“Australia is a secular country.”
“We live in a secular society.”
Such statements are generally part of the Australian identity, at least as defined by most of our newspapers. The adjective is generally taken to exclude talk of God—a fancy way of saying we aren’t religious. But it wasn’t always like that.
‘Secular’ is one of those words that demonstrates how language moves. It’s centuries-old; sometime in the Middle Ages the Latin saecularis became an English word, secular. But it didn’t mean atheistic, or non-supernatural, or anything like that back then. It meant ‘period of time’, or ‘age’.
This change in the meaning of ‘secular’ is no accident—it
was a deliberate ploy by religious radicals of the early nineteenth century, who had the foresight to see that changing language is a big part of changing thought. They wanted their society to be atheistic, or at least to remove the Christian church as a pre-eminent social force.
The first step was to use it to refer to this age, as opposed to the age to come. It meant things concerned with, or involved with, this present world. But it still did not have any of the non-religious overtones it has now. On the contrary, it was used to describe a large part of the clergy—the secular priests, as opposed to the religious priests.
Secular priests? A contradiction in terms? No, for ‘secular’ meant to talk of this world in a pragmatic way—it conveyed no metaphysical assumptions at all. A secular priest lived in his parish, amongst the people, out in the world, as opposed to the religious clergy, who withdrew from the world into monasteries. They were both devoted to God, both believers in the same Christian worldview, but had different work.
The Australian education system was founded on a similar understanding of ‘secular’. The public education provided for Australian children is secular, in that it deals with maths, reading, geography—ordinary things about this world. But it was expected that Australian children would also receive religious education in the schools—general Christian teaching from their teacher, and specialist teaching from a denominational perspective. Secular was different from religious only in that it dealt with different subject matter. Both were expected to be Christian.
It was not a new movement; nineteenth-century radicals such as George Holyoake (founder of the Secular Society) and Richard Owen followed in the tradition of the French Revolutionaries, philosophers who despised church power. In the robust intellectual society of the late eighteenth century, such radicals delighted in being called ‘infidels’ or ‘atheists’. In the far more polite circles of Victorian times, gentlemen distanced themselves from such terms. So how to continue advocating an anti-Christian stance? Why, use far more polite words. Holyoake deliberately began talking of himself and his friends as ‘secularists’ or ‘freethinkers’—much more palatable than ‘infidel’.
It was a clever political ploy, for ‘secular’ had been a harmless word for centuries. But it highjacked a worldview; for whereas ‘secular’ had previously meant one part of reality, it now had the overtone that this was all of reality. It spoke not just of this world; it implied as well that this world is all there is.
George Holyoake preached secularism as the doctrine that morality, education, art and all higher thought should be grounded in this world, for there is no other. Today, nobody needs to preach ‘secularism’ in this way because it has become part of the word itself. The hijacking of the language worked beautifully.
