SECULARISM

Secularism

Secularism

The term "secularization" did not convey the same thing to early modern ears that it does to ours. The public today interprets it as a decline of religious influence that is characteristic of modern developed societies. To an early modern observer, it usually meant the curtailing of an exclusively clerical privilege or institution, like the transfer of jurisdiction from religious to secular courts. The Reformation introduced a more unsettling connotation: the confiscation of church property by political authorities. The tendency of the new Catholic religious orders, like the Jesuits, to live in the world rather than apart from it, would also have been viewed as secularization (Birely, 1990).

The possibility of a society in which religious life and thought occupied only a restricted sphere was envisaged before the mid-seventeenth century, but its real impact came later. It grew in importance, not as a result of freethinking or skepticism, but through the subordination of religion to secular political aims. Even at the end of the 1700s, however, politics remained closely entangled with religion in every European state.

The Enlightenment intensified the trend toward secularized political thought. For many enlightened French thinkers, organized religion and even religious belief itself were seen as potential obstacles to political virtue. This was hinted at by Montesquieu (1689-1755), roared out by Voltaire (1694-1778), and accepted as a matter of fact by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788).

Few went so far as to reject religion altogether; Voltaire dreamed that Confucianism might infuse correct political principles, and Rousseau argued for a civic religion consisting of belief in a Supreme Being and tolerance for all faiths. The enlightened critique of religious influence in politics often boiled down to an assault on "priestcraft." (Sommerville, 2002) Historical writing, however, struck out in more innovative directions. Voltaire and David Hume (1711-1776) wrote political histories that made ...