Secularism, by contrast, is a way of thinking and living, an ideology or worldview: it maintains that religious claims are either simply false (there is no transcendent spiritual reality) or at least that we can and should live as if they are false. This world is all that there is, period. Secularism as a worldview does not necessarily follow from the sociohistorical fact (if it is a fact) of secularization. Whether secularism does in fact result from secularization—and if so, whether this is a necessary