Secularists would do well to acknowledge the place of Christianity in their heritage, suggests Ian Harris.
The Judaeo-Christian tradition sowed seeds of change by snapping the link between religious authority and the power of the stateTHESE days, people are more likely to tell you that they are not religious (and proud of it) than that they are.
Some wear it as a badge of superiority that they have seen through all that stuff.
Others will insist that abandoning formal religion does not mean they are indifferent to a spirituality that they value.
Their honesty is admirable.
But I wonder whether they realise how indebted they are to the religious tradition that has contributed mightily to the secular culture they are part of.
Indeed, since it is Western Christianity that gave birth to our secular society, secular people would do well to acknowledge its place in their heritage.
As for church folk, they should not dismiss secular culture as inimical to Christian faith, but rather see it as the legitimate offspring of their faith tradition, opening up new opportunities for the future.
For it is no accident that secularisation - the process by which Western society and culture were liberated from supernatural world views and priestly control - happened in the Christian West.
Why so? The answer lies deep within certain key emphases of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
One pivotal contribution is the way the biblical tradition stripped the gods away from nature.
Instead of every rock, river and tree being charged with a magical energy or spirit, or the sun and moon being worshipped as gods, the Bible sets God apart from nature.
That freed people to observe and experiment with nature without violating the divine.
Another dramatic departure from the older religions was that in this tradition God gave humankind dominion over nature.
This is never presented as a licence to exploit without restraint, still less to destroy.
It is rather an invitation to men and women to tend the natural world, live responsibly within it, and so make it a fit place for God one day to dwell on Earth among them.
In later centuries, fanciful speculation about a destiny in heaven or hell fudged the breath-taking audacity of this vision, and some churches have still to rediscover it.
But it goes hand in hand with an even more mind-blowing conviction - that human history is the sphere where God (or Godness) is to be discerned.
The importance of this uncoupling of nature from the spirit world and of humans' assumption of control over the physical world cannot be over-emphasised.
They were pre-requisites for the birth of the scientific spirit, which became central to Western civilisation.
The Judaeo-Christian tradition sowed further seeds of change by snapping the link between religious authority and the power of the state.
Some trace the decisive moment back to the Israelites break-out from slavery in Egypt 3300 years ago.
The pharaoh claimed to rule by divine sanction, but Moses and his followers claimed their freedom under a higher obedience.
Centuries later, the Roman empire persecuted the early Christians for refusing to worship at the emperor's shrine: if Christ is Lord, they said, the civil power cannot be sacred.
This laid the foundation for an expanding freedom of conscience and democratic institutions which the post-Christian West now takes for granted.
One further contribution of the tradition to our modern way of looking at the world is the rejection of moral absolutes.
This may seem surprising, because religious authorities are accustomed to claiming divine sanction for their moral codes and promote them as the universal norm.
That, however, falls into the trap of making an idol of those codes, and the Bible is uncompromisingly opposed to idols.
Nothing, it says, must be allowed to take God's place - not a church, not a dogma, not an ideology, not even a set of moral absolutes.
Life in a community can never be an anarchic free-for-all, so of course there are guidelines for living which any sensible person will follow, for their own good and everyone else's.
But with secularisation divine absolutes evaporate, and the onus for creating the values of society falls squarely on the people who comprise it.
This opens up a new vista of freedom - and with it a huge responsibility to use that freedom well.
Over time, other influences played their part in the emergence of secular culture, and it is sadly true that in later centuries the innovators repeatedly had to battle against the metaphysical preoccupation and dogged resistance of the Church.
But an alternative script had already been written; and when the time came, these basic Judaeo-Christian affirmations proved decisive in creating the circumstances that brought our secular culture to birth.
• Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
