parsons
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
2. Cox, Harvey. The Secular City (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1965).
3. Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(New York: Doubleday, 1967).
4. Neibuhr, Reinhold. Pious and Secular America (New York: Scribners, 1958­).
5. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
6. Inglehart, Ronald and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and
Democracy: The Human Development Sequence, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
Secular Populations
1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion
Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin

S ecularity, like religion, takes many forms in American society. Also like
religion, it varies in intensity along the trajectories of what are often referred to
as the “Three B’s,” belonging, belief, and behavior. Our recently published book,
Religion in a Free Market, shows that the American public does not subscribe
to a binary system—religion or secularity. Our research found self-identifying
Catholics and Lutherans who say they don’t believe in God, Mormons who
claim a secular outlook, and religious people who, despite their religiosity, are
comfortably married to people of other faiths or no faith at all.
In America, secularity is one option among many in a free-market-oriented
regime that has operated for two centuries. The boundaries between religion and
secularity, and between different religions, are not clearly fixed because, to quote
from Religion in a Free Market, “the government has found it is not equipped or
inclined to provide a precise definition of what constitutes a religion or religious
belief or practice....This laissez-faire attitude by the state means there is plenty
of organized religion around for Americans to consume and numerous options
and places to do so.”1
Secularity and secular people in America have gone largely unresearched
until now. Manifestations of secularity are difficult to distinguish and isolate
in the U.S. because people are not compelled to opt into or out of “religion.”
Many countries still operate either legally or in practice under a binary system
that offers very limited choices between a monopolistic supplier of established
religion and outright irreligion.
In contrast, in a free market, secularism and manifestations of secularity can
take both positive (pro-secular) and negative (anti-religious) forms. It can offer
a range of alternative non-theistic belief systems as well as levels of irreligion and
indifference to religion across the realms of belonging and behavior. Thus in the
U.S. we can observe populations of “freethinkers” of different types, sizes and

17
18 Secularism & Secularity

proportions according to the variable or issue being examined.

This chapter measures the secularization of the American public along the
three dimensions of belonging, belief, and behavior. Each dimension contributes
to understanding secularization because the three are by no means strictly
collinear: Americans who appear to be secular by belonging may appear religious
by belief, or vice versa. Others may appear religious by belonging and belief, but
not by behavior. And so on.
Statistics are drawn from the findings of the American Religious Identifi­
cation Survey (ARIS) 2001, a nationally representative telephone survey of more
than 50,000 respondents. The data is based on self-reporting and an open-
ended question: What is your religion, if any? This methodology incorporates
pluralistic and democratic values and so is better geared than most to tease out
the freethinking population and the various dimensions of secularism with
which they are associated.
The ARIS 2001 documented a doubling from 1990 to 2001 in the number
of American adults who reported that they had no religion. But secularity is
more than just a rejection of religion and religious authority or a default
option. It involves positive attributes such as rationalism and a belief in human
possibilities, and has its own moral values.2 Yet the exigencies of the ARIS
research design, like nearly all others in this area, necessitate beginning with the
concept of “belonging” to a religious group or to a religious institution.

Belonging
One obvious social manifestation of secularity is being distant from or out of
touch with religion. This can be measured by a lack of affiliation with organized
religion. The causes or reasons for this unwillingness or inability to “belong” can
vary widely, from ideological attitudes to physical access issues. Nevertheless,
the actual population of those who do not presently “belong” to a religious
congregation or institution is very large. The ARIS found that, in 2001, 46
percent of American adults, or nearly 100 million people, did not regard
themselves as or claim to be members of a religious group.
An alternative measure of “belonging” with which to identify the free­
thinking population is the response to the key ARIS question on religious
identification: What is your religion, if any? The responses categorized as “No
Religion” amounted to 14 percent of the national adult population, or 29.5
million people. The most common “secular” response, given by 13 percent of
the population, was “None.” An additional 1 percent offered a “positive secular”
response.
The total population estimates derived from the sample were 991,000
 1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion 19

Figure 1-1
Belief that God Performs Miracles: Identifiers by Religious Tradition

RELIGIOUS BELIEF SCALE

Adult
TRADITION/ Disagree Disagree Agree Agree Population
Group Strongly Somewhat Somewhat Strongly
Catholic 1 5 22 70 50,873,000
Mainline Christians 3 6 21 68 35,788,000
Methodist 2 5 18 73 14,150,000
Lutheran 4 6 21 68 9,580,000
Presbyterian 4 4 24 66 5,596,000
Episcopalian 3 8 28 58 3,451,000
United Church of Christ 1 14 30 53 1,378,000
Baptist 1 1 8 90 33,830,000
Christian Generic 2 5 15 78 22,546,000
Christian unspecified 2 4 13 80 14,150,000
Protestant unspecified 3 8 23 64 4,647,000
Evangelical/ Born Again 0 0 4 96 1,032,000
Non-denominational 1 2 14 82 2,489,000
Pentecostal 2 1 4 93 7,831,000
Assemblies of God 0 1 1 98 1,106,000
Church of God 2 0 9 89 944,000
Pentecostal unspecified 2 1 3 94 4,407,000
Protestant 3 2 12 81 5,949,000
Denominations
Churches of Christ 5 2 15 77 2,593,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses 5 4 13 74 1,331,000
Seventh Day Adventist 0 3 1 96 724,000
Mormon 1 4 7 87 2,697,000
Jewish 16 26 23 32 2,837,000
Eastern Religions 16 16 22 43 2,029,000
Buddhist 16 24 23 34 1,082,000
Muslim 4 7 13 70 1,104,000
New & Other 21 14 15 45 1,170,000
Religions
Nones/No religion 19 19 22 35 29,481,000
U.S. TOTAL ADULTS 4 7 16 70 208,000,000
(Rows may not tally to 100% as Refused & Don’t Know responses excluded from table)
20 Secularism & Secularity

Agnostics, 902,000 Atheists, 53,000 Seculars (so stated) and 49,000 Humanists.
In addition, over 5 percent of the sample refused to answer the question. As
we state in our book, there are indications to show that this group was mainly
irreligious; certainly it did not feel a compelling need to assert a religious
identity. This means we can extrapolate a “No Faith” population of adults, who
either profess no religion or refuse to answer the question, of 19 percent of adult
Americans, or over 40 million people.

(Dis)Belief
Disbelief does not correlate with a secular identification as much as might be
expected. “Non-theistic freethinkers” are a small minority. Only 5 percent, or an
estimated 10 million adult Americans, disagree either “strongly” or “somewhat,”
that God exists. (Though it must be stated that this group is five times the
number of self-designated Atheists and Agnostics.)
Surprisingly, the rate of disbelief is only 21 percent among the Nones,
which is very close to that among the Buddhists (20 percent). A level of
skepticism about the Divine is also found among a significant number of those
who identify with some other religious groups; 14 percent among Jews, 9 percent
among the New Religious Movements, and 3 percent among Lutherans.
A specific question about the ability of the Divinity to intervene in the
world and perform miracles reveals even more freethinkers. Overall, 11 percent
of Americans disagree, either strongly (4 percent) or somewhat (7 percent),
that “God performs miracles.” As Figure 1-1 shows, the proportion of skeptics
amounts to 38 percent of Nones but is even greater among Jews (42 percent)
and Buddhists (40 percent). A solid proportion of skeptics regarding the super­
natural powers of the Divine are also found among adherents of some Mainline
Protestant denominations, such as the United Church of Christ (15 percent)
and Episcopalians (11 percent), and even among Muslims (11 percent).

Behavior
One caveat to bear in mind with the No Religion population is that it is diverse.
As the statistics on belief show, this category contains theists and believers, many
of whom are indeed religious but have not found a religious group with which
to identify. Yet we can distinguish a sub-group of those who have consciously
rejected religion. One clear behavior that identifies a freethinker is apostasy or a
willingness to give up a previously held religious identity.
The ARIS investigated the level of “switching” among the population and
recorded the movement from a previous religious identity to the No Religion
category. Over 6.6 million adults made this change during their lifetime. These
 1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion 21

“new freethinkers” comprise 23 percent of the total No Religion population.

Figure 1-2 explores the point of origin in religious terms of the switchers,
namely the 6 million who in 2001 chose the no religion category, yet previously
professed a religion. These “new freethinkers” are predominantly former
Catholics, as nearly 2.6 million adults who self-identified as Catholics at one
point in their lives switched to the no religion option.
Tolerance of and respect for individuals holding alternative beliefs are
characteristics of liberal free societies. A willingness to live alongside others who
do not hold the same opinions is a form of secular behavior. It is certainly not
a value that most religious fundamentalists hold. So the population that resides
with a spouse or partner who holds a different religious identity could also be
regarded as part of the freethinking population. These mixed-religion couples
number over 14 million (28 million adults), account for 22 percent of American
couples, and fall into the category of “open minded or pluralist thinkers.”

Figure 1-2
Previous Religious Identification of “New Nones”
(Weighted estimates)

Previous Religion Number of Adults Percent

Catholic 2,599,000 43
Baptist 815,000 14
Christian 420,000 7
Methodist 394,000 7
Lutheran 264,000 4
Presbyterian 138,000 2
Protestant 134,000 2
Pentecostal 115,000 2
Mormon 114,000 2
Jehovah’s Witness 80,000 1
Episcopalian/Anglican 56,000 1
Jewish 53,000 1
Other Religious Groups 61,000 11
Refused 163,000 3
Total 6,045,000 100 %
22 Secularism & Secularity

Secular Outlook
One innovative approach of the ARIS was to introduce the concept of religious
or secular “outlook.” This goes beyond questions of group belonging, belief, and
behavior. It is a measure of world view or world outlook—what the Germans
call Weltanschauung.
The question posed offered a four-point scale and was rotated propor­
tionately among the sample to avoid bias. When it comes to your outlook do you
regard yourself as secular, somewhat secular, somewhat religious or religious? The
national poll result, shown in Figure 1-3, was 10 percent secular, 6 percent
somewhat secular, 38 percent somewhat religious, and 37 percent religious. This
shows that a generally secular outlook is held by 16 percent of American adults,
or 33 million people.
Cross tabulating the results on the outlook and religious identification
questions brings the complexity associated with this topic to the fore. Un­
surprisingly, the secular outlook scores were highest among the No Religion
category: 51 percent described themselves as secular or somewhat secular. But,
as Figure 1-4 (page 24) shows, scores were also high among several non-Christian
traditions: 42 percent among Jews, 37 percent among the New Religious
Movements, 26 percent among Eastern religions, and 15 percent among Muslims.
Among Christians, the highest secular score was 12 percent, among Catholics.
The Protestant scores showed some slight evidence of a liberal-conservative
continuum. Mainline Protestants scored 9 percent, Mormons 8 percent, Baptists
6 percent, Protestant sects 5 percent, and Pentecostals 4 percent.
These results, especially the overall ordering of the scores across the religious
traditions, suggest that the ARIS tapped into attitudes and concerns relating
to church-state separation and minority-group anxiety about what “religious”
actually means in practice in the contemporary U.S. It appears that some
who called themselves secular were expressing a civic or political concern that
constituted support for a secular state that guarantees freedom of expression
and worship to minority faiths.

How Big Is the “Freethinking” Population?

The actual size of the secular or freethinking population is open to
interpretation, depending on the criteria one uses to measure or identify
secularity. The variables considered so far show it can be claimed to be anywhere
from 1 percent (Atheists and Agnostics) to 46 percent (anyone unaffiliated with
a religious congregation) of Americans.
If one counts as freethinkers those who have a secular or somewhat
secular outlook and say they have no religion then more than one in five adult
 1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion 23

Figure 1-3
Outlook of U. S. Adult Population

“When it comes to your outlook, do you regard yourself

as religious or secular?”

Secular
Don’t know, unsure, refused 10%
9% Somewhat secular
6%

Religious
37% Somewhat religious
38%

Americans can be included, or about 46 million individuals. Interestingly, some

corroborating statistics for the size of the freethinking population have recently
appeared in a Gallup Poll on attitudes to the Bible, which found that 19 percent
of Americans think the Bible is a “collection of fables.”

Who Is the Typical American “Freethinker”?

An interesting socio-demographic profile or typology of the “classic freethinking
American” emerges when we look across a range of variables to search for those
most associated with the No Religion identity category and the secular outlook
population. This population is more male than female. It is young: the most
common age category is 18-35 years. It is more likely to be never married. Among
ethnic groups it is more Asian than the general population. Geographically it is
more Western, as seen in Figure 1-5 on page 25.
So, the picture that emerges is that of a young, never-married, Asian male
living in, say, Washington State.
An interesting sub-group is composed of the “new freethinkers”—that is,
people with no religion who say they professed a religion at some time in their
lives. Figure 1-2 showed a plurality of former Catholics among them. A socio-
demographic profile of these former Catholics who switched to no religion shows
that they are predominantly young or middle-aged; three-quarters were under
24 Secularism & Secularity

Figure 1-4
Outlook of Identifiers by Religious Tradition

RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK SCALE

Adult
TRADITION/ Secular Somewhat Somewhat Religious Population
GROUP Secular Religious
Catholic 6 6 50 33 50,873,000
Mainline Christians 4 5 48 41 35,788,000
Methodist 3 5 48 42 14,150,000
Lutheran 3 6 48 41 9,580,000
Presbyterian 6 6 46 40 5,596,000
Episcopalian 7 7 52 32 3,451,000
United Church of Christ 4 4 55 34 1,378,000
Baptist 3 3 37 54 33,830,000
Christian Generic 6 6 37 45 22,546,000
Christian unspecified 4 6 37 47 14,150,000
Protestant unspecified 8 7 46 32 4,647,000
Evangelical/ Born Again 7 1 19 70 1,032,000
Non-denominational 10 5 34 46 2,489,000
Pentecostal 2 2 26 63 7,831,000
Assemblies of God 0 2 18 72 1,106,000
Church of God 0 5 29 65 944,000
Pentecostal unspecified 3 2 27 61 4,407,000
Protestant 2 3 24 69 5,949,000
Denominations
Churches of Christ 0 3 30 65 2,593,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses 5 2 18 73 1,331,000
Seventh Day Adventist 3 4 19 73 724,000
Mormon 2 6 20 68 2,697,000
Jewish 26 16 41 11 2,837,000
Eastern Religions 15 11 42 27 2,029,000
Buddhist 7 15 46 24 1,082,000
Muslim 9 6 46 32 1,104,000
New & Other 28 9 21 25 1,170,000
Religions
Nones/No religion 39 12 28 8 29,481,000
U.S. TOTAL ADULTS 10 6 40 38 208,000,000
(Rows may not tally to 100% as Refused & Don’t Know responses excluded from table)
 1. The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion 25

Figure 1-5
Percentage of No Faith in Each State

No Faith
25-31%
20-24%
0-19%

Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, 2006, Religion in a Free Market: Religious and Non-Religious
Americans, Who, What, Why and Where, Paramount Market Publishing, Ithaca, NY

50 in 2001, compared with 51 percent of adult Catholics. Second, they are

well educated by national standards and slightly better educated than Catholics
overall; over 37 percent had graduated college, compared with 32 percent
among Catholics in general. Geographically, they tend more to reside outside
the historic areas of Catholic settlement; 27 percent live in the West and 21
percent in the South; as opposed to the general Catholics population, with 24
percent living in the West and 15 percent in the South.

Social and Political Implications

In Religion in a Free Market we demonstrated how in the civic realm “free­
thinkers” have distinct political loyalties. They have a strong tendency to be
independent of the two main political parties. Thus their reluctance to join or
identify with institutions holds for both religious affiliation and political party.
If the young cohorts maintain their religious preferences as they get older it
could have major consequences for societal and political issues at the heart of
current debates within U.S. society. Since there is less “class politics” than at
other times in the past, “values” are the new battlefield and the religious divide
is more central to politics. This is particularly so where ethical or moral issues
are involved, such as on stem cell research, science teaching, assisted suicide,
26 Secularism & Secularity

homosexual marriage, the death penalty, and gun control.

One current and topical example of a “culture war” divide between the more
secular and more religious forces is support for stem cell research. According to
a survey conducted in August 2004 by the Pew Research Center for the People
& the Press, “white Evangelicals” and “seculars” were the most polarized groups
on the importance of conducting stem cell research. Whereas only 33 percent
of “white Evangelicals” said that it was more important to conduct stem cell
research than to not destroy embryos, 68 percent of “seculars” expressed this
view. Interestingly, there was little movement in either group’s opinions over
two years; a similar survey in March 2002 had found 26 percent versus 66
percent respectively.
One consequence of a free market in beliefs and ideas is a proliferation of
choices and a wide distribution of individuals across those choices. Unlimited
and unregulated options inevitably give rise to the complexity that is observed
regarding the multiple dimensions of secularity and secularism. In a free society
freethinking stretches into all spheres of existence and reduces the pressure to
be logical and consistent in opinions or behaviors. This makes delineating the
boundaries between secularism, religion, and spirituality very difficult.
Indeed, without any obligation to be coherent and follow normative
patterns some people exercise their choices in idiosyncratic ways. In his Wealth
of Nations, the 18th-century free-market economist Adam Smith postulated that
just as with tangible goods in the economy so in a “natural state” of religion
there is no fixed limit to the number of suppliers or their ability to formulate and
offer philosophies, religious culture, and spiritual goods and services.3 And so
today in America there is no limit on the ways in which the sovereign consumer
can and does reformulate or consume ideas, loyalties, and rituals. This situation
is an essential marker of secularization. An environment that offers freedom
to exercise liberty of conscience and the pursuit of personal happiness is an
important legacy of secularism in the political ___domain.

Endnotes
1. Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, Religion in a Free Market: Religious and
Non-Religious Americans, Who, What, Why and Where, Paramount Market
Publications, Ithaca, NY, 2006 p. 7.
2. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Metropolitan Books,
New York, 2004.
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book
Five, Chapter 1, Part 3, Article III, The Modern Library, New York, 1965 [1776]
2. Putting Secularity in Context
Bruce A. Phillips

I t has been correctly asserted that “Secularity and secular people in America
have gone largely unresearched until now.” Indeed, Kosmin, Mayer, and
Keysar have put secularism back on the scholarly agenda.1 The qualifier “largely”
is important, however. Secularism did not entirely disappear from the sociology
of religion, and putting these most recent findings in the context of previous
research raises a number of analytic challenges. In this chapter I look at these
findings in the context of previous research and suggest that the re-emergence of
secularism in America needs to be understood in specific analytic contexts.

The Disappearance and Re-Appearance of Secularism

In 1965 the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox published The Secular City.2
Although it was a theological work that discussed the emergence of “post religious”
modernity, it was widely read as announcing the triumph of secularization. A
decade later this certainty was challenged by Dean M. Kelley, who observed that
“the conservative churches are growing.”3 This observation became important
to the country as a whole when the Christian Coalition was founded in 1988
by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed to make the “Religious Right” an important
force in American politics and a leading voice in the “culture war.” As Kevin
Christano has observed in the introduction to a recent text book, the revival of
American religion gave the sociological study of religion a new importance and
vitality.4 It showed religion was a vital force in America and led to new thinking
on how to explain it. One such intellectual development was the market model
borrowed from economics introduced by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke.5 A
related model has come to be known as “rational choice” theory, which draws on
a variety of economic models such as the existence of “free riders.”6 In a seminal
article, R. Stephen Warner grouped these and other works under the rubric of a
“new paradigm” that focused on explaining religious vibrancy.7

27
28 Secularism & Secularity

Studies of secularization receded to the background, but an important

exchange on secularization took place in 1989-1990. Mark Chaves argued
that, contrary to conventional wisdom, secularization was on the rise.8 Michael
Hout and Andrew Greeley challenged Chaves’ conclusion, debating the role
of age, period, and cohort effects.9 Chaves then rebutted their analysis, noting
that period effects revealed a sharp drop in church attendance between 1959
and 1980.10 No consensus emerged on whether or not the decline in church
attendance was evidence of secularization.
Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar’s American Religious Identification Survey11
(ARIS) has revived interest in secularization in two ways. First, rather than
looking at church attendance, they looked specifically at Americans who classify
themselves as Atheists, Agnostics, or as having no religion. Second, they explored
attitude related to a “secular outlook.”12
The ARIS was the first study in over 20 years to look at secular as self defined,
and a comparison with the early research is instructive. In 1985 Condran and
Tamney13 compared the 1957 Current Population Survey (CPS), which included
a question on religion, with the combined results of the General Social Survey
(GSS) for 1970-1982. They discovered that the percentage of people reporting
“no religion” grew from 2.7 percent in the 1957 CPS to 7.1 percent in the
1970-1982 combined GSS. The ARIS puts that figure currently at 19 percent.
This clearly shows that self-professed “seculars” or “religious nones” has grown
six-fold over the past half-century, and doubled over the past 20 years.
More instructive, however, is the consistency in the demographic profile
of seculars between the Condran and Tamey study and ARIS. Condran and
Tamney found that “religious nones” were more likely than religiously identified
Americans to be:
• Young
• Single
• Educated
• Geographically mobile
• Raised Catholic
Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar found the identical profile of their “seculars,”
with the addition of residence in the Western United States. These remarkable
consistencies suggest that the increase in seculars may be related to both structural
changes and cultural trends within American society.
 2. Putting Secularity in Context 29

Explaining the Rise of Secularism

Condran and Tamney proposed that explanations for the increase in “religious
nones” are both structural and cultural. The consistent association between being
secular and being young and single is a structural explanation. It suggests that
secular identification is a transitory phenomenon related to family formation.
There is evidence from other studies that religious identification increases when
families are started.14 There is also evidence that Americans are staying single
longer, and some may never marry at all.15 To what extent is secular identification
a reflection of changes in the American family structure in general and of the
“retreat from marriage” in particular?
There are cultural explanations for the rise of secularism as well. Secular­
ization was associated with those raised Catholic in the 1970s and in the 21st
century. Greeley has argued that the rise in secularism has been essentially a
Catholic phenomenon;16 ex-Catholics rebelling against the Church’s teachings
on birth control and abortion.
Wade Clark Roof has long associated secularization with individualism.
Referring to Bellah’s notion of the “sovereign self,” Roof has noted parallels
between having “no religion” and defining one’s own religion.17 Roof and
McKinney explained that “no religion” is most prominent in the West because
of its individualistic regional culture. They observed that Western states could
be called the “unchurched belt” because church attendance has long been lower
in this region. Their explanation was the individualism so central to the cultural
climate.18 Roof has also related secularism to individualism in the context of the
atomistic disengagement described by Robert Putnam in his Bowling Alone.19

Is Secularism Disengagement or a Residual Category?

Respondents rarely identify themselves as “secular.” The majority of “seculars”
say that they have “no religion.” A minority identify themselves as Atheists or
Agnostics. Because the last two categories are rarely mentioned, they get thrown
in with “no religion” respondents, thereby obfuscating important differences.
Atheists are organized. They form societies. They file lawsuits. They are the few,
the proud, the assertive. Hout and Fischer have inferred from their data that
alienation from the religious right has been a contributing factor to the increase
in religious nones, although they do not suggest these respondents have become
ideologically anti-religion.20
Condran and Tamney have suggested that religious nones are isolated from
religious institutions and therefore have no religious preference. Along the same
lines, Roof has suggested that religious disengagement may be part of a larger
pattern of disengagement from all institutions. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater
30 Secularism & Secularity

in reverse, secularism may be an echo, not a choice. It is more of a residual

category than an ideological position.
Jews who claim “no religion” tend to be the offspring of Jewish-Christian
intermarriages. Many of them were raised as Christians and “no religion”
represents a safe middle ground that avoided choosing between parents.21 This
possibility could and should be investigated for non-Jews whose parents were
religiously intermarried.

Understanding the Meaning of Secularism

Kosmin and Keysar have convincingly documented the increase in secular self-
identification. Putting their findings in the context of other research suggests
three questions for further investigation:
1. To what extent are “religious nones” different from “principled secularists”
such as Atheists and Agnostics? (see chapter 3)
2. To what extent is secularism a religious phenomenon, and to what extent is
a reflection of larger patterns of social disengagement?
3. To what extent is the increase in secular self-identification explained by
changes in family structure such as the “retreat from marriage?

Endnotes
1. American Religious Identification Survey, 2001. <http://www.trincoll.edu/
Academics/AcademicResources/values/ISSSC/research/ARIS+2001.htm>.
Kosmin, Barry A. and Ariela Keysar, Religion in a Free Market: Religious and
Non-Religious Americans (Ithaca, Paramount Market Publishing, 2006); Kosmin,
Barry. “As Secular as they come.” Moment. June, 2002, pp. 44-49.
2. Cox, Harvey. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological
Perspective. (New York, Macmillan Company, Collier Books, 1965).
3. Kelley, Dean. M. Why conservative churches are growing: A study in sociology of
religion. (New York, Harper & Row, 1977).
4. Christiano, Kevin, J., William H. Swatos, Peter Kivistos. Sociology of Religion:
Contemporary Developments. (Walnut Creek, Calif, AltaMira Press, 2002).
5. Finke, Roger and Rodney. Stark. The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners
and Losers in Our Religious Economy. (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press,
1992).
6. Iannaccone, Laurence. R. “Why Strict Churches are Strong.” American Journal of
Sociology 99(5): 1180-1211.
7. Warner, R. Stephen. “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological
Study of Religion in the United States” American Journal of Sociology 98(5): 1044-
93.
 2. Putting Secularity in Context 31

8. Chaves, Mark. “Secularization and religious revival: evidence from the U.S. church
attendance rates, 1972-1986.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28(4): 464-
477.
9. Hout, Michael and Andrew Greeley “The cohort doesn’t hold: comment on Chaves
(1989).” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29(4): 519-524.
10. Chaves, Mark. “Holding the Center: Reply to Hout and Greeley.” Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 29(4): 525-530.
11. American Religious Identification Survey, 2001. < http://www.trincoll.edu/Academ-
ics/AcademicResources/values/ISSSC/research/ARIS+2001.htm>.
12. Mayer, Egon. The Rise of Seculars in American Jewish Life. Contemplate, The Cen-
ter for Cultural Judaism (2003).
13. Condran, John and Joseph Tamney. “Religious ‘Nones’: 1957 to 1982.” Sociological
Analysis 46(4): 415-423.
14. Tilley, James R. “Secularization and Aging in Britain: Does Family Formation Cause
Greater Religiosity?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(2): 269; Glenn,
Norval. “The trend in ‘no religion’ respondents to U.S. national surveys, late 1950s
to early 1980s.” Public Opinion Quarterly 51(3): 293-314; Greeley, Andrew M. and
Michael Hout. “Musical Chairs: Patterns of Denominational Change in the United
States, 1947-1986.” Sociology and Social Research 72(January): 75-86.
15. Goldstein, Joshua R. and Catherine T. Kenney. “Marriage Delayed or Marriage For-
gone? New Cohort Forecasts of First Marriage for U.S. Women.” American Socio-
logical Review 66(4): 506-519; Schoen, Robert and Yen-Hsin A. Cheng. “Partner
Choice and the Differential Retreat from Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family
68(1): 1-10; Thornton, Arland and Linda Young-DeMarco (2001). “Four Decades
of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: the 1960s Through
the 1990s.” Journal of Marriage and Family 63(4): 1009-1037; Doyle, Rodger. “By
the Numbers: The Decline of Marriage.” Scientific American 1999(36).
16. Greeley and Hout; Hout, Michael and Claude S. Fischer. “Why More Americans
Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations.” American Sociological Re-
view 67(2): 165-190.
17. Greer, Bruce A. and Wade Clark Roof (1982). “‘Desperately Seeking Sheila’: Lo-
cating Religious Privatism in American Society.” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 31( 3): 346-352.
18. Roof, Wade Clark and Williame McKinney. American Mainline Religion: Its Chang-
ing Shape and Future. (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1987).
19. Putnam, Robert. D. Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Commu-
nity. (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2000); Roof, Wade Clark. “Religious Border-
lands: Challenges for Future Study” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37(1):
1-14.
20. Hout and Fischer.
21. Phillips, Bruce A. “American Judaism in the Twenty-first Century” in Dana Evan
Kaplan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 397-415.
3. Who Are America’s Atheists and Agnostics?
Ariela Keysar

Atheism: from Greek atheos, godless, a disbelief in the existence of a deity. Atheist:
one who denies the existence of God.
Agnostic: from Greek agnostos, unknown, one who holds the view that any ultimate
reality (as God) is unknown and probably unknowable.
(Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary)

A theists and Agnostics are fringe populations in U.S. society. Considered by

many to be deviant,1 Atheists are a distrusted group. According to a Gallup
Poll from September 2006, a vast majority of the public (84 percent) thinks that
Americans are not ready to elect an Atheist as president.2 Although Atheists and
Agnostics are tiny minority groups, the attention they attract, particularly from
the religious right, warrants a better understanding of exactly who they are in
terms of social characteristics such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity
and political preferences.
This chapter provides a demographic and social profile of three distinct
groups: self-identified Atheists, self-identified Agnostics, and those who
answered “none” to a survey question, “What is your religion, if any? ” The first
two groups are quite small, together amounting to about 1 percent of the U.S.
adult population. The third group, called the no-religion group, is about 13
percent of the population.
All are growing. Together, the three groups increased from about 14 million
in 1990 to over 29 million in 2001, according to Religion in a Free Market:
Religious and Non-Religious Americans, Who, What, Why, Where.3
It takes a very large sample of the population to develop a reliable portrait
of minority groups as small as Atheists and Agnostics. The American Religious
Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001 is perhaps the only survey large enough.

33
34 Secularism & Secularity

With its random sample of 50,281 adult respondents, it estimated the number
of American adult Atheists as 900,000 and adult Agnostics as 990,000.
This data set presents a unique opportunity to distinguish between three
groups previously lumped together—Atheists, Agnostics, and those professing
no religion. Drawing on the fine detail available from the ARIS, this chapter
is the first to show the differences as well as the similarities among these three
distinct groups.

Gender
Both Agnostics and Atheists are predominantly male. In the U.S. population as
a whole, 48 percent of adults are male, as are 47 percent of Catholic adults. By
comparison, males account for 56 percent of the no-religion group, 70 percent
of Atheists, and 75 percent of Agnostics, as shown in Figure 3-1. This may reflect
men’s greater tendency to disbelieve and reject authority.

Age
Atheists are young. Fully 55 percent are under age 35. Only 20 percent are 50
and over, as opposed to 37 percent of all Americans. Interestingly, Agnostics are
older than Atheists, though still younger than the general population, as shown
in Figure 3-2.
Beyond the numbers shown here, ARIS data show that one-third of Atheists
are under age 25. Half of them are age 30 or under. This age structure has major
demographic consequences. It helps explains their marital status—41 percent
are singles never married and only 40 percent are married. Among Agnostics
and “no religion” adults, about 30 percent are singles never married and about
50 percent are married. Once again, the Agnostic and “no religion” are similar to
one another while the Atheists’ marital status is more distinct.
Comparing this 2001 data with the 1990 National Survey of Religious
Identification (NSRI)4 provides clear evidence of a recent trend towards
secularization among the younger American population. The diffusion of secular
messages aimed at young people on TV and over the Internet may explain the
correlations between popular youth culture and the demographic characteristics
revealed by the ARIS. Of course, it is possible that this is an “age” rather than
a “generational” effect, so that some of these young people may “convert” and
become believers as they get older, and thus reassert the belief patterns of their
parents and grandparents.
 3. Who Are America’s Athiests and Agnostics? 35

Figure 3-1
Percent Male Among Atheist, Agnostic and No Religion Adults

U.S. Total 48

No Religion 58

Athiest 70

Agnostic 75

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
percent
Source: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001

Figure 3-2
Age Composition of Atheist, Agnostic and No Religion
18-34 35-49 50-64 65+

80

70

60

50
percent

40

30
55
20 40 46
30 32 31
24 29
10 21
18 13 16 16
9 11 8
0
Atheist Agnostic No Religion U.S. Total

Source: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001

36 Secularism & Secularity

Education
Agnostics clearly have the highest educational attainment, with 42 percent being
college graduates or having post-graduate education. This is far higher than
Atheists and the “no religion” group, as shown in Figure 3-3. The relatively low
educational level of Atheists may come as a surprise, because various researchers
have argued that Atheists are concentrated among the intellectual elite. Beit-
Hallahmi has called academia and science “the Atheist bastions.” Youth may be
one reason that fully 47 percent of Atheists have no more than a high school
diploma, vs. the national average of 41 percent. Some Atheists may not yet be
old enough to have earned a college or post-graduate degree. Atheists may also
have a bimodal distribution in terms of education, with large proportions at the
top and the bottom of the educational ladder.
The attribute of high educational level among Agnostics sets them apart
from Atheists and adults who profess no religion. One possible explanation
is that “Agnostic” is a sophisticated technical term; thus for someone to self-
identify5 as such suggests a well-educated person.
Overall, Americans who profess no religion or self-identify as Atheist or
Agnostic are more likely to be white non-Hispanic or Asian and less likely to
be African American, as compared to the general adult population. The small
sample size by ethnicity precludes detailed tables.

Geography
Where are Atheists, Agnostics, and people who profess no religion to be found?
Atheists concentrate in the West and the Northeast and are scarce in the South.
Agnostics and the no religion group also concentrate in the West, but are
comparatively less common in the Northeast, as seen in Figure 3-4. The Pacific
Northwest has been identified as the “None zone” by Killen and Silk.6 Pasquale7
focuses on a special group of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which includes
but is not restricted to Atheists or Agnostics. He calls them “Nots” and finds they
are most common in the Pacific Northwest.

