Secular society

[autumnalmonk]

One of the many things that I love about Australia is that it is a secular society.  Religion does not infiltrate politics, public life, education, or the workplace nearly as much here as it does back in America.  People here are free FROM religion as well as enjoying freedom OF religion, and even though I am a deeply spiritual person myself, I

Comments

[america_divine]

I think the American part is largely a bugaboo. I live in the so-called "Bible-belt" and am fully out as Queer, Marxist, Pagan and mystic. I never experience religious imposition and have never encountered any articulation--let alone an inappropriate articulation--of religion from any co-worker in more than 20 years. I think it's a country in which many people feel irrationally embattled, including both that 20% of our population that subscribes to fundamentalist doctrine, as well as that percentage that thinks of secular not as a shared space they move into civically, but rather as a component of identity that must be won and expressed. It is mostly a media media/political construct, and my experience of American society even in the Bible belt is that it's nominally protestant, but the clear majority don't seem to take religion very seriously at all. So I'm always very suspicious of claims about the centrality of religion--what I see, rather, is politicians and media outlets making spectacles out of isolated religious disputes

[elision]

I think your bible-belt must be different from my bible-belt.

Are you urban? Suburban? Small-town? Rural?

(I'm originally from Alabama and used to live in Nebraska, the scariest state, though I'm currently somewhere more accepting of a secular viewpoint.)

[america_divine]

Rural & small-town West Virginia. I haven't seen or experienced any of that since high school (and then it was kids who knew one another well, what with the school having only about 200 students).

In rural environs, I have experienced only one act of anti-gay discrimination (from a college administrator 20 years ago who turned out to be disturbed about a lot of things and was dismissed).

I definitely prefer small-towns well away from big towns.

[america_divine]

(But I've got no shortage of Queer and Pagan friends who fantazise Christian hegemony--I see them as the other side of the fundamentalist persecution complex, and as equally tyrannous in their desire to impose a particular epistemological framework or in the pretense that reason is less of a cultural construct than biblical literalism... from my perspective, both look like competing "fundamentalisms").

Which isn't to say there aren't some dangeous folks out there, like the Rushdooney crowd. Just that the vast majority of people don't seem to bring religion out in mixed company, and those who'd deprive others of religious liberty seem to be, in my experience, a very small minority that no one except politicians takes seriously.

[autumnalmonk]

Again, I must clarify- I am not fantasizing a Christian hegemony (as you put it). I was merely commenting on the differing levels of religiosity in two different cultures, and expressing my preference for one over the other.

I agree that a secular approach and "biblical literalism" are both epistemological frameworks. However, to equate them is patently ridiculous. Leaving aside the argument that some epistemological frameworks are inherently better than others, I would argue that the secular society leaves room for the personal practice of biblical literalism, whereas biblical literalism denies the possibility of a secular society. The casting of the two frameworks as opposing equalities is a pernicious myth fostered by some of the most militant of fundamentalists.

Lastly, the very idea that there are those who would deprive others of religious liberty and that "no one except politicians takes (them) seriously" is disturbing in so many ways that I hardly know where to start with it!

[america_divine]

I want to be clear that I didn't say that you were fantasizing a Christian hegemony, but many of my Queer and Pagan friends do. With them, I know the dynamic and what else fits into the political narratives... like the relationship between the idea of the "Burning Times" and how it codes contemporary issues or being what I regard as overly invested in the marriage cause du jour

[america_divine]

<<>>

I should have added that I'm sure, however, it sometimes erupted subconsciously, and that other times in a conscious zeal to avoid it, I went too far in the other direction and didn't offer enough.

[autumnalmonk]

Having spent thirty-odd years in America, my experience was that there is definitely a significant level of religiosity in general American culture. Australia, on the other hand, is much less religious in culture and provides a good contrast. However, because the religiosity is so pervasive in America it is difficult from within it to see how thickly insinuated into everything it is. For most Americans it is something they are so accustomed to that they either take it for granted or fail to notice it at all, and only in experiencing what a truly secular culture is like will most of them understand the level of religiosity in their own culture. Without an experiential basis for comparison it is very difficult to develop the appropriate awareness

[america_divine]

I think the rhetoric in the US is all about embattled stances and that current climate stems from the intensified role one's orientation to religion plays in concepts of personal identity (whether Christian fundamentalist or something that gets cast as oppositional, like humanist). The emergence of "secularist" as identity concept is relatively new and is inherently politicized and contentious; it seeks to redefine what was heretofore metaphorized as space or democratic processes as culturally typical, or as an ideal that should supplant older or non-secular identities