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"Secular" redirects here. For other uses, see Secular (disambiguation).

Secularity (adjective form secular,[1] from Latin saecularis meaning "worldly" or "temporal") is the state of being separate from religion, or not being exclusively allied with or against any particular religion.


A related term, secularism, is the principle that government institutions and their representatives should remain separate from religious institutions, their beliefs, and their dignitaries. Most businesses and corporations, and some governments, are secular organizations.

Etymology and definitions[edit]

Secular and secularity derive from the Latin word saecularis meaning "of a generation, belonging to an age". The Christian doctrine that God exists outside time led medieval Western culture to use secular to indicate separation from specifically religious affairs and involvement in temporal ones.

This does not necessarily imply hostility to God or religion, though some use the term this way (see "secularism", below); Martin Luther used to speak of "secular work" as a vocation from God for most Christians.[citation needed] According to cultural anthropologists such as Jack David Eller, secularity is best understood, not as being "anti-religious", but as being "religiously neutral" since many activities in religious bodies are secular themselves and most versions of secularity do not lead to irreligiosity.[2]

Modern usage[edit]

Examples of secular used in this way include:

Related concepts[edit]

  • Secularism is an assertion or belief that religious issues should not be the basis of politics, and it is a movement that promotes those ideas (or an ideology) which hold that religion has no place in public life. French frequently uses Laïcité as an equivalent idiom for "Sécularisme". Secularist organizations are distinguished from merely secular ones by their political advocacy of such positions.


All of the state universities in the United States are secular organizations (especially because of the combined effect of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution) while some private universities are still connected with the Christian or Jewish religions such as Boston College, Emory University, the University of Notre Dame, Wheaton College and Yeshiva College. Other universities started as being religiously affiliated but have become more secular as time went on such as Harvard University and Yale University. The public university systems of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, and Japan are also secular, although some government-funded primary and secondary schools may be religiously aligned in some countries

See also[edit]


  2. ^ Eller, Jack (2010). "What Is Atheism?". In Phil Zuckerman. Atheism and Secularity Vol.1: Issues, Concepts, Definitions. Praeger. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9780313351839. 

External links[edit]