Christian Today’s Krish Kandiah wrote a “Prayer for the day” in his column for the online Christian news site and recounted his days living in the communist country of Albania in the early 1990s.

Kandiah, however, seems to be under the impression tha he was living in a secular society and warns readers of the risk of unrestrained secularism:

[…] And religion was totally banned in the secular state. It was illegal to call your son John or to grow a moustache because these were seen as intrinsically faith-based behaviours and religion was to play no part in public life,” writes Kandiah.

Yet this is not secularism. Secularism does not suppress religious belief. In fact, it promotes the free exercise thereof.

The communist dictator Enver Hoxha (that’s an oxymoron by the way) used his power, much like Joseph Stalin, to suppress religion in an attempt to silence anything he believed could be loved more than him, anything that had the ability to topple his power. That is not secularism — it is fascism.

Kandiah is using his experience to drive fear of secular governments into the heart of religious people by falsely equating secularism to these communist dictatorships.

Secularism is not the opposite of theocracy. It thrives when the freedom to be religious lives alongside the freedom to not be religious. It simply means the government cannot tell you which religion to follow and does not enforce religious laws upon its citizens.