Secularity and fundamentalism

When I first read the following, I thought it was saying something else.

Fundamentalism's strength as an opponent is the certainty of its convictions.
The defenders of the secular state, believers and non-believers, can only hope to disarm it by finding a language that allows for doubt without compromising its own familiar principles - its faith in a rationally ordered society, a respect for science, for evidence-based knowledge, for non-religious education, and tolerance of religion supported by laws protecting individual rights.

I thought that what was recommended was that a language that allowed for identification of important faith-issues which also left room for people to honour them without necessarily interpreting them illiberally. I guess that's actually been going on for ages. In fact. But it does rumind us that we need to maintain wide roads between fundamentalisms and their 'host' faith-community so that on reflection people can move across to less aggressive and closed expressions of faith without feeling that it is some kind of second conversion but rather it has positive continuities with what has gone before in their lives. This is a really hard thing to do, and it requires that we can see and honour the goods of a fundamentalist position while critiquing it with, as far as possible, the resources of its own positions. It also requires a positive regard [which we might call respect, even love] and an unwavering commitment to the welfare of those who are involved in fundamentalism. The 'demonising' of opponents is to fall prey to the same dynamics as we are seeking to break others out from.

So the 'doubt' is presumably about how the principles of respect, equality, and freedom are to be exercised. I think that this amounts to preferring 'soft' secularism over 'hard'. This is the effect, I think, of "a secular society is not one with no religion, but one where all are free". I have come across versions of secularism where a hard attitude prevails; that is where, in effect religion is not really recognised or allowed in the public realm. 'Soft' secularism recognises that 'public space actors' bring with them, among other things, a religious or philosophical identity and makes room for it without allowing it to be unfairly imposed on others. It's messier and means constant negotiation and the risk of misunderstanding, but that's better than building a permanent resentment among those for whom religious concerns are precisely the issue in public life.
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