Lisa Miller


Newsweek Feb. 25 2008
























In the public school I went to in the 1970s,
"secular" was a neutral, descriptive word. Our social-studies
teacher taught us that ours was a "secular" government, by which she
meant that we lived free of any

religion established by the state. We were to be proud of this
secular government, she told us; it differentiated us from people in
other times and places where those speaking for God made the
rules—rules that sometimes were corrupt and unfair. As I understood
it then, "secular" had nothing to do with disavowing or disapproving
of any particular belief in God.

"Secular" does mean "godless," and its neutral
meaning has always fought with the more negative one; recently,
though, the word has taken on a lot more freight. Like the words
"feminist" and "liberal," "secular" and its derivatives have come to
mean extreme versions of themselves. They are code in conservative
Christian circles for "atheist" or even "God hating"—they conjure,
in a fresh way, all the demons Christian conservatives have been
fighting for more than 30 years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness
and moral lassitude. The

Fox News star

Bill O'Reilly frequently frames the culture war as "traditionals
versus secular-progressives." Ann Coulter accused "the liberals and
the secularists and atheists" of using religion as a wedge. In a
speech last year, Newt Gingrich decried the "growing culture of
radical secularism," and in a new book the diplomat John Bolton
critiques "the High Minded elite who worship at the altar of the
Secular Pope." In politics, where it is efficacious to unite people
against a common enemy, "secularism" has become that enemy's new
name.

To be fair, battles in the war against secularism
have been fought for about 150 years, dating back to a time when
discoveries in science (especially those of Charles Darwin) and a
disenchantment with organized religion led a critical mass of mostly
European intellectuals to declare that one could lead a moral life
independent of God. By the middle of the 20th century, their heirs
had coined the term "secular humanism," to mean a concern with
values but not with religion, and the

Rev. Jerry Falwell took particular aim at them. In 1986, he
proclaimed that secular humanists "challenge every principle on
which America was founded," including "abortion on demand,
recognition of homosexuals, free use of pornography, legalizing of
prostitution and gambling, and free use of drugs." Pope Benedict XVI
speaks out frequently against the dangers of secularism.


What's new about the assault on secularism is how,
among conservative pundits, it's become almost shorthand. O'Reilly
doesn't have to list secularism's sins as Falwell did; he has only
to utter the word. And the so-called secularists are hardly helping
their own case. Aware that no group is more reviled in America than
atheists, and reeling from all the attention atheists have gotten
from recent best-selling books, some nonbelievers prefer to wrap
themselves in a safer label: "secularist." This rhetorical
deflection only makes them targets. Secularist equals nonbeliever;
nonbeliever equals immoral God-hater. "It's red meat for the
pundits," says Greg Epstein, Harvard's humanist chaplain. He prefers
the word "humanist."

Language evolves. "Secular" was first used in the
Middle Ages to mean things and people not belonging to the church—as
Webster's puts it, "not overtly or specifically religious; not
ecclesiastical or clerical." This remains its best and most
important meaning. In this great experiment that is American
democracy, "secular" is the only word we have to describe the idea,
handed down by the Founders, that our leaders do not belong to God,
they belong to us.