Political Party Preference

The general U.S. population is about evenly distributed among Democrats,
Republicans, and independents. In contrast, a clear majority of Atheists are
politically independent, as seen in Figure 3-5. Atheists are far less likely than the
general public to be Republicans. The percentage who are Democrats is about
the same as that among the total U.S. population for all three of the irreligious
groups under discussion. Agnostics and the no-religion group lie between
 3. Who Are America’s Athiests and Agnostics? 37

Figure 3-3
Educational Level of Athiest, Agnostic, and No Religion
High School Grad or Some College College Graduate or Post Grad

80

70

60

50
percent

40
68 66 66
30 58
20 42
34 34
32
10

0
Atheist Agnostic No Religion U.S. Total

Source: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001

Figure 3-4
Regional Distribution of Atheist, Agnostic, and No Religion
Northeast North Central South West

60

50

40
percent

30

20
36 36
32
27 28 28 29
23 24
10 19 18 17 19 19 23 22

0
Atheist Agnostic No Religion U.S. Total

Source: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001

38 Secularism & Secularity

Atheists and the general public in their political leanings, but are considerably
closer to Atheists. Not only are Atheists disenchanted by the divine power, but
they are also the most likely to detach themselves and so be alienated from the
two main political parties.

Figure 3-5
Party Political Preferences of Atheist, Agnostic and No Religion
Republican Democrat Independent Don’t Know & Refused

80

70

60

50
percent

40

30
50
20 43 43
33 30 30 32 30
26
10 17
16
10 11 6 8 7
0
Atheist Agnostic No Religion U.S. Total

Source: American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001

Summary
Both academic research and public opinion polls have a tendency to blur
distinctions among Atheists, Agnostics, and what has come to be called the
no-religion group, or Nones. But the large sample from the 2001 ARIS allows
distinctions to be made. ARIS data show that Atheists are by far younger, more
likely to reside in the West, and more politically independent than Agnostics.
Both Atheists and Agnostics are predominantly male. And Agnostics are by far
the most educated group. In political preferences, age composition, and
geographical residency, Agnostics and Nones are similar. On educational
attainment, on the other hand, Atheists are more similar to Nones than Agnostics.
By gender, Atheists and Agnostics are more male than the Nones.
This illustration of clear inter-group distinctions should discourage the
practice of lumping together Atheists, Agnostics, and the “no religion” population
into an undifferentiated mass.
 3. Who Are America’s Athiests and Agnostics? 39

Endnotes
1. Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. Atheists: A Psychological Profile. In M. Martin (ed.)
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006.
2. For comparison, 38% of the public believes Americans are not ready to elect a wom-
an as president, 42% to elect a Jew and 91% to elect a gay or lesbian (the only other
group to attract more negative feelings).
3. Kosmin, Barry A. and Ariela Keysar. Religion in a Free Market: Religious and Non-
Religious Americans, Who, What, Why, Where. New York: Paramount Market Pub-
lishing, Inc, 2006.
4. See, Kosmin, Barry A. and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion
in Contemporary American Society. New York: Harmony Books, 1993.
5. Note, ARIS 2001 methodology was based on self-reporting and an open-ended
question: What is your religion, if any? Respondents chose their own category of
religion and were not read a list of pre-coded religious groups.
6. Killen, Patricia O’Connell and Mark Silk. Religion and Public Life in the Pacific
Northwest: The None Zone. Alta Mira Press, 2004.
7. Pasquale, Frank. The Non-Religious in the American Northwest. In Secularism and
Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives, 2007.
4. The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest
Frank L. Pasquale

“S ecular” and its cognates signify a range of phenomena, including

a) the “mere” absence of any direct reference to transcendental or super­

natural ideas or phenomena (as in the “purely” economic or political or
technological)
b) recession or minimization of the visibility or role of “religion” in society as
an institution or a general social force, or restriction of its formal influence
or role in the administration of government
c) personal indifference to or neglect of matters transcendental, super­natural,
or metaphysical
d) affirmative or hostile rejection of transcendental, supernatural, or meta­
physical ideas, phenomena, or religious institutions
e) lack of personal identification or affiliation with “religious” traditions
or institutions (regardless of personal metaphysical stance)
f ) subordination of metaphysical to other considerations in selected contexts
or in general.
In survey research, “seculars” has been a variable category encompassing
distinguishable types of individuals (“c” through “f ”). There is an ever-increasing
amount of data emerging from survey work on “seculars” and Nones (those
who profess no explicit religious identity or affiliation). There has been less
direct or detailed attention to the subset of Nones that might be characterized as
“quintessential seculars”—the substantially or affirmatively non-transcendental/
not-religious, or “Nots.” These are people who:

41
42 Secularism & Secularity

• eschew theistic, transcendental, or supernatural ideas or worldviews,

• do not identify with traditions or institutions that embrace such
worldviews,
• may be indifferent to “ultimate” or metaphysical questions and concerns,
or hold affirmatively non-transcendental worldviews, and
• substantially avoid public or private behavior associated with transcen­
dental ideas (prayer, worship, incantation or conjuring, interaction with
spiritual entities, etc.).
I have begun to take a closer look at Nots in the American Northwest.
This would seem to be a natural laboratory for this purpose, since it is the least
religious region in the United States based on such measures as percentage of the
population that is “unchurched,” professes no religious preference or identity,
identifies as “nonreligious” or “secular,” and reports limited behavior or beliefs
associated with religion or transcendentalism.
This work was stimulated, in part, by the volume edited by Patricia
O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk on Religion and Public Life in the Pacific
Northwest.1 Although the comparatively “secular” character of this region is
acknowledged in the volume’s subtitle—The None Zone—resident Nots make
nary an appearance in these pages. Indeed, it is suggested that all but a neg­ligible
number of Nones are, in one way or another, “religious” or “spiritual.” This
prompted a closer look through
• in-depth interviews with both affiliated and unaffiliated Nots (n=49 to
date)2
• membership surveys of irreligious organizations in the region (the first
of 15 planned surveys completed and analyzed; secular humanist; n=105
of 150 listed members)
• participant observation at the surveyed organization (one of the larger
nonreligious organizations in the region)
• meeting attendance, newsletter monitoring, and collection of organi­
zational histories at other regional groups.
The following are some preliminary observations.

Estimated Numbers
Most survey research does not break out the Pacific Northwest from the much
larger Western region. Available data are far from definitive, but suggest a sub­
stantial presence of Nots in the Northwest. Although regional samples are small,
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 43

the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 3 data indicated that 2.8
percent of respondents in Oregon and Washington strongly disagreed that
“God exists,” and another 3.8 percent disagreed somewhat. This compares with
2.4 and 2.2 percent of the national sample. Similarly, 14.5 percent considered
themselves “secular” and 9.4 percent more “somewhat secular,” compared with
10 percent and 6.2 percent in the national sample. Based on a population of 9.7
million (per 2004 Bureau of the Census estimates), this suggests some 640,000
individuals in these states who strongly or somewhat disagree that God exists,
and 1.4 million who consider themselves “secular” (whatever this may mean).
Data on Nones who are Atheist or Agnostic from the ARIS and General
Social Survey (GSS)4 yield similar numbers. The ARIS data showed that 21
percent of Oregonians and 25 percent of Washingtonians were Nones (pro­
fessing no explicit religious affiliation or identity). Data from the GSS showed
that 31.2 percent of Nones were “not spiritual.”5 In several surveys, 13.8 percent
of Nones did not believe in God (Atheist) and 18.7 percent did not know and
don’t think there is anyway to find out (Agnostic). Applying these numbers to
the regional population data,6 some 700,000 Oregonians and Washingtonians
are likely Atheist or Agnostic Nones and a similar number are “not spiritual.”
In the most direct study of religious beliefs and behavior in the region—
unfortunately more than 20 years old (1985)—The (Portland) Oregonian
commissioned a telephone survey of 600 Oregon residents. Selected results are
presented in Figure 4-1:

Figure 4-1
Religiosity Among Oregon Residents, 1985

Belief in “God or a Universal Spirit?”

(No indication of “don’t know” as an offered or volunteered option) Neither 4%

Belief in “life after death” No 18 %

Don’t know 12 %

Belief in “heaven as reward for those who led good lives” No 27 %

Don’t know 11 %

Religious faith is the most important influence in my life Completely untrue 5 %

Mostly untrue 18 %
Do you pray? Not at all 9%

Response rates would likely be somewhat different today. National data

from the GSS show that those professing no religious preference increased from
44 Secularism & Secularity

7.1 percent in 1985 to 14.4 percent in 2004, much as the ARIS found between
1990 and 2001. Those giving atheistic or agnostic responses concerning belief in
God have also increased from 5.3 percent in 1988 to 7 percent in 2002.
In general, these data suggest that at least 500,000 residents of Oregon
and Washington are substantially or affirmatively not religious with respect to
beliefs, identity, affiliation, and behavior.

How Nots and Nones Describe Themselves

There is a widespread tendency to refer to the substantially or affirmatively
nonreligious as Atheist(s) or Atheist(s) and Agnostic(s). In interviews, how­ever,
many express concern about popular associations with Atheist, or uncertainty
about its precise meaning, and avoid it for these reasons. Some use “humanist”
as a euphemistic substitute for Atheist or Agnostic. Some use atheist(ic) in
describing their way of thinking, but not as an identity label. For some, it is
simply considered an inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading characterization of
their worldviews. Many avoid Agnostic as ambiguous or a sign of ambivalence.
The descriptive terms used by Nots, and their combinations, vary
considerably. The serviceable acronym, SUNINSHARFAN, helps to keep
the principal terms in mind: Skeptic, Unbeliever, Nonbeliever, Irreligious,
Nonreligious, Secular, Humanist, Agnostic, Rationalist, Freethinker, Atheist,
and (philosophical) Naturalist or Non-transcendentalist.7
Complexity of usage is suggested by secular humanist survey respondents
(n=105), who were asked to choose any of eight terms they would or do use to
describe their ways of thinking, as shown in Figure 4-2.
While self-described religiosity is consistently low, choices of descriptive
terms vary considerably, as do the specific combinations among respondents.

Affiliated and Unaffiliated Nots

Most Nots are unaffiliated with organizations pertinent to their metaphysical
worldviews. Using 4 percent as a conservative baseline estimate, at least 10 million
Americans are substantially or affirmatively not religious. At best, affiliates of
the principal irreligious organizations number in the low hundreds of
thousands.8 Similarly, compared with an estimated 500,000 Oregon and
Washington Nots, at best, members of irreligious organizations number in the
low thousands.9
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 45

Figure 4-2
Self-Descriptions Among Humanist Group Members
Descriptors respondents Percentage of respondents Mean self-description as “religious”
apply to themselves who chose the term (0=not at all; 8= very)
Humanist(ic) 89 .97
Atheist(ic) 55 .81
Scientific 54 .95
Secular(ist) 53 .89
Skeptical 42 .86
Naturalistic 36 .84
Agnostic 32 1.03
Anti-religious 26 .78

Affiliated Nots
There is a representative array of relevant groups and organizations in the
Northwest, although memberships are small (in the tens or hundreds for each):
• Corvallis Secular Society (Oregon)
• Humanist Association of Salem (Oregon)
• Humanists of Greater Portland (Oregon)
• Humanists of The Rogue Valley (Oregon)
• Kol Shalom, Community for Humanistic Judaism (Portland)
• Oregonians for Rationality
• United States Atheists (Portland)
• Ethical Culture Society of Puget Sound (Seattle, Washington)
• Humanist Society of South Puget Sound (Washington)
• Humanists of North Puget Sound (Washington)
• Humanists of Washington (Seattle)
• Secular Jewish Circle of Puget Sound (Washington)
• The Society for Sensible Explanations (Washington)
• Inland Northwest Freethought Society (Spokane, Washington)
• similar groups on some college and university campuses in the region
• “humanist” subgroups in selected Unitarian Universalist fellowships.
46 Secularism & Secularity

A distinction between “soft” and “hard” forms of secularism has been

suggested by Peter Steinfels10 and Barry Kosmin.11 These terms are sometimes
used by Nots. There is general recognition that groups fall along a continuum,
from “soft” to “hard,” with respect to worldviews, degree of irreligiosity or anti-
religiosity, congregational culture or its absence, criticism, and so on. As such,
these groups address a range of interests, styles, sensibilities, and preoccupations,
as shown in Figure 4-3.
Each position on the continuum presents particular issues. “Humanists” in
Unitarian fellowships generally shun “God-talk,” supernaturalism, or substantive
transcendentalism. A shift in Unitarian Universalism toward increased “God-
talk” and “spirituality” has prompted some to move to (secular) humanist or other
groups. Among Humanistic Jews, an emphasis on “congregational” participation
in Judaic ritual (sans supernaturalism) prompts recurring debate—both locally
and nationally—about whether, and in what ways, “HJ” is or is not “religion.”
The degree to which participants do or do not wish to speak of “spirituality”
becomes a point of contention in some of the “soft” groups. At the other end
of the spectrum, philosophical stances and sensibilities may be more definitive,
but at a price. The place and character of criticism (of religious, supernatural,
or paranormal beliefs and related behavior) prompts debate and tension in
some atheistic and skeptical groups. Some self-identified Atheists consequently
distinguish between “positive” and “negative” forms.
There is general regard among members of these groups as nonreligious
comrades-in-arms. There is shared concern about misrepresentation or mis­
understanding of nonreligious people, erosion of church-state separation, public
and political influence of conservative religion, and aspects of American domestic
and international policy. But there are also notes of irreligious sectarianism.
In a meeting of secular humanists, one audience member proclaims, “We
have our fundamentalists, too. They’re called Atheists.” In an Atheist meeting
across town, derisive asides make reference to “a lack of spine” or “going soft on
religion” among “the humanists.”
These groups struggle for public recognition and legitimacy. Most hold regular
meetings, maintain Web sites, and produce newsletters and other publications.
Many sponsor lecture series. Some produce media programs (e.g., for community
access cable television). Some sponsor psychological and counseling services for the
irreligious (“Humanist Counseling Services” in Portland, Oregon, and SMART
[Self-Management And Recovery Training] support groups for non-religious
individuals struggling with alcoholism or other addictions—an alternative to 12-
Step programs. Regional symposia and conferences that bring together members
of many of these organizations have been held.
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 47

Figure 4-3
Group Characterizations from “Soft” to “Hard”

“Soft” “Hard”

UU humanists Atheism
Humanistic Judaism Skepticism/rationalism12
Ethical Culture CSH/CFI-style secular humanism13
AHA-style “H”umanism14

A Secular Humanist Group

Data from the first of several planned surveys of organizational memberships in
the region are fairly representative. Most would agree that this group lies in the
center of the “hard-soft” continuum.
• There is a strong age skew: mean and median age is 65, with a range of
28 to 91.
• There are more males (65) than females (40).
• The cultural/ethnic/racial profile is overwhelmingly “white,” European-
American, with 14 percent of Jewish heritage.
• The group is well-educated, with 85 percent holding undergraduate or
graduate degrees.
Most respondents report religious backgrounds, with
• only 4 percent of mothers and 10 percent of fathers described as “no
religion,”
• 9 percent describing their upbringing as “not at all religious,” and
• 70 percent reporting some form of early religious instruction.
Of those who received religious instruction, for 57 percent this was
Christian/Protestant, for 32 percent it was Roman Catholic, and for 11 percent
it was Jewish/Judaic.
Although most decided they were not religious early in childhood or
adolescence, a substantial number did so later in life: 38 percent before the age
of 18; 18 percent during the college years; 30 percent between 21 and 40, and 7
percent between 41 and 75. Interview data suggest that some shifting late in life
may be attributable, in part, to increased discomfort with a resurgence of public
48 Secularism & Secularity

religiosity and conservative religion in the U. S. in recent years.15

The most frequently cited reasons for membership or participation in an
irreligious organization were that this provides:
• a source of information and intellectual stimulation,
• a place for nonreligious people to meet and socialize, and
• a place where nonreligious people can feel at ease.
There is far greater ambivalence concerning public education and advocacy
of humanist philosophy or collaborative community and human service work (as
an organization). Groups vary in this regard. For example, Atheist groups may be
unreservedly involved in activism concerning church-state separation. Consonant
with a long-standing emphasis on social responsibility and tikkun olam (repairing
the world), Humanistic Judaic groups may have active social action committees
that lead the general memberships in addressing local, national, or global issues.
The overwhelming majority of respondents consider themselves “not at all
religious” (mean=.94 on a 0-8 scale). To one degree or another, nearly 90 per­cent
consider religion “a harmful force in human affairs” and 70 percent are angry
about “the role, dominance, or effects of religion in the world.” Even so, less
than one-third apply the term “anti-religious” to themselves.
Other research consistently shows a relationship between low (or no)
religiosity and social or political “liberalism.” This is true here. The secular
humanist survey respondents, for example, overwhelmingly describe themselves
as “liberal,” with 75 percent identifying themselves as Democrats, 25 percent
as “independent,” and no Republicans. The most frequently cited concerns
are consistent with this: environmental issues, the Bush administration and
U.S. policy, war and conflict, overpopulation, human/civil rights, and religion
(conservatism, fundamentalism, extremism, political influence, and erosion
of church-state separation). Content of meeting discussions and newsletters
indicates much the same in other regional groups.

Unaffiliated Nots: Salons, Social Networks, and Cause-Specific Collaboration

Among unaffiliated Nots, less formal patterns of affiliation and social partici­
pation are evident. “Salons” refer to scheduled gatherings of people with shared
interests or perspectives (for example, book discussion and topical lecture-and-
discussion groups). Substantial numbers of avowedly “nonreligious” or “secular”
individuals in the region may be found, for example, in “Great Books,” church-
state separation, “Death with Dignity,” global development, environmental, and
other cause- and interest-specific groups.
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 49

The Internet has become a medium for stimulating and maintaining

networks, “virtual communities,” and face-to-face groups of Nots. On-line
Atheist, humanist, or skeptical “meet-ups” and chat-rooms may give rise to friend­
ship networks, social clubs, and discussion or advocacy groups. In Seattle, Atheist
“meet-ups” have coalesced into groups that organize social, sporting, cultural,
and civic activities. In Portland, there is a weekly pub-gathering and network
of active and retired journalists, writers, scholars, development and government
workers, and other interested individuals. Its initiator and coordinator, a retired
academic, characterizes the “membership” as “secular.”16 Groups of regular,
frequent, and occasional participants—drawn from an email list of more than
300—appear each week at the same corner of a local pub (recently refurbished
by the proprietor to meet the group’s needs). Essays and brief topical exchanges—
typically concerning national and global politics and economics—are shared
among participants in a growing international email network. A recent essay, for
example, spoke of the value of collaborating with the liberal religious on issues
of common cause.
Even less formal, but more prevalent, are networks of friends and
acquaintances who share nonreligious worldviews. Nots are generally aware of
one another in their social circles and communities, even if they do not associate
specifically on this basis.
Consistent with their worldviews, Nots generally view human problems
and their solutions in social, cultural, political, economic, technological, or
scientific terms. Rather than address such issues en masse on the basis of their
irreligious identities, this is more often done as concerned citizens in issue-
specific collaborative groups or organizations. A secular humanist affiliate
interviewee observed:
I have thought about...my own frustration that we, as an organization,
do not do more to make ourselves more visible and offer more to the
community [as a group]. But, as I looked at who joins...and what
we do as a group, I finally came to the conclusion that an organized
group of do-gooders is not what [we are] about. We have a member
who volunteers her time at Outside-In, counseling youth in matters
of sexuality; we have a member who organizes and gets [a gender-
rights] group off the ground; we have a member who is a legislator...
attempting to positively influence our state laws; we have a member
who is a psychologist who heads a volunteer alternative program to
Alcoholics Anonymous; we have a couple who spends their vacation at
[a voter education and registration group]; we have a member who puts
50 Secularism & Secularity

in...time and energy in a cable TV show to provide an opportunity for

those who are out there doing the work to be heard. I could go on and
on. I realized that [this organization] is where we all come together to
be renewed, and to find encouragement and strength to continue what
we do individually, every day.

Societal Skepticism
Metaphysical skepticism is, of course, a defining theme among Nots. An
equally pervasive theme in interviews might be called “societal skepticism.” The
destructive potential of human beings in groups and institutions, and how to
overcome this, is a pervasive preoccupation. Theirs is often a conscious and critical
posture toward uncritical group or institutional participation or immersion. This
is equally true among both affiliated and unaffiliated Nots, but while the former
direct this attitude more toward the religious, the latter often direct it toward
both religious and irreligious (or other ideologically based) groups. Interviewees
make frequent reference to “brainwashing,” “demagoguery,” “mind control,”
“the psychology of groups,” “tribalism,” “herd behavior,” “totalitarianism,” and
so on. “Religion” (or metaphysical thinking in general) is viewed as one of the
more powerful forces in human affairs that fosters uncritical group participation
or immersion. Some are monolithic in this view of “religion;” others discriminate
among distinguishable forms, some of which are held to foster “blind” group
immersion more than others.
Societal skepticism is often obscured by reference to individualism or low
sociability or social need. Among some, societal skepticism may well be an
ideological rationalization for limited sociability, but this is by no means true of
all. Most interviewees and survey respondents describe active family and social
lives, as well as organizational involvement.17 In response to a query about the
most important sources of meaning in life, secular humanist survey respondents
most often cited family, friends, and general social relations. Even among the
most socially and organizationally active Nots, however, one finds notes of
societal skepticism. One interviewee, a community leader and self-described life-
long Atheist with an impressive record of formal organizational roles and one of
the most extensive friendship and acquaintance circles in his city, stated that:
[Despite all my involvements] it may be that my nature is such that
I’m not somebody who is a true believer in anything that I join....I
may just have a skeptical turn of mind that goes back to an early age.
I can be enthusiastic, but not committed to do something on the basis
of a doctrine.
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 51

Reasons for Nonaffiliation

What limits organizational affiliation among Nots on the basis of their
irreligiosity? One answer is that they personally see no need to; another answer
is that many are averse to this in principle. Societal skepticism is a factor. While
many affiliated Nots direct their skepticism outward, most acutely toward
anything they deem to be “religion,” the unaffiliated often direct this to groups
organized on the basis of religion or irreligion. An unaffiliated interviewee, for
example, described her father and his colleagues (in both humanist and Atheist
groups) as “too dogmatic,” and as such, “no different from the very religious
groups they criticize.” Other non-affiliates who are familiar with such groups
point to an ironic and uncomfortable unanimity of political and ideological
views among members. As one interviewee, an 86-year-old self-described Atheist
(female), said of Atheists gathering in organized groups:
I think it defeats its own purpose. Once you get into a group, then
you want everyone to think the same way, and then one thing comes
[to another]. I mean, we started with twelve apostles and look what’s
happened....I just can’t imagine being part of a group and saying,
“We’re all Atheists. Aren’t we swell.” You see, that’s the next thing that
happens. We’re smarter than the rest of these guys. And if only they
thought like us, there wouldn’t be all these wars, and all this trouble.
See what happens!?
Limited interest in matters metaphysical or philosophical may also
discourage affiliation on this basis. Interviewees frequently say that the interviews
are personally rewarding since they prompt more systematic reflection than is
typical. Even among the affiliated, there is evidence that despite an ideological
or philosophical basis for affiliation, direct focus on philosophical self-reflection
has limited appeal. For example, in one humanist group, weekly lectures focus
on “four broad areas relevant to Humanism: human well-being, science and
reason, secularism, and humanities, culture, and morality.” The philosophy of
humanism is not explicitly listed and, indeed, whenever member opinions have
been solicited in recent years, this topic garners the least amount of interest.
Greater interest lies with politics, economics, science, topical news issues, and
global affairs rather than humanist philosophy: what are human challenges and
what can be done about them. A habitual question put to lecturers is “What can
we do about it?”
Ambivalence about, or aversion to, public promotion of labeled philo­
sophies or “proselytizing” is also involved. Many interviewees stress a “live and
let live” attitude regarding matters metaphysical. The notion of participating in
52 Secularism & Secularity

an organization whose objective, in part, is to promulgate a specific metaphysical

stance flies in the face of a prevalent feeling that this simply should not matter
in human affairs as much as it seems to. Many prefer to downplay metaphysics
and religiosity or irreligiosity altogether, and relegate all of this to quiet personal
preference.
In this connection, there is ambivalence in some quarters about children’s
philosophical education. On the one hand, many express an interest in expanding
the ranks of the “rational” (i.e., nonreligious) over time. On the other, there is
resistance to explicit irreligious “inculcation” or “brainwashing.” All but a few
are apostates: they have emerged (or “escaped”) from religious backgrounds.
Many vow not to repeat the mistake of “blind culture transmission” with their
own, or others’, children.
There is great store placed on “free choice” in matters metaphysical. When
asked about the importance of a children’s program the response pattern among
humanist survey respondents was notably ambivalent (with a mean of 3.3 and a
median of 3.0 on a 5-point scale, from “not at all” to “very important”). Some
of this is attributable to the fact that most members are past their child-rearing
years. But it is also the case that opinion is divided concerning whether or how
(much) to explicitly promote nonreligious worldviews, and there is general
aversion to “proselytizing” in a “religious” manner.18 Some interviewees profess
ignorance of the metaphysical views of their grown children, suggesting that this
is as it should be.

“Spirituality” and “Religiosity” Among Northwest Nones

and Nots
In Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone,19 it is suggested
that neither the unaffiliated religious nor the “nones proper” in the region “is
without religion.”
Even among the ‘Nones’ only a small minority identify as atheist or
agnostic. In fact, the vast majority of ‘Nones’ claim beliefs and attitudes
more like than unlike those of persons inside churches, synagogues,
temples, and mosques.20
The sociologist Mark Shibley suggests that
[w]hile many Northwesterners are institutionally unencumbered, there
is no reason to believe they are a-spiritual. Most people in the region
who claim no religious preference...are, it can be argued, secular but
spiritual. They encounter the sacred and cultivate spiritual lives outside
mainstream religious institutions.21
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 53

Figure 4-4
“Spirituality” and “Religiosity” Among Humanist Group Members

Descriptors respondents Mean self-description Mean self-description as

apply to themselves as “spiritual” “religious”
(0=not at all; 8=very much) (0=not at all; 8=very much)
Naturalistic (n=38) 2.46 .84
Agnostic (n=33) 2.09 1.03
Scientific (n=58) 2.05 .95
Humanist(ic) (n=89) 2.03 .97
Secular(ist) (n=56) 1.97 .89
Atheist(ic) (n=58) 1.60 .81
Anti-religious (n=27) 1.56 .78
Skeptical (n=44) 1.43 .86

“Spirituality” is defined as “an individual’s personal experience with

sacred things (e.g., God, a divine being, a transcendent reality) and the beliefs
and practices that express that experience.” As evidence, Shibley describes
“three clusters of alternative spirituality” that are “prevalent in the Pacific
Northwest”—New Age spiritualities (e.g., paganism), apocalyptic millennialism
(e.g., survivalists and white supremacists), and the environmental movement
(characterized as “nature religion”).
While survey data consistently show that a majority of those professing
no religious preference exhibit some religious ideas and/or behavior, substantial
minorities do not. As noted earlier, GSS data suggest that roughly one-third
do not believe in, or do not think it is possible to know about, the existence of
God. An equal number rejects “spiritual” as a self-description. There is no reason
to conclude that this is substantially different in the Northwest. On available
measures of nonreligiosity, Northwest residents generally equal or exceed national
estimates.
There is good reason, as suggested here, to suspect that substantial numbers
of Nots in the region do not use the terms Atheist or Agnostic to describe
themselves or their ways of thinking. Further, some may use “spiritual/ity,” but
in explicitly non-transcendental or “nonreligious” senses.
Taking another look at self-descriptions among secular humanist survey
respondents (n=105), “spirituality” ratings were higher than “religiosity,” but
still quite low, as shown in Figure 4-4.
54 Secularism & Secularity

Nonetheless, some respondents seemed willing to use “spiritual/ity” in

restricted ways. In written comments, six said they did not understand what
this means. Among 40 who supplied substantive comments or definitions, 35
explicitly avoided or rejected theistic, supernatural, or transcendental content.22
The pervasive meaning was that of appreciation for existence or emotional
connection with people, humanity, all living things, or nature. Superficially, it
might be said that many of these people are “spiritual.” But what does this mean?
Their use of the term surely does not reflect the transcendental intent or worldview
of an Evangelical Christian or Wiccan. Representative comments were:
• “...in awe of natural processes, not spiritual in a religious sense”
• “...awe and wonder, but I don’t believe there is a conscious spirit or
being”
• “Just a vague feeling of being connected to humanity and nature”
• “Making connections with others is ‘spirituality’”
• “Interest in astronomy” or “...in a variety of social issues”
• “Music and nature can move me in a way I can only describe as
‘spiritual’”
• “Music and emotion”
• “Spirit means ‘breath.’ I enjoy breathing.”
Unaffiliated interviewees who make reference to “spiritual/ity” are
equally careful to parse their meanings so that there is no suggestion of super­
naturalism.
This raises broader questions about the meaning and accuracy of terms
used both by social scientists and the people we study. In both popular and
scientific discourse “spirituality” and “spiritual but not religious” typically
signify unchurched or “alternative” religiosity in some (often undefined but
clearly suggested) transcendental sense. If and when Nots refer to “spiritual/ity,”
however, this is likely without reference to supernaturalism, trancendentalism,
or religiosity in ideological, identity, behavioral, or affiliative terms. This would
seem to reflect a limitation of language. English does not provide clear and
simple means to convey a cognitive or emotional sense of “connectedness” or
appreciation for existence sans transcendentalism or its suggestion.

Unpackaging Customary Categories

The more closely one looks at people’s metaphysical worldviews (and related
behavior), the more customary categories seem inadequate. To comprehend, of
course, it is necessary to simplify and categorize. This said, our understanding
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 55

of such matters may be unreasonably constrained by simple dichotomies and

a tendency to “claim” individuals for one side or the other: the “secular” or
the “sacred,” “nonreligious” or “religious,” “atheist” or “theist,” “nonspiritual”
or “spiritual.” As has been observed many times before, “religious” and “secular”
or “nonreligious” represent a continuum (or multiple continua) rather, or more,
than discrete categories.
Some of my interviewees defy simple categorization. One is vehemently
“atheist” and “anti-religious” (with regard to supernatural or “irrational” ideas),
but participates in Buddhist group meditation (as a form of cognitive-behavioral
therapy with no acceptance of transcendental ideas). Another, trained as a
research scientist, is “skeptical” or “agnostic” about metaphysical questions that
cannot be subjected to empirical discovery. But he also employs Buddhist/Hindu
concepts (e.g., samsara and karma) “metaphorically” (i.e., without accepting
their ontological reality) to frame his ethical philosophy and approach to life.
Another describes herself as nonreligious and skeptical about transcendental
ideas, but she occasionally joins in eclectic “pagan-like” rituals created by relatives
and friends for the enjoyment, social bonding, and colorful celebration of life
they offer. While substantially naturalistic or non-transcendental in orientation,
and so, hardly “religious” or “spiritual” in substantive terms, neither are such
individuals thoroughgoing “nots.” They might be considered “soft” rather than
“hard secularists.”
Forms of human existential and metaphysical wondering, and related
behavior, exhibit a rich mosaic that well-worn dichotomies fail to capture.
There is a great deal going on behind and within customary survey or self-
identification categories.
Study of the “secular” and “secularism” seems to be a broad point of
departure for understanding worldviews, ways of living, and social phenomena
that have limited or no reference to supernatural or (ontologically) trans­cen­
dental ideas. Greater understanding requires that we carefully unpackage the
contents and describe them in ways that fairly reflect their character, complexity,
and diversity.

