The Longing
Stuff that didn't quite make it into The Briefing
The Hijacking of ‘Secular’
Phillip Jensen / October 2000
“Australia is a secular country.”
“We live in a secular society.”
Such statements are generally part of the Australian identity, at least as defined by most of our newspapers. The adjective is generally taken to exclude talk of God—a fancy way of saying we aren't religious. But it wasn't always like that.
‘Secular’ is one of those words that demonstrates how language moves. It's centuries-old; sometime in the Middle Ages the Latin saecularis became an English word, secular. But it didn't mean atheistic, or non-supernatural, or anything