Secularism

Secularism is a development of religion. It comes into existence when the ideal of equal liberty for all faiths and special privileges for none becomes a working hypothesis verifying itself in all the institutions of a culture. Then believers in creeds which are different from each other commit themselves to living with each other, not as feuding families but as good neighbors. In one aspect, secularism is the recognition by all religions of the right to be different of each religion, to be different without penalty and without privilege, and to hold to its creed and code no less freely and safely than any and every other religion. This attitude of different religions to one another becomes itself a religion whenever a person, a church or any other society bets its survival and growth on this relationship with the diverse.

Thus, the religion of Secularism neither competes with any other religion nor displaces any other. On the contrary it is belief in a free and fruitful union of all which should supplement and strengthen each, as a communion of the diverse in equal liberty. Such a communion signalizes a replacement of the historic war of each against all whereby each one seeks to overrule its alternates and peers by persuasion, by coercion, or by both, and to liquidate difference in conformation. There are those who religiously believe that men cannot live except they fight; that they are born to fight as they are born to breathe or to eat; that the failure to satisfy the need would bring their manhood down to sickness and death; that only war is well-being and virtue is only fighting. There are others who believe that fighting may not be inborn need, but that it is an outer necessity; that existence is a struggle for survival in which man's inhuman ity to man has the foremost role. They point out that in nature nothing they need or want comes in such abundance as to satisfy everybody, deprive nobody. Nature's scarcities, they say, compel man's pugnacities, and all men's cultures, particularly their religions, are devised to conquer scarcity and to win the life more abundant for those alone whose cultures they are.

As an article of faith Secularism envisages the miscellany of mankind, in all their irreducible singularities of cult and code and culture and vocation in benevolent and untrammeled communion with one another, and as a free society of free men by means of such communion.

This vision is the Secularist's substance of things hoped-for, his evidence of things unseen. Committed to it, he may be, in and for himself, a monist or a pluralist, a monadist or a dualist, a naturalist or a supernaturalist; a deist or a theist, a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist or an atheist; an agnostic, a positivist or a humanist; a Roman, a Greek, an English, a Uniate or other Catholic; a marxian, trotskyite or stalinist Communist; a fascist, nazi, malanite, falangist or dixiecratic racist; a Bahai; a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Wesleyan, a Quaker, a Universalist, a Unitarian or other Protestant; an Orthodox or Conservative or Reform or other Judaist; an adherent to one or another of the many sects and denominations of Moslems, Buddhists, Brahmanists, Taoists, Confucianists. But when his relations with any or all the others consist in acknowledging, understanding and respecting whatever they are, as they are, and in joining together with them in a reciprocal enhancement of life and liberty, he adds to his particular faith the common faith of Secularism.