Endnotes
1. Killen, Patricia O’Connell and Mark Silk, eds., Religion & Public Life in the Pacific
Northwest: The None Zone. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004).
2. Sample characteristics: 24 male, 25 female; age range: 16-87; mean age = 62.4 years;
25 unaffiliated “nots.”
56 Secularism & Secularity

3. American Religious Identification Survey 2001, <http://www.trincoll.edu/Academics/

AcademicResources/values/ISSSC/research/ARIS+2001.htm>.
4. General Social Survey Codebook, 1998. The National Opinion Research Center at
the University of Chicago. May 1, 2006 < http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/>.
5. The GSS only provides data for the “Pacific” region, which includes California.
6. There are, of course, challenges in applying national data to regional estimates.
However, available data on measures indicating substantial absence or rejection of
religious ideas or behavior in Oregon and Washington generally equal or exceed
those from national samples.
7. This is by no means exhaustive. Less frequently heard terms include “empirical/em­
piricist,” “objectivist,” “materialist,” or “monist.” “Bright(s)” is of recent coinage
and is promoted by some in an effort to change public perceptions of “nots” much
as “gay(s)” has done for “homosexuals.”
8. Based on an estimate of 178,000 members of U. S. atheist, humanist, and
freethought organizations in Williamson, William B., “Is the U.S.A. a Christian
nation: Pluralism in the U.S.,” Free Inquiry (Spring 1993), 8(3): 32-34, and circula­
tion figures for principal publications or membership estimates (2004-2006) for
the American Ethical Union, American Atheists, American Humanist Association,
Council for Secular Humanism, Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Society for Humanistic Judaism,
and The Skeptic Society.
9. Detailed estimation is hampered by many factors, such as variation in membership
categories, questionable membership claims or reluctance to disclose membership
information, and lack of documentation on individuals with memberships in mul­
tiple organizations.
10. Steinfels, Peter, “Hard and soft secularism,” Religion in the News (Winter 2006 sup­
plement), 8(3): 8, 11. Hartford, CT: Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society
and Culture and The Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in
Public Life, Trinity College.
11. Kosmin, Barry A., “Hard and soft secularists and hard and soft secularism: An intel­
lectual and research challenge.” Paper presented at the meetings of the Society for
the Scientific Study of Religion, Portland, Oregon, October 21, 2006.
12. Members of skeptical associations (e.g., The Skeptic Society or the Committee for
Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal) present a complex picture.
There are “soft” or “selective” types whose skepticism is focused specifically on ideas
or phenomena that may be subjected to scientific inquiry and may be questioned
or dismissed with available evidence. These, however, may embrace metaphysical
ideas that lie beyond scientific inquiry. By contrast, “hard” or “thoroughgoing”
types direct their skepticism broadly at both purported paranormal and meta­­phys­
ical phenomena. Michael Shermer found in a survey of Skeptic Society members
that 35 percent thought the existence of God likely or possible; 67 percent thought
this unlikely or impossible. Shermer, Michael. How we believe: The search for God in
an age of science. (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000). Reference here
is to thoroughgoing skeptics or rationalists.
 4. The Nonreligious in the American Northwest 57

13. American Humanist Association.

14. Council for Secular Humanism, under the umbrella of the Centers for Inquiry.
15. As suggested by Hout, Michael and Claude S. Fischer. “Why more Americans have
no religious preference: Politics and generations,” American Sociological Review, 67
(2002): 165-190.
16. Although discussion content and Internet exchanges suggest that many or most
participants are “nots,” there is a noticeable reluctance to discuss personal philo­
sophical, metaphysical, or (ir)religious stances. While the irreligiosity of some is
readily apparent in discussion, such matters are generally, as one participant said,
“off-table topics.” Here, “secular” reflects a subordination more than rejection of
matters metaphysical.
17. A check of GSS cumulative data suggests different rather than substantially less
social and organizational involvement among those giving a-theistic and agnostic
responses compared with believers in God. For example:

Don’t Don’t Some Some- Believe Know

believe know power times with God
doubts exists

Average memberships 1.66 1.72 1.87 1.50 1.85 1.79
reported

% of category with
membership in:
Professional societies 24.6 29.4 22.9 16.7 17.9 13.5
Sports clubs 20.0 20.5 23.8 23.3 24.7 16.2
Literary or art groups 15.4 11.8 17.5 8.3 6.9 9.9
Youth groups 10.8 7.1 7.1 10.0 10.4 10.4
School service groups 7.1 15.1 11.2 9.2 14.2 15.0
Political groups 4.6 10.2 4.6 7.5 4.1 2.9
Service groups 4.6 9.5 15.9 7.6 11.9 10.6

18. There are some notable differences concerning children’s education among nonre­
ligious organizations. Great store is placed on children’s guidance in Humanistic
Judaic groups. Paralleling their ritual emphasis, this focuses on Judaic heritage and
ethical guidance sans supernaturalism. Other regional humanist groups vary: one
has emphasized humanistic children’s education in the past, but this has faded as the
founders’ children have aged; others have not pursued such programs due to disin­
terest or divided opinion. The rise of humanist and atheist summer camps in the
U.S. has rekindled interest in educational programs among members of local
groups. There seems to be general agreement among most nonreligious groups
on the value of educating for ethics and critical thinking, but I know of no formal
programs in the region.
19. Killen and Silk.
58 Secularism & Secularity

20. Ibid., 17.

21. Shibley, Mark. “Secular but spiritual in the Pacific Northwest.” Religion & Public
Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark
Silk Eds. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004), 140-141.
22. The five whose comments suggested transcendental meanings present complex re­
sponse patterns:

Comment Religiosity Spirituality Self-descriptions

Scale: 0 = not at all; 8 = very much

“Pantheistic” 1 3 Humanist,
Scientist

“Only in a kind of 2 4 Agnostic,

pantheistic way” Humanist,
Scientist

“I pray when I’m troubled” 3 2 Agnostic,

Humanist

“Reality is in essence spiritual” 4 4 Atheist,

Humanist,
Scientist

“I believe there is a (no response) 5 Atheist,

collective spirit” Humanist,
Scientist,
Skeptical
5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular?
William A. Stahl

I s anyone in Canada secular? A facetious question. Obviously the answer is

yes, but exactly how many is difficult to determine. There are two problems
inherent in the question. A great deal depends, of course, on what one means
by “secular,” a problematic term inextricably bound with 19th-century ideology.
The second problem is that Canada is paradoxical. On the one hand, self-
identification with a religious organization is very high and “belief ” in God is
even higher. On the other hand, few Canadians today attend a place of worship
regularly and religion is conspicuously absent from most of public life.
Note that the question is “is anyone in Canada secular?” rather than “is
Canada a secular society?” The focus of this chapter is on people’s behavior and
not on institutional orders, and “secularization” is taken to mean a decline in
people’s religious beliefs and practices, and not institutional differentiation.
In order to understand the Canadian paradox, it is necessary to briefly sketch
the social and historical context of religion in Canada, which differs profoundly
from that of the United States. The chapter then presents a profile of religious
“dropouts” in Canada, paying particular attention to those who infrequently
attend religious services or who tell the census taker that they have “no religion.”
The chapter concludes by arguing that “secular” is a concept that does not
describe Canada very well but that “disembedding,” as developed by Giddens1
and Taylor,2 more adequately describes the Canadian situation.

The Canadian Religious Context

One can only understand the paradoxical situation of religion in Canada today
by looking at the social and historical context. Many people assume that because
Canada and the United States have an integrated economy, share large elements
of popular culture, and both contain a denominational institutional structure,
religious dynamics in the two countries are similar. This assumption is not

59
60 Secularism & Secularity

correct. In historical context, religion is where the United States and Canada
most differ,3 while Adams4 documents major—and growing—differences in
values between Canadians and Americans.
Both the United States and Canada are pluralistic, but their dynamics have
always been different. The United States has constitutional separation of church
and state. Canada has not had a state church since 1857, but neither does it
have constitutional church-state separation (which allows churches to maintain
a prominent role in education, for instance). American pluralism was grounded
in an underlying, religiously based consensus.5 By contrast, John Porter described
religion as “one of the major bases of political conflict”6 in Canadian history.
Up until World War I, religion was the foremost badge of identity in
Canada—people thought of themselves first as Protestant or Catholic (a role
played since then by language). Religious conflict, together with the chronic lack
of resources inherent in a small population spread over an enormous land, has
bequeathed to Canada a relatively strong institutional emphasis. The religious
entrepreneurs so prominent in American history have been rare in Canada.
A large majority of Canadians identify with one of only three churches:
Roman Catholic, United Church of Canada, or Anglican (65 percent in the
2001 census,7 down from the historical average of 75 percent). And Canadians
have always been overwhelmingly Christian. In the 2001 census, only 6 percent
of Canadians identified with a religion other than Christianity8 (by contrast
the figure in 1871 was 2 percent). On the other hand, this should not obscure
a significant amount of what James9 calls religious dimorphism, the situational
blending or cobbling together of different spiritual traditions, especially among
First Nations people, immigrants, or in “mixed” marriages. Religion in Canada
has always manifested strong regional variations, with Roman Catholics
dominating Quebec and the unchurched being most numerous in British
Columbia.
At the end of World War II church attendance in Canada was extremely
high. It fell steadily until the 1990s. Currently, only 32 percent of Canadians
over 15 attend their place of worship at least monthly, while 19 percent claim no
religious affiliation at all, as seen in Figure 5-1.
In response to the question “Where have all the people gone?” Reginald
Bibby10 has argued convincingly that they have not gone anywhere at all.
Canadians continue to maintain strong religious self-identification. Relatively
few switch churches, and then usually to a denomination close to their religious
“family.” Evangelical Protestants have not increased their percentage of the
population (about 8 percent) since Confederation. Sects and cults remain
marginal. People are not dropping out, Bibby frequently quips, they are only
dropping in.
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 61

Figure 5-1
Religious Affiliation and Attendance Among Canadians 15 and Older
1985 1990 1995 2000 2004 % change 1985-2004
Population aged 15 100 100 100 100 100
& older
No religious affiliation 12 12 15 20 19 7
Frequency of
attendance
Not in last 12 months 19 23 27 21 25 5
Infrequently 28 28 24 28 25 -3
At least monthly 41 37 33 31 32 -9
Data: Statistics Canada, General Social Survey
From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 2

Drop Outs, Drop Ins, and Religious Nones

Do falling levels of church attendance and rising levels of those who say they
have no religion mean that Canada is becoming more secular? Not necessarily,
because these figures measure only two dimensions of religious behavior. There
is some discussion in the literature11 that attendance figures may be skewed by
over-reporting in cultural circumstances where respondents perceive religious
activity to be “expected.” It is also quite possible that at times in Canada when
one’s religion is thought to be “none of your business” attendance or other
practices may be under-reported.
Furthermore, James12 chastises sociologists for uncritically accepting as
normative a monotheistic exclusiveness—as reflected by focusing upon weekly
church attendance—that may miss more individualized, eclectic spirituality.
Indeed, focusing exclusively on this one dimension of religiosity could be
compared to trying to understand the importance of hockey in Canada by only
counting season-ticket holders.
Fortunately, many sociologists recognize the need to look at additional
aspects of religiosity. Clark and Schellenberg13 measure four dimensions:
affiliation, attendance, private religious practices, and the importance of religion
in a person’s life. They conclude their study by developing a Religiosity Index
which combines all four of these dimensions.
62 Secularism & Secularity

Affiliation
Canadians have been asked their religious affiliation by the census since 1871
and by Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) since 1985. This
records people’s self-identification with a religious group, a figure that is usually
significantly higher than the churches’ own membership records as reported in
their Yearbooks. Until the 1960s, however, the Dominion Census or Statistics
Canada did not allow a response of “no religion.”
Since then, the “religious nones” have grown from 4 percent in 1971 to 7
percent in 1981, 12 percent in 1991, and 16 percent in 2001. The GSS puts
the figure at 19 percent of Canadians over 15 in 2004, as seen in Figure 5-1. In
addition, 25 percent of Canadians reported they had not attended services in the
previous year, up 5 percent in the past two decades. People in these two categories
are disproportionately young, as shown in Figure 5-2, disproportionately live in
British Columbia, as shown in Figure 5-3, and are more likely to be native-born
Canadians than immigrants, or, if an immigrant, to be from China or Japan.14
In part, the low levels of affiliation in British Columbia are affected by the
disproportionate numbers of immigrants from China and Japan in the Greater
Vancouver Area. Also note the anomaly in Quebec, which in 2004 had the
largest number of people who never attend services (35 percent), but the lowest
number of people who claim “no religion” (9 percent).
In his Project Canada surveys, Bibby looked more closely at those who
claim “no religion.” Of those in the “no religion” category, he found that 75
percent are under the age of 40,15 and that 63 percent come from a home with
at least one religious parent, as seen in Figure 5-4 (page 64). For most of these
people, “no religion” is a temporary designation, with about one third becoming
reaffiliated within five years and two-thirds within ten years. Desire for religious
rites of passage has remained extremely high for the past twenty years.
For example, in 2000, 89 percent of teenagers nationally wanted a church
wedding, including 79 percent of those claiming “no religion.”16 Nor does “no
religion” equate with unbelief. Bibby17 found that 40 percent of adults and 35
percent of teenagers in that category say they believe in God, and 35 percent of
adults and 30 percent of teenagers say they pray privately. About half express
interest in spirituality, he reports,18 but 98 percent of that interest is in less
conventional forms.

Attendance
Attendance is the most widely used measure of religiosity. But here too the data
are equivocal. Regular attendance (usually defined as weekly attendance) has
declined sharply over the past 50 years for mainline Protestants (United, Anglican,
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 63

Figure 5-2
Young Adults Are Most Likely to Have No Religious Affiliation

No religious affiliation Has a religious affiliation but does not attend services

60
50
40 23
28
30 25 28 24
27 21 27
20 28
20 19 23 24
30 16 18
10 19 23 20
15 16 13 17 14
12 7 10 8 8
0 4
1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004
15 and Over 15-29 30-44 45-59 60 and Over

Data: Statistics Canada, General Social Survey

From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 3

Figure 5-3
British Columbians Are Least Likely to Be Religious

No religious affiliation Has a religious affiliation but does not attend services

60
50
21
40 28 26

30 25 25 20
27 23 22 21
22 36 35
20 19 18 36
23 29 31
19
10 19 13
17 18 16 19 23 23
12 15 6
11 6 9 12 18
0 5 4
1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004 1985 1995 2004
Canada Atlantic Quebec Ontario Prairies British
Canada Columbia

Data: Statistics Canada, General Social Survey

From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 3
64 Secularism & Secularity

Figure 5-4
Mother’s Religion of Religious Nones

None Catholic Protestant Other

3%

30% 37%

30%

Lutheran, Presbyterian) and Roman Catholics in Quebec, with smaller declines

for Roman Catholics outside Quebec. Conservative Protestants have tended to
hold their own, with some groups gaining and others declining over the years.
Clark and Schellenberg19 use monthly (rather than weekly) attendance as a more
valid measure.20 They show that overall attendance has leveled out over the past
10 years at about one-third of the Canadian population, as seen in Figure 5-1
(page 61). Looking at weekly attendance, Bibby21 shows a plateau at 24 percent
through the 1990s, dipping to 21 percent in 2000 and then rebounding to 26
percent in 2003. As we saw above, non-attendees are disproportionately young,
reside in British Columbia (and in this case, Quebec), and are more likely to be
native-born Canadians.

Private Religious Practices

Private religious practices consist of various forms of spirituality, such as prayer,
meditation, or reading sacred texts or praying on one’s own. In everyday
discourse it is not uncommon to hear people say that they are “spiritual” but not
“religious.” Clark and Schellenberg22 found that 53 percent of Canadians engage
in such activities at least monthly, and an additional 11 percent a few times a
year, as seen in Figure 5-5.
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 65

Figure 5-5
Frequency of Religious Practices on One’s Own, Canada, 2002
Frequency of Religious Practices on One’s Own, Canada, 2002
A Few Times Not in Past 12
Weekly Monthly No Religion Total
a Year Months
Total 43 11 11 18 17 100
Men 34 10 13 23 20 100
Women 51 11 10 14 15 100
Age
15 to 29 32 12 12 19 25 100
30 to 44 39 11 12 19 19 100
45 to 59 44 10 11 19 15 100
60 or older 58 9 8 17 9 100
Region of Residence
Atlantic 48 13 13 19 8 100
Quebec 43 11 14 24 7 100
Ontario 44 11 10 17 17 100
Prairies 41 11 10 16 22 100
British 35 8 8 14 36 100
Columbia
Immigration Status
Canadian- 40 11 12 20 17 100
born
Immigrated 51 8 8 17 16 100
before 1982
Immigrated in 50 9 8 12 21 100
1982-2001
Frequency of attendance at religious Services or Meetings
At least 75 13 5 6 - 100
monthly
Infrequently 37 17 25 21 - 100
Not in last 12 27 8 13 51 - 100
months
No religious - - - - 100 100
affiliation
Data: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002
From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 5
66 Secularism & Secularity

What was most significant for Clark and Schellenberg was that 37 percent
of those who attended services infrequently and 27 percent of those who did
not attend services at all engaged in private religious practices on a weekly basis,
“representing 21 percent of the adult population.”23 Unfortunately, those who
had declared they had no religious affiliation were not asked this question in the
GSS, but as seen above, Bibby 24 found that approximately a third of those in the
“no religion” category engaged in some private religious practices at some time
during the year.
The profile here matches what is seen above, with private religious practices
highest among those over the age of 60, who live in Atlantic Canada, and who are
immigrants, and lowest among the young, those who live in British Columbia
and who are native-born Canadians.
These practices are not necessarily those of conventional religion, however.
James 25 points out that many of these private practices may be quite divergent
from the “orthodox” practices of the group with which the person identifies.
Bibby 26 found that of the 73 percent of Canadians who said they have spiritual
needs, 47 percent expressed an interest in less conventional forms of spirituality.
For the 54 percent of Canadians who claim “no religion” but who say they have
spiritual needs, 98 percent are interested in less conventional forms. Obviously
interest does not automatically lead to practice.

The Importance of Religion in a Person’s Life

The fourth dimension of religiosity is the importance of religion in a person’s
life. Clark and Schellenberg ranked people’s responses to this question as high,
moderate or low, based on a five-point Likert Scale, as seen in Figures 5-6 and
5-7.
Again, those who declared “no religion” were not asked this question.
They found that overall, 44 percent of Canadians ranked the importance of
religion as “high” and 19 percent as “low.” For those who did not attend services
regularly but who engaged in private religious practices at least monthly, 45
percent ranked religion as “high.” Among those who engaged in neither public
nor private religious practices, 15 percent still ranked the importance of religion
in their lives as “high.” For those rating the importance of religion as “low,” the
profile remained the same: more men than women, more young than old, more
in British Columbia than elsewhere, and more native born than immigrants.
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 67

Figure 5-6
The Importance of Religion to One’s Life, Canada, 2002
Importance of Religion to You*
High Moderate Low No Religion Total
Total 44 20 19 17 100
Men 36 21 23 20 100
Women 51 20 14 15 100
Age
15 to 29 34 20 22 25 100
30 to 44 39 23 20 19 100
45 to 59 43 22 20 15 100
60 or older 62 16 13 9 100
Region of Residence
Atlantic 54 22 17 8 100
Quebec 41 26 26 7 100
Ontario 47 19 16 17 100
Prairies 42 19 17 22 100
British 34 15 15 36 100
Columbia
Immigration Status
Canadian- 40 22 21 17 100
born
Immigrated 55 15 15 16 100
before 1982
Immigrated in 57 12 10 21 100
1982-2001

*Importance of religion to you is scored from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (very important). High importance
is defined as a score of 4 or 5, moderate importance as a score of 3, and low importance as a score of 1 or 2.
Those reporting no religious affiliation were not asked this question. Figures are percentages.

Data: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002

From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 6
68 Secularism & Secularity

Figure 5-7
The Importance of Religion to One’s Life
by Attendance and Private Religious Practice, Canada, 2002

Religious Practices Importance of Religion to You

Attendance at Private Religious High Moderate Low
Religious Services Practices
At Least Monthly At Least Monthly 87 11 2
At Least Monthly Infrequently or Never 60 27 12
Infrequently or Never At Least Monthly 45 36 18
Infrequently or Never Infrequently or Never 15 31 54
Data: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002
From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 6

The Religiosity Index

As a final measure, Clark and Schellenberg combined all four dimensions into a
Religiosity Index, as seen in Figure 5-8. Affiliation was scored as 0 or 1, and each
of the other three dimensions ranked from 0 to 4. The combined score ranges
results in low religiosity (0-5), moderate (6-10) or high (11-13). Overall, 40
percent of Canadians ranked “low,” following the familiar pattern. Of particular
significance is the importance of religious upbringing. When neither parent was
religious, 85 percent of the children scored a “low” degree of religiosity. Clark
and Schellenberg conclude: “even when other forms of religious behavior are
considered, almost half of Canadians aged 15 to 29 still have a low degree of
religiosity.”27

Secular or Disembedded?
What do these trends say about secularity in Canada? Given the ambiguous and
paradoxical nature of the data, interpretation becomes dependent upon theory.
Unfortunately, the two theories most discussed in the literature, secularization
and rational-choice, are both ideological and neither describes the Canadian
situation adequately. As Beyer says, “If a central problem with secularization
theory be that it falsely universalizes the European experience (at least to
“Western” countries), then religious market theories run the same risk, except
that their provincialism would be American.”28
The argument that religion is declining is hard to sustain when eight of ten
Canadians self-identify with a religious group, even if only three in ten attend
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 69

Figure 5-8
Religiosity Index, Canada, 2002
Degree of Religiosity

Low (0-5) Moderate (6-10) High (11-13) Total

Total 40 31 29 100
Men 48 28 24 100
Women 32 33 35 100
Age
15 to 29 48 30 22 100
30 to 44 43 32 25 100
45 to 59 39 31 30 100
60 or older 26 30 44 100
Region of Residence
Atlantic 29 35 36 100
Quebec 39 37 24 100
Ontario 37 30 33 100
Prairies 42 28 31 100
British Columbia 54 22 25 100
Immigration Status
Canadian-born 41 32 26 100
Immigrated before 1982 33 27 40 100
Immigrated in 1982-2001 34 25 41 100
religion of parents
Both parents same religion 32 34 33 100
Parents from different 50 28 22 100
religions
Neither parent religious 85 6 10 100
Data: Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey, 2002
From: Clark & Schellenberg, 2006: 7
70 Secularism & Secularity

services regularly. Attendance decline leveled out a decade ago, and Bibby29
reports that a rebound has begun. Private religious practices are widespread.
And of the nearly 20 percent of Canadians who say they have no religion, 40
percent say they believe in God, a third engage in private religious practices, and
two-thirds eventually reaffiliate with a church. The number of people in Canada
who would fit the “classical” definition of being secular is quite small.
A concept that may better describe the Canadian situation is what Anthony
Giddens30 and Charles Taylor 31 call disembedding. Giddens defines disembedding
as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their
restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”32 Both he and Taylor see
it as a central and ongoing characteristic of modernity. In traditional society
individuals were embedded in their communities; that is, people’s identities
were shaped within the bounded context of religion, authority, and view of the
cosmos. As Taylor puts it, “From the standpoint of the individual’s sense of
self, [embeddedness] means the inability to imagine oneself outside a certain
matrix.”33
The long, complex process of modernization is in large part a process of
disembedding, which according to Taylor “involved the growth and entrench­
ment of a new self-understanding of our social existence, one that gave an
unprecedented primacy to the individual.”34 Disembedding is thus not just the
loss of community or the decline of religion. It is the substitution of one moral
order for another, complete with new forms of solidarity, authority, and trust.
Looked at through this theoretical perspective, the Canadian data indicates
that cultural boundaries are being redrawn and the nature of religious practices
has changed. Canadians are less embedded in their religious communities, but
a large majority of Canadians seem to be unwilling to abandon their religious
identities. Individual spirituality, a good deal of it eclectic, has become more
important and large numbers of Canadians engage in private religious practices.
Canadians have not abandoned the church, but what they want from it has
changed. Most people want the church to provide rites of passage and a holiday
experience, many still look to it for meaning and spirituality, but few are any
longer committed to the church as a total life style. What at one time may
have been considered normative behavior, such as weekly attendance, is now a
virtuoso performance.
These changes in religious behavior have consequences for the organ­izational
and institutional dimensions of religion as well. The church is no longer the
center of the community, nor is it the sole arbitrator of morality or legitimacy.
Many churches, whose top-heavy structures have been slow to adapt, now face
financial problems. But change is not the same thing as decline.
 5. Is Anyone in Canada Secular? 71

Endnotes
1. Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity, (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1990).
2. Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2004).
3. cf. Beyer, Peter, “Religious Vitality in Canada: The Complementarity of Religious
Market and Secularization Perspectives.” Religion and Canadian Society, Ed. Lori
Beaman, (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2006), 71-90; Grant, John Webster,
“The Church in the Canadian Era,” A History of the Christian Church in Canada,
Eds. Terrance Murphy and Roberto Perin. Vol. 3 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
1972); Lipset, Seymour Martin, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of
the United States and Canada, (London: Routledge, 1990).
4. Adams, Michael, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging
Values, (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2003).
5. cf. Bellah, Robert, 1975, The Broken Covenant, (New York: The Seabury Press,
1975); Handy, Robert, A Christian America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971); Mead, Sidney, The Nation With the Soul of a Church, (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975).
6. Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965),
512.
7. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census, February 13, 2007, http://www12.statcan.ca/eng-
lish/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/rel/canada.cfm.
8. Ibid.
9. James, William Closson, 2006, “Dimorphs and Cobblers: Ways of Being Religious
in Canada,” Ed. Lori Beaman, Religion and Canadian Society, (Toronto: Canadian
Scholar’s Press, 2006).
10. Bibby, Reginald, Fragmented Gods, (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1987); Bibby, Regi-
nald, Unknown Gods, (Toronto: Stoddard, 1993); Bibby, Reginald, Restless Gods,
(Toronto: Stoddard, 2002); Bibby, Reginald, 2004, Restless Churches, (Toronto: No-
valis, 2004).
11. cf. Hadaway, C. Kirk and Penny Long Marler, “How Many Americans Attend Wor-
ship Each Week? An Alternative Approach to Measurement,” Journal for the Sci-
entific Study of Religion, 44(3): 307-322; Reimer, Samuel H., “A Look at Cultural
Effects on Religiosity: A Comparison Between the United States and Canada,” Ed.
Lori Beaman, Religion and Canadian Society, (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press,
2006), 54-70.
12. James, pp. 119-131.
13. Clark, Warren and Grant Schellenberg, “Who’s Religious,” Canadian Social Trends
(Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Summer 2006, Catalogue No. 11-008).
14. Clark and Schellenberg.
72 Secularism & Secularity

15. Bibby, 2004.

16. Bibby, 2002, 2004.
17. Bibby, 2004.
18. Bibby, 2002.
19. Clark and Schellenberg.
20. see also Bibby, 2002, 2004.
21. Bibby, 2004, p. 23.
22. Clark and Schellenberg.
23. Ibid. 2006, p. 4.
24. Bibby, 2004
25. James.
26. Bibby, 2002, pp. 180-182.
27. Clark and Schellenberg, p. 7.
28. Beyer, p. 71.
29. Bibby, 2004.
30. Giddens.
31. Taylor.
32. Giddens, p. 21.
33. Taylor, p. 55.
34. Ibid. p. 50.
6. The North American Pacific Rim:
A Response to Frank Pasquale and William Stahl
Patricia O’Connell Killen

I approach the Pasquale and Stahl chapters as an historian of religion, primarily

of Christianity in North America, who has been working for some time on
understanding the religious dynamics of the Pacific Northwest and British
Columbia.1 Most recently, as part of the Religion by Region project of the
Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, I co-edited Religion
and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone 2 with Mark Silk. The
volume provides a first take on two questions:
1) What is the religious configuration on the ground in the
Pacific Northwest?
2) What difference does it makes for public life in the region?
As the volume’s subtitle suggests, the Nones, those whom the American
Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found claimed no religious identification,
are prominent in this region. They make up 25 percent of the adult population
in Washington and 21 percent in Oregon, combining to give this region the
largest proportion of Nones of any in the United States.3 Further, according
to Census Canada, 36 percent of the adult population in British Columbia
identifies itself as having no religion.4
The North American Pacific Rim region and the questions of the Religion
by Region project, then, are germane to the goal of exploring who is “secular”
today by considering comparative geographic perspectives on the topic. Not
only are the majority of the people in this part of the U.S. and Canada outside
the doors of church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or any other conventional
religious institutions; a substantial portion of the adult population has moved
beyond even identifying with a religious family/heritage of any kind. Here the

73
74 Secularism & Secularity

significant population of Nones, coupled with the demographic thinness of

conventional religious groups, displays the erosion of the religious institutions
and forms of individual religiosity that have shaped religious life in the West since
the early modern period. Equally importantly, it signals the emergence of new
forms of religiosity and more fluid forms of religious organization. The religious
configuration and dynamics of this region, then, demand thinking anew about
individual religiosity and about religion as a social and cultural force.

Frank Pasquale:
“The Nonreligious in the American Northwest”
Frank Pasquale’s chapter offers a report on current ethnographic research he is
carrying out in the Portland and Seattle metropolitan areas. He is exploring the
beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of a group of adults whom he characterizes as the
“affirmatively nots,” adults whom he understands to be explicitly irreligious and
to hold explicitly secular worldviews. Pasquale’s Nots comprise approximately
one-third of the Nones in Oregon and Washington, or about 500,000 adults out
of a total adult population of slightly more than 7.4 million (a total population
of 9.7 million). His larger estimate of 640,000, reached by taking percentages
of adult respondents from ARIS and calculating an actual Not population from
a figure for the total, not the adult population, seems a bit high. Further, as
Pasquale himself notes about his own calculations, it is problematic to extrapolate
from surveys that use the U.S. Pacific census region, which includes California,
or from national surveys, to Oregon and Washington as a separate region.5
Disagreements with his calculations aside, Pasquale’s ethnographic research
on the Nots makes a contribution to an understanding of the Nones by dint of
his hard work on the ground: ferreting out an availability sample, identifying
and counting groups, observing and interviewing their members, describing
how Nots think, as well as their attitudes, the nature of their social relationships,
and their public presence. His preliminary research shows that most Nots do
not affiliate with “organizations pertinent to their metaphysical worldviews,”
are reluctant to identity themselves with a label, though whatever description
they give of their worldview emphasizes that it is naturalistic, and are ambivalent
about committing to organizations lest they give away their independence of
thought and action.
They share concern “about misrepresentation or misunderstanding of non­
religious people, erosion of church-state separation, public and political influence
of conservative religion, and aspects of American domestic and international
policy.”6 The small minority who are in secular humanist groups, says Pasquale,
“struggle for public recognition and legitimacy,” yet do not want to engage
in recruiting or in forcing their views onto their children.7 Most participate
 6. The North American Pacific Rim 75

publicly as citizens in “issue-specific collaborative groups or organizations.”8

They tend to be more action and issue oriented than they are interested in
reflection on metaphysical topics.9
What is striking about Pasquale’s description of the Nots is how congruent
it shows their attitudes and behavior to be with other Nones in the region, and in
many ways, with the religious style of the region generally. This is true especially
of two features of the Nots that his research highlights: their intense, ethically
construed individualism and their “social skepticism,” defined as their “pervasive
preoccupation” with “the destructive potential of human beings in groups and
institutions, and how to overcome” it. They exhibit the strong impulse to free
and unfettered activity and the ambivalence about social connections that has
rendered conventional social institutions relatively weak in this region since
earliest European-American settlement.10 Keysar and Kosmin report similar
findings about individualism and loose institutional connections for Nones
nationally.11
Where some of the Nots differ from the majority of Nones and the general
population of the region is in their self-conscious insistence on articulating
their worldviews in naturalistic terms.12 They consider worldviews that include
a “supernatural” dimension highly problematic and define themselves over
against people who hold this position. Whether and how to understand the
Nots’ reflective construction of their worldviews as in some way “religious” or
“spiritual” is at the center of Pasquale’s disagreement with the treatment of Nones
in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest.
In the chapter “Secular but Spiritual,” Mark Shibley focused on the majority
of the Nones, the 67 percent who agree strongly or somewhat that God exists.13
He argues that while all Nones are disconnected from conventional religious
institutions both by identification and affiliation, the majority of Nones, the
two-thirds who are religious by at least one conventional measure—belief—are
spiritually open and so religious. Shibley proposes that, for the None majority,
“Perhaps religious matters are simply experienced and expressed differently” in
the region and goes on to employ a broad interpretive framework to “better
illuminate the core values, ritual practices, types of transcendent experience, and
forms of community that engage non-church-going Northwesterners.”14
Pasquale’s difference with Shibley over his choice to explore the majority
of the Nones who are spiritually open rather than the minority of Nones who
are affirmatively secular, even materialist, rests partly on Pasquale’s claim that
the latter are distinctively and importantly different from other Nones. It also,
however, raises an issue of definition. Specifically, in discussions of secularization,
should naturalistic worldviews be considered religious or spiritual? Is reflective
meaning-making a spiritual activity?
76 Secularism & Secularity

Historically in the academic study of religion some naturalistic and

nontheistic forms, such as Buddhism, have been included in the category of
religion. In the academic study of spirituality, naturalistic worldviews also fit
under the widely accepted definition of spirituality as a total, embodied response
to life.15 Further, as Yves Lambert has noted in his “Religion in Modernity as a
New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms,” summarizing the work
of Karl Jaspers, Joseph Kitagawa, and Robert Bellah, a radical demythologization,
collapse of dualistic worldviews, and impulse to find meaning within history and
the natural world are key features of the modernization process in which we live
and affect religion.16
It is not accurate, today, to presume even that theists construe the world
in terms of the natural and supernatural. Most forms of theism today are
characterized by notions of this-worldly salvation. It seems, then, that establishing
firm distinctions between the worldviews of the Nots, the spiritually open
Nones, and many theists is more difficult than Pasquale suggests. His adoption
of Kosmin’s categories of hard and soft secularism suggests that he himself
recognizes the difficulty.17 Pasquale’s research and his disagreement with the
treatment of Nones in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest point up
the complexity of the relationship among “meaning-making” and the categories
of belief, participation, identification, and behavior in understanding individual
religiosity.
With regard to public life, as noted earlier, Pasquale’s Nots, like other
Nones both regionally and nationally, as well as many theists in the Pacific
Northwest, are reluctant to join civic or political organizations. They do so,
primarily, to move forward an agenda regarding a specific issue that carries
ethical import for them. As Keysar and Kosmin note, these specific issues
increasingly are ideologically charged.18 This pattern of episodic public
engagement on the part of even the most institutionally aversive, we argue
in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest, contributes to a larger
individual and institutional religious sensibility that shapes the region, including
less recognized dimensions of public life.
Based on his research to date, Pasquale’s Nots differ little from other
Nones or even most theists in the Pacific Northwest. His research on
the Nots is most valuable as a study of a limit case that sheds light on
broader emerging trends and shifts across religion and culture. I hope
he will carry the monograph that results from his research in that direction,
perhaps along the lines of what the anthropologist Michael Brown did in
approaching the deeper meanings of shifts in spirituality in the U.S. through
channeling as a limit case. 19
 6. The North American Pacific Rim 77

William Stahl:
“Is Anyone in Canada Secular?”
William Stahl’s chapter shifts attention from close ethnographic research to
much broader, complex national considerations, a take on secularization in
Canada. Using both national and comparative provincial data on religious
belonging, belief, and behavior, he argues that the contemporary Canadian
situation is paradoxical. He notes that “self-identification with a religious
organization is very high and ‘belief ’ in God is even higher,” but at the same
time, “few Canadians attend a place of worship regularly and religion is
conspicuously absent” from most of Canadian public life.20 His emphasis in
the chapter is not on institutional secularization, the process by which religious
institutions lose control over successive areas of human social life, but on the
behavior of the people, and so he defines secularization as “a decline in people’s
religious beliefs and practices” which he distinguishes from “institutional
differentiation.”21
While acknowledging differences among provinces, Stahl argues that
nationally, religious identification, religious practice, albeit frequently in non­
traditional forms, and interest in spirituality remain high in Canada. Census
Canada shows that in 2004, 81 percent of Canadians claimed a religious
identification, the vast majority Christian. The relative market share of the
three major denominations—Roman Catholic, United Church of Canada, and
Anglican—and of the smaller set of evangelical churches has remained quite
steady. Thirty-two percent of Canadians over the age of 15 “attend a place of
worship at least monthly.” Nineteen percent of Canadians claim no religious
identity.22 Those who claim no religion, Stahl points out, are primarily under age
30 and reside in British Columbia. Further, says Stahl, according to studies by
Reginald Bibby, two-thirds re-affiliate with a religious body within ten years.23
Despite the growth in the number who claim no religion, Stahl argues that
when affiliation and attendance are supplemented with data on private religious
practices and the importance of religion in an individual’s life, the Canadian
picture shows a relatively robust religiousness, albeit one that is increasingly
disconnected from conventional religious institutions. He cites research showing
that nearly 65 percent of Canadians engage in private religious practices at least
a few times a year, with most of this group doing so at least monthly. Thirty-
seven percent of those who attend services infrequently or not at all, engage
“in private religious practices on a weekly basis.”24 Nearly three quarters of
Canadians express having “spiritual needs.” One half of the Canadians who have
no religion express spiritual needs. Those who do are interested overwhelmingly
in “less conventional forms” of spiritual practice.25
78 Secularism & Secularity

Bringing his data together, Stahl argues that, while the “number of people
in Canada who would fit the ‘classical’ definition of being secular is quite
small,” there is a significant shift occurring in religion in Canada. This is a shift,
however, that in his judgment neither secularization theory nor rational choice
theory adequately explains. Both of these theories are too rooted in specific
historical settings, the former in Western Europe with its history of contest
between political and religious institutions, and the latter in the United States,
with its history of religious voluntarism and separation of church and state.
Instead, argues Stahl, the data show a process of religious “disembedding” in
Canada, a term he borrows from Anthony Giddens. Quoting Giddens, Stahl
defines “disembedding” as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts
of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”
This process, Stahl says—following Charles Taylor—expresses “a central and
ongoing characteristic of modernity.”26 It is best understood not as “the loss of
community” or the “decline of religion” but rather as “the substitution of one
moral order for another, complete with new forms of solidarity, authority, and
trust.”27
Stahl’s conceptualization of the Canadian data situates the religious change
going on there squarely within the larger frame of modernization theory,
a move that advances the understanding of secularization by highlighting its
multiple dimensions and the particular way that the process ensues in very
specific historical, cultural contexts. His caveat that change in religious belief,
identification, and participation does not equal secularization, is well taken. At
the same time, I think Stahl may be underestimating the significance of
institutional secularization for the trajectory of individual religious ident­
ification and practice over time. Canada may well be undergoing a process of
secularization not only institutional but also individual.
To advance this consideration I note the difference in the religious history
of Canada and the United States, a difference that Stahl also emphasizes. As he
says, the U.S. experience of religious “pluralism was grounded in an underlying,
religiously based consensus.” In Canada, however, while there has not been “a
state church since 1857,” neither is there “constitutional church-state separation.”
Rather, religion in Canada has been a major point of political conflict and a
foremost badge of identity. As Stahl puts it, “Religious conflict, together with
the chronic lack of resources inherent in a small population spread over an
enormous land, has bequeathed to Canada a relatively stronger institutional
emphasis.”28
That emphasis, however, existed in part because religion, for the reasons
Stahl noted, remained closely woven in with other ascriptive factors in indi­viduals’
 6. The North American Pacific Rim 79

lives until at least the 1960s. The strength of religion as part of a web of ascriptive
factors was supported by the cooperative relationship between political and
religious institutions. My question: what is the relative weight and staying power
of Canadians’ institutional emphasis, including the current residual religious
identification that is uncoupled from regular participation, when religious
institutions themselves have contributed significantly to the secularization of
the public sphere in Canada during the past fifty years? The historian Mark
Noll, drawing on the work of Canadian historians and sociologists, including
Reginald Bibby, notes that in Canada during the past forty years the ideology
of pluralism replaced the traditional Christian ideologies of French and English
Canada. “The social cohesion that the churches once provided is now offered by
political and economic loyalties, an ideology of toleration, personal growth, and
multiculturalism.”29
It is not clear to what kind of social cohesion these forces will lead. It does
seem, however, with its “no religion” population overwhelmingly young—under
age 30—and with only two-thirds of those re-affiliating within a decade, that we
must consider whether Canada may be undergoing a slow process of individual
secularization. That process may be the combined fruit of Canadian religious
institutions having advanced a religiously inspired, but now independent,
ideology of multiculturalism and the process of “disembedding” with its re­
configuration of belief, belonging, and valuing.

