After being able to hear about several different articles that are centered around secularism, in class last week, the topic had me questioning what I thought I had known about the word “secular”. All of my life I thought that it was a term that categorized certain types of books, music, movies, people, etc. into a group that was deemed to cause one to “stumble” or sin. As we were able to go through the articles last class, it was clear to me that there are so many different aspects to the word than I could ever really think of. The Demerath article which my group was assigned, took so many different aspects and said that to be secular had so many different meanings, and it’s so much more complex than its book definition. All of the other articles that were assigned contained different sub groups of the word, and all combined together were able to define secularism, but not if they were all apart. Most of the other articles pertained to aspects about religion dying out, and how gender plays a role in this – however, from what we discussed, “Secularization serves as a form of adaptation to historical change”, thus based on societal changes occurring, is when the word secular is defined. It isn’t just one set list of things being “bad”, yet it it is set upon the feelings and beliefs occurring within a culture at one set time. As secular things and ideas were different in the 1960s, it is also different in 2019, and will be different again in the next 50 years.