On Secularity

A reader writes:Does it seem to you that many liberals arguing the loudest for the separation of church and state are really arguing that the state adopt their religion, secular humanism? Religion is not a closed category.  A “religion” is any system or scheme of morality.  Anytime someone advocates something as “the right thing to do” or just or fair, the assertion is based on the speaker’s morality and thus based on the speaker’s religion.  A person may adopt a particular system in total and such people are called fundamentalists.  In my experience, far more people adopt a buffet approach to their religion, taking bits from various sources.Secular humanism has enjoyed (and is enjoying) power because it has avoided being called what it is – a form of religion.Yeah.  As I’ve pointed out in this space, it’s not the case (as Christians sometimes foolishly argue) that atheists or secularists are “immoral without religion”.  Indeed, most atheists are *intensely* moralistic people and never more so than when raging righteously against the sins of theists.  They are not immoral, they are moralistic shoplifters who are stealing a transcendent basis for their moral proclamations from the theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And, as you note, they are choosey shoplifters who just take the bits of the Tradition they like, often being complete unaware of the fact that the moral points they mysteriously regard as “self-evident” are not at all self-evident to those who do not benefit from the huge patrimony of the Christian Tradition.That said, Catholics should not fall into the opposite trap of despising the idea of the “secular” altogether as many Fundamentalists do.  “Secular” is, paradoxically, a *Church-invented* idea that respects the fact that, in the words of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, “Respect for the legitimate autonomy