Have We Forgotten How to Be Secular?

[rug]

September 13, 2012
By Jason Pitzl-Waters

According to Jacques Berlinerblau, associate professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, more biblical verses have been invoked by presidents and presidential candidates in the past four years than they have in the previous two or three decades. Berlinerblau posits that our society may be forgetting how to be secular, or what “secularism” even means, and has written a new book entitled “How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom” in order to address the issue.

“Weary of religious conservatives urging “defense of marriage” and atheist polemicists decrying the crimes of religion? Sick of pundits who want only to recast American life in their own image? Americans are stuck in an all-or-nothing landscape for religion in public life. What are reasonable citizens to do? Seen as godless by the religious and weak by the atheists, secularism mostly has been misunderstood. In How to Be Secular, Berlinerblau argues for a return to America’s hard-won secular tradition; the best way to protect religious diversity and freedom lies in keeping an eye on the encroachment of each into the other.”

Berlinerblau notes that the concept of secularism has been blurred from both sides, with conservative Christians and atheists both defining the term as equivalent to atheism. This wasn’t always so, as “secular” was a label anyone could apply to themselves, in many different contexts.

“Why must so-called secular organizations be focused exclusively on nonbelievers? After all, just a few decades back, in secularism’s mild separationist golden age, all sorts of religious believers could have been categorized as secularists. The term could refer to a Baptist, a Jew, a progressive Catholic, a Unitarian, and so on. Also, there were secular identities that didn’t make any reference to a person’s religious belief or lack thereof. A secularist might just as likely have been a public school teacher, a journalist, a civil rights activist, a professor, a Hollywood mogul, a civil libertarian, a pornographer, and so forth. From the 1940s to the 1980s all of the aforementioned groups mobilized on behalf of secular causes, the most prominent being separation of church and state.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2012/09/have-we-forgotten-how-to-be-secular.html

[malokvale77]

1. When "God" appeared on the money, that we all are pretty much bound to in our daily lives,

secularism was tossed out the window.

[SarahM32]

2. What we need is Jeffersonian Democracy.

"Religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions." Therefore, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and State." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The principles of Jefferson are the axioms of a free society." -- Abraham Lincoln

Read Quotes of the Founding Fathers Regarding Religion, and Jeffersonian Democracy.

[SarahM32]

3. Be New Deal Democrats as well as Jeffersonians

"A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1st Inaugural Address

Read How FDR Saved the Country.
.

[Igel]

4. I know how it worked in my church.

Generally, the more Scripture you spouted, the less religious you were.

Those with the fewest religious trappings were often those the most dedicated and devoted to their faith. We're not talking "spiritual" in some sort of non-actionable sense. We're talking about observing the doctrines, prayer, study, all the things that are sort of self-contained inside a person or family, as well as helping the poor and sick.

Those who went around citing chapter and verse could be found pushing their wives down the stairs or out Saturday night at a strip joint and swilling beer all day while watching Sunday sports (or on the phone gossipping) instead of spending time with family or engaged in more constructive pursuits.

[dmallind]

5. Easy - as more religious people become fans of theocracy

...it leaves secularism more and more dominated by the non-religious.

Since when in the last few decades did more than a tiny handful of religious groups speak up against entanglement? Until more do so, it's easy to see why the idea that secularism = atheism comes from.

[cbayer]

6. Good point. It was the rise of the religious right in politics that probably

changed the dynamic. I do think that some religious groups and many religious people oppose entanglement, but have been pretty quiet during this period of the religious rights rise to power.

Hopefully that is changing, as more progressive/liberal theists try to take religion back.