What Fundamentalists and Atheists have in common

Secularization was defined first by a Dutch theologian C.A. Peursen as the deliverance of man “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.” This is where extremists on both sides of the wall of separation focus – on the phrase “control over his reason”. Both atheists and religious fundamentalists share a fear of having their thinking controlled – because they both want to rely on one form of knowledge exclusively, reason or revelation.

Atheists object to voters using their religion as a factor in deciding their preferred candidates or voting in referendums, although this is clearly within the parameters of a liberal, democratic society protecting freedom of conscience. Fundamentalists want to separate the education of their children because they do not want science to challenge their children’s faith in religious doctrine. Extremists on both sides of the wall would like truth to be as simple their single-sided analysis because they share the fearful assumption that reason and revelation are incompatible.

At the moment they are to a certain degree, but it is only through honest public conversations between individuals that they can be reconciled. Secularization, as opposed to secularism, is a process that assumes that there is ultimate compatibility between reason and faith that will one day be revealed. Secularism, on the other hand, excludes this possibility hence in secular ideologies like communism, faith is something to be controlled if not extinguished.
 
Today’s populist conflicts are the due to the fact that for some the wall represents the position that faith and reason cannot be reconciled and therefore must be a permanent part of any “modern” or “post-modern” state until religion dies. This secularist belief then stimulates reactive and dangerous win/lose thinking.
 
Secularization is merely a political commitment to separate the institutions of church and state, which only requires that public laws be limited to those that are “rationally justifiable in a free and democratic society” as we say in Canada. Secularization is the political process of transferring of responsibility to resolve any conflicts between reason and faith to individual citizens.