Conclusion
Frank Pasquale’s and William Stahl’s chapters point up sharp changes in
individ­ual religious sensibility and practice that complicate and push a refinement
of the understanding of who is “secular” today. Change, as Stahl notes, cannot be
equated with secularization. At the same time, “disembedding”—the separation
of religious belief, identification, and participation from a nexus of ascriptive
factors—radically expands religious individualism and religious voluntarism.
The more individualistic religion becomes, the more stretched the historic
concepts of the secular and secularization.
Three more theoretical questions arise from these chapters:
• How should the nature of religiosity among the Nones, a population that
construes its philosophical, metaphysical, or “religious” meaning-making
as the project of individuals elaborating a worldview, primarily in
natural­istic terms, and doing so mostly disconnected from religious
institutions, be understood?
• How should the patterns of public participation, the public presence
80 Secularism & Secularity

and effect, if any, of a population with a heightened sense of “social

skepticism” and reluctance to make long-term institutional commit­
ments, be understood?
• And what is the public, political, social presence and power of religion
in relation to other social and cultural forces when its connections
within a web of ascriptive factors are weakened or severed and it is
“disembedded”?
Beyond these specific questions, however, is a larger possibility to be
considered. Perhaps the Nones on the North American Northern Pacific Rim
exhibit what Ernst Troeltsch argued would be the dominant form of religion at
the end of the industrial period, inner-worldly mysticism.30

Endnotes
1. I want to thank Professor Mark Shibley, Department of Sociology, Southern Oregon
University, for providing his sociological expertise in conversation about the two
papers. I am responsible for any errors in the interpretation of the sociological data
in this response.
2. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Pacific
Northwest: The None Zone [henceforth RPLPNW] (AltaMira Press, 2004).
3 See Ibid. at 28-29.
4. See William Stahl, “Is Anyone in Canada Secular,” Figure 5-3.
5. See Frank Pasquale, “The Nonreligious in the American Northwest,” p. 42-43.
6. Pasquale, p. 46.
7. Pasquale, p. 46, 52.
8. Pasquale, p. 49.
9. Pasquale, p. 50-51.
10. Pasquale, p. 49-52; “Introduction,” RPLPNW: 10-14.
11. Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin, “The Freethinkers in a Free Market of
Religion,” p. 24, 26.
12. Pasquale, p. 49.
13. Mark Shibley, “Secular but Spiritual,” in RPLPNW: 143.
14. Shibley in RPLPNW: 139.
15. Joan Wolski Conn, “Dancing in the Dark: Women’s Spirituality and Ministry” in
Robert J. Wicks, ed. Handbook of Spirituality for Ministers volume 1 (Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press, 1995).
 6. The North American Pacific Rim 81

16. Yves Lambert, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New
Religious Forms?” Sociology of Religion 60/3 (Fall 1999), quoted from <http://pro-
quest.umi.com/pdqlink?did=45346863>, 3-4.
17. Pasquale, p. 46.
18. Keysar and Kosmin, p. 24, 26.
19. See for example Michael Brown’s trenchant analysis of broader trends in U.S. culture
in The Channeling Zone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
20. Williams Stahl, “Is Anyone in Canada Secular?,” p. 59.
21. Stahl, p. 59.
22. Stahl, p. 60 and Figure 5-1.
23. Stahl, p. 62.
24. Stahl, p. 64.
25. Stahl, p. 66.
26. Stahl, p. 70, quoting Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990): 21.
27. Stahl, p. 70.
28. Stahl, p. 60.
29. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75:2 (June
2006): 258, 261.
30. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, reprint ed. (Louis-
ville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992).
7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image”:
A Contemporary Overview of Secular Australians
Andrew Singleton

I n 2006, the Australian federal government announced that it was funding a

program to place school chaplains in all Australian schools, at a total cost of
Aus$90 million. This was met with both praise and derision in the mainstream
press. For example, a columnist in one major metropolitan daily noted that
the plan potentially contravened the Australian constitution, while others
fretted that Christian philosophy would be taught to the exclusion of other
perspectives. The presidents of various rationalist and humanist societies wrote
a joint letter to one newspaper warning that the plan favored “zealous evangelical/
fundamentalist/Pentecostal groups.” Others applauded the initiative. One wrote
a letter thanking all the politicians involved and concluded: “I give all thanks
to God, who makes all things possible.”
Debate about the school chaplain plan constitutes just one instance in
which secular and religious perspectives on ethical, legal, civic and legislative
matters have been aired in public. Other notable examples include legislation
on stem-cell research, the availability of the abortion drug RU 486, and gay
marriage. And yet, as the responses noted above testify, various attempts to
“Christianize” public life continue to meet strong resistance, usually from a
committed few “secularists.” Most objectors seek to defend the secular character
of the Australian state, which is enshrined in the constitution.1
Debates about religion’s role in society have been part of public life since
the Australian colony’s inception. However, contemporary discussions are taking
place against the backdrop of some significant recent changes to Australia’s
religious demography. Australian census data reveal that over the past fifty
years, the percentage of the population affiliating with the major Protestant
denominations has declined, while the percentage identifying with religions
apart from Christianity (particularly Islam and Buddhism), alternative religions
83
84 Secularism & Secularity

(including witchcraft), neo-Pentecostal Christian groups, and those not affiliating

with any religion, have all grown significantly.2
Arguably, what it means to be either religious or secular is different in a
society that is now post-industrial, multicultural, and religiously diverse and in
which one’s religious identification is increasingly a matter of personal choice
rather than social obligation.
In these changing times, it is the religiously committed or the spiritually
inclined who are accorded the most public attention, rather than the secular.
After the 2001 Australian census many newspaper articles on Paganism
appeared, featuring lines such as: “Nature religions, including witches, druids,
are Australia’s fastest growing religious group,” “The Neo-pagans move from
strength to strength,” and “It’s the fastest-growing religion in Australia.”
Secular people have always been an important part of Australia’s social fabric.
Yet there remain a number of questions about who secular Australians today are.
• Are they younger or older?
• Are most former believers in God?
• Do they hold different values compared to religious Australians?
This chapter attempts to answer these questions.
Drawing on data from various Australian national censuses and the national
Spirit of Generation Y (SGY) research project,3 it presents a contemporary
overview of the secular members of contemporary Australian society. These are
people who reject religious and spiritual beliefs, practice, and affiliation. For
them, religion has little salience in their daily lives and their life orientation is
abidingly “this-worldly.”4
This chapter begins by describing recent changes in Australia’s religious
profile, which provides a context for understanding contemporary secularity.
Secularity cannot be identified and explained without a discussion of religion,
for the secular are those who are not religious. Next is an examination of levels
of religious and spiritual belief and non-belief in Australia, which is used to
identify the resolutely secular portion of Australian society—14 percent of the
13-59-year-old population (the age range of the SGY survey respondents). This
is followed by a socio-demographic profile of the secular, and then an exploration
of the ways in which this group differs from religious Australians.

The Context of Contemporary Secularity:

Australia’s Changing Religious Profile
In order to understand the context of Australian secularity, this section describes
changes in Australia’s religious profile from 1901 until 2001. The best picture of
 7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image” 85

religious change in Australia can be obtained by examining religious affiliation

data from various national censuses. Not affiliating with a religion is a partial
indicator of secularity. Figure 7-1 presents selected national census data on
Australian’s religious affiliation from 1901 to 2001. The most significant changes
have taken place over the past thirty years.

Figure 7-1.
Religious Affiliation Among Australians for the Years 1901-2001

Religious Affiliation
Census Other Total Other No Not stated/
Year Anglican Catholic inadequately
Christian Christian religions religion
% % described
% % % %
%
1901 39.7 22.7 33.7 96.1 1.4 0.4 2
1933 38.7 19.6 28.1 86.4 0.8 0.2 12.9
1947 39.0 20.9 28.1 88.0 0.5 0.3 11.1
1961 34.9 24.9 28.4 88.3 0.7 0.4 10.7
1971 31.0 27.0 28.2 86.2 0.8 6.7 6.2
1981 26.1 26.0 24.3 76.4 1.4 10.8 11.4
1991 23.8 27.3 22.9 74.0 2.6 12.9 10.5
2001 20.7 26.6 20.7 68.0 4.9 15.5 11.7

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Year Book Australia 2003.

Table based on one presented in the 2003 Year Book.

Bouma notes that until 1947 “Anglicans [previously known as the Church
of England], Presbyterians, and Methodists together comprised 60 percent of
the population, dominating Australian religious life” 5 (1947 being the first post-
war census). Between 1901 and 1947, Catholics constituted about 20 percent of
the population, and religions apart from Christianity generally totaled less than
1 percent of the population. Those affiliated with no religion also accounted for
less than 1 percent.
Among the most significant postwar shifts in Australia’s religious profile
is the sharp decrease in the percentage who affiliate themselves with the major
Protestant denominations, particularly the once-dominant Anglican Church,
whose percentage of adherents halved between 1947 and 2001. Other Protestant
groups, including the Presbyterians, have also experienced a decline: the total of
“other Christian” has fallen from 33.7 percent in 1901 to 20.7 percent in 2001.
86 Secularism & Secularity

But within this category, some Christian groups have improved their
market share, particularly the Pentecostals.6 These more fundamentalist groups
are now a conspicuous presence in Australia’s religious landscape. The largest
congregation in Australia is Sydney’s Hillsong Assemblies of God. Their annual
national conference has been attended in recent years by the Prime Minister,
Treasurer, and the state Premier, while an album of Hillsong worship music
reached the number-one position on the national (secular) album chart.7
The other major Christian group, the Catholics, have fared much better
than the Anglicans, having increased by 6 percentage points since 1947. Large
numbers of postwar immigrants to Australia were Catholic, originating first from
Southern Europe and later from Asia.8 Other contributing factors include the
higher birth rate among Catholics in the 1950s and 1960s.9 Postwar migration
has altered Australia’s religious profile in other important ways, notably the
percentage who affiliate themselves with religions apart from Christianity.
Adherence to Islam increased by 40 percent between 1996 and 2001, while
adherence to Buddhism grew by 79 percent during the same period.10
The most notable pattern in Figure 7-1 is the increase in those declaring
that they have no religious affiliation, which grew from 0.3 percent of the
population in 1947 to 15.5 percent in 2001. The large increase between 1961
and 1971 occurred in part because in 1971 the instruction “if no religion, write
none” was first introduced.11 Between 1981 and 2001, the proportion of the
population declaring no religious affiliation increased by almost 5 percentage
points. Many of those now identifying as “no religion” probably once would
have identified with one of the previously stronger Protestant groups.12
Between 1996 and 2001, the number who identified as Agnostics increased
by 100 percent, while the number of self-identified Atheists increased by 226
percent.13 However, the numbers who identify themselves on the census this
way are very few: 24,000 Atheists and 18,000 Agnostics were counted in the
2001 census.
People who choose not to answer the religion question on the census, or who
provide inadequate answers, are categorized as “not stated” and “inadequately
defined.” Apart from a sizeable dip in 1971, these two categories have represented
more than 10 percent of the population in censuses since 1933.
The contemporary picture that emerges from these census data is one of
religious differentiation and diversity, notably characterized by a “decline in the
hegemony of the English Protestant establishment,”14 and the growth of other
religious and spiritual groups. The religious marketplace in Australia is now
more segmented and less centralized than in any previous time.
The spiritually interested have more choices open to them, both from world
 7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image” 87

religions and newer alternatives. Significantly, amid these patterns of religious

growth, decline and differentiation, census data affirm that a sizable portion of
the Australian population is comfortable declaring that they have no religious
affiliation and that this preparedness not to affiliate has increased markedly in
the last thirty-five years.

Who is Secular?
While many who indicate on their census form that they have no religion are
probably secular in their life orientation, a declaration of “no religious affiliation”
seems an inadequate measure of how religious or secular someone is. Indeed,
defining who is secular or not is a difficult task. Can someone who does not
believe in God, does not identify with a religion, but believes in a higher power
and takes her horoscope very seriously be accurately described as secular? Or
someone who attended church when he was younger, is now “unsure” about
the existence of God, but still very open to the possibility that “something” is
“out there”? In both cases, there is not an unequivocal rejection of religion or
spirituality.
To be secular, however, is to be neither religious nor spiritual: rejecting
religious and spiritual beliefs, supernatural superstition, and religious practices,
like prayer or worship. How many Australians are like this? Drawing on data
from the national Spirit of Generation Y study, Figure 7-2 shows the extent of
non acceptance of religious and spiritual beliefs in Australia for those aged 13-
59.15 This table features three age groups: 13-29 year-olds, 30-44 year-olds, and
45-59 year-olds.
The beliefs in this figure can be characterized as either Christian-derived
beliefs or alternative-spiritual beliefs. Christian-derived beliefs are listed in the
top half of the table and include belief in God, belief in the existence of angels,
and belief in the existence of demons and evil spirits. Alternative spiritual beliefs
are listed next. These are: astrology (i.e. that stars and planets affect people’s
fates; the possibility of communicating with the dead directly or in a séance);
reincarnation (i.e. that people have lived previous lives); and the power of
psychics or palm readers. The figure also includes percentages for those who
have ever seriously got into esoteric practices: yoga; Eastern meditation; tai-chi;
and Tarot. “Seriously” was defined as “regular practice of the activity over an
extended period of time, study of the activity, meeting with others who practice
the activity or the purchasing of equipment associated with the activity.”
When assessing who might or might not be secular, it is important to
consider the uptake of alternative spiritual beliefs and esoteric practices. Given
the recent changes in Australia’s religious profile, those who are spiritually
88 Secularism & Secularity

interested are free to search widely for spiritual meaning. Some sociologists
describe the contemporary context, full of choices, as the “spiritual marketplace”
or “spiritual supermarket.”16
Figure 7-2 shows that approximately one fifth of 13-59 year-olds reject a
belief in God, while similar numbers hold that there is very little truth in religion,
and do not believe in life after death. Levels of unbelief in angels and demons
is even higher, almost 50 percent of those aged 13-59. The levels of unbelief are
similar across the three age groups for most categories, except a belief in life after
death, where those aged 45-59 are more likely to reject this belief. This is because
those aged 13-29 have higher levels of belief in reincarnation and many of those
who believe in reincarnation also believe in life after death.
Looking at alternative spiritual beliefs, the number who reject these
outright is considerable, with half the 13-59 year-old population rejecting belief
in astrology, the possibility of communicating with the dead, reincarnation or
in the power of psychics and palm readers. There is little age difference when it
comes to rejecting belief in astrology, but those aged 45-59 are significantly more
likely to reject the other alternative spiritual beliefs. The non-participation rate
in various esoteric practices is even higher still, with almost three-quarters of the
population aged 13-59 never having seriously gotten into yoga, tai-chi, Tarot or
Eastern meditation.
Overall, these data show that a substantial portion of the population
reject Christian-derived beliefs, while more than half of 13-59 year-olds reject
alternative spiritual beliefs.
Among these, who is “secular?” According to SGY data, 14 percent of 13-
59 year-olds definitely do not believe in God; do not believe in the existence of
angels or demons; do not hold any of the alternative spiritual beliefs listed in
Figure 7-2, and do not affiliate with any religion.
By the strictest understanding of the term, these are the most decisively
“secular” members of Australian society. They reject superstition, religious
affiliation, or a belief in the transcendent. For the remainder of this chapter
they will be referred to as “seculars,” a term that indicates that their worldview
and life orientation is non-theistic.1 7
The other members of the population can be considered to some degree
“religious,” “spiritual,” or merely “unsure” in their orientation. They range from
those who are nominally Christian (believe in God, still affiliate with a religion,
perhaps attend services of worship only once or twice a year), to those who
are committed Christians (those who attend services at least once a month,
definitely believe in God and Jesus, and pray at least once a month), those who
follow other world religions, Paganism or Wicca, to those who are seriously or
 7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image” 89

moderately into alternative spiritualities, to those who simply believe that there
is something “out there” and engage in one or two esoteric practices.18 While
some might choose to identify the nominal Christians as secular, these people are
not so secular as to have rejected a belief in God or some transcendental reality.
Such a claim about the extent of extreme secularity—just 14 percent are
seculars—may seem incongruous given that Australia is generally regarded in
the public mind as a “secular” nation, is secular according to the constitution,
and given that only 14 percent of the population aged 13-59 are committed
Christians (according to the criteria specified above). However, 68 percent of
the population at the last census identified with a Christian denomination.

Figure 7-2.
Selected Religious/Spiritual Beliefs and Practices Among Australians Aged 13 - 59

Age Groups
13-29 30-44 45-59 All (13-59)
Selected beliefs and practices % % % %
Believe in God No 19 22 18 20
Unsure 32 27 25 28
Yes 48 52 56 52
There is very little truth in any religion 22 21 18 21
Does not believe in life after death 24 23 34 26
Does not believe in the existence of angels 37 34 43 38
Does not believe in the existence of demons 47 46 55 49
Does not believe in astrology 55 57 57 56
Impossible to communicate with the dead 52 53 68 57
Does not believe in reincarnation 46 45 58 49
Does not believe in psychics and palm 54 51 64 56
readers
Never got seriously into yoga 89 85 83 86
Never got seriously into Eastern meditation 94 88 90 91
Never got seriously into tai-chi 96 91 90 93
Never got seriously into Tarot cards 94 91 92 92
Never got into any esoteric practices 80 70 68 73

Source: Spirit of Generation Y Survey 2005.

Note: Percentages of belief in God may not add to 100 because of rounding and unreported
refused/“can’t say” answers.
90 Secularism & Secularity

Clearly, many more Australians than just the very religious are affected by
religion, even if their only point of connection is a belief in God or identification.
According to the 1998 Australian Community survey, 70 percent of the adult
population attended one religious festival, memorial service or rite of passage in
the previous 12 months.19

Characteristics
What is the background of the typical secular Australian? This person is more
likely to be male than female (65 percent are male). In comparison, the most
committed Christians (those who attend services at least once a month, definitely
believe in God and Jesus, and pray at least once a month) are more likely to be
female. This finding is not surprising; Australian research consistently shows that
women are more likely to be religious than men.20
Seculars are fairly evenly spread among the three age groups (34 percent
are 13-29; 35 percent are 30-44; 32 percent are 45-59). This finding is perhaps
unexpected, given that fewer young people believe in God, as seen in Figure 7-2.
However, young people are more open to alternative spiritual beliefs, and thus
many non-believers did not fit the strict criteria used to classify seculars.
Most seculars are Australian-born, as are the most committed Christians.
However, seculars are more likely than the most committed Christians to have
an Australian-born mother and father. This suggests that secularity is more
closely aligned with the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture. Indeed, the postwar
growth of denominations such as the Catholics is attributed in large part to
migration.21 Ninety percent of seculars live in an urban area, although this is
similar for committed Christians, largely because Australia is one of the most
urbanized nations on earth.

Not Believing in God

None of the group referred to in this chapter as seculars currently believe
in God. Of these, 53 percent have never believed, while 47 percent believed at
some stage in their lives. What is known about these former believers?
Many once identified with a religion: 37 percent of former believers once
identified as Catholics, 20 percent once identified as Anglicans, the remainder
with other Protestant denominations, non-Christian religions, or have never
identified. The largest group of these non-believers who once believed are
30-44.
It is also interesting to consider why these people no longer believe. In the
Spirit of Generation Y survey people were asked to provide open-ended reasons
why they no longer believed. The most common reasons for no longer believing
 7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image” 91

include: “doing further study, especially science” (16 percent of responses); “no
convincing evidence or proof ” (13 percent of responses); “disillusionment with
the churches” (11 percent of responses); and a category called “can’t accept that
God allows suffering” (9 percent of responses). Below is an example of each:
“Having learned some things about science and evolution I can see that
people were not made to be in God’s image and that led me to realize
that I don’t believe.” (18-year-old male)
“There’s all these images of what God might be like, but there are
no photographs. And how did Mary ever get with God, and how did
God’s son come to Earth?” (14-year-old female)
“The church is into making a lot of money, one of the biggest businesses
in the world.” (22-year-old male)
“Can’t believe that there would be a God who would allow tragedies.”
(30-year-old female)

Values, Purpose in Life, and Social Concern: Are Seculars Different?

In an age characterized by religious differentiation and choice, it is worth
inquiring into the ways seculars might differ from those who are more religious,
particularly with respect to values, ways of achieving peace and happiness, and
the purpose and meaning of life. SGY respondents were questioned about these
areas. “Values” surveyed included the importance to respondents of things
like having an “exciting life,” money, ways of achieving peace and happiness
included listening to music, being in nature, taking drugs, etc; questions about
the meaning and purpose of life included the extent to which one feels life has
meaning, and feeling like one belongs.
The following analysis considers the responses of young Australians (those
aged 13-29). The data indicate that there are differences between the very
religious and the secular.
When it comes to the ways in which people obtain a sense of peace and
happiness, young seculars (aged 13-29) are just as likely as the committed
Christians (those who attend services at least once a month, definitely believe
in God and Jesus, and pray at least once a month) to rate work or music as
being important or very important to them. Seculars are more likely than
committed Christians to rate “being in nature” as important or very important
to them. Seculars give a much lower rating to meditation as a source of peace
and happiness. Unlike committed Christians, who largely eschew recreational
drugs or drinking, a minority of seculars rate drinking or taking drugs as being
92 Secularism & Secularity

moderately important for a sense of peace and happiness.

Young seculars and committed Christians are fairly similar when it comes
to questions about life’s meaning and purpose, with the most notable differences
being that seculars are less certain that their lives fit into “some sort of great
scheme of things,” and much more likely to agree with the statement that it is
important to enjoy “life here and now.” Clearly, enjoying life here and now will
be important if one believes that this is “all there is.”
When it comes to values, having an exciting life is more important to young
seculars than the committed Christians, while values such as having friends,
caring for the environment, and social justice are rated highly by all. The most
notable area of difference is the value placed on the importance of leading a
spiritual life; young seculars do not rate this as important whereas the young
committed Christians do—an entirely expected outcome given the seculars’
this-worldly orientation. Overall, secular and religious young people appear
different in ways consistent with being religious or not religious: on valuing
a “spiritual life,” feeling part of the scheme of things, and rejecting drugs and
alcohol.22

Conclusion
This chapter has presented a profile of Australians whose worldview and set
of beliefs can be characterized as abidingly secular. The data suggest that this
is about 14 percent of the 13-59-year-old population. Rather surprisingly, the
most secular Australians are not more or less likely to be younger or older.
About half are former believers in God.
Although scholarly interest in secularity is often concerned with its growth,
it is equally interesting to ponder the question of how seculars and the religious
will coexist in the future. While the percentage of Australians identifying with
a Christian denomination is decreasing, the Christian groups who are growing
are typically vigorous in their proselytizing and fundamental in their theology.
These groups have also shown a proclivity to try to influence public morals and
values, as evidenced by recent political debates. Whether the increasing efforts of
the religious to influence public life provokes more impassioned responses from
seculars remains to be seen.

Endnotes
1. Section 116 of the Australian Constitution states: “The Commonwealth of
Australia shall not make any law establishing any religion, or for imposing any
religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no
religious tests shall be required as a qualification for any public office or public trust
under the commonwealth.”
 7. “People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image” 93

2. Every Australian census has had a question about religious affiliation.

3. The Spirit of Generation Y (SGY) is a national study of spirituality among Australian
young people in their teens and twenties conducted between 2003-2006. The re-
search consisted of a survey of a nationally representative sample of “Generation Y”
(born 1976-1990), with comparison groups from “Generation X” (born 1961-75)
and the “Baby-Boomer” generation (born 1946-60), supplemented by extended,
face-to-face interviews. The sample for the national survey was a national prob-
ability sample (N=1619), stratified by age and ___location (state, and metropolitan/
non-metropolitan). The age-range principally targeted was those born 1976-1990.
A “control sample” of persons born from 1945 to 1975 was included for comparison
purposes. Unless otherwise noted, the data referred to in this paper are weighted,
restoring the oversampled age groups (13-24) to their population proportions. The
(weighted) sample is designed to be representative of the national population in
age, gender, state of residence, and residence in capital city/rest of state. For a full
description of the results see Mason, Michael, Andrew Singleton and Ruth Web-
ber, The Spirit of Generation Y, (John Garratt Publishing, Melbourne, forth­­coming).
A technical report on the survey and survey questionnaire are available at:
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/ccls/spir/sppub/sppub.htm
The SGY research team gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the following
project sponsors: the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Board of Management
for Pastoral Projects, the Catholic Education Commission of Queensland, the
Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, the Catholic Education Commission
of Tasmania, the Catholic Education Commission of Canberra-Goulburn, the
Catholic Education Office of Sydney, the Catholic Education Office of Parramatta,
the Broken Bay Diocesan Catholic Schools Office, Catholic Education South
Australia, the Catholic Education Office of Lismore, the Salesians of St John Bosco,
the Council for Christian Education in Schools, Lutheran Schools Australia, the
Lutheran Church National Office, The Salvation Army (Southern Territory), the
Seventh-Day Adventist Church (Australia), the Victorian Council for Christian
Education, the Uniting Church in Australia National Assembly and the YMCA.
4. Pasquale, Frank, “The ‘Nonreligious’ in the American Northwest,” in Barry A.
Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, eds., Secularism and Secularity: Contemporary Interna-
tional Perspectives, ISSSC, Hartford, CT, 2007.
5. Bouma Gary D., “Globalization and recent changes in the demography of Austra-
lian religious groups,” People and Place, vol. 10, no. 4, p. 17.
6. see Bouma 2002; Bouma Gary D., “Globalization, social capital and the challenge
to harmony of recent changes in Australia’s religious and spiritual demography:
1946-2001,” The Australian Religious Studies Review, vol. 16, pp. 55-68.
7. Chart position is determined by the number of units shipped to accredited record
stores, not by sales volume. Hillsong has an accredited store.
8. Bouma, Gary D. and Andrew Singleton, “A comparative study of the successful
management of religious diversity: Melbourne and Hong Kong,” International Soci-
ology vol. 19, no. 1, pp 5-24.
9. Bouma Gary D. 1992, Religion: Meaning, Transcendence and Community in
Australia, (Melbourne: Longman, 1992), p.88.
94 Secularism & Secularity

10. Dennis Trewin, 2003 Year Book Australia, Number 85, Canberra, Australian Bureau
of Statistics, 2003.
11. Ibid.
12. Bouma Gary D. “Globalization and recent changes in the demography of Australian
religious groups,” People and Place, vol. 10, no. 4, p.19.
13. Bouma, 2003, p. 63
14. Bouma, 2003, p. 59
15. The age range of the SGY survey respondents. See n. 3
16. Roof, Wade Clark, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of
American Religion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Lyon, David, Jesus
in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times, (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). For discus-
sion of this phenomenon in the US and UK, see Carrette, Jeremy and Richard King,
Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, London: Routledge, 2005); Hee-
las, Paul, Linda Woodhead, Benjamin Seel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski, The Spiritual
Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005);
Partridge, Christopher, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities,
Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occucultre, London: T & T Clark, 2004); Roof,
1999; Wuthnow, Robert, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
17. For a good discussion of appropriate terms, see Pasquale, 2006.
18. For a full description of the range of “religious” and “spiritual” types, see Mason,
Singleton, and Webber, forthcoming.
19. Bellamy, John, Alan Black, Keith Castle, Philip Hughes and Peter Kaldor, Why
people don’t go to church, (Adelaide: Openbook, 2002), p. 6.
20. e.g. Bellamy, et al. 2002.
21. Bouma, 2002; 2003.
22. cf. Smith, Christian with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Reli-
gious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005).

Acknowledgements
This chapter has been developed within the context of the team research project: “The
Spirit of Generation Y: The Spirituality of Australian Youth and Young People aged 13-
29,” conducted jointly by ACU National, Monash University, and the Christian Research
Association. Members of the research team are: Michael Mason (ACU National), Ruth
Webber (ACU National), Andrew Singleton (Monash), Philip Hughes (Christian Research
Association). Very special thanks are due to my project colleagues for the countless hours
spent in discussion and their contribution to my understanding and analysis of secular
Australians. Thanks also to Ceridwen Spark for comments on an earlier draft.
8. Secularity in Great Britain
David Voas and Abby Day

T here is probably no common understanding of the term “secular” among

ordinary people, or even among scholars. Britain is formally a religious
country in a way that many modern states are not, having (different) established
churches in England and Scotland. There is also a willingness to countenance
religious involvement in the machinery of government: the Church of England
is represented by a number of its bishops in the upper house of Parliament,
and in 2000 the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords even
recommended that other religions should be represented as well, increasing the
number of religious seats. The Labour government under Tony Blair did not
accept the proposed extension of religious representation, but neither did it
suggest eliminating the bishops.
The links between church and state have very little impact on contemporary
life, however. In some cases they seem to achieve the worst of both worlds,
creating an impression that offends one side without benefiting the other. The
law on blasphemy, for example, seems to Muslims to show that the English
deck is stacked in Christianity’s favor, and yet the law is effectively a dead letter;
it is almost inconceivable that a case could even be brought today, much less
successfully prosecuted.
Debates on the issue of establishment are often curious affairs, with some
bishops wanting to “cut the connection”1 and some Muslims seeing the Church
as a bulwark against secularism. In these circumstances the special privileges and
duties of the national churches have no necessary bearing on Britain’s character
as religious or secular.
The term “secular” might for many people be associated with the mission of
the National Secular Society, a lobby group for church-state separation, which is
overtly atheistic rather than merely opposed to giving religion a public role. (For
example, the society maintains that “supernaturalism is based upon ignorance

95
96 Secularism & Secularity

and assails it as the historic enemy of progress.”2)

In common usage, though, a contrast is usually apparent between “secular”
and “secularism.” “Secular” is the opposite of “religious,” and simply indicates an
absence of religious motivation or content (e.g. secular ceremonies, morality, art,
etc.). “Secularism” is an ideology that opposes religious privilege and frequently
religion itself. Because the British are typically non-religious rather than anti-
religious, many people are secular but far fewer are secularists.
Unlike Americans, Britons are accustomed to the idea of state-supported
religious education, religious broadcasting on network television, bishops in the
legislature, and so on. But unlike many continental Europeans, Britons do not
tend to feel that they need protection from religious institutions.
Indeed, the implicit assumption seems to be that a modest dose of religion
is good for people—or at least other people. The notion that God’s function is
to make children well-behaved, strangers helpful and shopkeepers honest means
that outright secularism is less popular in Britain than one might suppose. But
as individuals themselves, having little desire for divine supervision, are mostly
secular, the benign acceptance of public religion does little apart from frustrate
secularists and religious leaders impartially.

