What are the important elements of secularism?
Answers
There are innumerable philosophers who cut their teeth on secularism over the past couple of centuries. My boiling down of their often impenetrable prose is as follows:
Freedom from other people’s religion - Other people’s belief sets are not the basis for governmental action, law and regulation, but instead empirical, scientifically valid evidence is the basis.
Freedom of your own religion - You can believe whatever you want in a society where you are free from other people’s religion, whether it be in a 6,000 year old Earth or a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Reasonable accommodation - If your religious observance requires a certain headdress or ritual token on your body, and that headdress or token do not represent a harm to others, then it’s reasonable to accommodate your use of them. If your religious observation represents a harm to others, then the expectation is that you will moderate it in public. The hijab, a headscarf which covers the hair, harms no one ever, anywhere. The niqab and burka, which cover the face, prevent identification and at least in Canada, must be lifted in a private room for identification of the individual before they engage in public efforts such as citizenship or court trials. That’s reasonable accommodation. If you are of the subset of sikhs who believe that the kirpan, a ceremonial dagger, must be not merely symbolic but an accessible knife with a 12 cm, sharp metal blade, it is not as reasonable to accommodate your belief in school settings where knives are banned. Instead, the accommodation swings the other way to symbolic, 2 cm, dull blades stitched inside clothes or on a pendant.
Attacks from the irrevocably religious - While secularism includes freedom of your own religion and reasonable accommodation, many religious groups do not see it that way as their belief set includes the requirement to restrict the actions of others to what they consider appropriate. Abortion is a classic example of this dynamic, with Christian groups in secular countries such as the USA and Canada constantly struggling to limit or eliminate access to abortions. When they can’t foist their beliefs on others, they blame secularism, frequently equating it with godlessness or practices they may deem worse, such as worship of alternate deities. Similarly, reasonable accommodation is deemed unreasonable by a subset of the religious and they attempt to insist on unreasonable accommodation of their belief sets, such as Christian prayer in schools and displays of Christian symbols and commandments in court houses. Finally in this space is the belief that their symbols should be culturally sacrosanct, not just legally allowed, and so they often claim that there is an attack on Christmas when end of year holidays are greeted with innocuous phrases such as Happy Holidays.
The devil is, as always, in the details.
Secular states sometimes step over the line on certain harmless religious observations and ban them in the name of secularism, but really on the basis of bigotry and fear. This is evident with the current debate over banning the burka and niqab in Quebec. These head dresses harm no one and there are reasonable accommodations for when they must be lifted for identification in a society where a vanishingly small percentage of people where them. Banning them is just as inherently wrong as men forcing women to wear them, but in Canada, the woman’s choice is paramount and protected by law. If I’m allowed to wear a balaclava, an observant Islamic woman must be allowed to wear a burka. Yet due to fear and bigotry, a subset of Canadians do not accept that.
Similarly, there are historical religious symbols in a wide variety of buildings. Crosses carved into stone in law buildings should not be covered or defaced, but merely considered part of the historical legacy of certain periods. Defacing the historical religious symbols of others is what religious fanatics do, not what secularists should do.