Secularism

Oversimplified

• The ordering of life and society as if God were absent or irrelevant — religion privatized, the public world "disenchanted."
• Orthodoxy names this not neutrality but a rival faith about the meaning of the world, answered by a sacramental vision of all creation as bearer of God.

Summary

Secularism is the modern arrangement in which the world is treated as self-explaining and self-sufficient, with religion reduced to a private preference. Fr. Alexander Schmemann called it, most deeply, "the negation of worship" — the denial that the world is a gift meant to be offered back to God in thanksgiving (eucharistia).[^1]

A sacramental answer

Against a disenchanted cosmos, Orthodoxy sees matter as capable of grace: bread and wine become Christ's Body and Blood, water sanctifies, icons make holiness visible. Secularism is not the absence of religion but a different account of reality; the Church answers it by living the world as Eucharist. See The Enlightenment, Eucharist, Iconography.

[^1]: Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World.