secularism-- "religious" and otherwise

A few excerpts from a long article on Secularization by Peter Berger in First Things...

In the second section of the article, Berger defines three types of secularism and describes the challenges that each has with "dynamic religion". In his view, Secularism finds itself in a global context of dynamic religiosity and thus, faces some serious challenges.

Although he does not label the first version, one might call it "Benign Evolutionary" secularism.

First, the term may refer to accepting the consequences for religion [as one piece] of modernity. Social activities that were undertaken in pre-modern societies within a unified institutional context are now dispersed among several institutions [including the Church]....The American case makes clear that secularism, as an ideology that accepts the institutional specialization of religion, need not imply an antireligious animus. This moderate attitude toward religion is then expressed in a moderate understanding of the separation of church and state. The state is not hostile to ­religion but draws back from direct involvement in religious matters and recognizes the autonomy of ­religious institutions.

The second type of secularism, however, is characterized precisely by anti-religious animus, at least as far as the public role of religion is concerned. The French understanding of the state originated in the anti-Christian animus of the continental Enlightenment and was politically established by the French Revolution. This second type of secularism, with religion considered a strictly private matter, can be relatively benign, as it is in contemporary France. Religious symbols or actions are rigorously barred from political life, but privatized religion is protected by law.

The third type of secularism is anything but benign, as in the practice of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. But what characterizes both the benign and the malevolent versions of laïcité is that religion is evicted from public life and confined to private space. There have been tendencies in America toward a French version of secularism, located in such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union or Americans United for the Separation of Church and State....

All typologies oversimplify social reality, but it is useful to think here of a spectrum of secularisms: There is the moderate version, typified by the traditional American view of church-state separation. Then there is the more radical version, typified by French laïcité and more recently by the ACLU, in which religion is both confined to the private sphere and protected by legally enforced freedom of religion. And then there is, as in the Soviet case, a secularism that privatizes religion and seeks to repress it. Its adherents can be as fanatical as any religious fundamentalists.

All these types of secularism are being vigorously challenged. Even the moderate version of secularism, as institutionalized in an American-style separation of church and state, is being challenged by the contemporary religious movements that reject the differentiation between religious institutions and the rest of society. Their alternative is the dominance of religion over every sphere of human life....

Later in the article, Berger turns to "motive" and the cultural aspects of religion (including those which trump religious belief and practice):

For obvious reasons, most attention is now focused on the radical Islamic challenge....[But] Many Muslims who have no inclination toward terrorism or holy war have similar views. Nor is such a view of religion dominating all of society peculiar to Muslims. The ideal of a Shari’a state has strong similarity with the ideal of a halakhic state propagated by some Orthodox Jewish groups in Israel. In India, the ideology of hindutva has similar ambitions, as have powerful groups within Russian Orthodoxy calling for a “monolithic unity of church and state” (a phrase used recently by a high official of the Moscow Patriarchate). In all these cases, the term fundamentalism is appropriate. In progressive circles in America, comparable ambitions are frequently attributed to evangelical Protestants and Catholics. [But] The attribution is empirically untenable....

One must make an important distinction between movements animated by genuinely religious motives and movements where ­religious labels are attached to agendas that are ­nonreligious.

Admittedly it is difficult to decide which motives are genuinely religious and which are not....

There are also clear instances of religious labels stuck on agendas rooted in very material interests. One such case is the Bosnian conflict, where religious markers were attached to clashes of political and ethnic interests. As P.J. O’Rourke once put it: There are three groups in the Bosnian conflict. They look alike, and they speak the same language. They are divided only by religion, which none of them believe in. Another case is Northern Ireland. And this case is again nicely illustrated by a joke: A gunman jumps out of a doorway, holds a gun to a man’s head and asks, “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” “Actually,” says the man, “I’m an atheist.” “Ah, yes,” replies the gunman, “but are you a Catholic or a Protestant atheist?”