Social Scientific Approaches

It has become conventional to focus on three aspects of religious involvement:
belonging, belief, and behavior. There are three distinct though overlapping
ways of being secular: not belonging (not affiliating), not believing, and not
practicing.
None of these concepts is unambiguous. If the rather strict view is taken
that religious people must accept specific articles of faith and know basic church
doctrine, then only a fraction of the population qualify. But if accepting the
existence of a higher power or an ultimate moral order counts as religious belief,
the proportion is much more substantial.
Similarly with religious practice, it makes a great deal of difference whether
the focus is on regular attendance at services or if more occasional forms of
practice with a strong social dimension (e.g., church weddings and baptisms
or participation at Christmas, harvest festivals and the like) can be considered.
Private prayer may provide more or less evidence of a religious disposition,
depending on its form, content, and motivation.
Although affiliation (belonging) is simply what Americans label “religious
preference” rather than a measure of commitment, the growth in Britain in
the number of those who say that they have no religion has ironically turned
the simple willingness to accept a denominational label into an indicator of
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 97

religios­ity. Religion is still capable of being an aspect of personal identity that

does not depend on active participation, official membership, or even agreement
with basic doctrine. Precisely because of this subjectivity, though, self-
identification as having or not having a religion is sensitive to the wording and
context of the inquiry.
Beyond all of these definitional and methodological issues, one question
stands out: how much does religion matter to people? Many believe in God, call
themselves Anglican, and appear in church on occasion, but does that suffice for
them to be usefully regarded as religious rather than secular? If religion makes
little difference in their lives and does not seem important to them, or if they
describe themselves as not very religious, then there is a case for classifying them
as secular.
The study of secularity thus raises a double problem: first to try to measure
religious (non)adherence, and second to decide what the results might mean.
At the end of the day, perhaps, identifying with a religion, believing in the
supernatural, or attending religious services should not necessarily disqualify
someone from being regarded as basically secular. The argument will be
developed more fully later, but a few immediate remarks follow.
To someone in a traditional society, coming from such-and-such village may
be of the utmost importance, while for people in post-industrial society it may be
more or less incidental where they were born or grew up. Likewise with religion:
origins may mean a lot or a little. Most Britons are still able to specify their
religious background, just as they can name their birthplace, father’s occupation,
and secondary school. But whether these things make any difference to how they
see themselves or the way they are perceived by others is not at all certain.
Long after active religious participation has ceased, people may still want
services for special occasions; after even that degree of interest has waned, they
may still accept association with their religion of origin. The result is similar to
a self-description as working class by the owner of a large business, or claims to
Irishness by Americans who have a grandparent from Galway. Such personal
identities may be personally meaningful, but the chances of passing them
successfully to the next generation are slim. In any event, any characteristic
tends to disappear from self-description as it loses its social significance. Being a
Muslim currently seems sufficiently salient that very few British Muslims would
not describe themselves as such; for relatively few Christians is the same true.
With respect to belief, there is a strong inclination among sociologists to
include transient supernatural experiences or opinions as “religion,” which is
commonly held to include “the paranormal, fortune telling, fate and destiny,
life after death, ghosts, spiritual experiences, luck and superstition.”3 Such
98 Secularism & Secularity

definitions broaden the concept to include formulations known as (inter alia)

folk, common, invisible or implicit religion.4
Yet some people who describe themselves as Atheists often report seeing
ghosts or similar phenomena.5 They do not link such experiences to anything
religious or theistic but, rather, comment that science will one day explain
them. Moreover, what people describe as fate, luck or destiny varies widely from
pre-destination (“we can’t change fate”) to random events (“bad luck”) or self-
determination (“I am master of my destiny”).
Having a worldview that does not depend on supernatural powers is
consistent with believing that rationally inexplicable things happen, when these
episodes are viewed as incidental. The mere fact of holding some supernatural
beliefs should not prevent someone from being classed as secular. Being secular
is to have a non-theistic worldview; to accept the possibility of “something else
out there” does not in itself make one religious, especially where such beliefs play
no role and are accorded little importance in the person’s life.
Finally, while it is unusual to find unreligious people in church, religious
practice can occur even among the secular. Many parents in England hope—for
reasons that are academic or social rather than religious—to have their children
admitted to state-funded schools controlled by the Anglican or Catholic
churches, and they attend church in order to pass the religious qualification.
Others accompany religious parents or spouses, or (especially at cathedrals) go
for the music. Private prayer is frequently practiced even by people who do not
identify with a religion, attend services, or believe in a personal God;6 whether
and to what extent such people are thereby shown to be “spiritual” rather than
“secular” is debatable.

How Many People are Secular in Britain?

Affiliation (Belonging)
It might seem a simple matter to find out what proportion of people claim to
have a religion. Unfortunately the answers vary considerably depending on how
and in what context one asks the question. At one extreme, for example, the 2001
Census of Population shows 72 percent of people in England and Wales, and
65 percent of those in Scotland, categorized as Christian. On the census form
for England and Wales religion follows the questions on country of birth and
ethnicity, so that it appears to be a supplementary question on the same topic.
The positive phraseology (“What is your religion?”) combined with tick-box
options that simply list world religions (e.g., Christian/Muslim/Hindu) invite
the respondent to specify a cultural background rather than a current affiliation.
Note too that census forms are typically completed by the household head
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 99

on behalf of all individuals at the address, and to the extent that such people tend
to be older and more religious than average, the numbers may be higher than
they would be on confidential individual questionnaires. The religion question
used on the census form in Scotland preceded (rather than followed) those on
ethnicity, and also offered answer categories for specific Christian denominations;
perhaps as a result, people were nearly twice as likely as in England to give their
affiliation as “none.”
In contrast to the census, the question posed in the British Social Attitudes
(BSA) survey occurs in the context of a wide-ranging inquiry into opinion and
practice, and is worded in a way that might seem more likely to discourage
than to encourage a positive response: “Do you regard yourself as belonging
to any particular religion?” The respondent must interpret for him or herself
what “belonging” might mean, but for most it probably implies some current as
opposed to past affiliation. Indeed, the BSA questionnaire goes on to ask what
religion (if any) one was brought up in, and the answers are strikingly different.
While some 43 percent of people in 2004 said that they belonged to no religion,
only 16 percent declared that they had been raised without one—though this
figure has been increasing. A bare majority still present themselves as belonging
to a Christian denomination.
The importance of wording is strikingly apparent when the BSA results and
those from Gallup Polls are compared. In the latter the question has a strong
positive presumption, similar to that found in the recent census: “What is your
religious denomination?” In consequence, the proportion of “nones” is less than
half that found in BSA: 18 percent in Gallup vs. 39 percent in BSA. Fully a
fifth of people apparently do not regard themselves as belonging to a particular
religion, but if pushed to claim one will do so. Even nominal affiliation has
different levels: in conjunction with the phenomenon of “believing without
believing,” there are multiple ways of “belonging without belonging.” Relatively
few people actually practice their supposed religion; there is much more notional
than actual belonging.

Belief
Opinion polls in Britain show high levels of belief, but in all sorts of things,
including reincarnation (a quarter of respondents), horoscopes (also a quarter),
clairvoyance (almost half ), ghosts (nearly a third), and so on.7 It is far from
clear that these beliefs make any difference to the people claiming them.
Research suggests that casual believers, even in astrology, for example, which is
distinguished by its practical orientation, rarely do or avoid doing things because
of published advice.8 Studies on polling show that people are prepared to express
100 Secularism & Secularity

opinions about almost anything, whether or not they have any knowledge of or
interest in the topic. Such “beliefs” may be uninformed, not deeply held, seldom
acted upon, and relatively volatile. Feeling required to hold and even to express
opinions is one thing; finding those issues important is another.
While 25 percent of respondents may say that they believe in reincarnation,
one is not inclined to feel that they thereby express any basic truths about their
own identities. The corollary, though, is that it is difficult to be too impressed
by the apparent number of conventional believers. The argument here is not
that the large subpopulation that acknowledges the God of our fathers—the
memorably styled “ordinary God”9—is shallow or insincere. The point is simply
that it cannot be concluded from the fact that people tell pollsters they believe in
God that they give the matter any thought, find it significant, will feel the same
next year, or plan to do anything about it.
In any event one can no longer infer from the widespread inclination to
believe in a broadly defined God that people are basically Christian. Opinion
polls over recent decades suggest (even given the previous caveats about
interpreting survey evidence) that the characteristically Christian beliefs—
particularly in Jesus as the Son of God—have been in decline, and are now
held by a minority.10 Many Britons would like to be known as “spiritual” (the
alternatives seem unattractive; who wants to be labelled a “materialist?”) and will
therefore acknowledge a belief in something, but that something is less and less
likely to be recognizable as religious doctrine.
A useful supplementary approach (employed for example by Opinion
Research Business in its Soul of Britain survey, or in the Scottish Social Attitudes
survey module on religion in 2002) is to ask respondents to rate the personal
importance of various activities they might have tried, from prayer to divination.
Similar questions can be found on some national surveys; the British Household
Panel Survey, for example, periodically asks ‘How much difference would you say
religious beliefs make to your life?’ The responses are helpful in distinguishing
between real commitment and mild interest or nominal allegiance.

Behavior (Practice)
Comprehensive surveys of church attendance in England and Scotland have
been conducted by Christian Research, an organization that produces statistics
on organized religion. Although the most recent results11 are still confidential
pending publication, it is safe to say that at best 10 percent of the population
goes to church with any regularity (e.g. monthly or more often). Even if we
assume that half of all Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and other non-Christians
(who collectively make up 5.4 percent of the population) are observant, only one
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 101

eighth of people in Britain are religiously active.

Other criteria are possible, as mentioned above. Religious ceremonies for
rites of passage remain popular, though much less so than previously, and some
special services draw large congregations. Christmas attracts two and a half times
as many people to Anglican churches as appear on a normal Sunday. It seems
very likely, though, that tradition and nostalgia rather than sporadic religious
enthusiasm are largely responsible for high turnout at such times
It is well known that people tend to exaggerate the frequency of their
attendance at religious services when responding to surveys,12 a tendency that
varies with age.13 Asking whether the individual attended within the last seven
days (the question normally used in American Gallup polls) has produced values
even in Britain that are more than twice as high as observed weekly attendance.14
If being a churchgoer is part of one’s personal identity, there may be considerable
resistance to answering in a way that places one outside the fold. Clearly
subjective feelings of regularity are being translated into unrealistic frequencies;
it is not unreasonable, however, to label those who say that they attend monthly
or more often as religious, even if in self-description rather than in practice.
Fully 18 percent of respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey in 2004
claimed to attend services at least monthly—a figure we know to be half again
as large as the true value.

Estimating the Religious/Secular Composition of the Country

The European Social Survey provides good data on the three main areas of
religious affiliation, practice and belief, as follows; the actual questions are
provided in the Appendix:
Belonging current or past identification
(Affiliation)
Belief self-rated religiosity
importance of religion
Behavior attendance at religious services
(Practice) prayer
participation/support
(While these last two questions on how religious the respondent is and how
important religion is to him/her do not measure beliefs directly, it seems likely
that there is a strong association between these variables and strength of religious
belief.)
As an initial attempt to produce a typology to describe the religious
composition of Great Britain, one could define three categories: the actively
102 Secularism & Secularity

religious, the privately religious, and the unreligious. For example, someone
may be categorized as actively religious if he/she claims to attend services at
least monthly and rates him/herself as 6 or higher on a scale from 0 (not at all
religious) to 10 (very religious). The “privately religious” attend services rarely or
never, but they both rate themselves as more religious than not (6+ on the scale)
and also describe religion as more important than unimportant in their lives (6+
on the scale).
A rather strict definition of being unreligious would require the respondent
to satisfy all of the following:
• attends only at major holidays, less often, or never
• prays only at major holidays, less often, or never
• rates self as 0, 1 or 2 on a scale from 0 (not at all religious) to 10 (very
religious)
• describes the importance of religion in his/her life as 0, 1 or 2 on a scale
from 0 (extremely unimportant) to 10 (extremely important)
These three categories still only account for half the population, as seen in
Figure 8-1). A key question, therefore, is what characterises the other half of the
population. What do they believe, when do they go to church, and how do they
describe themselves? Are they somewhat religious or basically secular?
In 1998, about a quarter of British respondents answered a question on
the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) religion module with either
“I don’t believe in God” or “I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t
believe there is any way to find out.” Not quite a quarter said ‘I know God really
exists and I have no doubts about it’. As the sample was only 800 the results
should be treated with caution. Nevertheless, these figures do correspond to the
distribution suggested here (a quarter religious, a quarter unreligious).
It seems reasonable to suppose that most of the “middle 50 percent”
identified here will fall into one or another of the remaining ISSP categories for
belief:
• I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of
some kind
• I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others
• While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God
As for religious practice, few of these people attend church services except
for weddings, funerals, and possibly on special occasions such as Christmas.
Many (40 percent) never pray, but a quarter do so weekly or even daily.
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 103

Figure 8-1
Religious Composition of Great Britain
(Categories based on ESS data)

Actively religious
15%

Privately religious
?? 10%
50%

Unreligious
25%

Finally, about half identify with a religious group and half do not. Of those
who do not, two thirds have a religious background, generally in a mainline
Anglican/Protestant church.
In terms of general orientation, these respondents are by definition neither
particularly religious nor unreligious. Nearly three-quarters place themselves at
points 3, 4 or 5 on the 0-10 scale from “not at all religious” to “very religious.”
What is more striking, however, is how little religion seems to matter in their
lives. Nearly a third rate religion as unimportant (placing it at 0, 1 or 2 on the 0-
10 scale from extremely unimportant to extremely important), with another 30
percent rating it at 3 or 4 and 27 percent giving it a 5 (moderately unimportant).
Only 10 percent, in other words, think that religion is personally even somewhat
important rather than unimportant.
The dominant British attitude towards religion, then, is not one of rejection
or hostility. Many of those in the large middle group who are neither religious
nor unreligious are willing to identify with a religion, are open to the existence of
God or a higher power, may use the church for rites of passage, and might pray
at least occasionally. What seems apparent, though, is that religion plays a very
minor role (if any) in their lives.
Those who fall in the “middle 50 percent” may simply be at intermediate
(and possibly confused) stages between religion and irreligion. Perhaps, though,
characteristics on separate dimensions distinguish them from the others. A
104 Secularism & Secularity

possible typology is shown in Figure 8-2; in the absence of good quantitative

data the frequency distribution can only be guessed at. The following description
of the ‘nominalist’ categories is paraphrased from Day.15
Natal nominalists ascribe their Christianity (it is rarely anything else) to
familial heritage alone. Typically they were baptized and attended church when
they were young. They are unsure whether God exists, but if he does he does not
play a part in their lives. They do not refer to any religion or deity in answer to
questions about what they believe in, what is important to them, what guides
them morally, what makes them happy or sad, their purpose in life, or what
happens after they die. Christian natal nominalists admit that they rarely, if ever,
think about their religious identity. They assume religious identity is something
one acquires through birth or early upbringing.
Ethnic nominalists describe themselves as Christian (or Hindu, Muslim,
etc.) to position themselves as different from others. Like natal nominalists,
Christian ethnic nominalists are not convinced about God, do not engage in
religious practice, and do not give the matter much thought. They differ in
describing themselves as Christian as a way of identifying with a people or
culture. They see themselves as belonging to a distinct group, which may be
national (e.g. English as distinct from Welsh) rather than necessarily racial. In
doing so they clearly aim to separate themselves from other groups (in particular
Muslims?) that are identified with a different faith.
Aspirational nominalists describe themselves as Christian, and perhaps
more specifically as part of the established church, because they want to belong
to this group. It represents something to which they aspire. The emphasis on
membership in a group is shared with ethnic nominalists, but the identity carries
for them an additional notion of middle-class respectability and confidence. In
their view the label is attached not simply to people like themselves but to people
like they want to be.
Whereas these three “nominalist” categories have been defined largely by
reference to self-identification, the remaining two classes relate more closely to
belief. They include people who entertain beliefs about their fate, the afterlife,
a higher power, etc., that are quasi-religious but inconsistent with the teachings
of particular organized religions. Those in the “popular heterodox” group may
combine elements of astrology, reincarnation, divination, magic, folk religion
and conventional Christianity. They are not especially reflective about their
worldviews, which in consequence may be incoherent. The salience of these
beliefs tends to be rather low.
By contrast the “Sheilaists” are more conscious of spiritual seeking.
“Sheilaism” was the self-applied label used by a respondent (“Sheila Larson,” a
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 105

Figure 8-2
Religious Typology for Great Britain

Conventionally religious Actively religious

Privately religious
Unconventionally religious/spiritual Sheilaism
Popular heterodoxy
Nominal adherents Natal nominalists
Ethnic nominalists
Aspirational nominalists
Nonreligious Agnostics
Atheists

young nurse) in Habits of the Heart 16:

“I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t re­
mem­ber the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long
way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”
Although the numbers active in what has been termed the ‘holistic milieu’17
are quite small, a more substantial proportion of the population will privately
follow a variety of self-spirituality.
Exactly where one should draw the line distinguishing the secular from the
rest is unclear. Many nominal adherents are failed Agnostics: they used to have
doubts, and now they just don’t care. Arguably, most are secular for all practical
purposes. If they are included, then at least half the British population could
reasonably be regarded as secular.

How Are Secular People Different from Others?

Socio-Demographic and Economic Characteristics
There is enormous variation by age in religious identification. Among people
aged 65 and over surveyed for the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey in 2004,
only 22 percent say that they regard themselves as belonging to no religion, while
63 percent of young adults (18-24) so describe themselves. These differences
might be influenced by life stage (if older people are more religious than young
ones), but the evidence suggests that in the main they are generational (produced
by a steady decline in religiosity over time18). Although the ethno-religious
minority population is growing more rapidly than the rest, their numbers are too
small to prevent the arrival of a clear secular majority in the next decade or so.
106 Secularism & Secularity

Figure 8-3 shows the percentage of adult men and women classified as
having no religion on the 2001 census of England and Wales. Although these
figures may underestimate the actual size of the secular population, they do give a
good indication of the generational trend. As is evident, gender is also associated
with secularity. Exactly half of white men say that they have no religion (in the
BSA 2004), versus 41 percent of white women. To put it another way, men make
up 58 percent of the secular category as defined using European Social Survey
data, but only 36 percent of the religious groups.
Only 17 percent of religious people are not married, widowed, separated or
divorced; by contrast, nearly 40 percent of the secular are never-married. Most
but not all of this effect is explained by age; among those born before 1970,
17 percent of the secular and only 8 percent of the religious are never-married.
Likewise, only 15 percent of the religious born before 1970 say that they have
ever lived with a partner without being married, while 38 percent of the secular
have done so.
Both the religious and the secular are better educated, on average, than
those who are neither. (About 30 percent have been in higher education, as against
less than 20 percent for the others.) High levels of education often produce skepti­
cism about religion and the self-confidence to be overtly Agnostic or Atheist, but
higher education is also associated with middle-class values, civic participation,
suburban living and other characteristics conducive to churchgoing. The
census shows a clear distinction between the “Nones” and “Christians” (among
people aged 25-49, for example, 32 percent and 23 percent respectively have
high qualifications), but the latter group includes nominal as well as religious
Christians. Conversely, 23 percent of religiously active BSA respondents have
degrees, as against only 18 percent for religiously unaffiliated non-attenders, but
this “secular” group (which includes 41 percent of the population) is much more
loosely defined than with the ESS or census criteria.
Actively religious respondents to the BSA are more likely to be in inter­
mediate, managerial or professional occupations than unaffiliated non-attenders
(55 vs. 42 percent). Using 2001 census data for England and Wales, however,
there is a tendency for those responding “none” to the question “what is your
religion?” to be in the higher occupational categories. Among men (omitting
those not classified) 51 percent of the Nones were in intermediate, managerial or
professional occupations, as compared with 44 percent of (nominal) Christians.
These findings are consistent with the suggestion that many of those describing
themselves as Christian on the census were working class whites who viewed the
term as an ethno-national rather than a religious label.19 As with education, it
30
8. Secularity in Great Britain 107

25 Figure 8-3
No Religion by Age and Sex (England and Wales, 2001 Census)
20
30

15 25 Men
Men
Women
Women
20
No Religion (%)

10

15
5

10

0
25 30 35 40 5 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85
Age

0
25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85
Age

is apparent that the better-off are over-represented among both the genuinely
religious and the overtly secular.

Social and Political Attitudes

Using the categories already defined with European Social Survey data it is
possible to examine the social and political views of the secular and religious
subpopulations. The secular are somewhat more likely to appear on the left of
a left-right scale (30 percent left vs. 26 percent right), with the opposite true of
religious people (25 percent left vs. 31 percent right). The secular are somewhat
more likely to say that they never discuss politics, however (25 percent vs. 18
percent among the religious). A similar picture comes from looking at the de­
rived left-right scale variable in the BSA 2004; here the mean value (on a scale
from 1 to 5) is 2.7 for those who have no religion and rarely or never attend
services, as opposed to 2.9 for people who identify with a denomination and
are regular attenders. Again, only 26 percent of the secular (vs. 37 percent of the
religious) say that they have “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of interest in politics.
These results hold up even when controlling for age.
On a libertarian-authoritarian scale derived for the BSA, religiously active
respondents are somewhat more authoritarian than unaffiliated non-attenders,
but the difference largely disappears once one controls for age. Both of these
groups are more libertarian than the in-between category, which probably relates
to the educational and class distributions mentioned above.
108 Secularism & Secularity

Unsurprisingly nearly two thirds of religious people describe the view that
“it is important to follow traditions and customs” as “like me” or even “very
much like me;” not even a quarter of the secular do the same. More unexpectedly,
hedonistic values are not claimed solely by the secular: 46 percent identify with
the statement that “it is important to seek fun and the things that give pleasure,”
but 36 percent of the religious do so as well. The gap is modest, but perhaps
the secular have some catching up to do; in answer to the question “how happy
are you?,” 39 percent of religious people but only 29 percent of the secular
placed themselves at 9 or 10 on a scale from 0 to 10. (A similar finding has
been reported from the U.S. General Social Survey.)20 The association is partly
explained by a remarkably strong age effect, however: 45 percent of people born
before the end of the Second World War say that they are extremely happy (9 or
10 on the scale), against only 28 percent of those born since 1945.

Conclusion
So, are secular and religious people in Great Britain different? Yes and no.
The age contrasts are significant, with younger, more secular generations
gradually replacing the older and more religious. At the same time, people
who are consciously and consistently religious or unreligious tend to be better
educated and in higher occupational categories than those in the muddled
middle. Sociologists of religion have tended to concentrate on the core religious
constituency, and this volume is a welcome opportunity to examine the opposite
pole.
Ultimately, the challenge lies in understanding the group in between.
When it comes to religion, the British have been “puzzled people” for decades.21
Their secularity, like their religiosity, is casual and unconcerned. Britain may
illustrate how the secular triumphs: by default.

Endnotes
1. Buchanan, Colin, Cut the Connection: Disestablishment and the Church of England
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994).
2. See http://www.secularism.org.uk/generalprinciples.html.
3. Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994) 83.
4. Bailey, Edward, ‘Implicit religion: A bibliographical introduction’, Social Compass,
37(4): 499-509; Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Be-
longing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Luckmann, Thomas, The Invisible Religion (Lon-
don: Collier-Macmillan, 1967).
 8. Secularity in Great Britain 109

5. Day, Abby. (2006) Believing in Belonging in Contemporary Britain: A case study

from Yorkshire, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
6. Bänziger, Sarah. ‘Praying in Dutch society: The socialization versus individualism
hypotheses’, paper presented at the annual conference of the BSA Sociology of Reli-
gion Study Group, Manchester, 4 April 2006.
7. Gill, Robin, C. Kirk Hadaway, and Penny Long Marler. ‘Is religious belief declining
in Britain?’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(3): 507-16.
8. Spencer, Wayne. ‘Are the stars coming out? Secularization and the Future of Astrol-
ogy in the West,’ Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures. ed.
Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
9. Davie.
10. Gill et al.; see also The Tablet, 18 December 1999: 1729
11. Brierley, Peter, Pulling Out of the Nose Dive: A Contemporary Picture of Churchgoing,
(London: Christian Research, 2006).
12. C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, ‘What the polls don’t
show: A closer look at US church attendance’, American Sociological Review, 58:
741-52.
13. C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, ‘How many Americans attend worship
each week? An alternative approach to measurement’, Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion, 44 (3): 307-322.
14. C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, ‘Did you really go to church this week?’,
The Christian Century, 6 May 1998, pp. 472-5.
15. Day.
16. Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tip-
ton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
17. Heelas, Paul, Linda Woodhead, Benjamin Seel, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Karin
Tusting. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2005).
18. see David Voas and Alasdair Crockett, ‘Religion in Britain: Neither believing nor
belonging’, Sociology 39(1): 11-28; Alasdair Crockett and David Voas, ‘Generations
of decline: Religious change in twentieth-century Britain’, Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion 45(4).
19. David Voas and Steve Bruce, ‘The 2001 census and Christian identification in Brit-
ain’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 19(1): 23-8; Day.
20. see David G. Hope, ‘The funds, friends, and faith of happy people’, American Psy-
chologist, 55(1): 56-67.
21. Mass Observation, Puzzled People: A Study in Popular Attitudes to Religion, Ethics,
Progress & Politics in a London Borough (London: Gollancz, 1948).
110 Secularism & Secularity

Appendix: European Social Survey 2002 Questions on Religion

• Do you consider yourself as belonging to any particular religion or denomination?
[Footnote: Identification is meant, not official membership.]
Yes/No (if yes, which; if no…)
• Have you ever considered yourself as belonging to any particular religion or
denomination?
Yes/No (if yes, which)
• Regardless of whether you belong to a particular religion, how religious would you say
you are? (0 = Not at all religious . . . 10 = Very religious)
• Apart from special occasions such as weddings and funerals, about how often do you
attend religious services nowadays?
1. Every day
2. More than once a week
3. Once a week
4. At least once a month
5. Only on special holy days
6. Less often
7. Never
• Apart from when you are at religious services, how often, if at all, do you pray?
1. Every day
2. More than once a week
3. Once a week
4. At least once a month
5. Only on special holy days
6. Less often
7. Never
• Looking at this card, how important is each of these things in your life. (0 = Extremely
unimportant . . . 10 = Extremely important)
1. religion?
[Other items are family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, voluntary
organizations]
• For each of the voluntary organizations I will now mention, please use this card to tell me
whether any of these things apply to you now or in the last 12 months, and, if so, which.
—a religious or church organization?
• None
• Member
• Participated
• Donated money
• Voluntary work
[If the response is other than ‘none’, ask…]
• Do you have personal friends within this organization?
Yes/No
[Other organizations—in a list of 12—include sports clubs, trade unions, etc.]
Varieties of Secularism
9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France
Nathalie Caron

T he American notion of “being secular” has no easy translation in the French

language and context. Part of the difficulty stems from the ambivalence of the
use of the term secular in the United States.1 Under the influence of politics and
culture wars, the words “secular,” “secularist,” and “secularism” are undergoing a
semantic shift that tends to narrow and polemicize their meanings. The situation
has lately been exacer­bated, possibly by the tragedy of 9/11, undoubtedly by the
so-called “religion gap” that determined voting patterns in the 2004 elections, as
well as by recent controversies over the nature of American identity in a changing
social and political environment.2
While retaining their original sense connecting them to the broad con­cep­tion
of an autonomous society independent of religion, the words secular, secularist, and
secularism have taken up new meanings. As an increasing number of Americans
are “[working] themselves out of a religious frame of mind,” sociologists have
used the terms to refer to individual postures on matters of religious choice, while
among religious conservatives they have become synonymous with irreligious
and irreligion, godless and godlessness, Atheist and atheism.3
A second difficulty in defining who is secular in France is that although
the adjective secular can easily be translated into French by séculier (from the
Latin saeculum i.e. “century,” and then “world,” as in English) the translation
that spontaneously, although somewhat grudgingly, comes to a French mind
is laïque, which associates the initial question “who’s secular?” with issues of
laïcité. Institutionalized and immortalized in 1905 by the law on the separation
of church and state, laïcité is an essential component of French identity and
exceptionalism, to which there is no satisfactory linguistic equivalent in
the American English language, and which is also complex and polysemic.4
Referring to laïcité, however, is unavoidable when discussing who is secular in
France since, whether as a cause or a consequence, laïcité creates the conditions

113
114 Secularism & Secularity

of French secularity today. In this short chapter I transpose the term secular into
the French context. Hence I do not confine the definition of the term secular to
that of laïque, but also extend it to the sociological meaning it has acquired in
English, that of “non-religious.”

The French Are All Secular

As French political leaders like to emphasize, the French Republic rests on a
secular ideal, called laïcité. It is the “grammar which enables the different
religions to talk to each other,” the “pillar” of the French model of integration,
the “cornerstone of the republican pact.”5
French laïcité is not a choice or a particular spiritual option, but a
national founding principle specified by law and inscribed in the incipit of
the Constitution, which separates not only church and state, but also what is
religious from what is not.
Article 1 of the 1958 Constitution states: “France shall be an indivisible,
secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens
before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect
all beliefs.”6 As a result, a French citizen is necessarily secular and is expected
to appreciate the notion of laïcité as a value inherent in republicanism, which
it enhances by ensuring the equal treatment of all religions and by protecting
freedom of religion and of conscience.
In the United States, the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the
American Constitution place freedom of religion beyond the reach of leg­is­la­tion
by a negative phrasing, but they commit only Congress (“Congress shall make
no laws”).7 In France, by contrast, the principle of laïcité is positively defined
and associated with the notions of indivisibility, democracy, equality, and liberty
of conscience. As such it binds the whole nation by contractual obligation.
The word laïcité, coined in the 1870s, comes from the Greek laos, which
designates the unity of a population: “The laic is a man of the people, whom no
prerogative distinguishes or elevates above the others…. He can be the faithful
member of a particular religious group, but also someone with an atheistic
worldview, the founding conviction of which is distinct from that which inspires
religion.”8
Laïcité refers to an institutional system informed by a secular worldview
that determines a civic and moral ideal, unifies the community, and legitimates
sovereignty. Hence it shapes a social frame in which the boundary between
religion and non-religion is much clearer than in the United States where civil
religion permeates public life.9 It is both an organizational frame establishing
the neutrality of the state in religious matters, and an attitude about the proper
 9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France 115

relationship between the political and religious spheres and, more broadly,
religion and society.
Scholars have distinguished between laïcisation and secularization and
shown that laïcisation aimed to reduce the social significance of religion as an
insti­tu­tion by engaging political power, whereas secularization is the outcome of
social evolutions to which political power adapted or in which it participated.10
The historian Jean Bauberot has argued that laïcité was the result of a con­flict in
which the state had to destabilize religious institutions—mainly Catholic —to
assert its authority and ensure democratic liberties, whereas secularization should
be viewed as a cultural transformation that has taken place mostly in countries
with a Protestant culture.11 Hence “French laïcité cannot be properly understood
without taking into account the struggle against clericalism, namely against the
power of the Church over society and individuals, particularly in the field of
education,” and that struggle originates the French specificity.12
Laïcité is a result of a historical process of laïcisation that started during
the Revolution, when the old monarchical regime collapsed and with it the
religious origin of its sovereignty. 13 In August 1789 the authors of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen declared “The principle of all sovereignty
resides essentially in the nation” (Article 3) and asserted liberty of conscience
(Article 10).
The domination of the Catholic Church, which legitimized the Old Regime,
was subsequently challenged as the Church was subordinated to the state: clerical
property was nationalized and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy reorganized
the hierarchical structure of the Church. After the fall of Robespierre, who had
imposed a deistic religion called “the Cult of the Supreme Being” the principle
of church and state separation was reestablished (1795) without, however, being
fully implemented.14 Napoleon’s Concordat in 1801 recognized the Catholic
Church as the majority religion while preserving the religious liberty acquired
by the Revolution.15
In the 19th century, a fierce confrontation opposed the “two Frances,” a
Catholic France and a republican France. Put differently, two different visions
waged “a war of religion:” one considered France the “eldest daughter of the
Church” (“la fille aînée de l’Église”) and the other saw France as the daughter of the
Revolution.16 In the second half of the century free thinking and anticlericalism
based on reason and the progress of science radicalized the conflict. So did the
debate on secular schooling (l’école laïque) in the 1880s when primary education
became free of charge, mandatory and secular. Religion was no longer taught
in schools, but one school-free week day was made available for religious
education.
116 Secularism & Secularity

The law on the separation of church and state, which was eventually passed
in 1905, abolished the Concordat. It was supported by the Jewish and Protestant
minorities, which were seeking to resist the hegemony of the Catholic Church.
Its principles established that “the Republic assures freedom of conscience.17 It
guarantees the free exercise of worship” (Article 1) and says that “The Republic
neither recognizes, nor salaries, nor subsidizes any religion” (Article 2). The law
was not applied to Alsace-Lorraine, which was then part of the German empire.
Nor was it extended to French Guyana, a colony. To this day the law does not
apply in those regions.
As the relationship between church, state, and society became less strained,
compromises were reached under the acceptance of a “secular pact” (pacte
laïque).18 Attitudes towards religion became more benevolent and less hostile—
“more open.”19 Today, laïcité is widely accepted.
Contrary to what is often said, the 1905 law had not confined religion to
the private sphere, but it had privatized the institution of religion by giving
religious groups the status of non-profit associations. Laïcité does not exclude
religious expression from the public sphere, but respects all beliefs by establishing
a distinction between an individual’s private life and his public dimension as
citizen, based on the idea that “it is as a private individual that, in his personal
life, an individual adopts spiritual or religious convictions, or does not, which he
can of course share with others.”20
The process of laïcisation and the subsequent 1905 law, however, have
fashioned a reserved behavior vis-a-vis religion and rendered the public expression
of religious beliefs sparse—French people do not talk about religion—and even
out of place, in the case for example of a president or any political figure bound
by the neutrality of the state. Besides, while ensuring the “social recognition of
religion,” laïcité has fostered a somewhat paradoxical lack of acknowledgement
and knowledge of religions—the French state and by extension French people
tend to ignore religion.21 And yet France is a secular state with a Catholic culture,
as the persistence of the religious elements in French public life demonstrates.
One striking example is the number of public holidays in the French calendar
—Easter Monday, Ascension Thursday, Pentecost Monday, Assumption Day,
All Saints’ Day, Christmas—the Christian orientation of which comes under
regular criticism by secularists or members of religious minorities.22

