"Thank God for the Secular"

Martin Marty has a good column in the current Christian Century, "Thank God for the Secular." He carefully points out that he is not expressing gratitude for secularism, but for

a secular approach that lets the things of this age belong to this age (saeculum) and the mundane remain mundane. The Vulgate translates John 3:16: “sic enim dilexit Deus mundum,” God so loved the “mundane,” the world.

Think of the power of religion that makes its way by persuasion rather than by coercion, privilege or favor. Think of the decline of religious participation in the European nations where “establishment” and governmental privileges lasted too long and left the churches complacent. Think of philosophers like Montesquieu, who advised that the way “to attack a religion is by favor,” and that to promote it, “invitations are stronger than penalties.”

Thank God for the secular, as an adjective attached to words like “law,” “constitution,” “polity” and the like. Thank God for the religious freedoms it helps assure and the right to counter “godless orthodoxy” it guarantees. Let there be tens of thousands of crèches voluntarily placed on individual and church lawns, but none on the courthouse lawn. Let the Ten Commandments be engraved in hearts, mounted in homes and learned in synagogues and churches, but let them not be graven images in courtrooms and capitols. Let prayer and praise for a free nation sound out from 250 million hearts and throats. Oppose secularism but thank God for the secular.

The tricky part, of course, is discerning the line between "the secular" and "secularism" in the real world of public policy -- e.g., the debates over government funding (school vouchers, Charitable Choice) and any public policy shaped in large part by religious conceptions of the good (stem-cell research, the definition of marriage). On most issues worth discussing today, one American's rampaging godless secularism is another American's healthy and vital defense of the secular. Nevertheless, the ideal embodied in the distinction is worth pondering and pursuing.

Rob