More and more I've been seeing the Christian Right falsely equate secularism with atheism. It's only to be expected that few atheists won't also be secularists, but there is no way to stretch the meaning of either "secularism" or "atheism" that would allow equating them.

The Messenger is a good example of this trend, writing:

A secularist is one who is not a Christian. Does not actually believe in God or accept Jesus Christ as their Savior. Secularists believe in science, the theory of evolution. Not faith. ... The future of America will become a new state religion called "Secularism"! This is the new one world religious government referenced in Revelations in the Bible. The U.S. will no longer be a sovereign nation, but will answer to the one world leader. That leader will be known as the "antichrist"!

And:

Secularism is just another term for atheism. Atheism is in its own right a religion. It is a belief that there is no supreme Creator or God, or the failure to not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ as the Lord God of Heaven Above. Today the Secularists, led by the ACLU believe that the separation of church and state means to remove all reference of religion from all governments, local, county, state, and federal. That all public schools, secondary schools, and institutions of higher learning cannot teach anything to students, including the country's founding documents, that has any references to God in them. In other words, the creation of a godless state (government).

What's so sadly ironic about all of this is that, far from being an atheist creation, secularism originally developed in a Christian context and secularism does not require one to abandon religion, even today.

It is true that one can take secularism to extremes and promote a secularist philosophy that does attack or undermine religion, but the same is also true of any philosophy or ideology. Secularism need be nothing more than the absence of religion — baseball and stamp collecting are "secular" pursuits, for example. In the realm of politics, secularism is the development of an autonomous sphere of political and social action which is independent of religious authority.

People who attack secularism aren't attacking the first sense — they don't appear to have any problem with the fact that pursuits like baseball and stamp collecting occur outside of religious contexts. Attacks on secularism must be attacks on the second sense: people are attacking the idea that political or social activity is permitted to go on without being under the direction of religious authorities.

An attack on secularism is, therefore, part of an effort to lay the groundwork for theocracy because that's the only real alternative to secular politics. Equating secularism with atheism is part of the plan because atheists are reviled by theist bigots across the nation and if secularism can be associated with atheism, then it will be easier to defend theocracy later on.

 

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