Some Are More Secular Than Others

Despite, or rather because of, the compromises reached under the secular pact,
laïcité became a hot topic of debate again when the left and then the right
sought to reform the status of private, mostly Catholic, schools. In 1984, the
 9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France 117

left sought to unify the private and state systems of education and in 1994 the
right favored resorting to public funding for the construction of private religious
schools. The scope of the resistance, which in both cases forced the governments
to abandon their proposals—together with the more recent debate on the
Muslim “veil” (headscarf ) in schools show that “school remains the place where
the historical trace of the war between the two Frances, persists.”23
The understanding of secularity in France indeed cannot be dissociated
from a full appreciation of the crucial role of public (state) schools, secular places
par excellence. The link between schools and laïcité was conceived in reference to
the Enlightenment motto “Sapere aude! ” and Condorcet’s idea that “instruction,”
as distinct from parental education, was political and schools the vehicle for
emancipation, universal progress, liberty, and equality.24 The champion of secular
schools is the FCPE, the largest parents’ union, which emphasizes that secular
schools are where “children of all origins learn how to live and work together
whatever their religious and philosophical convictions.” Freedom of conscience
and freedom of thought coexist to combine respect for religious pluralism with
the construction of critical minds.25
As in other secular countries, laïcité is now confronted with issues of
pluralism. The main change France is faced with is the growing presence of
Islam, which is now France’s second religion and which, as Daniele Hervieu-
Leger remarks, although hardly a new phenomenom “questions and disturbs
the normal way [European] society deals with religion in the public space.”26
Other changes must also be taken into account. These testify to the vitality of
religion within the secular framework, namely the arrival of North African Jews
in the 1960s who had a much more visible religious culture than the already
existing Jewish population, the increasing visibility of evangelical and Pente­
costal Protestantism, the attraction of Buddhism, as well as the multiplication
of “new religious movements” and the related fear of “cults.”27
In 2003, the law banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools
raised new passions which, as it was debated, divided the proponents of laïcité.
Two years later, the centenary of the law on church-state separation provided
the opportunity for an in-depth reflection on the meaning of France’s founding
principle as well as a debate over the relevance of a revision of the 1905 law.28
Three major secular attitudes can be broadly defined in relation to laïcité.
Some, advocating an “open laïcité,” are concerned with the free exercise of
religion, but are also tempered by a revision of the 1905 law. Those favoring a
“laïcité in movement” are sensitive to social and religious change, but
remain faithful to the history of the secular ideal. Finally, the more militant
laics defend the French republican model by denouncing the dangers of
118 Secularism & Secularity

“communitarianism” and calling for the strengthening of the 1905 law.29

Seen from a certain viewpoint, the most “secular” today belong to the third
category (laïcité de combat ). That category fosters a movement that has recently
gained some momentum in a context of putting emphasis on the need for a
new understanding of Enlightenment thought.30 The most vocal proponents are
members of the FCPE, scholars or polemicists, all unbending defenders of the
1905 law.
Thus, Henri Pena-Ruiz defines laïcité in Kantian terms within a transcendal
framework: “the misreading of this status is the blind spot of the conceptions that
seek to renegotiate it ceaselessly, as the religious landscape and the power
struggles underlying it fluctuate.”31 Heirs of 19th-century rationalist freethinkers
and anticlericals, members of this group often view religion with suspicion,
and in some extreme cases with a downright hostility, and tend to confine
religion to the private sphere. French hardline secularists defend freedom of
thought above all and are ardent supporters of the law on religious symbols
in schools, which they see as an emancipating factor for women.32 Today, the
feminist journalist Caroline Fourest, editor of ProChoix, is probably one the
most representative figures of that trend, which wages a war on totalitarian
ideologies. It focuses on a fight against Islamic, Christian, and Jewish funda­
mentalisms, defined as manifestations of political projects for changing societies
that draw on a rigorous moralistic vision of religion.33

Please Don’t Call Me a Secular Catholic

In an article on secular and fundamentalist attitudes in France and other Western
countries, based on two surveys of the International Social Survey Programme
(1991 and 1998), the sociologist Yves Lambert concluded that, among countries
in which secular attitudes are more frequent than fundamentalist ones, France is
the most secular.34 He found that 40 percent of the French have secular attitudes,
characterized by an opposition to the direct influence of religion on society, with
few socio-demographic and economic variations. Hence in the 1998 survey,
63 percent of the French disagreed with the idea that politicians who do not
believe in God are not suitable for public office and 55 percent believed that
religious authorities should not try to influence governmental decisions.
In an attempt to explain the causes of the high degree of secularism in
France, Lambert examines the relationship between religious attitudes and
attitudes to laïcité in schools. He notes that while it is impossible “to say if secular
attitudes in France are the cause or the consequence of laïcité,” laïcité in schools
is supported by a large majority of the French population, Catholic or not,
secular or not.35 Attitudes to laïcité, however, interact with political orientations,
 9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France 119

55 percent of those favoring a strengthening of laïcité in schools are found on

the left. Interestingly though, attitudes to laïcité cut across attitudes to religion.
Among those supporting a strengthening of laïcité Lambert finds a substantial
number of Catholics and believers. Conversely non-religious people and non
believers can express non-secular ideas when they support a more flexible
laïcité.36
Secular attitudes can also be defined in relation to religiosity and to the sense
of religious belonging. As in the United States and other industrialized countries,
the “no religion” category in France (sans religion), the equivalent of the American
Nones, has been growing since the 1980s and gained even more speed in the
1990s. At the same time, while remaining by far the dominant religion, French
Catholicism has declined.37 In 1999, 53 percent of the population affiliated with
Catholicism, as against 71 percent in 1981.38
Figures vary, but it is estimated that today a little less than one-third of
French people belongs to the no religion category, an ill-defined constituency
composed of “non-believers,” people who do not belong to any religion, people
who do not identify as religious, anticlerical people, Agnostics, Atheists, and those
who are indifferent to religion. A survey published by the National Institute for
Sta­tis­tics and Economic Studies establishes that in 2004, 23.9 percent of women
and 30.6 percent of men identified as “no religious practice, no feeling of
belonging” (ni pratique ni sentiment d’appartenance ), with the highest rate found
among people aged between 15 and 24 (40 percent of women, 45 percent of
men).39
Men with intermediary professions, employees and workers, managers,
executives, and people with intellectual careers have the highest rates, while
the lowest rates are observed among farmers and retired people.40 As in other
industrialized countries, the typical secularist is male, young, and with some
education. Despite the growth—less than 10 percent identified as not religious
before the 1980s—few studies are devoted to that category whereas secularization
had generated countless surveys, articles and books.41 Sylvette Denefle’s Sociologie
de la sécularisation, published in 1997, is still the only, albeit not the definitive,
book on the topic, in which the author suggests that the category be defined in
positive terms.42
As noted above, the no religion category is very diverse, a diversity that
Denefle’s study does not reflect. Lambert qualifies her study by identifying three
subgroups. Less than a third are convinced Atheists, anticlericals and ration­al­
ists (the group Denefle’s sample of 78 people best represent). The other two
thirds are comprised of people “indifferent” to religion and people “interested”
in spirituality.43
120 Secularism & Secularity

Lambert observes that both institutional religion and religiosity are

weakening and that more people are now declaring themselves convinced
Atheists—in 1999, 14 percent of the whole population did against 10 percent in
1990.44 And yet, he observes that after-death beliefs (life after death, hell, paradise,
reincarnation), “parallel beliefs” (astrology, telepathy, charms), and attention to
ceremonies (attached to birth, marriage, death) are growing, especially among
the youth and to a lesser degree baby boomers, thus revealing “ a general
religiosity.”45 Hence, from 1981 to 1999, while the belief in a life after death
weakened among Catholics it grew among non-religious people, whether
Atheists or not.46 Even more paradoxically, the belief in God—usually conceived
as some vital force—is growing among young people who declare themselves
convinced Atheists.47
As Lambert points out, the non religious are not what they used to be.
In the context of deinstitutionalization, people are free to choose their own
religions, or rather their own way of believing.48 French seculars participate in
the transformation of spiritual belief described by sociologists. This spiritual
transformation occurs in opposition to Catholicism, with which the words
religion and religious are usually associated.

Conclusion
This chapter defines two distinct meanings of the word secular in the French
context. One is related to issues of laïcité and individual attitudes towards the
relationship between religion and society. Following the work of other authors,
it has distinguished three ways of looking at laïcité today, one being “open” to
change and hence revision of the law on church and state separation, the other
two varying in degree in their defense of strict separation. The second meaning
of “secular” refers to non-religious worldviews and private attitudes to religious
and spiritual feelings.
The French are obsessed by laïcité, but they know little about it and also
about the role of what it is supposed to protect, namely religions.49 They have
reservations about religion in the world, but tend to ignore the evolution of
private religiosity in France.50 Looking at this cherished French idea through
American glasses, at a time when it is challenged by the vitality of religion
and confronted with pluralism, provides useful insights into the current
transformation of French society. Conversely, probing into the uses, meanings,
and interpretations of the term “secular” from a foreign perspective should help
to assess the significance of the controversial use of the term in the U.S.
 9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France 121

Endnotes
1. “Secularism: A Symposium,” Religion in the News, vol. 8, n°3, Winter 2006.
2. See for example “Churchgoing Closely Tied to Voting Patterns,” USA Today, June
2, 2004; Samuel Huntington, Who are We?: The Challenges to America’s National
Identity (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 82-83.
3. In his study of baby-boomers’ religiosity, Wade Clark Roof identifies a category
he labels “Secularists,” in “Toward an Integration of Religion and Spirituality,”
Michele Dillon, ed. Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 147. This category is growing in the US, see Barry Kosmin and
Ariela Keysar, Religion in a Free Market: Religious and Non-Religious Americans—
Who, What, Why and Where (PMP, 2006). On the use of the term by religious con-
servatives David Klinghoffer, “That Other Church: Let’s Face it: Secularism is a
Religion. Let’s Treat it as Such,” Christianity Today, Dec. 21, 2004.
4. Françoise Champion, “La laïcité n’est plus ce qu’elle était,” Archives de sciences socia-
les des religions, 116 (2001), [On line], URL: http://assr.revues.org/document2775.
html. Page viewed June 9, 2006. This critical note on four recent books on laïcité
underlines the polymorphous quality of laïcité. In conclusion, the author calls for a
reflexion on “what is laïcité today?”.
5. Senate, Annex to the Minutes of the February, 25, 2004 session; Jacques Chirac,
December 12, 2004; Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de
laïcité dans la République, Rapport au président de la République, December 11,
2003. The Stasi commission, named after its head, Bernard Stasi, was in charge of
the report on religious symbols in public schools which inspired the 2004 law. “Re-
publican pact” has become a buzz phrase in French political rhetoric. It was popu-
larized by General De Gaulle in the mid-1940s to refer to what united the French
when the Fourth Republic was created following WW2.
6. “La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. […],”
Constitution of 4 October 1958, Assemblée Nationale. French laïcité was already
inscribed in the 1946 Constitution.
7. Phillip E. Hammond, David W. Machacek, and Eric Michael Mazur, Religion
on Trial: How Supreme Court Trends Threaten Freedom of Conscience in America
(Walnut Creek, AltaMira, 2004), p. 11.
8. Henri Pena-Ruiz, Qu’est-ce que la laïcité ? (Paris, Gallimard, 2003), p. 21.
9. Jean-Paul Willaime, “Laïcité et religion,” Grave Davie et Daniele Hervieu-Leger,
dir., Identités religieuses en Europe (Paris, La Découverte, 1996), p. 156.
10. Jean Bauberot, Histoire de la laïcité en France (Paris, Que Sais-je, 2000), p. 20 n.1.
See also Karel Dobbelaere, Secularization: A Multidimensional Concept (London,
Sage Publications, 1981).
11. Jean Bauberot, “Laïcité et sécularisation dans la crise de la modernité de l’Europe,”
Cahiers français, n° 273, oct.-nov. 1995, p. 29-30.
12. Willaime, “Laïcité et religion,” op. cit., p. 156.
122 Secularism & Secularity

13. Bauberot, Histoire de la laïcité en France, op. cit., p. 4. The author points out that the
notion of a secular (laïque) state truly emerged during the Revolution and refers to a
“prehistory” of laïcité, namely the long secularizing process prior to 1789 by which
institutions progressively dissociated themselves from the Catholic Church.
14. Ibid., p. 16.
15. Ibid., p. 19. The Concordat was signed in July 1801 by Pope Pius VII and Napo-
leon. For Henri Pena-Ruiz, it partook of a “logic of Old Regime theologico-political
domination more than it was “a step in the process of laïcisation” as Bauberot has
it (Qu’est-ce que la laïcité ? op. cit., p. 151)
16. Bauberot, Histoire de la laïcité en France, op. cit., p. 29.
17. Freedom of conscience refers to the freedom of thinking for oneself, which includes
agnosticism and atheism and integrates freedom of religion.
18. Bauberot, Histoire de la laïcité en France, op. cit., p. 87-88. Bauberot’s notion of
“pacte laique” is criticized by Pena-Ruiz who contends that the 1905 was not the
result of negotiations, but a governmental decision (Qu’est-ce que la laïcité?, op. cit.,
p. 302). On the compromises showing that the separation between Church and
State is not absolutely strict, see Jean Bauberot, “La France, République laïque,”
Jean Bauberot, dir., Religions et laïcité dans l’Europe des douze (Paris, Syros, 1994), p.
63-64.
19. Willaime, “Laïcité et religion,” op. cit., p. 164.
20. Pena-Ruiz, Qu’est-ce que la laïcité ?, op. cit., p. 12.
21. On the occasion of the centennial of the 1905 law Archives des sciences socia-
les de la religion published a special issue on the notion of state “recognition” of
religion banned by Article 2 (n°129, 2005). The question of religious studies
(“l’enseignement du fait religieux”) is another debated issue in France today. See
Regis Debray, “L’enseignement du fait religieux dans l’école laïque,” rapport au
ministre de l’Éducation Nationale, February 2002, 8-15.
22. Pentecost Monday, traditionally a public holiday, was transformed in 2005 by Prime
Minister Raffarin’s conservative government into a working “Day of Solidarity”
as part of a program designed to benefit old and handicaped people. The issue is
highly controversial, not because the move secularized the calendar, but because it
changed a paid holiday into a working day…
23. Jean Bauberot, “La France, République laïque,” Jean Bauberot, dir., Religions et
laïcité dans l’Europe des douze (Paris, Syros, 1994) p. 67.
24. Condorcet, Sur l’Instruction publique, 1791-1792.
25. Fédèration des Conseils de Parents d’Élèves des Écoles Publiques website, http://
www.fcpe.asso.fr/themes.aspx?idT=1, page viewed June 9, 2006.
26. Daniele Hervieu-Leger, “Islam and the Republic: The French Case,” Thomas
Banchoff, ed., The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy (Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming). The number of Muslims – secular and practicing – is estimated
at 5 or 6 million. Laïcité proscribes questions on religious belonging in the national
census.
 9. Laïcité and Secular Attitudes in France 123

27. An anti-sect law was passed in 2001.

28. See for example Yves-Charles Zarka et dir., “Faut-il réviser la loi de 1905?” (Paris,
PUF, 2005).
29. I borrow and adapt Jean Bauberot’s labeling in Histoire de la laïcité, op. cit., p. 119.
Proposals for a revision can be found for example in Nicolas Sarkozy’s provoca-
tive book, La République, les religions, l’espérance : entretiens avec Thibaud Collin et
Philippe Verdin (Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2004), in which the Interior Minister
advocates the public funding of religious buildings, mosques in particular, in a call
for the integration of Islam into French society. Within religious communities, po-
sitions vary. For example, on Evangelical Protestants, see Sebastien Fath, “De la
non-reconnaissance à une demande de légitimation?,” Archives de sciences sociales des
religions, 129 (2005).
30. See Tzvetan Todorov, L’ésprit des Lumières (Paris, Laffont, 2006), p. 24. See also Mi-
chel Onfray, Traité d’athéologie (Paris, Grasset, 2005) p. 30. The renewal of interest
in the Enlightenment is not limited to France, but has emerged in other societies
in search of secular values. In the United States see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A
History of American Secularism (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2004), p. 359-60.
31. Pena-Ruiz, Qu’est-ce que la laïcité ?, op. cit. p. 10.
32. As it was debated the controversial law was supported by 69 percent of the total
population and by 42 percent of the Muslim population (CSA poll, January, 26,
2004). For an analysis of the debate see Hervieu-Leger, “Islam and the Republic,”
op. cit. To date there is little public analysis on the impact of the law. In 2004, 47
pupils were officially expelled from school (out of 600 cases), an encouragingly low
figure according to the government.
33. Caroline Fourest, Tirs croisés: La laïcité à l’épreuve des integrismes juif, chrétien et
musulman (Paris, Calmann-Levy, 2003), p. 12. See also La tentation obscurantiste
(Paris, Grasset, 2005). “Caroline Fourest: Missionnaire de la laïcité,” Le Monde,
May 12, 2006. Fourest’s first target was Christian fundamentalism as it expresses
itself in the United States. The committed journal ProChoix has a wider scope of
activities and interests than the American ProChoice movement, after which it is
named, and also focuses on the defense of individual liberties.
34. Yves Lambert, “Attitudes secularistes et fondamentalistes en France et dans divers
pays occidentaux,” Social Compass 48 (1), 2001, 37, 42. Lambert defines fundamen-
talism as a desire to structure society according to religious principles.
35. Ibid., p. 47.
36. Ibid., p. 45.
37. Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Catholicisme, La fin d’un monde (Paris, Bayard, 2003).
38. Yves Lambert, “Religion: développement du hors-piste et de la randonnée,” Pierre
Brechon, ed., Les valeurs des Français, Paris, Colin, 2003, p. 175.
39. INSEE, Pratique religieuse selon l’âge, 2004. Accessible online. Twenty two per
cent did in 1987, 25 percent in 1996 (INSEE, “L’état de la pratique religieuse en
France,” n° 570, mars 1998).
124 Secularism & Secularity

40. INSEE, Pratique religieuse par categorie socioprofessionnelle, 2004. Accessible on-
line.
41. Lambert, “Religion” , op. cit., p. 170.
42. Sylvette Denefle, Sociologie de la sécularisation: Être sans-religion en France à la fin
du XXe siècle (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997), p. 8. The author has conducted her own
survey, but also refers to G. Michelat, J. Maître, J. Potel, J. Sutter, Les Français sont-
ils encore catholiques ? (Paris, Cerf, 1991) p. 105-110.
43. In Dominique Vidal, La France des ‘sans-religion’,” Le Monde Diplomatique,
September 2001.
44. Lambert, “Religion” , op. cit., p. 174.
45. Ibid., p. 175-182. The author points out that women are more likely to turn to
after-life or parallel beliefs, thus echoing previous patterns.
46. Ibid., p. 183. In 1999, 27 percent of convinced atheists believed in a life after
death.
47. Ibid., p. 184. In 1999, the rate was 10 percent for people aged between 18 and 29.
48. Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Le pèlerin et le converti: La religion en mouvement (Paris,
Flammarion, 1999).
49. The point that French people’s familiarity with laïcité prevents them from knowing
it well is made by Bauberot, Histoire de la laïcité, op. cit., p. 3.
50. CSA poll, September, 7, 2005. Accessible on line.
10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark:
From Emancipation to Ethnocentrism?
Lars Dencik

D enmark, like Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, is today a

highly developed society, fully committed to progress and modernization.
Individuals, as in the other Scandinavian countries, are granted extensive social
rights. Denmark is also characterized by being a stable democracy organized as
a comprehensive and well-functioning welfare state.1
Measured by GNP per capita, Denmark belongs among the most affluent
countries in the world. The Gini-index of income is low, meaning that there is
a fairly equal distribution of wealth among the population. There are no sharp
divisions in terms of social class, and the population as a whole is well educated.
Recent studies have also shown that all the Scandinavian countries rate among
those having the best quality of life in the world.2 Other studies show that the
Danes, not least its youth, rate as the world’s most satisfied citizens.3
Not only is egalitarianism highly valued in Denmark, as in the other
Scandinavian countries, but these countries also have had—up until recently—an
extraordinarily high degree of ethnic homogeneity. With very few exceptions:
• All citizens belonged to the same state-governed Lutheran church.
• All citizens spoke the unique language of the country, a language spoken
by all inhabitants of the country but spoken almost nowhere outside the
country.
• All citizens shared the experience and consciousness of a long and unified
national history.
However, in the wake of the radical modernization that has taken place in
the Scandinavian countries over the last decades, two processes relevant to the
discussion of secularism in society have taken place:

125
126 Secularism & Secularity

1) The church as an institution, and the influence of religious thought on

politics and social affairs in general, has lost influence.
2) Increased migration and cultural globalization has significantly affected
the fabric of social life.
Actually, the weakened position of the church and of the influence of
religious ideas in society has a longer history. It goes back to the early 1930s, to
the breakthrough of rationalism in connection with building a modern welfare-
state society. In the decades after World War II this process became radicalized.
This did not have as much to do with the experiences of the war or of the
Holocaust as with the dynamics of social modernization itself.
From a social psychological view this has meant a process of de-tradition­
alization.4 In matters such as family life and childrearing, people adapted to
radically modern life conditions by no longer doing what had been the “normal
thing to do,” but rather felt a need to “invent” new ways they perceived as more
adequate to the new conditions.

Where Tradition Had Ruled Reflection Took Over

Today, Scandinavians travel at great speed towards an ever-more radicalized
modernity—unknown as to form and content, yet carried along by the same
processes that created modern Denmark and the other Scandinavian welfare
states: rationalization, individuation, and secularization. These processes have
continued to act as transformational forces in society but now with modernity
itself as the point of departure.
• Rationalization implies that effectiveness, utility, and profitability are
superior considerations in all spheres of life.
• Individuation has meant that individuals have become singled out
socially, and “disembedded” from their social background, as the noted
British sociologist Anthony Giddens5 puts it. Nowadays they are—
ideally—treated as representatives only of themselves, not of any ascribed
collective, be it kinships, ethnic group, or religious affiliation.
• Secularization has opened up the opportunity for critical questioning of
established values and religious traditions.
Thus, each contemporaneous modernity is in turn replaced by the changes
that further modernization brings about. Individuals live in an era of continuous
modernization of modernity—an “era of shifts”—that implies a constant
rad­icalization of modernity.6
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 127

Change and shifts are communicating vessels. As conditions change indi­

viduals as well as social and cultural collectives, artistic groupings as well as
organizations, must continuously find new ways to cope with their existential
predicaments in order simply to remain in their current positions in society. The
need to find a new balance between continuously shifting orientations, strategies,
and attitudes—in short, of social identity—and the need to keep one’s integrity,
becomes a significant part of one’s existential game.7
This is the essence of a post-traditional world, a world in which both
knowledge and traditions can be found and cultivated but no longer function as
obligatory and controlling cultural patterns for the individual. Rather, there are
opportunities for choice and for creating a mix that suits the individual.
Understanding individuation is necessary to understanding secularization.
A seemingly paradoxical tendency occurs in the wake of radical modernization:
some people evince a propensity to religious and/or national fundamentalism—
what I in another context have labeled the tendency towards “neo-tribalism.”8
Individuation is one side of a psychological coin, the other side of which
is a yearning for belonging. Thus radicalization of modernity from the point of
view of the individual tends to create two seemingly contradictory but, in reality,
deeply connected tendencies. On one hand, the individual becomes increasingly
socially “disembedded,” free to, but also forced to, choose among an increasing
number of life options. On the other hand and by the same token, the indi­vid­ual
also becomes increasingly “existentially lonely,” prone to involve her or himself
in anything that glimpses at an experience of belonging, a sense of “we-ness”
—such as a family, a gang, a nation, or a religious grouping.

Secularization
Now to the issue of secularization. How is this defined in the modern
Scandinavian welfare states? Three partly overlapping points cover the common
understanding fairly well:
• Social affairs should be handled in a “rational” way, meaning that no
religious or other “metaphysical” belief systems should be allowed to
interfere with—not to say govern—political decisions. Nor should
religious values, feelings and interests be given special considerations in
the handling of social affairs.
• There should be no interference of religion in the political, social,
educational, and scientific fields.
• Religion is privatized and should be regarded and handled by citizens
purely as a question of a person’s “inner” beliefs.
128 Secularism & Secularity

Yet in this context a remarkable fact is that during the whole process of
modernization the state-church system in Denmark and Sweden has remained
intact. Denmark today maintains a state church, and Sweden separated church
from state only at the turn of the millenium. The present state-church system in
Denmark implies:
• According to the constitution (§54) the Evangelical Lutheran Church is
the Danish People’s Church (Folkekirke) and is as such supported by the
state, which means that the Lutheran religion and its institutions and
churches are given a favored place among religions in Danish society.
All tax-paying citizens, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, thus
contribute to the priests and bishops of the Folkekirke.
• According to §56 of the constitution the King (or the Queen if she is
the Head of State, as is presently the case) has to belong to the Lutheran
Church.
• The governmental system includes a “Ministry for the Church” headed
by one member of the Danish government (at present the person in
charge is also the Minister for Education). The Danish government
appoints the leading officials of the Folkekirke, such as the Archbishop
and the bishops.
• Every year the official opening of Parliament is accompanied by a
Lutheran religious service in the annexed church (Slotskirken).
• Practically all citizens are automatically members of the Folkekirke from
birth. Not to be so included requires that the citizen takes an initiative to
leave the church. At present 83 percent of the Danish population belong
to the Folkekirke.
• The public community schools (Folkeskolen) all teach “Christianity
classes.” Only when pupils reach the senior classes are they taught about
other religions. When the children reach the 7th or 8th grade they are
given 48-56 lessons at their school in order to prepare for their religious
confirmation.
• Most, if not all, official holidays in Denmark, such as Christmas,
Easter, Pentecost, Christ’s Ascension, etc. follow the Lutheran Church
calendar.
There rests a strange paradox in this: from one point of view Denmark
is clearly a Christian country—as are by more or less the same standards the
other Scandinavian countries. Looked at from another point of view, however,
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 129

Denmark, as well as Sweden, is a highly secular society.

In the wake of the infamous publication in the fall of 2005 of the Muhammad
cartoons in Denmark’s largest daily newspaper, Jyllandsposten, there arose an
intense debate about the status of religion in Danish society. The Prime Minister,
Anders Fogh Rasmusen, leader of the liberal-conservative coalition government,
is one of President Bush’s closest allies on the international scene. According
to several serious analysts his behavior on the diplomatic scene following the
publication of the caricatures was an active cause of subsequent events in the
Muslim world:
On February 15, 2006, he made the following statement on Danish Public
TV: “We shall be careful not to allow religion to fill up too much in the public
space.” A little later, he clarified his position in an article titled “Keep religion
indoors” in the leading Danish daily newspaper Politiken. In that article he
stated:
We shall keep religion and politics separate. In the Danish State of Law
it is the laws proclaimed by the Parliament that rule—not the Bible,
the Koran or other holy texts.
He continued:
Less religion in the public space implies that the believers keep their
dogmas for themselves—and allows others the right to believe and
think something else.
And he added:
Religion may release human beings from freedom and responsibility:
This is particularly true when holy texts are presented by legalistic
religions that prescribe in detail how the individual believer shall lead
his or her life.9
In a speech given at the occasion of the Danish Constitution Day, June 5,
2006, he elaborated on this matter, saying:
Religion is and remains a personal matter between the individual and
the God the person may believe in.... In Denmark neither the Bible nor
the Koran nor any other holy book is elevated above public debate....
It is dangerous when personal beliefs become substituted by a religious
law according to which the individual human being should subordinate
himself to pres­crip­tions that are thousands of years old. And society be
arranged according to religious decrees.
130 Secularism & Secularity

Given the context, the Prime Minister’s implicit attack on “legalistic (law)
religions” clearly refers to Islam. It is noteworthy that in the article quoted above,
the prime minister also proclaimed both that the Danish state does not have—
and shall not have—any religion, and that he is a warm supporter of the existing
Danish state church system, the Folkekirken. Thus he wrote:
Religious beliefs of course affect a person’s attitudes to many of the
topics that are debated in the public space...in that way religious faith
influences both attitudes and actions...in that respect religion will always
be present in the public space.... The Danish history and culture and
Danish society is penetrated by Christian thinking—simply because
most Danes are Christians…. In that regard religion and politics can
not be separated.
On the same occasion the speaker of the Danish Parliament,10 a member of
the same political party as the Prime Minister, in his speech stated:
Denmark is an old Christian country. This has been imprinted in gen­
erations. We see it in the arts and in the literature. We can note it in
our flag —the cross-banner.
The Vice Prime Minister and leader of the Danish Conservative Party,
Bendt Bendtsen, on the same occasion reiterated the same line of thought and
warned that:
Pushing our religion—Christianity—into the backyard.... We enjoy
religious freedom in this country, but religious freedom does not mean
equality among religions. Christianity has and shall have a favored
position.
Two days later, the vice prime minister, in an interview in the largest Danish
morning newspaper, elaborated on his position:
Christianity is under pressure…rather than abolishing religion in
the public space it may be timely for us to strengthen the Christian
foundations of our society.... Denmark and Western Europe rest on a
foundation of values that build on Christianity.... Christianity is in the
public space, and I acknowledge the values that Christianity give me as
a person and as a politician, and I don’t want to hide that.11
It should be noted in this context that neither the prime minister nor the
vice prime minister approve of the idea that religious symbols—be it a Christian
cross or a Muslim hijab—should be prohibited in public.
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 131

“We have a society based on Christianity, and this means that there is room
for Muslims to cultivate their religion. I do not approve of prohibitions and law
regulations on this field,” he said.12
It may be noted here how sharply the Danish, and in a larger context, the
Scandinavian, interpretation of secularism, differs from the more well-known
French understanding of this, as summarized in the concept of laïcité.

A Secularized Lutheranism
In Denmark, as in the other Scandinavian countries, an institutionalized Luth­
eran Christian belief system today exists in symbiosis with dominating secular
values. In these countries the values and system of democracy have strong
popular backing, as do the ideas of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly,
and the right to individual choice—for instance in religious beliefs and practices.
These “secular” notions extend to the ideas of gender equality, children’s rights,
and that each individual has the right to choose romantic partner(s) and to shape
his or her sexual life style according to personal preferences.
This amalgamates into what I, for want of a better notion, label a dominant
cosmology of secularized Lutheranism. Although Denmark (and Sweden) is a
country in which most of the citizens by tradition belong to the Lutheran state
church Folkekirken, Christianity as a practiced religion does not characterise the
life of a large segment of the population.
The number of churchgoers on any regular Sunday is below 5 percent of
the adult population13 and even on the religious holidays (with the exception
of the traditional Danish Christmas Eve service) doesn’t rise much above that.
A good 80 percent of the population can be characterized as “secular” in the
sense that religious practices do not have any place at all in their daily lives.
Nor do they in any substantial part support the Christian-Democratic political
party—in Denmark that party attracts hardly 2 percent of the voters in general
elections (in Sweden a little over 4 percent).
Paradoxical as it may seem, still most of the citizens are members of the
Folkekirke. The church is used by a large majority of the citizens only for lifecycle
events—entry and exit services—birth/baptism, confirmation, weddings (to a
lesser extent) and death/burials.
However, even if religious practices have a remarkably weak hold on the
vast majority of Danes and Swedes, and even if secular values are strongly
held, the everyday world view and daily life ethics of most Danes and Swedes
are profoundly coloured by certain Christian, or rather Lutheran, values: the
Protestant ethics14 of hard work and diligence, combined with a preference for
handling human affairs in a “rational” way. In an analysis of the formation of
132 Secularism & Secularity

the modern Danish and Swedish welfare states three intertwined processes
have been pointed out: rationalism, secularism and individuation.15 Religion is
regarded as purely a question of private inner beliefs.
Within the cosmology of secularized Lutheranism virtually everything is
measured according to its utility, nothing is really ”holy,” and religiosity should
play no role in social affairs. This penetrates the Danish and Swedish societies
to the extent that the very categories by which one organises and evaluates social
affairs in Denmark and Sweden are tinted by the tacit values and viewpoints of
the secularized Lutheran cosmology.
Nearly a year after the infamous so-called Muhammad Crisis, when Danish
embassies and flags where burned in several Muslim countries, Danish Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reiterated and underlined this attitude.
We should regard each other as citizens and as human beings and not
as Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists. Religion should be
erased as a criterion when organizing the activities of public institutions
and in the construction of laws.16
Even if not as outspoken as in some other countries, such as the Jewish state
of Israel and the Muslim Republic of Pakistan, there prevails in Denmark an
intriguing relationship between religion and nation.
Looking at the Danish society from the point of view of the sociology
of religion, it is quite striking that regardless of a citizen’s stand on religious
issues, the vast majority of them are members of the Folkekirken. They are, of
course, also Danish citizens, and also share what may be called a perspective of
Danishness, referring to the certain cultural prism through which one experiences
the world.
These three factors, secularized Lutheranism, Danish citizenship, and Danish­
ness as a prism of experiencing, constitute three cornerstones of a triangle into
which any Dane can be placed.

So What About Danishness?

