Interesting talk by Wilfred DeClay of the University of Tennessee from the Pew Center’s colloquium on Religion and Secularism. Here’s the thesis:
Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed by the degree to which religion persisted in the American democracy and that religious institutions seemed to support American democratic institutions. What Tocqueville was describing, in fact, is a distinctly American version of secularism. It points in the direction of a useful distinction, which I made briefly at the outset, between two broadly different ways of understanding the concept of secularism, only one of which is hostile or even necessarily suspicious of the public expression of religion.
The first of these is a fairly minimal, even negative, understanding of secularism in the same way that Isaiah Berlin talks about negative liberty. It’s a freedom from imposition by any kind of establishment on one’s freedom of conscience. The second view, what I called the philosophical view or positive view, is much more assertive, more robust, more positive by affirming secularism as an ultimate and alternative faith that rightly supersedes the tragic blindnesses and, as [Christopher] Hitchens would have it, [the] “poisons” of the historical religions, particularly so far as activity in the public realm is concerned.
I would prefer “world-view” to “faith”, but no matter. It would also be good to find a different word for the second kind of “secularism”, but no single term seems to fit. It would need to cover atheism, agnosticism, and probably various pantheistic and deistic positions.
In any case, I believe that the rise in prominence of this second kind of secularism is directly related to the increasing attacks on the first kind of secularism which we’ve seen over the last 20 years. When (e.g.) evangelical Christians try to smuggle religion into schools, a response of “You are infringing on my personal beliefs” is seen as more effective than “You are upsetting a historical consensus about the interpretation of the First Amendment.” (Christians, even when culturally dominant, are attracted to a mythology of persecution that goes back to the Romans; ironically, this makes them more susceptible to protests about “religious persecution” than on arguments about political rights.)