We do get rather mixed up because of the use of the word "secular."  What does it mean? It depends on who is using (or abusing) the term and in what context.

To some, it means atheism or generic non belief such as in "I am a secular Jew."  (To others it means militant "new atheism".)

In other instances, it simply means support for neutrality in government with regards to religion.

In still other cases, it is synonymos with pluralism, meaning that a secular society which respects all religious points of view and prefers none.

I could go on.

But let's set aside the matter of secular types for a moment. Why pick on them? How about various religious factions involved in say, middle east politics, who abuse history for political purposes or confuse it for ideological reasons?

The point is that any time one sets up the secular strawman, absent any real facts, one is falling into the same old false framing that the religous right has used for decades.

There are plenty of real world misuses and misstatements of history without resorting to the great, unnamed secular anything.

Awhile back we had Wallis, Obama and others making vast claims about secularists driving people of faith from "the public square" or from the Democratic Party.  They have yet to name a single person who has ever been silenced or barred from public life because of their religous views or expressions. They have yet to name a single secularist or identified any secular movement that has behaved in this fashion. After having been vigorously challenged, we don't hear that embarrassing claim much anymore outside the religious right.

As for Fea, lets see him define "the secular left," by some reasonable standard, and name some specific incidents so we can understand and evaluate his claims. I have no idea what he is referring to, and I suspect, neither does he.

by Frederick Clarkson on Wed Oct 03, 2007 at 03:09:44 PM EST
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