What Is Secularism

Religion and Politics

Final Paper

Instructor: Hovhannes Hovhannisyan

Sahak Mukhsikhachoyan

Secularism and Modern Democracies

The golden age of religion – this is how the 19th century was called. During that period church attendance was at its peak. People were connected to religion very strongly, and mostly because they could justify by religion the meaning of life and many other issues unjustified for that time. Also religion was creating community by creating norms and helping to unite people as a society. However, today considerably less people is practicing religion, less people marry by church, less people are baptized, less people attend liturgies frequently. But first, what is secular or secularism? As professor Jose Casanova explains

For example, church attendance in European countries and US have dropped from 45-50% to 5-8% of the population from 19th Century to 21th Century. Also Sunday church attendance, church weddings and the number of baptized people has registered a huge decrease. However, the United States and most part of Europe didn’t become secular because people started attend to churches less or something like that, the real reason is that the importance of church dropped and it became something superficial. This means that secularization occurred because people’s lifestyle has changed, their priorities have changed. Nobody will shame you for missing a Sunday church liturgy. To consider another example, China is the biggest country and its population is one sixth of world population and in spite of the fact that some people practice religion, China is officially considered to be an atheistic state. And this brings misinterpretations in statistics. But from my personal point of view people should not be considered atheists because of their country’s governmental regime, people should come this on their own, freely. So in this case a lot of Chinese will be ruled out of being counted atheists. And not only Chinese people, many Russians and people from Eastern Europe accepted Christianism after communism and there many that didn’t yet done it officially. However, even considering this group of people, it is a big part of population in western countries. Besides that, there is a considerable number of people who believe in God, so they are defiantly not atheist, but do not accept or subscribe to any religion. Because of such people it is hard to define the range of atheism, as most people do not turn from fully religious to fully atheist or vice versa. And also depending on the wording of questions, same person easily can become more or less