Janusz Węgrzecki
Instytut Politologii
Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego
The Ideology of Secularism as the Theology of Modernity
It is essential to distinguish Secularism as a social process from the Ideology of
Secularism. My further analysis concentrates only on the latter, thus the analysis has a
character of political science, especially political thought rather than sociology. According to
Brendan Sweetman, it was not until the twentieth century that atheism was replaced by the
Ideology of Secularism. Our aim is not to discussing the legitimacy of this thesis from a
historical perspective. But it is fundamental to recognize the mere fact of this replacement.
Sweetman`s analysis of Secularism, although it is not analytically sufficient, allows to extract
and describe a set of its five key characteristics, namely: intention and positive nature,
representatives and adherents, credo or sets of beliefs, defense and promotion, faith as a
source of beliefs.
The first characteristic is that Secularism is connected with mental state and has a
voluntarily character. Secularists “want (…) to give Secularism a more prominent place in the
debate between worldviews, to distinguish it and themselves from traditional religion more
sharply” (Sweetman 2006: 80), and they “wish to highlight this fact” (Sweetman 2006: 81).
While atheism is perceived rather negative, as being first of all antireligious, the Ideology of
Secularism seems to be a positive worldview, a positive doctrine which has significant
political implications. Secular naturalistic humanists develop their views in a positive way and
seem to broaden their beliefs into a coherent worldview. The intention of the Ideology of
Secularism is to replace the role of religion in thought and condition of human live, both in
private and public spheres. Secularists would like to establish what Sweetman calls
“seculocracy”. They want that “their views on significant political, social and moral questions
are established in law” (Sweetman 2006: 66).
The second characteristic are specific adherents or representatives such as organized
groups, spokespersons and fund-raising initiatives, who want to “promote their beliefs and
values in the political arena” (Sweetman 2006: 66). According to Sweetman, classical
representatives who actively promoted Secularism as a way to transform society, include such
thinkers as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin,
Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Karl Marx, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H. L. Menken, John
Dewey, Corliss Lamont, Sidney Hook, Walter Lippmann, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre
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and Simon de Beauvoir. Coming back to the present, there are formally organized secularist
groups, for example in the United States those who published Humanist Manifesto I (1933),
Humanist Manifesto II (1973) and Humanist Manifesto III (2000), the Council for Secular
Humanism, Ethical Culture, American atheists; in Britain - the National Secular Society.
Despite existing formal secularist societies in many countries, most secularists do not belong
to any organized group, but all of them represent and work “within a broadly secularist
worldview and outlook, and are advancing their own distinctive part of it in their research and
writing. While some secularists today emphasize the scientific side of things, and some
emphasize the moral and political side of things, eventually these two areas will have to come
together to form a full theory of Secularism, a theory which will then have to be defended
against religious belief” (Sweetman 2006: 70). The most prominent adherents of the Ideology
of Secularism belong to academia or media. Other types of supporters include general
population. Sweetman says that “the number of secularists in the United States might range
anywhere from fifteen to thirty percent of the electorate (many of these are highly
concentrated on the east and west coast)” (Sweetman 2006: 72). In short, secularists in the
United States control much of the establishment like universities, the courts, media, law
schools, TV and Hollywood.
The third characteristic is a credo or sets of beliefs. Secularists differ in many ways,
however, there is a fairly broad agreement among them on the fundamental beliefs which
have a triple character: metaphysical, axiological and pragmatic. As to the metaphysical
beliefs, for example, “secularists will say they believe that human life is the outcome of a
purely random, naturalistic process (evolution), and that all of reality is physical” (Sweetman
2006: 80-81). Secular naturalistic humanists not only express their beliefs that all of the
reality is physical, but they also offer positive arguments, which are based on an appeal to
science, like cosmology, evolution or genetics. The beliefs of the second group have an
axiological and moral character. Secularists try to reformulate all moral categories and give a
positive lecture of a secular naturalistic system of ethics, for example they would explain
altruism from an evolutionary perspective. For all secularists their view is “a substantive,
positive and superior worldview to that of religious belief” (Sweetman 2006: 67). The third
group of the beliefs is characterized by the view that the secularist agenda must define and
dominate the public sphere and that traditional religion must be relegated to the private
sphere. In short, secularists “of all stripes usually agree that their worldview not only should
dominate public and social policy matters, but that religious beliefs should have little or no
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role in these matters (and …they hold that whenever secularist and religious views disagree,
secularist views should be presumptive)” (Sweetman 2006: 73).
