Definition
Of or relating to temporal, worldly affairs as distinguished from spiritual or ecclesiastical matters. In legal usage, "secular" operates primarily as a limiting or qualifying adjective. Its significance depends entirely on context:
1. General legal usage. Secular describes persons, institutions, purposes, laws, or activities that belong to the civil or temporal sphere rather than the religious or ecclesiastical. A secular court has jurisdiction over civil matters; a secular purpose is one that is not grounded in religious doctrine or advancement.
2. Sunday laws and Sabbath statutes. In the context of blue laws, "secular business" encompasses the full range of ordinary commercial and employment activity — executing promissory notes, conducting trade, lending money, and similar transactions — as opposed to acts of worship or religious observance. Historical courts used the term to draw the operational boundary of statutory prohibitions.
3. Constitutional law (Establishment Clause). "Secular" carries its greatest doctrinal weight in First Amendment jurisprudence. Laws or government actions that lack a genuine secular legislative purpose are suspect under Establishment Clause analysis. The requirement of a secular purpose formed one prong of the framework articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), though the precise analytical framework has evolved in subsequent Supreme Court decisions.
4. Secular clergy. A historically significant ecclesiastical and legal distinction: secular clergy are parochial clergy who minister in the world (in seculo), as opposed to regular clergy who are bound by the rules of a religious order. This distinction had legal consequences in pre-Reformation and early common law contexts regarding jurisdiction, property rights, and benefit of clergy.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Secular is used in ordinary English to describe anything not religious or spiritual in character — secular music, secular education, secular government. It also carries the astronomical/scientific sense of long-term or age-spanning change.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's captures both senses — the temporal (as opposed to sacred) and the age-long or century-spanning, as in "secular games" held once a century. The temporal meaning dominated in legal contexts even then.
Editorial note: The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow in modern usage but was more pronounced historically. The legal term carries precise jurisdictional weight — particularly in constitutional and Sunday-law contexts — that ordinary usage does not. A researcher encountering "secular purpose" in a constitutional opinion, or "secular clergy" in an ecclesiastical law source, is reading a term of art, not a casual descriptor.
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Common Confusion
Secular vs. non-religious vs. civil: These are related but not interchangeable in legal texts. "Civil" describes the jurisdiction or legal forum (civil court, civil law). "Non-religious" is a functional description. "Secular" is the doctrinal and constitutional term. A law may be civil without being evaluated for secular purpose; a purpose analysis is triggered specifically by Establishment Clause considerations. Older sources, particularly pre-20th-century dictionaries, use secular almost entirely in the temporal/ecclesiastical contrast sense and do not address the constitutional dimension — because that usage is largely a product of 20th-century First Amendment doctrine.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter "secular" across three largely separate bodies of law, and conflating them produces errors.
In Sunday law research, the term defines statutory scope. 19th-century cases construing blue laws used "secular business" to determine what activities were prohibited on the Sabbath. The definition was expansive and practical — courts asked whether the activity was part of ordinary commercial life, not whether the actor had religious or irreligious intent. These cases appear in state reporters throughout the 1800s and are indexed inconsistently; searching for "Sabbath," "Lord's Day," and "secular" in combination will recover more than any single term.
In constitutional law research, the modern doctrinal meaning of "secular purpose" emerges almost entirely after 1947 (Everson v. Board of Education) and gains its clearest articulation in the 1970s. Researchers using older digests and dictionaries will find no trace of this usage. The absence is a trap: Black's 1st and 2nd editions, Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence all define secular in the temporal/ecclesiastical sense only. A researcher relying solely on historical dictionaries for a constitutional memo will miss the operative modern meaning entirely.
In ecclesiastical and early common law research, "secular clergy" has substantive legal significance. The distinction between secular and regular clergy governed benefit of clergy claims, property succession in certain contexts, and jurisdictional allocation between ecclesiastical and common law courts. Bouvier's and Rapalje & Lawrence preserve this usage; modern dictionaries largely omit it.
Corpus connections: Entries touching Establishment Clause, Sunday laws, benefit of clergy, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction will all intersect with this term. Researchers moving between constitutional and historical materials should flag that the word is doing different work in each period.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree on the core definition — secular means not spiritual, not ecclesiastical, relating to affairs of the present world — and reproduce it with near-uniform brevity. Bouvier reduces it to "temporal things; of the world; worldly." Rapalje & Lawrence adds the in seculo gloss and the secular/regular clergy distinction, which is the most practically useful addition for historical research. Black's 2nd edition contributes the most operationally specific content by linking "secular business" to Sunday law jurisprudence and providing examples (promissory notes, lending, trade) that show how courts drew the line.
What the historical dictionaries miss entirely is the constitutional dimension. None of them — including the later editions of Black's available in the corpus — engages with secular purpose as a First Amendment standard. This is not a deficiency in the dictionaries so much as a reflection of when that doctrine emerged. Researchers should treat the historical dictionary entries as complete for their period and supplement with constitutional law sources for any Establishment Clause analysis.
Webster's 1913 adds the interesting secular/century sense (secular games, secular refrigeration) that has no legal analogue but occasionally surfaces in older statutory interpretation arguments about temporal scope. It can safely be set aside for most legal research purposes.
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Jurisdictional Note
Sunday law and secular business definitions were developed state by state and varied considerably in scope and enforcement. Some states prohibited all secular business; others carved out specific exceptions. Federal constitutional analysis of these statutes, and of secular purpose more broadly, is uniform in standard but variable in application. Researchers working in any single jurisdiction should consult that state's own Sunday law cases rather than relying on the general doctrine alone.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Establishment Clause (for secular purpose doctrine and constitutional framework); Church and State (for historical relationship between ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction); Sunday Laws (for secular business in Sabbath statute context).
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