Definition
Secularism is the principle that religion and the institutions of the state should be kept structurally separate, so that government neither establishes nor suppresses any particular faith and treats citizens equally regardless of what they believe. A secular state guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion, bars an official church, and keeps doctrinal claims out of legislation, courts, and public education.
The idea has two distinct lives. As a civic arrangement, it is a design choice about how laws and institutions are organised — a choice many religious believers themselves endorse because it protects every faith, and the freedom not to have one, from state interference. As a historical project, it is one of the defining transformations of the modern world: revolutions, constitutional founders, and post-imperial reformers all chose to disestablish religion from public power, often against fierce resistance.
Secularism is not the same thing as atheism. Atheism is a personal position about belief in God. Secularism is a principle about how public institutions should be arranged. Confusing the two — treating a secular state as a hostile one — is one of the most common errors in debates about religion in public life.
Why it matters
How it works
Institutional separation as the core mechanic
A secular framework typically does four things at once. It declines to establish an official religion. It guarantees the free exercise of any faith and the right to none. It keeps religious doctrine out of legislation, public schooling, and the judiciary. And it treats citizens as legally equal regardless of belief. The aim is a public square in which people of every conviction meet on the same terms, with the state acting as referee rather than partisan. None of this requires citizens to be irreligious; it only requires that institutions stop ranking faiths.
This is the difference between secularism and secularisation. The first is a constitutional principle; the second is a sociological trend — declining personal religiosity. A society can be highly religious and politically secular (modern India, in aspiration), or politically theocratic and personally indifferent. The two phenomena are often conflated, but they answer different questions: how should public power be organised, and what do private citizens actually believe.
Dawkins's civic argument in The God Delusion
Across The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins makes two arguments that he is careful to keep separate. One is the personal case against belief in a supernatural creator. The other is the civic case for secular institutions — and the second does not depend on the first. Dawkins values secularism because it protects freedom of conscience and because it keeps schools, courts, and policy debates open to evidence-based reasoning rather than appeals to revealed truth. A believer who accepts the civic case can disagree with him entirely about God and still share the political conclusion.
Dawkins's complaint is that religion enjoys an unusual exemption from ordinary criticism — what he describes, borrowing from Douglas Adams, as a thick "wall of respect" around faith that other ideas do not get. Conscientious-objector status granted more readily on religious than philosophical grounds, courts exempting churches from drug law, violent responses to satire: these are, for him, symptoms of an institutional bias the secular arrangement is supposed to prevent. The point is not that religion should be ridiculed but that it should be argued with on the same footing as any other set of public claims.
The American founders as case study
In topic 2 of The God Delusion, Dawkins devotes a long passage to the religious views of the US founders. Whatever their private beliefs — theist, deist, or, he suspects, in some cases atheist — they were unambiguously secularists in the institutional sense: they wanted religion kept out of government. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, signed under John Adams, declares plainly that the United States government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." That signature line, for Dawkins, encapsulates the founders' design intent and stands in sharp contrast to the religiosity of modern American politics.
The founders' settlement is the canonical modern example of secularism as a constitutional choice rather than an anti-religious campaign. It establishes no church, taxes no citizen for the support of belief, and refuses to make office contingent on a religious test — while leaving every citizen entirely free to worship as they choose.
NOMA and the limits of "non-overlapping magisteria"
Dawkins also rejects Stephen Jay Gould's "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" — the proposal that science handles facts and religion handles meaning, and that the two simply do not collide. He argues this cannot be true in practice because religions actually make factual claims: virgin births, resurrections, answered prayers, miracles. Each of these is a claim about what happens in the world, and so each is, in principle, subject to the same evidential standards as any other empirical assertion. The 2006 Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer for cardiac patients, which found no measurable benefit, is the kind of test NOMA wrongly says cannot exist.
The relevance for secularism is structural. If religious claims really were sealed off from empirical scrutiny, then the case for keeping them out of public reasoning would be weaker. Because they are not sealed off, a secular public square — where every claim, religious or otherwise, can be examined — is the more honest arrangement.
Religious upbringing, education, and the back half of The God Delusion
In topics 8 and 9, Dawkins shifts from metaphysics to society. He argues that fundamentalist religion teaches people not to change their minds and not to want to know things that are there to be known — a habit corrosive to science education in particular. He also argues that labelling small children with their parents' faith ("Catholic child," "Muslim child") forecloses a choice the child has not yet had the chance to make. Both arguments are sharply contested by religious and secular critics alike — the comparison to child abuse, especially, is rejected by most commentators — but they map onto a concrete civic question: how far should religious authority extend into schools, family law, and the formation of the next generation? Secularism is, in part, the institutional answer to that question.
The Ottoman millet system: pluralism without secularism
World History 101 offers a long counterpoint in its topic on the Ottoman Empire. For six centuries the Ottomans governed an enormous, religiously diverse population using the millet system: subjects were organised by religious community rather than ethnicity, and Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, Jews, and others lived under their own religious courts and leadership while paying taxes to the sultan. It was a workable form of pluralism that allowed a multi-faith population to coexist for centuries — but it was emphatically not secularism. Muslim subjects had clear legal advantages, the state itself was Islamic, and the framework rested on a tolerated hierarchy of faiths rather than on equality before a single neutral law. When European-style nationalism reached the empire's minorities in the late nineteenth century, that tolerated-hierarchy logic broke down catastrophically, contributing to the violence against Armenian communities in 1915.
The lesson is not that pre-modern pluralism failed but that pluralism and secularism are distinct projects. The millet system bought coexistence with structural inequality. Secularism tries to buy it with structural equality — at the cost of a constitutional argument every generation must have again.
Atatürk and secularism as nation-building
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the Republic of Turkey that emerged under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923 defined itself by deliberately rejecting much of what the empire had been. Atatürk replaced Islamic law with European-style civil codes, swapped the Arabic script for the Latin alphabet, dissolved the sultanate, abolished the caliphate, and recast Turkey as a European-facing parliamentary nation-state. Secularism — laiklik in Turkish — became one of the founding principles of the republic, written into its constitution and enforced as an active state project rather than a passive guarantee.
This is secularism in its more assertive form: not merely a refusal to establish a religion but an active programme of disestablishment, sometimes confronting religious authority directly. It produced a functioning modern state — and a permanent argument, still live under the current Turkish government, about the right balance between secularism, religion, and democracy. The Turkish case shows secularism not as a finished settlement but as a continuing political contest, and a reminder that the post-Ottoman map of the Middle East — drawn by Britain and France in agreements like Sykes-Picot — was itself part of the same upheaval that brought the secular republic into being.
Where the boundary is contested
Even in stable secular democracies, the boundary is renegotiated constantly. Should religious schools receive public funding? May religious arguments be made in legislative debate? How are conscience-based exemptions weighed against general laws? Should religious symbols appear in courtrooms or classrooms? None of these have permanent answers — and that is the honest character of the principle. Secularism is not a fixed line but an ongoing argument about where to draw it, conducted under shared rules of equal citizenship. The widely shared core — no established church, equality before the law regardless of belief — leaves the perimeter open for democratic deliberation in every generation.