What is it to be secular in Christian tradition and culture
The distinction between religious and secular spheres in Christian society is the result of a long and articulated historical process. The concept of secularity as it has developed in the Christian West and adopted in public institutions and modern legal systems cannot be used to understand political and religious realities present in other parts of the globe.
There were already signs of it in the first centuries of Christianity, at least in the western part of the Roman Empire, and it found its first theoretical elaboration in medieval thought (William of Ockham and Marsilio Ficino), reaching a peak in the 16th century, developing a rational and temporal approach to the realities of politics and the right conduct of the state.
The Weberian concept of the secularity of political orders is a purely Western ordering principle, the result of a particular historical process activated by competition and collaboration between the secular and the religious for the guidance of Christianity.
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