Secular society

[autumnalmonk]

One of the many things that I love about Australia is that it is a secular society.  Religion does not infiltrate politics, public life, education, or the workplace nearly as much here as it does back in America.  People here are free FROM religion as well as enjoying freedom OF religion, and even though I am a deeply spiritual person myself, I

Comments

[america_divine]

I think the American part is largely a bugaboo. I live in the so-called "Bible-belt" and am fully out as Queer, Marxist, Pagan and mystic. I never experience religious imposition and have never encountered any articulation--let alone an inappropriate articulation--of religion from any co-worker in more than 20 years. I think it's a country in which many people feel irrationally embattled, including both that 20% of our population that subscribes to fundamentalist doctrine, as well as that percentage that thinks of secular not as a shared space they move into civically, but rather as a component of identity that must be won and expressed. It is mostly a media media/political construct, and my experience of American society even in the Bible belt is that it's nominally protestant, but the clear majority don't seem to take religion very seriously at all. So I'm always very suspicious of claims about the centrality of religion--what I see, rather, is politicians and media outlets making spectacles out of isolated religious disputes

[elision]

I think your bible-belt must be different from my bible-belt.

Are you urban? Suburban? Small-town? Rural?

(I'm originally from Alabama and used to live in Nebraska, the scariest state, though I'm currently somewhere more accepting of a secular viewpoint.)

[america_divine]

Rural & small-town West Virginia. I haven't seen or experienced any of that since high school (and then it was kids who knew one another well, what with the school having only about 200 students).

In rural environs, I have experienced only one act of anti-gay discrimination (from a college administrator 20 years ago who turned out to be disturbed about a lot of things and was dismissed).

I definitely prefer small-towns well away from big towns.

[america_divine]

(But I've got no shortage of Queer and Pagan friends who fantazise Christian hegemony--I see them as the other side of the fundamentalist persecution complex, and as equally tyrannous in their desire to impose a particular epistemological framework or in the pretense that reason is less of a cultural construct than biblical literalism... from my perspective, both look like competing "fundamentalisms").

Which isn't to say there aren't some dangeous folks out there, like the Rushdooney crowd. Just that the vast majority of people don't seem to bring religion out in mixed company, and those who'd deprive others of religious liberty seem to be, in my experience, a very small minority that no one except politicians takes seriously.

[america_divine]

I don't know if this makes any on-the-ground cultural difference, but WV is one of only two states that does not recognize the incorporation of churches (I think only 2). We have only non-profits and a "registry of persons authorized to perform marriages". The actual face of religion "on the ground," though, looks similar just across the Pennsylvania, Ohio or Maryland borders. Right now, churches are closing left and right because of outmigration and economics, and we have largely avoided the megachurch phenomenon (also because no large population centers--none over 100K). There are still a lot of old-style West Virginians who think it's unseemly or sinful to mingle religion and politics. (WV got the short end of that from both sides in the Civil War, which is really when the "Christian Nation" concept took root, and school books moved our founding from commercial Jamestown to the Massachusetts religious colonies--I do go on, and shall hush now, but your post excited my pet themes and are closely related to the questions that