What is Atheism, Secularism, Humanism

4. Atheism and Secularism across Cultures

Neither “atheism” or “secular” is monolithic or stable—it is not an essentially fixed category

but a culturally variable one

• Atheism and secularism are socially constructed, in contrast to local notions of god(s) and religion

• Since religions and god-concepts are cultural phenomena—which differ or do not exist at all in various cultures—then non-theism and non-religion will differ too

• Atheism and secularism take on local contours—there are multiple kinds of atheism and secularism

In societies without god-concepts, “theism” and “atheism” are not relevant terms

• Even concepts of “religion” or “the supernatural” are not appropriate in all cultures

• For example, African “ancestor worship” (Driberg 1936)

• In Africa, the dead ancestors are not so much spirits to be worshipped as elders to be respected

• A man no more worships or prays to his dead grandfather than to his living father

• The dead are merely the oldest elders, deserving the greatest respect

In other cultures, the division between “natural” and “supernatural” is different—or non-existent

• A. Irving Hallowell: among Native Americans, all natural beings, objects, and phenomena are potentially “persons” with a spiritual component

• The term “supernatural” does not apply, since nature, spirit, and personhood are intermeshed

• So making a distinction between “religion” and “the secular” is meaningless

Case #1: Japan

2005 World Values Survey: 62% identified as non-religious and 13.7% as atheists

Covered with thousands of shrines and temples that are sites of ritual and festival activity

Has spawned so many new religious movements that H. Neill McFarland wrote The Rush Hour of the Gods (1967)

Yet the Japanese tend to think of themselves as a non-religious people

• Japanese language and culture does not think about “religion” the same way that Western/Christian cultures does

• Shūkyō (“religion”) was introduced by Christian missionaries

• “religion” tends to mean “organized religion” or “dogma” to Japanese

• “religion” tends to be associated with superstition and fanaticism

• Japanese religious world is not separate from worldly life, and religious behavior is more a matter of fulfilling social obligations than “faith”

Official or national religion (Shinto) is nature based, ancestor based, and political

(“state Shinto”)

• Buddhism was introduced from India via China, absorbed local kami spirits (Japanized)

• often involved in politics and war

• suppressed in 20th century as foreign religion

• has recently been undergoing “secularization” in the form of public lectures, strip mall temples, television ads for household altars, and even bars and cabarets

Case #2: France

• Officially and explicitly “secular” society: current constitution of 1958 declares unequivocally (Part 1, Article 2) that France is “an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic.”

• Unique French version of secular is laïcité

• More than American-style church-state separation

• Neutrality of the state in relation to religion + management of religion by the state + evacuation of religious identities and symbols from the public sphere

• Reaction against the dominance of the Catholic church (“clericalism”)

• Radical intellectual tradition of philosophes and French Revolution

“Religion” is associated with the power of the Catholic Church and with fanaticism and intolerance

• By mid-1800s, laïcité was part of French discourse, particularly in reference to freedom of social institutions like schools from Catholic authority

• 2013 Charter of Secularism at School

--separation of religion and state (state neutrality)

--freedom of conscience for all, “to believe or not believe”

--assures a common culture, prohibits anyone from boasting or promoting religious membership, including religious symbols (e.g. Muslim headscarf)

--stresses the importance of scientific inquiry and prevents religion-based disputes over evolution or sex education

Case #3: Turkey

• The modern state of Turkey was established after World War I and has been a relatively stable Islamic democracy ever since

• Ottoman system had a separation of the “sultan” (head of state) and “caliph” (head of religion)

• 1830s began Tanzimat (“re-ordering”) including Western science and education and a secular council to decide legal questions outside the Seriat (Turkish version of shari’a)

“Young Turk” movement of late 1800s and early 1900s advocated French-

style secularism or laiklik

• Founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (“Ataturk”), insisted on a secular state

• Religion was seen as backward and anti-modern, and secularism was associated with being a modern state and society

• Abolished the caliphate, closed Seriat courts and Islamic schools, and even banned traditional Islamic dress for men and women

• Religion was placed under government control of Department of the Affairs of Piety

Top-down/elite secularism?

