Secularism is commonly defined as the idea that religion should not interfere with or be integrated into the public affairs of a society. It is often associated with the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, and plays a major role in Western society. The principles of separation of church and state in the United States and Laïcité in France draw heavily on secularism.
Definition
As secularism is often used in different contexts, its precise definition can vary from place to place. In philosophy, secularism is the belief that life can be best lived by applying ethics, and the universe best understood, by processes of reasoning, without reference to a god or gods or other supernatural concepts. Secularism in this sense was coined by George Jacob Holyoake and is one of the precursors of modern secular humanism.
When applied to society, secularism is considered to be any of a range of situations where a society less automatically assumes religious beliefs to be either widely shared or a basis for conflict in various forms, than in recent generations of the same society. In this sense secularism is linked to the sociological concept of secularization and may be upheld as an academic thesis, rather than advocated as a desirable state of affairs.
In government, secularism means a policy of avoiding entanglement between government and religion (ranging from reducing ties to a state religion to promoting secularism in society), of non-discrimination among religions (providing they don't deny primacy of civil laws), and of guaranteeing human rights of all citizens, regardless of the creed (and, if conflicting with certain religious rules, by imposing priority of the universal human rights).
Secularism can also mean the practice of working to promote any of those three forms of secularism. It should not be assumed that an advocate of secularism in one sense will also be a secularist in any other sense. It is also important to remember that secularism does not necessarily equate to atheism; indeed, many secularists have counted themselves among the religious.
The antonym of secularism is usually theocracy, which is a form of government where religion often plays a major or dominant role.