Terms: Interreligious dialogue: Best not to conflate 'secular', 'secularity' with 'secularism', 'secularist', 'secularistic'

Celal - The reformational Christian movement, tho a tiny minority of the world population and even Christendom, makes a strong distinction between secular and secularistic. I wish that practice were more widespread within Christianity. It's just that the latter term with its "-istic" ending makes the word more lengthy and, for many, too cumbersome. In between is the term for designation of motive, what motivates a particular person, group, or institution - namely, in this case, "secularism" for the overall religious movement of "no religion;" and then "secularist [motive]" or "secularist" for a person so motivated ... as in "she is a self-acknowleged secularist who won't come to our house for dinner simply because we pray before meals."

Dr Hendrik Hart used to speak of a "biblical secularity." One needn't have a confession of faith or prozelytizing "witness" at the forefront of one's discourse and conversation on all occasions. Perhaps this is the basic reason why crosses were worn originally as pieces of jewellry, a silent symbol that needed no direct backup with faith-profession words, most of the time.

But, as a consistent Christian, one can't always hold back from direct statements indicating who one's Lord is, either. Even when the interlocutor/s know one is a sinner too, one may not wish to mention one's own ultimate motive in life that one's sins betray.

Sometimes the time is ripe; sometimes not; sometimes drastically inappropriate. Over the centuries, we've figured out in North America at least, how to negotiate the secularist suppression in the culture (outside church and home) of all Christ-talk, often all God-talk, without our full surrender and without always allowing the secularist religion/s to have the uncontested hegemony (much of the communities of discourse of said religions are populated by secularist atheist Jews (not "observants" or "Judaic believers"), ex-Catholics turned to the same values, nominal Protestants who wear one Deist shoe and one atheist shoe, and ex-Fundamentalists all trying to outdo one another in their zealotry for their new religion of secularism, atheism, or, more philsophically designated, Humanism (as Dooyeweerd defines it as the simultaneous absolutizing of nature and freedom in dualistic tension with one another in various ways ... and hence the hi-falutin' elite denominations of secularism like Freudianism, Jungianism, Marxism, Austrian Capitalism, and a host of others).

But now we Christians of reformational, Old Reformed, and Evangelical bent must learn new manners of inter-religious discourse on a personal level (say, if you're a teacher of Christian confession in a govt-school classroom with several Muslim girls who are sensitive to and bewildered by some by their 'difference' in contrast to the little secularistos/as and christos/as around them ... you can as a Christian in that schoolroom put the youngsters at ease by occasional gentle references to "Allah" and even "the Prophet" (you needn't absolutuely add the "Blessed Be He").

Secularism, on the other hand, and Christian teachers who receive their training in secularistic educational colleges, all too often blank out all reference to God by any name, it would seem. This silence in all the classrooms and courses creates a divide between home and its extended culture thru its Islamic connections with relatives and friends, and the school where Islamotalk need be whispered only, in the halls and on the playground.

I have used just one humble example, and its sphere-specific particularities to try to suggest a metaphor for new manners in all realms where Christians are called to be good neighbours and to participate in a gentle person-to-person inter-religious dialogue that puts the other at ease, off the defensive, and able to contribute, even perhaps share an inter-religious friendship.

There's so much stereotyping going around about "Muslims," when the world's 1.3 billion Muslim people are reduced to the mere 13 million who sympathize worldwide with Islamofascism.

And not Muslims only. In constructing negative stereotypes about Muslims, one often tends to construct stereotypes about yet others, in this latter case stereotypes that are intended to be positive. I noticed just today another case of stereotyping that included Jews being designated as rich and inveterately capitalistic on Joe Carter's blog Evangelical Outpost (he's a very educated man, but the piece swarms with stereotypes of the broadest kind). The cartoon crisis is throwing lite as much on the anomalies of Christians as on anyone else; we are a confused lot.