Pope John Paul II Journal of Philosophy

Democracy has become the most popular form of government in the contemporary world order. Aligned to democracy is the requirement of being religiously neutral in politics for which many countries of the world -especially in the West- would prefer to be described as a secular state. This is irrespective of the general pledge to a freedom of religion. Yet if we accede to the fact that humans order their lives according to their worldviews and that religious beliefs provide a very basic worldview from which humans order their lives, it becomes impossible to sustain the argument for the possibility of being religiously neutral in the political sphere. This is so, because the religious worldview is a type of worldview that is life-regulating based on its conception of reality, of the human person, and of moral and political values, expressed through rituals and practices. Conversely, secularism is itself, also a worldview that is not unbiased. Like other worldviews, especially religious ones, secularism contains beliefs about the nature of reality, the nature of the human person and the nature of morality, which has political implications. Worthy of note is that the quest for secularism, requires supplanting the religious worldview with the secular worldview. Given the above, this essay argues that the projection of the secular state is crisis ridden. The paper recommends that a more sustainable arrangement would be to acknowledge our religious biases and seek a point of convergence between competing worldviews, religious or otherwise in the political sphere.

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