Secularism: The Basics. By Jacques Berlinerblau

Abstract

Students at the college where I teach—a nondenominational, liberal arts school in the northeast—have certain assumptions about the secularity of the United States. First, they broadly assume that the Constitution installs a wall of separation between church and state. Second, they assume that this wall ensures that governmental entanglement with religion—whether by its citizens giving voice to politics in explicitly religious terms, or by the government itself in its own engagements with religion—is strictly forbidden. Jacques Berlinerblau’s Secularism: The Basics is a book I would consider handing to my students to help dispel them of these myths, and then introduce them to the protean nature of secularism. Indeed, Berlinerblau could have called this pithy and eminently engagingly written text, “a handbook on the varieties of secularism,” because his main point is this: There is no single definition or political manifestation of secularism. Secularisms are plural across time and space, made of unstable and malleable ore.