Rise of Secularism to be Examined

Frances Grandy Taylor, Hartford Courant, June 15, 2005

Research suggests that if secularism were a religious denomination, it would be one of the largest and fastest-growing in the United States today. The number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has grown since the early 1990s to nearly 14 percent of the population. This trend has surprised researchers, given the political and social impact that religious values have had in America in recent years.

A new program at Trinity College, the Institute for the Study of Secularism and Culture, will begin in July to delve into the struggle between religious and secular values in society. It is believed to be the first academic institute devoted to the study of the history and development of secular values.

Barry Kosmin, a sociologist who has conducted major studies of religious identity in the United States, will be the institute's director.

Secularism demands further study, Kosmin said Tuesday, because it underlies intense public debate, but is not well understood.

"It's an issue for our times - at the personal level and the public level - that has to be looked at in some detail," Kosmin said in a telephone interview from New York. "It's a very intriguing question - our mission is to bring more light than heat to the subject."

The institute is being funded with a five-year, $2.8 million grant from the Posen Foundation of Lucerne, Switzerland, which has underwritten earlier research conducted by Kosmin.

Kosmin led the American Religious Identification Survey, a 2001 study that mapped details of religious diversity in the United States, based on polling of more than 50,000 people. That study also showed that people with no religious affiliation doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent over a decade - most particularly among the young and males.

The new program will be housed with the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, which was created in 1996 to study the varied roles that religious movements, institutions and ideas play in contemporary society. Both institutes will become part of the new Trinity Program on Public Values, headed by Greenberg Center director Mark Silk.

The secular institute's interdisciplinary program will conduct research, and present classes and seminars for students, and hold public conferences.

"People with no religion would be among the biggest denominations in the United States - its roughly about the same number of people who say they are Baptist or Catholic - it's a big slice of the religious pie," Silk said, noting that Jews, by comparison, account for only about 2 percent of the population.

"A corresponding trend is among those who do not attend any religious institution, yet identify themselves by a denomination, such as Presbyterian," Silk noted. "We don't know much about those people either."

The political and social impact of secularists is felt in a variety of ways, particularly in the battles over abortion, stem cell research, teaching of creationism and right-to-die issues, Silk said. "One thing we do know is that people who fit this category tend to be Democratic voters, where people who report frequent church attendance tend to be Republicans."

While secularism has gotten a bad name in recent years - the word flung almost as an epithet toward people suspected of being anti-religion - secular values have shaped modern society, Silk said, in ways that both religious and nonreligious people take for granted.

"If you were to ask even people on the religious right if they think they the federal government should mandate evangelical Protestantism, the vast majority would say no," he said. "They may be intensely religious people, but they believe very strongly in that secular principle."

Copyright, 2005, Hartford Courant, Reprinted with permission.

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