I have been defining my terms, an activity comparable to sharpening my axe. Thus far, Christendom and Liberalism. Now, three in one: secularism, humanism, and the enlightenment.
The enlightenment was a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Central figures included the philosophers John Locke (1632 - 1704), David Hume (1711 - 1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804), and the scientist Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727).
The Enlightenment is sometimes known as ‘the age of reason’. This is a silly description, as Aquinas, Anselm, Aristotle, and Plato all lived and wrote before the enlightenment. Were these not men of reason? Of course they were. What separated the enlightenment from previous eras was a supposed triumph of reason over and against belief in the supernatural. As I wrote previously, Europe had been Christian for more than a millennium. This began to change during the enlightenment.
Thinkers like Locke and Hume advocated for empiricism, the view that we should derive all knowledge from what we can experience through the senses. Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, on the other hand, were rationalists, who regarded reason as the chief source of knowledge. To put the difference between the two positions crudely: think lab scientist vs armchair philosopher.
While some enlightenment figures, like Newton and Locke, believed in the supernatural, the movement set in motion the train that would lead to atheism becoming dominant in western universities and wider society.
This leads us to secularism. James K. Smith, drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, offers a helpful definition of ‘secular’:
In modernity, particularly in the wake of the Enlightenment, ‘secular’ begins to refer to a nonsectarian, neutral, and areligious space or standpoint. The public square is ‘secular’ insofar as it is (allegedly) nonreligious; schools are ‘secular’ when they are no longer ‘parochial’— hence ‘public’ schools are thought to be ‘secular’ schools. Similarly, in the late twentieth century people will describe themselves as ‘secular,’ meaning they have no religious affiliation and hold no ‘religious’ beliefs… It is this notion of the secular that is assumed both by the secularisation thesis and by normative secularism. According to secularisation theory, as cultures experience modernisation and technological advancement, the (divisive) forces of religious belief and participation wither in the face of modernity’s disenchantment of the world. According to secularism, political space (and the constitutions that create them) should carve out a realm purified of the contingency, particularity, and irrationality of religious belief and instead be governed by universal, neutral rationality.
In summary, institutions, like schools and universities, become secular as they remove religion from their principles and practices. And people are secular if they lack religious belief and are not attached to religious communities. Secular = absence of religion.
Finally, humanism. Steven Pinker claims humanism ‘promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.’ The British Humanist Association defines humanism as a secular belief system based on three principles: 1) Trust in the scientific method (alongside rejection of belief in the supernatural) 2) Base ethical decisions on reason, empathy, and a concern for others 3) In the absence of an afterlife, make meaning in life through seeking happiness and helping others do the same. Although not many people label themselves as humanists, many in the western world agree with some or all of these key humanist principles.
Charles Taylor notes that we are living in a very unusual time. Sparked by the enlightenment, secularism is in full swing. The presence of religion in our schools, universities, workplaces, and cultural institutions is in decline. We’ve moved ‘from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (Taylor, A Secular Age). For Taylor, it’s enlightenment » secularism » humanism. He writes the following about our current age:
For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.