Secularity

This article concerns secularity, i.e., being secular, in various senses.

The word "secular" comes from a Latin word meaning "happening once in an age". This offers the opportunity for a confusing variety of meanings. A dog is "big" compared to an ant but not compared to an elephant, and "secular" is similarly subject to "relative to what?" ambiguity. But secular also means, in different contexts, long (relative to something else) because an "age" is a long time, and (relatively) short because an age is "not very long compared to eternity".

Table of contents

1 Secularity as Relatively Long Duration 2 Secularity as being Relatively Worldly 3 Secular trend

Secularity as Relatively Long Duration

In astronomy, "secular" is used in ways that draw on the "long time" emphasis, and implies contrasting phenomena whose periodic repetition astronomy observes with secular one that either repeat too slowly to observe (or are understood not to go through cycles not matter how long). In particular, astronomical ephemerides use "secular" to label long-term perturbations in the motion of planets, as opposed to periodic perturbations. (See month.)

Secularity as being Relatively Worldly

The Christian doctrine that God exists outside of time led medieval Western culture to fix the meaning of "secular", in contexts related to religion, as indicating the direction away from religious affairs and toward "worldly" (or "temporal", time-related) ones, and this has been extended to apply relative to all religious or spritual beliefs, whether or not they include a similar doctrine.

One example is "clerical authority" (referring to matters the church controls) as opposed to "secular authority" (referring to feudal power).

Nevertheless, "secular clergy", for instance, is no contradiction, but rather describes a parish priest, who is secular in comparison to a "religious", a noun referring to a person subject to monastic vows.

A separate article discusses the various senses of "secularism" in the personal, social, and political spheres, based on this same contrast between religious or spiritual matters on one hand, and secular or worldly matters on the other.

The next section contrasts secular in the sense of long term versus short term:

Secular trend

In numerical descriptions, such as of a time series of numbers, a secular trend is the long-term trend in the numbers (up or down), as opposed to a smaller cyclical variation in the time series, with a periodic short term duration.

For example, in the business operating cycle, revenue might fluctuate during the fiscal year; an experienced management can then ignore the cyclical fluctuation in revenue, and concentrate on the 'year over year' trend, hopefully a secular trend upward.