At present in Denmark what constitutes Danishness, and how—if at all—a non-
native Dane may achieve that, is a very hot issue.
In order to illustrate the mechanisms that constitute a cultural prism I want
to give an example that I know from my own experience and that at present
is much less disputed than Danishness—the cultural prism of Swedishness.
By growing up in Sweden, by having Swedish as one’s mother tongue, and by
having spent one’s formative years in a Swedish school—as I have—one acquires
a Swedish way of perceiving the world.
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 133

This may manifest itself in the way one perceives society and interprets
social justice, but also with a rather special affection, bordering on religious
devotion, for nature as such. There is a way of appreciating wild forests, red
cottages, empty landscapes, and beaming sunshine that is more or less “typically
Swedish.” The fact that the songs of Swedish folklore and the special products of
Swedish cuisine evoke positive associations and feelings among some Swedes is
only because they are Swedish.
Over the past two decades cultural globalization has challenged whatever
Danishness has meant to Danes. In particular, the migration of Muslim groups
into the Danish welfare state. Today, approximately 6 percent of the inhabitants
of Denmark are immigrants or children of immigrants, not all of them Mus­lims
but most of them refugees from Turkey, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent
workforce immigrants from Pakistan. Their presence in Denmark has become a
major issue on the contemporary political scene in Denmark. Having for long
been a country of extraordinary cultural homogeneity––the very phenomenon
of a culturally “deviant” presence in the Danish society, and in particular the fact
that it is a Muslim group, has sharpened the awareness among Danes of their
own cultural heritage, life-style, and values.
This has, to some extent, led to a strengthened awareness of, and stress on,
Denmark’s Christian heritage. Christianity in Denmark may be said to have
developed into an ethno-cultural demarcation sign. The situation has also meant
that the Danish Government has launched commissions to define a Danish
cultural canon in all fields of the arts, including stating which Danish literary
works should be compulsory readings in schools.
But more significantly in this context, this has meant a sharpened ar­ti­c­u-­
la­tion of the secular values modern Denmark celebrates: political freedom,
freedom of expression (including the right to criticize and even to ridicule
religious and other “holy” texts and symbols), individualism (also within the
family, for instance with respect to children’s rights) and every individual’s right
to live according to one’s own individual preferences, sexual liberalism (includ­
ing relaxed attitudes to homosexuality, to being “daringly dressed” in public,
to pornography, etc.), and women’s rights and gender equality in all spheres
of life.
Not only have these secular values become more clearly articulated than
before, they are nowadays also launched, at times aggressively, as values that
express the very essence of contemporary Danishness. One implication is that
those who, for cultural and religious reasons, cannot accept these values become
targeted for being non-Danish, and at times even harassed for representing
values basically antithetic and hostile to Danishness.
134 Secularism & Secularity

As in other European countries the success of what might be called

“traditional secularism,” advocating the independence of politics, education,
science and social affairs from religious dogmas and institutions, in Denmark
has served as a vehicle for emancipation and democracy. The question is: what
social role does traditional secularism serve today, given the context of cultural
globalisation and migration and given the content of the secular values advocated
as characterizing contemporary Danishness?

A “New Xenophobia” and the Neo-Tribalist Backlash17

Finding an answer to the question posed above requires broadening the per­
spective both in time and space.
During the last decade a virtual inversion of the traditional image of Den­
mark as an overly tolerant and humane and liberal society has taken place.
Globalization, increased migration, and enhanced mobility within Europe have
contributed to diminishing the congruence between Blut (blood) und Boden
(soil), to use a renowned and infamous German phrase, on the European
continent. This in turn has had repercussions in a wave of “new xenophobia,” a
xenophobia, paradoxical as it may sound, in the name of tolerance, and populist
politics in several European countries. The terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 accentuated these trends and caused
latent anti-Muslim sentiments to be voiced openly in public debate.
Two tendencies that have become manifest in the aftermath are, on the one
side, a strengthened emphasis on national unity and national culture, such as
Christianity and secularism, and on the other side, increased militancy of those
groups that feel targeted by this new xenophobia.
The way immigration from non-European and mainly Muslim countries
into Europe has been handled over the last two decades has contributed to this.
In the wake of the failure—or perhaps, rather, unwillingness—to let these immi­
grants become integrated into their host countries a strengthened tendency
towards a “new nationalism” in several European states has emerged. Populist
political parties such as Front National in France, Jürg Haider’s nationalist
Freiheitspartei in Austria, Lega Nord in Italy, Vlamske Front , now Vlamske Belang,
in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn’s Party in The Netherlands, and Dansk Folkeparti
(Danish People’s Party) in Denmark have more or less successfully exploited
this.
With some variations between the countries, the policy these parties have
launched could be described as a kind of “diet version” of Blut und Boden. The
tendencies these parties express have not been confined only to these and similar
outspoken populist parties and movements; well-established and “decent”
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 135

democratic political parties and groupings in some of the countries mentioned

have jumped onto the hyper-nationalist band-wagon.
Denmark, one of Europe’s most advanced liberal welfare states and most
enlightened countries, is a case in point. Denmark is not just a small, ethnically
homogeneous, and seemingly peaceful country on the Nordic edge of the
European continent. Denmark is also the European country that today has been
judged by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)
as having the most xenophobic public debate and government policies.18
One significant reason for this is the influence of the populist Danish
People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti ). This political party, whose leading spokesmen
on these matters are two priests in the Folkekirken,19 combines a strongly
Islamophobic, anti-immigration, and anti-asylum-seeker position with political
protection of central aspects of the social welfare state system, granting the
Danes such goods as free medical care, relatively generous allowances in case
of unemployment, sickness, retirement, etc. The political platform of the party
may be described as ”welfare state chauvinism.”
In the last elections the party gained approximately the same following as
many right-wing populist parties in other European countries, about one eighth
of the vote. But in contrast to what has happened in many other countries, the
populists in Denmark have gained a dominant influence both on the public
debate and on government policies as far as immigrants, asylum seekers, and
foreigners are concerned. Contributing to this has been the strategy chosen by
the two major established political parties in Denmark, the Social Democrats
and the Liberal Party (Venstre, headed by the present prime minister), in
combating the challenge posed by the up-and-coming Danish People’s Party. In
what, at best, could be understood as an attempt to pre-empt the challenge, they
co-opted the anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalist arguments put forward
by the Danish People’s Party—thereby in effect legitimising the very discourse
launched by the populist agitators.
This discourse has now become very influential in Danish politics and many
of the measures taken by the government in these matters. The underlying,
but also publicly expressed idea is that the coherence (sammenhængskraften ) of
Danish society is threatened by the very presence of these “strangers” (fremmede )
in Denmark. Islam, and by the same token, Muslims, are pictured not only as
basically incompatible with both Danishness and democracy, but also as posing
a threat both to the Christian and the secular culture.
This development was greatly helped by a populist tabloid press and by
a certain brand of Danish publicists and intellectuals, many of whom were
previously active on the extreme left, and were influenced by the ideas of the
136 Secularism & Secularity

popular 19th century Danish Christian priest, writer, and philosopher Frederik
Severin Grundtvig.
A celebrated notion in his philosophy is the notion of “the people” (folket).
In his understanding “the people” is synonymous with “the Danes”—entrusted
with a particular folkesjæl (soul or spirit of the Danish people) and constituting
a certain folkestam (the tribe of Danes)—that by implication is Christian but at
the same time also secular.
The political exploitation of such ideas apparently has deep cultural reso­
nance among the Danish population. When referring to the celebrated notion
folket, what is denoted is the Danish ethnos, rather than a demos corresponding
to the “the inhabitants of Denmark.” As a consequence, much of the political
discourse in Denmark today centers around blatantly ethnocentric and
outspokenly anti-multiculturalist propositions.
A corresponding tendency towards neo-nationalism now penetrates also
into the sentiments of some of the other “indigenous” European populations.
There are similar tendencies towards developing an ethnically and/or religiously
defined social identity among some of the newly arrived groups on the European
scene.
Taken one by one, each of these tendencies is potentially xenophobic and
at times also manifests itself in xenophobic attitudes and actions.20 Paradoxically
enough then, considering the ongoing European integration within the eco­
nomic and political spheres, in its shadow a kind of neo-tribalism within the
social and cultural spheres seems to be emerging.

“Ethno-Christianity” and “Militant Secularism”

On one hand one can notice a tendency towards a strengthened Christianity-
colored neo-nationalism celebrating secular values within some of the estab­lished
European nation states. On the other hand, an equally strong tendency exists
towards increased ”Muslim militancy” within the very same European societies.
These tendencies are not unrelated; on the contrary, they reinforce each other.
A political spiral is set in motion: neo-nationalistic tendencies encourage
increased marginalisation of the growing numbers of immigrants (regarded
as “strangers”) in European countries, which then engenders increased ethnic
radicalism, (Muslim militancy) among them, which in turn breeds even more
xenophobic sentiments in several indigenous European populations. Intriguing­
ly enough, this kind of “new” xenophobia argues its case in the name of tolerance
by focussing on the murderous intolerance of its target group. Thus cases like
the following serve to underpin this standpoint:
 10. The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark 137

Denmark: 9 found guilty in ‘Honor killing’. A jury in Copenhagen

con­victed nine people, all family members and friends, of murder or
accessory to murder in the killing of a 19-year-old woman. The woman
was gunned down by her older brother last September, two days after
her wedding, because her Pakistani family disapproved of her choice
of husband.... Besides her brother, the defendants included her father,
three uncles, an aunt and two family friends.” 21
As has become the case in Denmark, but also in other European countries,
events like this feed a kind of “ethno-Christianity” amalgamated with a militantly
secular neo-tribalism. Even if Muslims and other religiously and culturally
“deviant” groups are not all fundamentalists of the kind illustrated by this case,
the fact that such things actually take place fosters not only hostile attitudes
towards these groups in general, but also a sense of self-sufficiency among those
who feel they embody the “righteous” secular values of tolerance. In Denmark
this, by extension, now manifests itself in hostile attitudes to immigration from
Muslim countries and “strangers” in general, against giving asylum seekers
refuge, and against—in actual practice—granting equal human rights for all,
regardless of origin, religion and ethnicity.
Thus, the paradox occurs whereby the hegemony of a secularized Luth­
eranism combined with the valorization of contemporary secular values (at
least in ethno-Christian Denmark) can serve in effect not only as a vehicle for
individual emancipation, but also, as an effective instrument for a militant
ethnocentrism.

Endnotes
1. Esping Andersen, Gosta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, (Cambridge:
Polity, 1990).
2. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Life Index. 2005. The Economist. April
1, 2007. http://www. economist.com/media/PDF/Quality_OF_LIFE.pdf.
3. Global Youth. 2007. Kairos Future. April 1, 2007. http://www.kairosfuture.com/en/
international/projects/globalyouth or http://www.kairosfuture.com/en/node/1012
4. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
5. Ibid.
6. Dencik, Lars. “INTO THE ERA OF SHIFTS—How everything gets designed in
an increasingly non-designed world” Ed. Lars Dencik. SHIFT: Design as Usual or a
New Rising, (Stockholm: Arvinius, 2005), pp. 6-29.
7. cf. Dencik, Lars. “Transformations of Identities in Rapidly Changing Societies” Eds.
138 Secularism & Secularity

Mikael Carleheden and Michael Hviid Jacobsen The Transformation of Modernity.

Aspects of the Past, Present and Future of an Era, (London: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 183-
221.
8. Dencik, Lars. “ ‘Homo zappiens’—A European-Jewish way of Life in the Era of
Globalisation,” Eds. Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson. Turning the Kaleidoscope—
Perspectives on European Jewry, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) pp. 79-105.
9. “Keep religion indoors.” Politiken 19 May 2006.
10. His name is Christian Mejdahl.
11. Jyllandsposten, 7 June 2006
12. Vice Prime Minister Bendt Bendtsen in Jyllandsposten 7th of June 2006
13. Gundelach, Peter. Danskernes værdier, (København: Hans Reitzel, 2002).
14. Weber, M. (2004) Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Max
Weber Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I, Tübingen (1934), pp. 1-206.
15. Arvidsson, Håken, Lennart Berntson, and Lars Dencik. Modernisering och Välfärd.
Om individ, stat och civilt samhälle i Sverige. (Stockholm: City University Press,
1994); Dencik, Lars and Per Schultz Jørgensen. Børn og Familie i det postmoderne
samfund, (København: Hans Reitzel, 1999).
16. Politiken 1 March, 2007.
17. This section is in parts based on a corresponding section in my article “‘Homo zap-
piens’—A European-Jewish way of Life in the Era of Globalisation,” Eds. Sandra
Lustig and Ian Leveson Turning the Kaleidoscope—Perspectives on European Jewry,
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 79-105.
18. In a poll published 5. June, 2003 by Jyllandsposten, the largest morning daily in
Denmark, more than 80% of the Danes admit that in Denmark “racism” now pre-
vails against those that have arrived in the country as refugees and immigrants.
19. Søren Krarup and Jesper Langballe, who also happen to be cousins.
20. Thus, e.g. the radical Muslim group Hizb-ut-Tahrir is active in Denmark where
they, among other things, have set up a web-site and distributed pamphlets referring
to the Jews proposing: “And kill them wherever you find them, and expel them from
wherever they expelled you.”
21. “World Briefing: Europe: Denmark: 9 found guilty in ‘Honor killing’.” New York
Times 28 June 2006.
11. Secularism in Iran:
A Hidden Agenda?
Nastaran Moossavi

I n a country where honest responses to simple questions such as “Are you a

Muslim? Do you believe in God? Is the Holy Koran the word of God? Do you
pray and read the Holy Koran? When you were growing up did your father pray,
fast, and read the Holy Koran?” led to mass executions in the late 1980’s,1 it is
very difficult to know who is secular and to what extent. In this kind of situation
people do not trust each other easily and often deny their true identity. It is
infinitely more complicated to conduct a survey that asks questions like “What
is your religion, if any?”2 Therefore, this assessment of religious identification
among Iranians has shortcomings in terms of a quantifiable evaluation.3
However, those living in Iran distinguish the extent of adherence to religion
among themselves by other means. They also use other measures to find out
who believes in a different interpretation of religion, even when people do not
identify themselves. One way to document such distinctions is through one’s
appearance, especially in the case of women.4 Another source of information on
the issue is the various life styles people take up.5 Furthermore, membership in
certain social organizations or affiliation to specific religious institutions separates
believers and non-believers from each other and also indicates differences among
believers.
A more direct way of knowing who is secular today in Iran, and in what
terms, is to look at the literature published in recent years on secularism, in its
broadest meaning, and follow the people who spoke up and expressed their ideas
on the issue. This chapter attempts to review this literature and come up with
clues for understanding the debate about secularism in Iran.
In the absence of a reliable social survey, the focus must be on reviewing the
writings of those who have considered themselves secular by whatever definition,

139
140 Secularism & Secularity

and also those who have raised certain doubts about the legitimacy of the existing
Islamic government from a religious point of view. It is widely believed that the
debates on issues such as secularism, Islamic government, and the proper role of
clergymen in the government date back to the years around the Constitutional
Revolution in Iran in 1906.
Certain articles of the Supplement to the Constitution Acts, approved then,
reflect how power was consolidated between religious and non-religious parties.
One of these articles asserted that the representatives of people in the parliament
would select five qualified clergymen from a list of twenty presented by the
high ranking clerics. The role of these clergymen was to ensure that every new
law and regulation in civic affairs was in accordance with Sharia’h. Observing
this agreement, some, like Ahmad Kasravi,6 decided that the Constitutional
Revolution had failed since it had offered the clerics the upper hand in super­vis­
ing the newly constitutional government. According to him, the Constitutional
Revolution was expected to put an end to the misery of Iranians, who were
suffering from despotism and “harmful” religious teachings equally. He is one
of those who believed “…religion is not something useless. We expect benefits
from religion… Religion is for the purpose of helping the people to advance and
religious people must be superior to irreligious people.”7
It is interesting to note that the debate on secularism which emerged again
in the mid-1990’s focused on two of Kasravi’s premises and tried to justify them.
However, there has been no direct reference to him or to his ideas. In 1943, he
wrote against the clerical establishment, saying:
Should this establishment remain, it will always be a shackle for the
nation; it will prevent progressing (as it has done so far).8
This statement is reminiscent of the criticism of “religious intellectuals”
against the Islamic government during the past decade, which claimed that
“Islam does not need clerics.”9 Kasravi, in his attempt to cleanse Islam from all
its faults, tries to reconcile it with science. He is against clergymen who believe
“God’s religion cannot be measured with the rational faculties.”10 Kasravi finds
Islam, science, and civilization compatible. Again, this is echoed in the recent
discussions that find a rational philosophical trend in Islam, and therefore assert
that Islam does not hinder scientific and technological progress.
The point in linking these periods is that secularism, as it began in 1906,
is still an “unfinished project.” It should be understood as an ongoing process,
with its ups and downs. Being a time bound phenomenon, people at different
times have articulated their ideas on secularism differently. The determination
to realize its goals has also differed in various periods. During the Constitutional
 11. Secularism in Iran 141

Revolution, there was a range of demands expressed by different political figures

and parties. These demands included the complete separation of religion from
government (and sometimes its elimination), as well as an emphasis on the right
of supervision by clerical institution over legislation.
At the present time, the demands that can be expressed in public may
not have the same radical intonation, but they raise deeper concerns about the
relationship between religion and government, the role of clerics in Shi’ism, the
significance of rational thinking, and other relevant issues. The process that has
begun is more problematic and painstaking for those who want to replace the
existing interpretation of Shi’ism with another one.
It is unknown how far redefining and reinterpreting the sources of Islam
will create reliable grounds for criticizing the official religion. Ever since the
Constitutional Revolution, attempts to formulate an alternative interpretation
of Islam and the struggle of “Religion against Religion” have continued in Iran.11
It was repeated by people like Kasravi until the 1940’s, taken up as an agenda
by Mujahedin-e Khalgh12 in the mid 1960’s, and elaborated by Shariati13 in the
1970’s. Once again we hear the same voice, but in a different variation.
This new round of effort is said to be due to the changes that Iranian society
underwent after the domination of Islamists in the 1979 revolution. For the first
time, the Shi’ite clerics got the opportunity to run a government. It was then
time to see how a certain interpretation of Shi’ism is able to adjust itself to the
requirements of modern-day Iran.
Though it took some time for the Islamist leaders of the revolution to gain
control over all the dissidents and either wipe them out physically or silence
them, the revolution had to demand that the people acknowledge its legitimacy
from the outset. The first and second articles of the new Constitution explain
explicitly that the basis of the government is a combination of Islamic values and
republicanism. The very act of establishing an Islamic government was posed
to people in a referendum vote.14 The amazing endorsement of 98.2 percent of
voters solidified the new government’s position.
The disillusionment with the clerical authorities and criticism against their
interference in every aspect of life occurred in the years following the end of the
war with Iraq in the late 1980’s. Now the dismay went beyond the “outsiders”—
apostates, and secularists who had struggled to undermine the clerics since
the beginning of the Constitutional Revolution. The heart of Islamism was
attacked by its own children, from within. This process has its advantages and
disadvantages since it is such an internal conflict. On one hand, it is unlikely to
cut off its own roots, for fear of losing a firm basis on which to promote Islamic
values, and in fear of absolute denial by its “spiritual fathers.” On the other
142 Secularism & Secularity

hand, these internal opposition groups know the limitations of Islamism better
than their intellectual and political rivals outside the governing circles.
The final decision to be taken was, of course, individual for “religious
intellectuals,” but prior to making this choice they tried to deal with the issue
collectively. One strategy was to speak up and tell their audiences and readers
how another interpretation of Islam could exist; an interpretation that has as its
primary requirement curtailing the power of the clerics. Exploring the history
of Islam, as well as adopting different ways of argument with more emphasis
on rational thinking and a positivist outlook, served them well in making their
points.
One of the prominent figures of the new trend, better known to the West
than others, is Abdolkarim Soroush.15 Some of his basic views can be formulated
as follows:
• Religion, due to its celestial nature, is not limited to historical and human
decrees. However, our understanding of religion is time dependent and
changes as the human knowledge is transformed.
• Islam (and any other religion) is modified by its essence, not its change­
able formal components. Therefore, a true Muslim is one who is devoted
and committed to the essence of Islam.16
• There is a distinction between political secularity and philosophical
secularity. The tension between these two distinctions has always existed
in Shi’ism in Iran, though Shi’ism is alien to secular politics.
• Authorization to reinterpret Islam is allowed for the most highly learned
man of the time. Such a person is not necessarily a clergyman who is most
educated in Islamic theology. Men with high qualifications in modern
knowledge and education are in a better position to revise Islamic
thought and practice.
For the religious critics of Islamic government, the problem of reconciling
Islam and democracy, intellectualism and religiosity, rationality and faith,
and similar issues are yet to be worked on.17 Among themselves they discuss
whether rationalism is only a tool that an intellectual is equipped with. Does
it mean that anybody may be wrong and subject to questioning, that one can
keep on questioning about anything without restriction? Do human beings need
evidence of proof to believe things are right? On the other hand, does religiosity
necessitate that one simply believe in the sayings of one specific person and/or
some specific people? If the essence of Islam is absolute obedience to God, is
then the term “religious intellectualism” paradoxical?
 11. Secularism in Iran 143

It is said that though materials are written and translated on the differen­
tiation between reason and intellect, between discursive reason and intellectual
intuition, there is no conflict between religiosity and intellectual intuition.18
Some scholars are not sure what intellectual intuition exactly means and implies.
So they recommend that it is preferable to dismiss the whole idea and stay safe in
the ___domain of religion or, at most, rephrase the current attempt as “Revisionism.”19
This trend emphasizes the right of Ijtihad 20 in Shi’ism, saying that the new wave
of revising Islam in Iran has nothing to do with the Enlightenment as it emerged
in Europe. Despite different ways of articulation, the “religious intellectuals” all
agree that religion should be separated from government, but not from politics.
On other issues, such as the negation of Velayat-e Faqih,21 or denial of the right
of clerics for mediating between God and people, their ideas and commitment
to religious reform varies in degrees.
In addition to these internal debates, certain journals started asking opinions
of some intellectuals that were known as “non-religious.” The Iranian Diaspora
was also encouraged to join the debate on secularism. The fact that some of these
“non-religious” intellectuals were welcome to participate in the debates showed a
change in attitude among people who had once helped with the construction of
the Islamic government, but then changed into its mild critics. They were seeking
allies in order to push for reform and challenge the governing clerical power.22 In
their attempt to increase the scope of their influence, they turned to their rivals
at the eve of the 1979 revolution,23 and sought their intellectual assistance to
enrich the process of dialogue. Some of these “old” rivals (i.e., remaining leftists
and seculars from the suppressions of the 1980’s onward) were in a mood of self
defeatism, and some had already started to revise their previous beliefs. It is now
believed that the new coalition includes religious reformers from one side and
secular neo-liberals from the other side.
The product of such exchanges of views has been a significant number of
articles, books, and interviews published inside and outside Iran and posted
on various Web sites. One could add the number of participants in discussion
meetings to the circulation figures for those books; the number of subscribers
to the journals that publish such articles; and finally, the number of visitors
to these Web sites, in order to estimate the percentage of secular persons in
Iran with respect to the whole educated population. But the major part of the
current students’ movement and women’s movement has been dominated by the
religious reformist discourse. This is not to deny the existence of other tendencies
or believe they will permanently remain marginalized since the social dynamism
incurred in these years is still operative.
Of course, some people find the literature on secularism confusing and
144 Secularism & Secularity

comment that Iranians do not know what we precisely mean by terms like
secular, laïcité, modernity, secularization, etc., especially when we apply it to
our own society.24 This might be true, especially when one notes that no exact
equivalent of these words exist in the Persian language. This situation creates
frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings, but also forces writers and
readers to explain themselves as clearly as possible. Therefore, there is a set of
common questions; whether “secularism implies separation of religion from
government or from politics,” if “laïcité is the same as secularism,” and in what
ways “modernity, modernization, and modernism are different from each other.”
It is not to say that all these challenges are happening in the ___domain of language.
On the contrary, the need for naming these phenomena properly specifies how
crucial it is to understand the options the religious reformers are offering to the
society.25
“Religious intellectuals” have been repeatedly asked to respond and clarify
in what ways their interpretation of Islam guarantees freedom of expression and
how women and non-believers are to be treated. When terms such as “Islamic
democracy,” “Islamic civil society,” and “religious secularism” are created, one
doubts the possibility of mixing these concepts. One “non-religious” scholar
claims that in the late 1970’s Iranians combined religion and revolution and
shaped one of the most extraordinary revolutions in history. According to him, it
is not surprising that an unexpected intertwining of intellectualism and religion
was created.26 The desire to benefit from Enlightenment values and remain a
faithful Muslim and/or an Iranian patriot still permeates the intellectuals’
minds. Despite all that has happened in the last 100 years, Iranian intellectuals
continually face the same challenges.
The debate over secularism has brought together some intellectuals, who
have made revisions in their previous theories and practice, from both sides
of the religious and non-religious spectrum. Their main agenda is to recreate
secularism in an Islamic way and turn it into the ideology of the opposition
movement in Iran. Meanwhile, ordinary people have been dealing with the
pressure of Islamism in different ways. Deeply rooted middle-class values, and
the revival of them in public life in recent years, have offered options to people,
especially to youth, to experience different life styles. Many visitors from the
West are surprised by the emergence of a youth culture in such a restricted
country like Iran. On the other hand, the authorities have taken the issue of
regulating the youth problem more seriously.27 They are aware that the concept
of secularism has its own attraction for many young people.
Therefore, the youth have become the battlefield between secularists and
fundamentalists. Struggles over women preceded this new conflict, and are still
 11. Secularism in Iran 145

going on. Undoubtedly, women and youth have tried to organize independently
and find an outlet for their problems with the clerical establishment, but there
are certain limitations in going beyond the offered options given censorship and
the exclusion of alternatives. The need to hear more voices is crucial now. It is
not fruitful to compel Iranians to choose between the dichotomies of “bad” and
“worse” that are expressed in the current discussions on secularism. Iranians have
sought their independence from foreign powers, political freedom, and social
justice since the Constitutional Revolution. Yet the right to keep religion away
from government has yet to be fought for.
Organizing scholarly debates and raising social awareness on secular values
requires relatively peaceful conditions. The road towards setting up a democratic
society in Iran is already rough. It may be completely blocked if the existing
dispute over the Iranian government’s nuclear program keeps on threatening,
and if no diplomatic resolution is found. If the U.S. government takes coercive
military measures against Iran all the attempts that have been made so far will
be in vain. As in the early 1950’s it will constrain the emergence of internal
alternatives to our problems.28
I believe any plan for taking military action against Iran will strengthen
fundamentalism within the country and the region. All the other social and
political groups will be forced to withdraw their demands under the threat
of a foreign invasion. It is obvious that the debate on the role of religion and
democracy cannot be carried on in a wartime situation, as the example of Iraq
indicates. On the other hand, any future arrangement between the U.S. and the
Iranian governments that keeps silent about human rights violations in Iran will
undermine the democratization process and weaken the secular movement.

Endnotes
1. For more details, see Abrahamian, Ervand, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public
Recantations in Modern Iran, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
2. American Religious Identification Survey, 2001. < http://www.trincoll.edu/Academ-
ics/AcademicResources/values/ISSSC/research/ARIS+2001.htm>.
3. Actually, there exists a mechanism in Shi’ism that lets Muslims conceal their faith
in anticipation of damage or injury. Taqiyyah becomes the norm of public behavior
when ordinary people fear the danger of being persecuted for their belief.
4. Men are distinguished from their clothing, such as wearing a tie or letting their shirt
fall loose over their pants, and the way they shave.
5. There are certain public spaces that the fundamentalists avoid, especially if they are
not segregated for men and women. The way one manages her/his leisure time is
determined, to a large extent, by how adherent one is to religious beliefs.
146 Secularism & Secularity

6. Ahmad Kasravi (1890-1946) has been a controversial figure for his direct attack on
Shi’ite clergy. He was assassinated by the clandestine Devotees of Islam (Fedaiyan-
Eslam). Except for his books on the history of Constitutional Revolution, his other
works have been banned on and off since 1946. There is a bibliography of Kasravi’s
works in Kasravi, Ahmad, On Islam and Shi’ism, trans. M.R. Ghanoonparvar, Costa
Meza: Mazda Publishers, 1990, pp. 54-57.
7. Ibid. p. 95.
8. Ibid. p. 98.
9. Quoted from an interview with Abdolkarim Soroush published in www.BBCPer-
sian.com on August 22, 2004.
10. On Islam and Shi’ism, p. 99.
11. “Religious intellectuals” consider Jamal ad-Din Asad-abadi (d. 1879) and Hadi
Najmabadi (d.1902) as the leaders of the first generation of Shi’ite modernism.
12. An Islamic oppositional guerrilla organization formed in 1965 that considered the
establishment of a classless monotheist society as its ultimate goal.
13. Ali Shariati, the twentieth century Iranian sociologist and Islamologist differenti-
ates “religion of revolution” from “religion of legitimation.” He has discussed the
difference between them in Shariati, Ali, Religion vs. Religion, trans. Laleh Bakhtiar,
Chicago: ABC International Group, 2003.
14. “If democracy is invalidating any rule that people have not voted for it, naturally
this does not reconcile with religion. Nevertheless, asking for people’s consent and
the approval of majority for realization the rules of sharia’h is acceptable in Islam.
Actually, this is what religious democracy mean.” The quotation is from Mesbah
Yazdi, an orthodox conservative theoretician well known for his opposition with
Abdolkarim Soroush. www.mesbahyazdi.com
15. For more information, see Soroush, Abdolkarim, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in
Islam, trans. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000. Moreover, many of his ideas can be searched for in his official website at the
following address: www.drsoroush.com/English.htm
16. Nikfar, Mohammadreza, “Zaat-e yek Pendar” {Essence of a Thought} Negah e-Nou,
13: 16-27.
17. It is worth mentioning that some clergy men have also joined the debate, but
with more cautious on how far intellectualism and religion can go along together.
Mohsen Kadivar, Mojtahed Shabestari, and Yousef Eshkevari joined the debate as
soon as it started in mid 1990’s.
18. Ideas of some scholars like Burkhart, Huston Smith, and Seyed Hossein Nasr have
been translated and read in these years.
19. Malekan, Mostafa, “Ho’zeh va Donyaye Jadid”{Seminaries and the New world},
Rah-e Nou, 1(13): 18-26.
20. The Shi’ite and the Sunni scholars believe that the Islamic law has derived its sources
from the Quran, the Sunna (the model behavior of the prophet, as related in collec-
 11. Secularism in Iran 147

tions of sayings or Hadith that are in variations and localized as necessary), the Qiyas
(analogical reasoning, subject to the clergymen’s determination), and the Ijma (Con-
sensus of the community, subject to the community leaders’ determination). Shi’ism
has added a fifth element to these sources that is Ijtihad, (ongoing reinterpretation
by religious authorities of the present time).
21. The Guardianship of the Jurisconsult in the absence of the Twelfth Imam has been
asserted in the Constitution Acts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Article 110 ex-
plains the authorities given to the Grand Juriconsult, among which is the right to
appoint the highest rank of the Judiciary, the head of the Islamic Republic Broad-
casting Agency, the head of Military, and the General Commander of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards. It should be noted that there is less dispute over the authority
of the jurist in Shi’ism, but the extent of this authority has been questioned and
the Islamic theologians and clerics have differed on the issues of the leadership and
advisory role of the jurists.
22. The reformers participated in the political power and supported the Iranian presi-
dency from 1997 until their recent defeat in 2005.
23. Kashi, Ghlolamreza, “Bohran dar Roshanfekri-eh Dini” {Crisis in Religious Intel-
lectualism} in www.nilgoon.org, p.2.
24. Sometimes the interaction between the Iranian Diaspora and those living in Iran
happens through internet, for instance this criticism can be found in correspon-
dences in Persian posted to www.Secularismforiran.com
25. This paper does not mean to assess the class combination of the seculars, religious
reformers, and official ideologues. Therefore it takes the whole Iranian society as
listeners of the debates.
26. www.BBCPersian.com has conducted a series of interviews with prominent figures
of “religious” and “non-religious” intellectuals in 2005 and 2006.
27. More information on the official policies on the youth is available at: http://www.
nyoir.org/eng/default.htm
28 The coup d’etat against Muhammad Mossadeq in 1953 designed by the CIA and
carried out by the supporters of Muhammad Reza Shah prepared the ground for 25
years of dictatorship in Iran.
12. Secularism in India
Ashgar Ali Engineer

S ecularism in India has unique implications and meaning. In the Indian

context the word secularism has never been used in the way in which it is
often used in Western countries (i.e. a purely this-worldly approach, rejecting
other-worldly beliefs).
India is a country where religion is central to its people’s lives. India’s age-
old philosophy, as expounded in Hindu scriptures called Upanishad, is sarva
dharma samabhava, which means equal respect for all religions. The reason
behind this approach is that India has never been a mono-religious country.
There existed before the Aryan invasion numerous tribal cults from
Northwest India to Kanya Kumari, most of which happened to be Dravidian.
Following the Aryan invasion, people of Dravidian origin were driven south,
and today we find all Dravidian people in the four southern states of India.
The Aryans brought a religion based on Vedas and Brahmins that dominated
the intellectual life of north India. But a section of the Brahmins also migrated
south and evolved new cults, marrying Vedic cults with Dravidian ones. As a
result Hindu Indians worship thousands of gods and goddesses.
Christianity and Islam added religious traditions to the pre-existing Indian
traditions. So it can be said that India is a bewilderingly diverse country in every
respect: religion, culture, ethnicity, and caste.

Caste Over Religion

Caste rigidity and the concept of untouchability have evolved and still play a
major role in religious, social and cultural matters. Caste dynamics in Indian life,
even in Christian and Islamic communities, play a larger-than-life role. Since
most converts to Christianity and Islam were lower-caste Hindus, these two
world religions also developed caste structures. There are lower-caste churches
and mosques in several places.

