Remarks by Peter Steinfels at Trinity College

Inauguration of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture

November 2, 2005

What does it mean to become secular?  Scholars of the so-called “secularization thesis” have disentangled at least three meanings.  The first is usually captured under the label “differentiation”: the recognition, growing in the West since the Middle Ages, that different spheres of life are governed by their own autonomous principles and authorities rather than directly by sacred scriptures or religious authorities.  Science, medicine, law, economics, art, politics—each has its own governing laws, procedures, and authorities.…

In this sense, we are all secularists, and our numbers—driven by the three
great engines of secularization, science, the state, and the market—are sure to grow. ...

We are becoming simultaneously more secular and more religious, not in terms of population but of intensity of conviction and in different segments of life. Our elite culture and much of popular culture grows more secular.  Our politics become more religious.  Our capitalist market economy is divided between a minority segment catering to the religious and the majority implicitly or implicitly promoting the secular.  ...

One challenges for soft secularism is to draw finer lines on what is permissible under the First Amendment and to defend that territory strongly while opening up both political and other public discourse to intelligent religious discussion, including that by hard secularism. …   

If the new institute here at Trinity advances these tasks in any degree whatsoever, well, as a religious believer, I say thank God.