The fourth characteristic is a defense and promotion of Secularism. According to some
analysts, there is battle between the secularist and religious mindsets in the modern world.
Christian Smith, for example, states that there is “the secular revolution” in the history of
America in the last hundred years. His thesis is that Secularism became politically dominant
in the U. S. culture. Smith says that there were adherents of the secular revolution who
“consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking,
agnostic, atheist, or theologically liberal; who were well-educated and socially located mainly
in knowledge-production occupations; and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism,
positivism and the privatization or extinction of religion”. (Smith 2003: 1). Contemporary
secularists feel that, for example in the moral sphere, they need to formulate arguments
motivated by their secularist worldview. Naturalism and secular humanism – the view that
human being is the source of all meaning and value – has to be the basis for arguments in
ethics questions like abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty.
The fifth characteristic is that key beliefs of Secularism are based on faith. The beliefs
of Secularism and religious beliefs differ with regard to their content but these are no
differences of form. Both, members of every religion and adherents of the ideology of
Secularism, “accept beliefs they cannot prove but to which they pledge their commitment, and
these beliefs help regulate their behavior” (Sweetman 2006: 81). One of main differences of
content between religion and Secularism is that the latter does not accept belief in God in any
sense of the term or belief in any unseen realm.
According to Michel Freeden there are two kinds of ideology, namely macroideologies and micro-ideologies. The former can exist and function in social and political life
independently. The latter, though they have their own identity, have to attach themselves to
one of the macro-ideologies (Freeden 2003: 78-93). Some versions of micro-ideologies
regularly join Liberalism or Socialism (which belong to macro-ideologies) or are a part of
another small ideology (like Ecologism). Each ideology, both macro- and micro-ideology has
core, adjacent and peripheral concepts. Core and adjacent concepts have a rather theoretical
meaning, but peripheral concepts have a more practical meaning. Social conduct and policy
might follow peripheral concepts. In fact there are families of ideologies, therefore ideologies
bearing the same name (e.g. liberal) have in common only core concepts, but they differ with
regard to adjacent and peripheral concepts. The concepts of each ideology have syntactic,
semantic and pragmatic aspects. The concepts in the syntactic aspect constitute a structure of
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ideas, like freedom or equality. This structure not only contains concepts (some are in the
center and other in the peripheries), but it also contains relations between them. Many
ideologies have the same ideas but in a different order, for example freedom and equality are
key concepts for socialism and liberalism, but they play a different role in each of them. In
the semantic aspect, the meaning of the concepts depends on their context within the
ideology. The same concept would have a different meaning in various ideologies, for
example an idea of freedom is different in the ideology of liberalism and socialism. The
pragmatic aspect refers to representatives and adherents of the ideology. There are persons
who are authors of the ideology and groups of people who are “believers” of this specific
ideology. They could form a majority or minority of population in specific country and time
(Freeden 1996: 13-136).
My thesis about the ideology of Secularism is that it is a kind of a micro-ideology.
Secularism as a micro-ideology has to directly join one of the macro-ideologies, like
liberalism or socialism, or jointly with another micro-ideology (for example Ecologism or
Feminism) be linked to a specific macro-ideology. This being said, it is not surprising that
some exponents of Liberalism, Socialism, Ecologism and Feminism accept and promote the
key ideas of Secularism.
It has its own identity and has syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. In syntactic
and semantic perspective there are four kinds of core and adjacent concepts of ideology of
Secularism. They include the nature of reality, the nature of human being, the nature of moral
values and the nature of political values. Peripheral concepts contain a number of private,
social and political life-regulating beliefs. In the pragmatic perspective, the ideology of
Secularism has its own followers, organs, outlets. Spokespersons of Secularism are wellknown intellectuals and they include some widely recognized public exponents of humanities
and science. The fundamental assets of ideology of Secularism are based on faith and are
engaged in “missionary” work. To sum up, the ideology of Secularism has a structure similar
to theology and for its “believers” it performs a role of religious thought.
Bibliography:
Freeden M. (1996), Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Freeden M. (2003), Ideology. A very short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith Ch. (2003), The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the
Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Sweetman B. (2006), Why Politics Needs Religion. The Place of Religious Arguments in the
Public Square. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
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