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Under the feudal system, there was no competition between the different
religious traditions, as authority resided in the sword; generally there was no
tension between people of different religions. Though occasional inter-religious
controversies did arise, blood was never shed in the name of religion.
There was also a tradition of tolerance between religions due to the state
policies of the Emperors Ashoka and Akbar. Ashoka’s edicts clearly spell out a
policy of religious tolerance, and Akbar used to hold dialogues between followers
of different religions; he also followed the policy of tolerance and even withdrew
the jizya tax (poll tax on Hindus), which was an irritant. Thus both Ashoka
and Akbar have a place of great significance in the religious life of India. It is no
wonder that they have been designated as “great” (they are referred to as Ashoka
the Great and Akbar the Great).
Also, India had Sufi and Bhakti traditions in Islam and Hinduism
respectively. Both Sufism and the Bhakti traditions were based on respect for
different religions. The poorer and lower-caste Hindus and Muslims were greatly
influenced by these traditions. Unlike ‘ulama and Brahmins, the Sufi and Bhakti
saints were highly tolerant and open to the truth in other faiths. They never
adopted sectarian attitudes and were never involved in power struggles. Indeed
they kept away from power structures.
Nizamuddin Awliya, a great Sufi saint of the 13th-14th centuries, saw the
reign of five Sultans but never paid court to a single one. When the last Sultan of
his life sent a message requesting him to come to the court, he refused. Then the
Sultan sent the message that if Nizamuddin did not come to his court, the Sultan
would come to his hospice. Nizamuddin replied that there were two doors to
his hospice; if the Sultan entered by one, he would leave by the other. Such was
the approach of Sufis and Saints to the power structure of their time.
Dara Shikoh was heir apparent to Shajahan, the Moghul Emperor, but
he had a Sufi bent of mind and was a great scholar of Islam and Hinduism.
He wrote a book Majmau’l Bahrayn (Co-mingling of Two Oceans Islam and
Hinduism) and, quoting from Hindu and Islamic scriptures, showed that the
two religions had similar teachings. The difference lay in language (Arabic versus
Sanskrit), not in teachings. Thus, Dara Shikoh also contributed richly to inter-
religious harmony in India.
Most conversions to Islam and Christianity were facilitated by Sufis and
missionaries with a spirit of devotion. Today in India, most of the Christians
and Muslims still belong to these lower-caste communities. Even centuries after
conversion, their caste status and economic status have not changed.
 12. Secularism in India 151

Emergence of Competitive Politics

However, the entire social, economic and political scenario changed after the
advent of British rule in the 19th century. Differences between the Hindu and
Muslim elites began to emerge for various socio-cultural, economic, and political
reasons. The British rulers, adopting the policy of divide and conquer, distorted
medieval Indian history to make Muslim rulers appear as tyrants to the Hindu
elite. This distorted history was taught in the new school system established by
the British rulers.
Economic and political competition also developed between the Hindu and
Muslim elites, leading to communal tensions. The Hindu elite were quick to
adjust to new realities and took to modern education, commerce, and industries.
The Muslim ruling elite resisted the new secular education system and did not
take to commerce and industry. They were thus left far behind in the race for
progress.
This secular education system was supported by the perceptive Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan. He understood the importance of a modern education system
and founded Mohammedan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College, which became the
fulcrum of modern education for the North Indian Muslim elite. The orthodox
Ulama, however, vehemently opposed modern secular education and declared
Syed Ahmad Khan a kafir (unbeliever).
Initially, the Hindu and Muslim elites cooperated with each other and Syed
Ahmad Khan emphasised Hindu-Muslim unity. But the competitive nature
of political and economic power drove a wedge between the two elites and
communal tensions emerged. When the Indian National Congress was formed
in 1885, it adopted secularism as its anchor in view of the multi-religious nature
of Indian society. India could not head towards becoming a Hindu Rashtra
(Hindu Nation) as India was not merely a Hindu country. Prior to partition in
1947, Muslims made up 25 percent of the population of the British Raj, and
there were other religious minorities such as Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and
Jains.
In addition, Hindu society was highly fragmented and far from monolithic.
The dalits (low-caste people) refused to call themselves Hindus; subsequently
their leader, B. R. Ambedkar, adopted Buddhism in protest. Muslims, though
not monolithic, had some semblance of unity, a fact communal Hindus used to
try to unite Hindus as one community.
At the same time, the Hindu elite was more confident than the Muslim
elite in the emerging new power structure. The Muslim elite felt less secure
and hitched their wagon to the British rulers. They wanted to build a power-
152 Secularism & Secularity

sharing arrangement before the British left the country. But this could not be
satisfactorily worked out and India was divided into two independent states,
with the Muslim-majority areas of the Northwest becoming Pakistan. After
independence and partition in 1947, a large population of Muslims was left
in India; hence, leaders like Gandhi and Nehru preferred to keep India secular
in the sense that it has no state religion and individuals are free to follow any
religion of their birth or adoption.
So, secularism in India is more a political than a personal or philosophical
phenomenon. The Indian National Congress adopted secularism not as a
worldly philosophy but more as a political arrangement among different religious
communities. Thus, India has remained politically secular while its people
continue to be deeply religious. Indian secularism is basically a political doctrine.
All political parties have to conform to secularism as a political philosophy. The
national election commission requires all candidates and political parties filing
nomination papers to declare their acceptance of Indian secularism.

Secular Versus Communal

From the British period and onwards, the main political conflict in India was
not between the religious and the secular forces; rather, it was between the
secular and the communal. In the Western world, the main struggle is that of
the church versus the state and civil society, respectively. But in India neither
Hinduism nor Islam has any church-like structure; so there never was any
struggle between secular and religious power structures. The main struggle has
always been between secularism and communalism. The communal forces from
among Hindus and Muslims mainly fought for a share in political power and
they used members of their respective religions for their power base.
Even after partition in 1947, the communal problem did not die in India.
It reared its head again within a few years. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh), the mainspring of the Hindu right, remained in existence and spawned
a new communal political outfit called the Jan Sangh. In independent India,
the Jan Sangh was the core Hindu communal faction, continuously denouncing
secularism as a Western concept alien to the Indian ethos.
Jawahar Lal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, was a champion of secularism
and secular politics. Theoretically, the Congress Party was also committed to
secularism. However, the Congress Party contained several members and leaders
whose secularism was in doubt. But Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Abul
Kalam Azad, and B.R. Ambedkar led India to commit itself to secularism and its
constitution was drafted on secular lines. According to the Indian Constitution,
there can be no discrimination on the basis of caste, creed, gender, or class.
 12. Secularism in India 153

Similarly, all citizens have the right to vote irrespective of religion, gender, or
caste. According to Article 25, all those who reside in India are free to confess,
practice, and propagate the religion of their choice, subject to social health and
to law and order. Thus, conversion to any religion is a fundamental right.
But the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the RSS are opposed to this.
According to them, there should be a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) in India,
and Muslims and Sikhs should be second-class citizens with no political rights.
Since the BJP is a political party, it cannot disagree with the Constitution openly
and publicly. It also has to take a pledge of secularism to contest elections. Yet
since it is an integral part of RSS ideology, it is responsible for RSS beliefs. In
fact, all the truly secular forces in India consider the BJP to be a communal
party. It always takes an anti-minority stance and accuses Congress, supposedly
a secular party, of “appeasement” of minorities. It also describes Congress and
other secular parties as indulging in “pseudo-secularism.”
The RSS and the BJP, also known as the Sangh Parivar, not only reject
secularism but incite violence against minorities. Since independence, several
major communal riots have taken place in India. The first took place in Jabalpur
in Central India, and the last major riot took place in Gujarat (Western India)
in 2002, where more than 2,000 Muslims were killed and several women were
raped. At the time of the Gujarat carnage the BJP ruled Gujarat. The Chief
Minister of the BJP party, Narendra Modi, was allegedly involved in the carnage,
along with the entire governmental machinery, and on this basis the U.S.
government denied him an entry visa in early 2005.
The BJP was also directly involved in high-pitched propaganda against
the historic mosque called the Babri Mosque, and ultimately demolished it,
claiming it to be a birthplace of Lord Ram, a Hindu god. Lal Krishna Advani,
then President of the BJP, spearheaded the campaign against the Babri Mosque;
the mosque was demolished in his presence. He later became Home Minister
in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) administration. He is known as
a hard-line Hindu. Shri Vajpayee, who became Prime Minister of India in the
NDA government, is known as the moderate face of the BJP, though one can say
there is hardly any ideological difference between the two.
There is no doubt India has witnessed much communal violence due to
the involvement of the RSS and the BJP, and occasionally the Congress party.
Communalism is a powerful political weapon used by politicians. The Hindu
masses are generally pawns in these power games. However, fanatics under the
influence of the RSS ideology are involved, along with anti-social elements.
It is also true that on certain major issues, like the birth place of Ram,
people get misled by powerful communal propaganda and may side with the
154 Secularism & Secularity

BJP, but that does not mean they are for violence and bloodshed. If they are
properly informed, they withdraw their support. But secular forces are typically
not as pro-active as communal forces are in these political-myth arguments.
Communal forces actively work to spread inter-group hatred throughout the
year, while secular forces typically become active only after communal violence
has occurred and once peace is established they become nonchalant again.
Communal forces thus came to power through propaganda, but were
exposed during their five-year rule. They were voted out of power in great part
because they were perceived to be behind the communal carnage in Gujarat in
2002, which even the former BJP prime minister, Vajpayee, acknowledged.
This response clearly shows that people of India are by and large secular
and do not like killing of others just because they are not Hindus. The BJP has
been deserted by many of its former allies as they realize that association with
communal violence is not politically tenable.

Secular and Unsecular People

Since secularism in the Indian context does not mean being “this-worldly,” it
is difficult to divide Indians into believers and unbelievers. In fact, in India an
overwhelming majority of people are religious, but tolerate and respect other
religions and are thus “secular” in the Indian context. Even Sufis and Bhakti
Saints are considered quite secular in that sense. Followers of the RSS and the
BJP are very few, not more than 5-10 percent. Thus India has remained secular
and democratic for its 60 years as an independent nation.
There are some, but very few, rationalists and secularists who reject religion
in its entirety. Though there are no census figures available, one can safely say they
are less than 0.1 percent of Indians. Also, there are extremely orthodox people
who exhibit rigidity and intolerance towards other faiths, not on communal
grounds but on the grounds of religious orthodoxy, but they too are a minuscule
minority.
India’s extreme tolerance is perhaps due to the influence of the ancient
Indian doctrine that the one truth is manifested in different forms, and to the
Sufi doctrine of wahdat al-wujud (Real Being is one). This doctrine holds that
there is only One Real Being and all of us are mere manifestations of that real
being. Both of these doctrines breed inherent respect of others’ actions, beliefs,
and existence.
As the ancient Hindu doctrine leads to inclusiveness and peaceful coexistence
so does the Sufi doctrine. For peaceful co-existence, another Sufi doctrine of
sulh-i-ku (total peace and peace with all) is also important. Sufism has left a
deep influence on the Hindu masses as much as on the Muslim masses. Thus,
 12. Secularism in India 155

the real spirit of secularism in India is all-inclusiveness, religious pluralism and

peaceful co-existence. With few exceptions, it is not religious leaders who divide
but politicians seeking to mobilize votes on grounds of primordial identities like
religion, caste and ethnicity.
In a multi-religious society, basing politics not on issues but on identities
can prove highly divisive. Politicians are tempted to appeal to identity rather
than to offer policies to solve problems. Medieval society in India was religiously
tolerant as it was non-competitive. Modern Indian society, on the other hand,
has proved to be more divisive as it is based on competition. This competition
becomes even more acute if economic development is uneven and unjust.
Thus, in the case of India one can say that it is secular in as much as it
is a religiously plural and tolerant nation. However, presently there are active
and politically divisive forces creating communal pressure and widening the
gap between the various religious communities. This tendency threatens the
underpinnings of the Indian concept of secularism.
13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity:
An Impossible Dream?
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

C ertain similarities can be observed in secularization processes across societies.

Secularization is always gradual and relative, moving continually to a
pronounced decline in common religious beliefs and behaviors while maintaining
many rituals surrounding rites of passage. Life cycle rites, directly tied to individual
identity, survive even in highly secularized societies. Individual claims to identity
labels (i.e. I am Catholic) often persist in the absence of any beliefs or behaviors. If
religiosity is measured as a continuous variable, and an individual can be assigned
a score of zero to 100 based on commitment to religious beliefs and rituals, secular
individuals are those with scores at or close to zero.
The case of Israeli Jews who consider themselves secular is unique because of
its historical background, particularly the formal involvement of the state of Israel
in religious institutions. Zionism, and the State of Israel it created, represents one
response to the process of secularization among Jews, which has been more radical
than in any other religious group. Jewish secularization has been vigorous and
thorough ever since it started in the eighteenth century. It meant that Jewish
identity was maintained by individuals who completely stopped participating in
the behaviors inherent in the Jewish religion. This transformation amounted to
a conscious attempt to remake a religious community into a nationality.
Secularization in the Jewish case shows some universal features, together
with uniquely Jewish aspects. If secularization is measured by distance from the
historical dominance of religion, for Jews it has meant creating distance from the
historical, rabbinic (Orthodox) Judaism created in the Middle Ages.
Pre-modern Jewry had caste-like qualities, united by rules of excluding
impurity and preserving the integrity of endogamy. These rules were articulated
in the Talmud (canonized around 700 CE) and its derivative literature of

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158 Secularism & Secularity

rabbinical responsa, and led to the development of countless rituals during the
subsequent centuries. Jewish communities across the medieval world, from
Yemen to Germany, shared the same rules and could communicate easily and
agree on the correct wording of a bill of divorce (the most important document
in this tradition), the practice of ritual slaughter of animals for food, and
menstrual taboos. There might have been slight differences of emphasis or
practice between local communities but they all claimed to follow the Talmudic
injunctions and maintained their loyalty to the letter and spirit of the Talmud.
Jewish secularization in the modern period was tied to the rise of liberal
capitalism in Europe and the corresponding economic decline of most Jewish
communities. Three hundred years ago European Jewry was a small, marginal
group, completely outside the mainstream of social and cultural developments,
a minority of outsiders. In 1800, there were about 1.5 million Jews in Europe,
out of a European population of 100 million, and a world Jewish population of
some 2.5 million.
The modernization of European Jews, which took place between 1780 and
1880, meant social and cultural dislocation on a massive scale. Emancipation
for the Jews, the granting of citizenship and political rights, came against the
background of the general European decline of religion and feudalism and
the rise of secular nationalism, democracy, and socialism. The rise of the new
bourgeoisie and the appearance of the ideals of equality, popular representation,
and pluralism, which ran counter to religious traditions, made emancipation for
excluded groups possible.
Entry into the modern world via the granting of emancipation meant
the collapse of the internal Jewish consensus and society. Tearing down the
figurative walls of the ghetto and the concrete limitations on participation in
society brought about not just the weakening, but the destruction, of traditional
community structures. “Jewishness” was separated from Judaism, with the result
that most Jews today are such only in a sociological sense.
Secularized Jews were a European reality by the early 19th century, and
a significant majority in Western Europe by its end. By that time, the process
of secularization was making significant inroads into Jewish communities in
Eastern Europe. Most sociological Jews today are “assimilated” and far removed
from historic Judaism. In most cases, they have little idea what its traditions are.
Less than 10 percent of world Jewry today preserves historical Judaism.
The Zionist vision, created under the impact of the Enlightenment and
European nationalism and secularization, faces another kind of historical challenge
among Israeli Jews. While about half of Israeli Jews are of European descent,
the other half comprises individuals whose ancestors lived in the Islamic world.
 13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity 159

Because that world has not experienced the Reformation or the Enlightenment,
European secularization has affected it to a minimal degree, and religion has
remained more powerful than secular nationalism. Thus, Israeli Jews of non-
European descent are often more religious than their European counterparts.

The Role of the State

The State of Israel formally regulates the religious involvement of its citizens in
many ways. The state maintains a list of recognized religions (16 at last count),
and classifies all its citizens (and resident non-citizens) according to religious
affiliation. Marriage and divorce can take place only within the (recognized)
religious group. Religious conversions from one recognized group to another are
registered and reported. Vital statistics are reported based on religion (e.g. “live
births by mother’s religion”).
Israel defines itself as the state of the Jewish people, meaning about 13 million
individuals, only about half of whom currently reside in Israel. Jews are viewed
by the state not only as a religious group, but as a national group as well. Yet
joining this national group is only possible through a religious conversion. Thus
the boundaries of the Jewish group are maintained by the system of religious
courts, as well as by civil authorities. Attempts to have the state recognize an
Israeli nationality (as distinct from citizenship) have been rejected time and again
by the courts, and this rejection is supported by a solid majority of the public.
The leadership of the state has always been totally non-observant. More­
over, leaders of the religious parties, which almost always participate in
governing coalitions, are always excluded from the really important decisions.
They are never involved in discussions about war, or the economy, and do not
even seem to aspire to be part of such fateful deliberations. Of all Israeli prime
ministers since 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda
Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak, Binyamin
Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Menahem Begin, only the last ever
attended synagogue services outside of fulfilling an official or ceremonial duty,
and even he did so rarely. It is important to note also that Israel’s intellectual,
literary, scientific, and artistic elite is also overwhelmingly non-observant.
But at the same time the political leadership shows reverence for traditional
symbols of Jewish identity and especially identity boundaries. For example, the
prime minister of Israel will not be seen, while on an official visit abroad, to
be travelling on the Sabbath. Neither will the prime minister of Israel be seen
driving a car on Saturday in Jerusalem, even though he will not be seen in a
synagogue.
The state invests significant public resources in the maintenance of historical
160 Secularism & Secularity

Judaism. This is done by financing an expensive system of lifelong Talmudic

learning, in which more than 100,000 individuals are involved. Such a large
religious education system is unprecedented in Jewish history. In addition to
the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox educational systems, there is a system of
rabbinical courts, where the judges enjoy the same salaries and benefits as civil
judges, and other systems that provide ritual purity for those who desire it, at
state expense. Most ultra-Orthodox men and a fair number of Orthodox men
are full-time religious professionals, creating a modern “priestly class.” These
occupations include those making sure that any menstruating Orthodox woman
can find a ritual bath close to home, and those engaged in support of the kosher
dietary taboos. Raising pigs and selling pork to Jews and Muslims is forbidden
by law, representing a symbolic victory of millennia of Jewish dietary taboos, but
the non‑observant can easily get around these limitations.
By law, Israeli Jews are not allowed to work on the Sabbath, and every year,
businesses pay fines if they are caught employing Jews in economic activities. A
business open on Saturday is immune if it can prove, with the help of government
identity cards, that its employees are non-Jews. Those handing out the tickets for
Saturday work are drawn from members of the Druze minority.
The whole enterprise of maintaining Orthodox traditions employs many
thousands of civil servants, all Orthodox. Ultra-Orthodox parties, which
currently hold 18 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, (and are openly non-Zionist),
act to increase religion budgets, and have a vital interest in maintaining the
system. However, they would not be able to do that without widespread public
support for the idea that the state should invest in maintaining the system of
Jewish Sabbath observance.
In Israeli society there is a clear, social line of division between two sub­
cultures, the religiously observant and the non-observant. About 20 percent of
the Jewish population continues to follow a historical Judaism where expectations
for public behavior are quite clear. The nature of Judaism as a religion of practice
makes this division both public and visible. Members of the two groups can
identify each other immediately by distinctive cues, such as dress (for example,
head coverings for Orthodox men and married women, and for the ultra-Orthodox
black coats, long beards, side locks, etc.).
The taboos concerning the Sabbath in Orthodox Judaism serve as the
best example of behavioral divisions. Traveling in motor vehicles on Saturday
(except for a real life‑saving emergency) is out of the question for members of the
religious subculture, as is watching television or using the telephone. In addition
to Sabbath observance, historical food taboos mean that intimate social contact
between the observant and the non-observant is limited. An observant Jew will
 13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity 161

not have dinner at the home of a non-observant family.

In everyday discourse, finer distinctions are sometimes made. The varying
levels of religiosity among Israeli Jews are reflected in the following labels: Haredi,
denoting the very Orthodox, Dati (literally religious) denoting Orthodox, Masorti
(literally traditional) denoting those who are partially observant, and Hiloni
(literally secular) denoting the non‑observant. These Hebrew terms are widely used
in everyday life, and in both the spoken and written language.
However, what should be kept in mind is that most non-observant Jews
choose to take part in many Orthodox life-cycle rites. There is almost no support
for the idea of civil marriage, and only slight support for the idea of civil burial.
There is universal support for the idea of a religious conversion as the only way for
non-Jews to become Jewish. Nevertheless, this issue is under constant discussion
and debate in Israel. The non-observant claim that the rabbinical courts are too
strict in their requirements for converts, and expect these courts to change their
practices. The debate is provoked by so-called secular Israelis, who would like the
conversion process itself to be “easy” or “liberal” while nonetheless agreeing that
a religious conversion is the only way to join the “Jewish people.” Thus there can
be no serious challenge to the monopoly principle that confers Jewishness on those
undergoing the Orthodox rites of conversion, which are regarded as historically
authentic. This is clear in the case of group conversions, when non-Jews or “lost
tribes” from Ethiopia, Peru, or India, are recognized by the state as Jewish and only
gain citizenship following Orthodox conversions.
According to Talmudic law anybody born to a Jewish mother is Jewish. This
matrilineal rule is universally accepted in Israel. In Israeli identity discourse, as in
Orthodox religious discourse, nobody can be half-Jewish, or of Jewish descent.
Either you are Jewish or not. In the Israeli media, discussions of Jewish identity
often take the form of reporting on the presumed Jewishness of well-known
individuals around the world, and the list of great Jews is indeed interminable.
What is expressed when they are mentioned is justified pride in the
achievements of a distant cousin, together with special glee in exposing those
who have chosen not to call themselves Jews even if they had a Jewish mother.
Thus, special pleasure is taken in outing Marcel Proust, who wrote in 1896:
“...I am a Catholic, like my father and my brother, my mother is Jewish.”1
Israeli literary critics (who are self-described secularists; few Orthodox Jews read
Proust) will not miss a chance to comment on what they regard as Proust’s denial
of his true, objective, Jewishness. Israeli identity discourse, just like the classic
anti-Semitic thinking, does not allow a choice in self-definition. It is not just the
question of blood, but of the 23 maternal chromosomes.
162 Secularism & Secularity

Social Characteristics
Religiosity levels among Israeli Jews have been systematically measured in
numerous surveys. Ben‑Meir and Kedem2 have developed two indices, for
religious beliefs and for religious observance (behavior). These indices were based
on a 1970s survey of a stratified random sample of the urban Jewish population
in Israel.
The belief scale starts with the belief in the immortality of the soul (29 ­
per­cent agreement in the sample), then goes on to the belief in the coming of the
Messiah (36 percent), to belief in the Jewish people as chosen (57 percent), and
to the final item, belief in God (64 percent). Twenty-two percent did not drive
on Saturday, and 44 percent reported keeping to the dietary separation between
meat and milk. Seventy‑four percent claim to fast on the Day of Atonement, 88
percent light Hanukka candles, and 99 percent take part in the Passover meal.
Since the Ben‑Meir and Kedem3 benchmark study, there have been several
additional surveys assessing observance level among Israeli Jews. According to
Kedem,4 the levels of non-observance between 1962 and 1988 ranged from 22
percent to 32 percent of the Jewish population. Self-identification as a secular
Israeli means a lower likelihood of religious belief and a much lower likelihood
of religious observance.
The question of Jewish identity and self-definition is discussed quite often
in the Israeli media, and the results of systematic surveys reported regularly. A
2004 survey showed that 81 percent of Israel’s population defined themselves
as Jewish; 12 percent as Muslim; 3.5 percent as Christian (both Arab and non-
Arab); 1.5 percent as Druze; 1.5 percent as Atheist; and another 0.5 percent
as followers of other religions. Among Muslims living in Israel, 11 percent
defined themselves as very religious; 49 percent as religious; 21 percent
as not so religious; and only 18 percent as not religious at all. In terms of
religiosity, among Israeli Jews aged 20 and over, 44 percent defined themselves as
secular; 27 percent defined themselves as traditional; 12 percent as traditionally
observant; 9 percent as Orthodox; and 8 percent as ultra-Orthodox.
The ideological gap between the elements of the population with a European
Enlightenment heritage and those with a legacy of the Islamic world was clearly
demonstrated in this survey. In 2004, there was a particularly high prevalence
of the secular label, 63 percent, among native Israelis of European descent,
compared to 33 percent among native Israelis of Asian origin, and 25 percent of
native Israelis of North African origin. This was consistent with earlier surveys,
which showed higher levels of observance among Mizrahim (Eastern Jews).5
In terms of income, secular Jews had the highest levels, followed by the
Orthodox, the traditionally observant, and at the bottom the ultra-Orthodox.
 13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity 163

Secular Jews also had the highest level of education, with 32 percent reporting
higher education.
A 2005 survey by Ephraim Yaar for the Shmuel Neeman Institute for
Advanced Study in Science and Technology at the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa reported that 41 percent of secular Israelis believed in God
(compared with 52 percent who did not). Sixteen percent of secular Jews believed
in heaven and hell, and 23 percent agreed with the statement that “nature is
spiritual or holy.” In a 2006 survey, 47 percent of the self-defined secular said
they believed in God, but only 6 percent observed the Sabbath prohibitions.

Politics and Ideology

In terms of political attitudes, it is routinely reported that higher levels of
religiosity among Israeli Jews are correlated with hawkishness and conservatism.
This finding parallels those reported for religions all over the world.6 Thus, an
April 2004 survey of attitudes toward the Sharon Gaza disengagement plan
showed that while 85 percent of the ultra-Orthodox opposed disengagement, as
did 67 percent of those defining themselves as “religious,” only 38 percent of the
“traditional” and 17 percent of the “secular” opposed it.
To properly appreciate the connection between Israeli secular culture and
Judaism, it is useful to examine the state education system. The state school
system in Israel for Jews (there is a separate system for Arabs) is divided into
two parallel sub‑systems, one religious and the other “secular.” Children of
the religious subculture (not the ultra-Orthodox), raised according to Jewish
Orthodox beliefs and behaviors, attend state religious schools. There is also
an independent orthodox system, which is state-financed, but directed by the
ultra‑Orthodox community.
What can be observed is that even the “secular” state schools follow a
curriculum with large doses of Old Testament texts and Orthodox law. The
stated rationale for that is that these are the building blocks of Jewish national
identity, and without them such an identity will be totally devoid of content and
meaning. The main difference between rabbinical Judaism and what is taught in
Israeli state schools is the relative absence of the Talmud, which is perceived as an
expression of Diaspora culture. In contrast, the state favors the Old Testament,
representing a mythic, glorious, Jewish past rooted in the “Promised Land” in
West Asia.
The Zionist conception of Jewish history offers a division into distinct
periods. Jewish history is divided into periods of activity and heroism (ancient
history and modern Zionism, before 135 CE, when the last rebellion against the
Romans ended, and after 1880, when Zionist settlement in Palestine began),
164 Secularism & Secularity

and the long period of submission and passivity (between 135 CE and 1880
CE). Thus the years when there was no Jewish sovereignty should be largely
erased from the collective memory.
Zionism, in rejecting rabbinical Judaism, started a “biblicalization” of
Jewish history and identity. Biblical Hebrew and biblical mythology became
the cornerstones of the new nationalism. The ancient Jewish past in the Holy
Land was seen as marked by activism, pride, and a readiness to fight and die
for national independence. The leap over the history of nearly 2000 years of
rabbinical tradition and Diaspora experience, aimed at landing in a past of
glorious national sovereignty, to be overshadowed only by future grandeur.
The reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible started with nineteenth century
Hebrew literature and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, which
discovered new heroes and new ideas in the ancient texts. Those who wanted to
revive Hebrew found the Bible to be a source of classical Hebrew style, and a
repository of great literature. Today’s interpretation of the Bible, as it is studied
in all Israeli schools, is a direct continuation of the 19th-century approach.
Observing a so-called secular Israeli nursery school today will demonstrate
that children as young as three are taught the Genesis story of the creation,
the Exodus story, starting with the baby Moses in the bulrushes, and so on.
These stories are taught every year in the same order, in connection with related
religious holidays. In elementary school they are taught as the starting point
of national history. Thus most non-observant adults in Israel believe in the
historicity of the Old Testament texts.
Following 19th-century revitalization ideals, secular Israelis often claim that
they represent a new, and still authentic, kind of Judaism, by trying to defend
their historically recent conception. Orthodox Jews have no such problem. They
don’t have to apologize because no one will ever doubt their Jewishness and
their Judaism, which are historically authentic. If you claim to be Jewish you
cannot gainsay these representatives of Jewish history and historical Judaism.
Thus, in any debate about Jewish identity, and there are many of those in Israel,
the secular side tends to be apologetic while the Orthodox side is confident and
secure.
Those who describe themselves as non-observant among Israeli Jews choose
to follow a pattern of minimal observance, which is still acceptable in terms of
the medieval rules of the rabbinate. “Secular” Jews claim a Jewish identity and
so inevitably follow the minimal requirements of Orthodox Judaism whereby
divorce (more important than marriage) can be handled only by rabbinical
courts. Beyond the minimal requirements, secular Jews also follow the rituals
of circumcision for male infants, mezuzah (door amulet), and bar-mitzvah for
 13. The Secular Israeli (Jewish) Identity 165

boys at age 13. As a result the Orthodox rabbinate still views them as worthy
of Orthodox marriage and burial rites, because they are matrilineal Jews, whose
lineage is not marred by an improper divorce. The Orthodox have agreed to a
national consensus, which is rejected only by the ultra-Orthodox. The latter
refuse to marry members of the secular sub-culture, just as they will not marry
converts. This reasoning has to do with menstrual taboos, which make most
Jews in the world today impure in their eyes.
Secular Jewish Israelis are highly offended when the authenticity of their
Jewishness is challenged. This is done often enough, and easily, by Orthodox
spokesmen. All it takes is for the particular rabbi to refer to secular Jews as “rabbit
eaters” (referring to their non-observance of food taboos), or as “men having sex
with menstruating women.” In 1999, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, the leader of the
Shas ultra-Orthodox religious political party, described the justices of the Israel
Supreme Court, as men who had sex with menstruating women. This caused
a storm of denunciations from the secular camp. Yet the incident proved the
power of ancient taboos, and the vacuity of the notion of Israeli secular Jews. If
you are truly secular, why should you get upset over a factual description of your
disregard for ancient taboos?
Israel is an ideological state, a state with a mission, and the mission is to
revitalize Jewish identity in its ancient homeland. Most secular Jews in Israel are
committed to this mission. Whether secular or observant, there is a national
consensus around the overall Jewish identity label. Thus, so-called secular
individuals who are distant from the Talmudic tradition still help to keep its
spirit alive. Zionism is dedicated to preserving Jewish identity, though in a new
form. However, it cannot betray its links to a historical Jewish identity, which can
only in essence be religious.

Endnotes
1. Hayman, Ronald. Proust: A Biography. (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) p. 108.
2. Ben‑Meir, Yehuda and Peri Kedem. “Index of religiosity of the Jewish population of
Israel.” Megamot, 1979, 24, 353‑362. (Hebrew).
3. Ibid.
4. Kedem, Peri. “Dimensions of Jewish religiosity” Ed. Zvi Sobel and Benjamin Beit-Hal-
lahmi. Tradition, Innovation, Conflict: Judaism and Jewishness in Contemporary Israel.
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
5. Ibid.
6. Beit‑Hallahmi, Benjamin, and Michael Argyle. The Psychology of Religious Behaviour,
Belief and Experience. (London: Routledge, 1997).
 Contributors

Dr. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi is professor of psychology at the University of Haifa,

Israel. His many books include The Psychology of Religious Behavior, Belief, and
Experience and Despair and Deliverance: Private Salvation in Contemporary Israel.

Dr. Nathalie Caron, a historian of the 18th century, is maître de conférence

(associate professor) in American Civilization in the Department of English and
American Studies at the Université de Paris 10-Nanterre. She is the author of Thomas
Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres (Thomas Paine against the imposition of priests).

Dr. Abby Day is Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow,
Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, UK. Her current project, “Believing
in Belonging: exploring religious belief and identity” follows from her empirically based
doctoral research at Lancaster University, UK.

Dr. Lars Dencik is professor of social psychology at Roskilde University, Denmark,

and director of the Social and Cultural Psychology Program at the Danish Graduate
School of Psychology.

Dr. Ashgar Ali Engineer, a civil engineer, holds honorary doctorates from several
Indian universities. He is chairman of the Centre for the Study of Secularism in Society,
editor of the Indian Journal of Secularism, and director of the Institute of Islamic
Studies, Mumbai, India.

Dr. Ariela Keysar, a demographer, is associate director of the Institute for the Study of
Secularism in Society and Culture and associate research professor of public policy and
law at Trinity College. She was the study director of the American Religious Identification
Survey 2001 and is co-author of Religion in a Free Market.

Dr. Patricia O’Connell Killen, a religious historian, is professor of religion and

director of the Center for Religion, Cultures and Society in the Western United States
at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington.

Dr. Barry A. Kosmin, a sociologist, is founding director of the Institute for the Study
of Secularism in Society and Culture and research professor of public policy and law at
Trinity College. He was principal investigator of the CUNY National Survey of Religious
Identification 1990 and the American Religious Identification Survey 2001.

Nastaran Moossavi was the McGill Teaching Fellow in International Studies at Trinity
College in 2005-2006. Ms. Moossavi has been a member of the Board of the Iranian
Writers’ Association since 2001. She is also the editor of two readers in Persian on
women.

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168 Secularism & Secularity

Dr. Frank Pasquale, a cultural anthropologist, is a research associate of ISSSC engaged

in the study of the nonreligious population of the U.S. He has written and lectured
widely on humanism, morality and ethics, and church-state relations. He resides in
Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Bruce Phillips is a sociologist at the University of Southern California and

professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.
He has conducted research on inter-faith marraiges and local communities.

Dr. Andrew Singleton is a lecturer in the Sociology Program, School of Political

and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His research interests
include youth spirituality, alternative religions, fatherhood, and men’s health. He is
co-author (with M.Mason and R.Webber) of the book The Spirit of Generation Y:
Young people’s spirituality in a changing Australia (John Garratt, forthcoming).

Dr. William A. Stahl is professor of sociology at Luther College, University of Regina,

Saskatchewan, Canada. He is author of God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of
Technology and co-author of Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion.

Dr. David Voas, a social statistician, is the Simon Research Fellow at the Cathy
Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester, England.
He specializes in religious change in modern societies.