Recently, secularism has become a popular movement in Turkey, with street demonstrations against Islamist doctrine and the assertion that “Turkey is secular, and it will remain secular”

Others, especially Islamists, have challenged the official secularism of Turkey

Arguably, Muslim Turkey is more “secular” than the United States

Case #4: India

• Modern state of India (1947) is also officially secular

• “Secular” does not mean in India what it has meant in the West

• Neither Hinduism nor Islam has a church-like structure, and there has not been a struggle between religious and non-religious power structures

“Secularism” in India mostly means

• Anti-Brahmanism = challenging the caste system and priestly authority

• National unity = avoiding sectarian violence

• Opposing superstition and self-appointed “god-men” like Sai Baba

Indian secularism is not anti-religion

• Ashgar Ali Engineer: “an overwhelming majority of people are religious, but tolerate and respect other religions and are thus ‘secular’ in the Indian context”

• David Gellner: Indian man called himself “a secular Hindu”…and it is “hard to imagine a British person describing themselves as a ‘secular Christian’”

• Indian Muslims are among the strongest supporters of Indian secularism

Even Indian atheism is different

• Johannes Quack Disenchanting India: groups like Organization for the Eradication of Superstition or the Atheist Center focus on magic and charismatic gurus

• They do not limit themselves to attacking religion but focus on social reform and activism

• Indian scientists tend to be atheist but often respect and even practice religion as “culture” or “tradition”

• At international conference on “Atheism and Social Progress,” hardly any Western atheist speakers addressed the conference topic

Case #5: Jewish secularism

• David Biale Not in the Heavens

• Jewish secularism “is a tradition that has its own unique characteristics grounded in its premodern sources”

• scriptural and classical Judaism “never made such a sharp distinction” between secular and religious or sacred and profane—”a strong worldliness informs much of the biblical, rabbinic, and medieval philosophical traditions”

• 1. Characteristics of scriptural god lead to secularism: Notion of an utterly transcendent god has the potential to evacuate him/her/it completely from the world

• 2. Spinoza’s “pantheism”: the world is God, but then “it is impossible to speak of God as acting out of his free will upon the world”

• 3. Kabbalism: God created the world by reducing or contracting himself, “leaving an empty space”—so the world is precisely where God is not, leading to “a radical secular identification of God with nothingness”

• 4. Jewish Enlightenment: textual criticism and scientific approach to/analysis of religion

5. 19th-century Jewish secularist/atheist intellectuals

• 6. Zionist movement and modern state of Israel: Jews as a “nation” or a “race” and Israel as a normal secular state

• 7. Contemporary humanistic/secular Judaism

Case #6: Arab Secularism

• It is widely believed that the Arab world, and Islam in general, is the most immune to secularism and modernization

• “Secularism” does not make as much sense in the Islamic context as the Western/Christian one

• Some Arabs and Muslims claim that Islam does not distinguish between the religious and the civil/political (e.g. Muhammad was both a prophet and a political authority)

• Others say that Islam has long separated religious functions (teachers and preachers) from political functions (kings and emperors)

• Some say that, for example, democracy and popular sovereignty are opposed to Islam, while others assert that the Quran provides the means for government through consultation

Arabic has no indigenous term for secularism; after contact with the West in around 1800, the term word al-‘alamaniyyah was coined (derived from ‘alam for

“world”)

• Despite the idea of the “caliphate” (rule by descendants of Muhammad), Islam does not have a centralized institutional structure—there is no Muslim “church”

• There were philosophical and rationalist movements in pre-modern Islam like the Mu’tazilites that verged on disbelief

• Some schools of zindiq (heresy, dualism) denied the existence of a supernatural creator

• In the 1800s, a generation of modernizing and even secularist Muslims appeared

First in Egypt and then elsewhere, local rulers opened Western-style schools to promote scientific/secular

education

• Arabs who studied in Europe brought home secular or at least liberal ideas

• Most reformers wanted modernization and democracy but not an end to Islam

• “Islamic modernism” and “Islamic secularism”

• Reformers like Al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh claimed the compatibility of Islam and science and sought to renew Islam rather than overthrow it

• In the early 1900s Rashid Rida published a journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse) promoting modernize and preserve Islam

Early 20th-century secularist Ali Abd al-Raziq insisted that Muhammad never created or governed a state and that Islam does

not determine or depend on a particular kind of political system

• By the mid-1900s “Arab socialism” replaced Islam as a unifying political force (e.g. Nasser)

• Virtually all Arab Muslims today live under secular regimes, in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, etc.

• An increasing number of Arabs claim to be non-religious (13% in 2018)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48703377

Even in the U.S., secularism is not synonymous with atheism or irreligion

• Bruce Phillips (2007) found that most Americans who can be categorized as “secular” claim to be non-religious—but they do not identify as “secular” but as “without religion”

• Many religious individuals and groups (especially minority ones) support secularism in the form of church-state separation

• However, Americans do not subscribe to a binary system of religion-versus-secular

• Barry Kosmin: “Disbelief does not correlate with a secular identification as much as might be expected”; secularism, “like religion, takes many forms in American society”

Barry Kosmin (2007) “Contemporary Secularity and Secularism”

In other words, non-religion or anti-religion is ONE of the things that “secular” can mean and (2) “secularism” is not necessarily the “opposite” of religion

• “secular” can actually be pro-religion, e.g. the British Bible Society that explicitly engages in “strategic secularism”