Category Archives: Other Educational Resources

Secularity in Great Britain

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David Voas, Simon Research Fellow at the Cathy Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester, England & Abby Day, Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, UK

There is probably no common understanding of the term “secular” among ordinary people, or even among scholars. Britain is formally a religious country in a way that many modern states are not, having (different) established churches in England and Scotland. There is also a willingness to countenance religious involvement in the machinery of government: the Church of England is represented by a number of its bishops in the upper house of Parliament, and in 2000 the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords even recommended that other religions should be represented as well, increasing the number of religious seats. The Labour government under Tony Blair did not accept the proposed extension of religious representation, but neither did it suggest eliminating the bishops.

Secularity in Great Britain

“People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image”: A Contemporary Overview of Secular Australians

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by Andrew Singleton, Lecturer in the Sociology Program, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

In 2006, the Australian federal government announced that it was funding a program to place school chaplains in all Australian schools, at a total cost of Aus$90 million. This was met with both praise and derision in the mainstream

press. For example, a columnist in one major metropolitan daily noted that the plan potentially contravened the Australian constitution, while others fretted that Christian philosophy would be taught to the exclusion of other perspectives. The presidents of various rationalist and humanist societies wrote a joint letter to one newspaper warning that the plan favored “zealous evangelical/fundamentalist/Pentecostal groups.” Others applauded the initiative. One wrote a letter thanking all the politicians involved and concluded: “I give all thanks to God, who makes all things possible.”

“People Were Not Made to Be in God’s Image”: A Contemporary Overview of Secular Australians

Is Anyone in Canada Secular?

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by William A. Stahl, Professor of sociology at Luther College, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

Is anyone in Canada secular? A facetious question. Obviously the answer is yes, but exactly how many is diffcult to determine. There are two problems inherent in the question. A great deal depends, of course, on what one means by “secular,” a problematic term inextricably bound with 19th-century ideology. The second problem is that Canada is paradoxical. On the one hand, self-identifcation with a religious organization is very high and “belief” in God is even higher. On the other hand, few Canadians today attend a place of worship regularly and religion is conspicuously absent from most of public life.

Is Anyone in Canada Secular?

Who Are America’s Atheists and Agnostics?

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by Ariela Keysar, Associate director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and associate research professor of public policy and law at Trinity College.

Atheists and Agnostics are fringe populations in U.S. society. Considered by many to be deviant, Atheists are a distrusted group. According to a Gallup Poll from September 2006, a vast majority of the public (84 percent) thinks that Americans are not ready to elect an Atheist as president. Although Atheists and Agnostics are tiny minority groups, the attention they attract, particularly from the religious right, warrants a better understanding of exactly who they are in terms of social characteristics such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity and political preferences.

Who Are America’s Atheists and Agnostics?

The North American Pacific Rim: A Response to Frank Pasquale and William Stahl

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by Patricia O’Connell Killen, Professor of religion and director of the Center for Religion, Cultures and Society in the Western United States at Pacifc Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington

I approach the Pasquale and Stahl chapters as an historian of religion, primarily of Christianity in North America, who has been working for some time on understanding the religious dynamics of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Most recently, as part of the Religion by Region project of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, I co-edited Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone with Mark Silk. The volume provides a frst take on two questions:1) What is the religious configuration on the ground in the Pacific Northwest? 2) What difference does it makes for public life in the region?

The North American Pacific Rim: A Response to Frank Pasquale and William Stahl

The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest

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by Frank L. Pasquale, Research associate of ISSSC engaged in the study of the nonreligious population of the U.S

In survey research, “seculars” has been a variable category encompassing distinguishable types of individuals. There is an ever­increasing amount of data emerging from survey work on “seculars” and Nones (those who profess no explicit religious identity or affliation). There has been less direct or detailed attention to the subset of Nones that might be characterized as “quintessential seculars”—the substantially or affrmatively non­transcendental/ not­religious, or “Nots.”

The “Nonreligious” in the American Northwest

Putting Secularity in Context

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by Bruce A. Phillips, Sociologist at the University of Southern California and professor of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles.

It has been correctly asserted that “Secularity and secular people in America have gone largely unresearched until now.” Indeed, Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar have put secularism back on the scholarly agenda. The qualifer “largely” is important, however. Secularism did not entirely disappear from the sociology of religion, and putting these most recent fndings in the context of previous research raises a number of analytic challenges. In this chapter I look at these fndings in the context of previous research and suggest that the re-emergence of secularism in America needs to be understood in specifc analytic contexts.

Putting Secularity in Context

Contemporary Secularity and Secularism

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Barry A. Kosmin, Founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture and research professor of public policy and law at Trinity College

Secularism and its variants are terms much bandied about today, paradoxically, as a consequence of religion seeming to have become more pervasive and influential in public life and society worldwide. This situation poses a number of questions.

Contemporary Secularity and Secularism

Egypt: Secularism, Sharia, and the Prospects for an Inclusive Democracy.

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by Manar Shorbagy,  Arab Center for Development and Future Studies & Political Science Department, The American University in Cairo

The relationship between religion and politics is at the top of the political agenda in Egypt, and, as I shall argue, it has important implications for the political rights of Egyptian women and minorities. However, the issue is not a simple secular/religious divide. It is, rather, the problem of how to define the nature and characteristics of a civil, democratic state that is neither a theocracy nor an Islamically “naked” public space. The Islamist/secularist dichotomy is a false one; it has little or no relevance to actual political processes and possibilities in Egypt, where a middle ground is both theoretically and practically conceivable. Such a middle ground, however, must be deliberately sought and found by Egyptians, so that a national consensus on the relationship between religion and politics can emerge.

Egypt: Secularism, Sharia, and the Prospects for an Inclusive Democracy.