Secularist Secularism

Writing in The Guardian , the leftiest of the English broadsheets, a former MP offers a “manifesto for secularist change” . He leads the article with the claim that “secularism” is “unfairly characterized and attacked by religious leaders as a way of seeking to protect their privileges,” and then simply offers a different definition of the word than the one almost everyone else recognizes (and some people criticize for principled reasons), which is a little annoying, but leads are hard to write, so we’ll let it go. (The next to last paragraph is also pretty silly.)

By “secularism,” he means a movement that “seeks to defend the absolute freedom of religious and other belief, seeks to maximise freedom of religious and other expression and protect the right to manifest religious belief insofar as it does not impinge disproportionately on the rights and freedoms of others.”

Most of what follows is unexceptionable, but then there’s goal number three, “End unjustified religious discrimination by” and his first example:

• Stopping faith schools from sacking or rejecting a teacher based on his/her religion or marital status.

So: to prevent discrimination, he demands discrimination. Faith schools aren’t allowed to propagate their faith by hiring only teachers who share it, which would seem to be a right implicit in the idea of a faith school. He evidently intends faith schools to become secularist institutions, in the usual sense of secularism. So maybe, even on his own grounds, the characterization and attacks aren’t so unfair after all.

The pope, by the way, is a subtler student of what might better be called “secularity” than this writer.