Secularism is not the same thing as atheism or humanism. You don't have to have a non-religious view of life and meaning and values in order to be a secularist. Secularism is a political principle.
Religious people can hold to it, non-religious people can hold to it. It's a way of having freedom in a diverse society. Secularism isn't just the separation of religion from state, although it does include that, it's also about freedom of religion, maximising freedom within the rights of others, for all people and also protecting people of different religious beliefs from discrimination - making sure that everyone is treated equally as a citizen of a diverse society.
Secularism isn't all of one type - there are different sorts of secularism, depending on the national history and culture of the country where it's been instituted. So in America, secularism is really there to protect religious people from the power of the state. In France, it's more there to protect people from religion and in India, it's there to protect all the different believers in all different religions and none, from each other.
If it weren't for secularism, so much of the modern world and modern civilisation that we enjoy and benefit from would have been impossible. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, the foundation of freedom in the world today is built on secularism and comes in the wake of secularism. Everyone thinks of secularism as a modern phenomenon because it's roots are very obviously in the 18th century in Europe.
But, in fact, there are many ancient antecedents to this way of thinking about politics. In India for example, in classical India, princes and other governments needed a way of mediating between their subjects of other loyalties and in pre-Christian Europe, as well, god's and religion had very little to do with the state. So secularism is a modern phenomenon, but it has roots all across the world and further back in time than that.
There have been big wins from secularism, it's not just an abstract political principle, it's changed our world for the better. How much different would the history of India be, tragically violent though it has often been in the last few decades, if secularism hadn't been there to provide equal citizenship for people. Would the wars of religion in Europe still be raging on now with millions more dead, if secularism hadn't come along to put an end to that sectarianism.
One of the stereotypes about secularism is that it is oppressive of religious people, that it's somehow atheists in government and people point at a country like China today as an example of that. They say 'this is a secular state but look how it abuses religious people. Look how it takes away their freedom'.
But China, like the Soviet Union before it, is not actually an example of a secular state - it has an established religion. Secularism means having the state completely separate from any ideology or doctrine. That's not the case in China.
There is an established religion, it's just Marxist-atheism. That's not a secular state, that's just the flip-side of a religious state. How is secularism faring in the world today?
Well, it's a mixed picture. In some countries, a few like Fiji or Nepal, the constitution has become more secular, the state has secularised. In many other countries, the movement has been away from secularism, countries like Turkey or India.
Can you be a secularist Muslim, or a secularist Christian, or a secularist Hindu? Yes, absolutely and many religious people maintain secularist ideas as a political allegiance. They're ardent about their religion, they believe in that, it's the way they structure their own private life.
But when it comes to their shared life in society with others, they recognise that secularism is the fairest political principle to agree with. It's not just non-religious people, like Thomas Jefferson or Nehru in India, who have influenced secularism. Many religious people have played a part in formulating and developing this political idea.
You can't think probably of a more iconically religious person than Gandhi in the twentieth century and he was an ardent secularist, as was probably the most religious ever president of the United States - Jimmy Carter. They were religious but they recognised that secularism is a political principle that defends all people. What is secularism really?
Well, there are a lot of academic debates about this. Obviously, on the one hand it's something real, something written into country's constitutions, formed in that way. But some people think it can also be something more abstract - just a way of doing politics in a political culture.
If you think about countries like the UK or Denmark, which don't have secular constitutions, none-the-less they have a very secular way of doing government in practice. Secularism isn't just an abstract political principle that is there to be discussed by academics, political philosophers, politicians. It hits peoples daily lives in a number of ways.
What sort of schools are we going to have paid for by the state? What are we going to teach children in those schools? How are we going to govern ourselves?
Who should sit in our parliament? What sort of rules against discrimination are we going to have in provision of goods and services, whether it's bakers or librarians, or whatever? All of these are questions that engage vital principles of secularism.
Secularism is not just something written up in constitutions, it's something that we have to live. What are the virtues required of citizens in a secular state? Well, we have to accept that other people have views different from our own, we have to adopt a measure of tolerance in our dealings with others, a bit of give-and-take, be willing to extend freedom of speech, freedom of worship, to those even that we might disagree with.
That can be very hard, but it's the most effective way to guarantee a stable, peaceful society.
