The secular, the term bequeathed by Christianity to refer to the world, is the best antidote to all forms of utopianism, religious or non, because it understands that in this world, in time, we will not achieve the perfection of the world to come, because we have to live with sinful humanity and are thus limited in what we can do to make heaven on earth. It's not an excuse to give up on the common good, but it is a crucial check on man-made messianic tendencies to impose perfection, usually by killing those who don't get with the program.
Also, the secular, as Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal has drummed into my head over nearly 20 years, does not mean non-religious as many wrongly use the word. The secular is the world that includes all of us, whether we are religious believers or not.
To conflate the secular with non-religious is dangerous, and so is the use of the word secular to exclude religious arguments in a pluralistic society.
If religious and transcendent arguments are excluded from debate, then we will end up worshipping Caesar, aka the state. The difference between a theocracy is that the state has a religious basis; the "secular" (in its wrong use) has a non-religious basis. Both versions use the state apparatus to enforce their monistic views.
I would like to add that I believe that the reason why secularism is confused with non-religiosity has something to do with the decline in the confidence in reason to attain truth.
If all is relative, and God can't be proven, and religion is myth, and no one has ANY absolute truth (as opposed to haveom SOME absolute truth) then you cannot make a distinction between reveal religion and philosophical absolutism.
Philosophical absolutism and religion are, in a sense, the same thing. They both make a claim on absolute truth. One does it through revealed religion, the other through reason. Since both are rejected as illogical, they are often confounded. If there is no standard to judge philosphy or religion, they're all equally false, right?
I believe this is one reason why fundamentalist secularists can't understand that there is a philosophical underpinning to religious belief that can be the non-religious basis for policy. If Faith AND Reason are BS, it makes no difference to them that Faith has a basis in reason. Faith doesn't have a basis in reason (if you get my drift). It's illogical to believe that a subjective human being can really know the truth, whether he searches it for himself, or whether he puts his faith in a religious body to lead him.
If faith and reason are BS, then all you have left is whatever seems right. Whatever seems right is automatically defined as non-religious, even if it's propagated by religious people. That's why political intervention from the United Church is never objected to in left-wing politics-- because they advance "what seems right", whereas intervention from the Catholic Church is seen as a condemnable mixture of Church and State. What seems right is okay for everyone to advance, whether they are believers or not, whereas those who are opposed to political correctness are religious, selfish or just plain illogical to believe in some kind of philosophical absolutism.
