Secularization is the name for a change: religion has less and less control over a country, a school, a court, or public life. Laws stop being written in the name of a church. Schools and hospitals may still have chapels, but they are no longer run as church property. People can still believe, and many do; the word is about the public world, not about whether anyone prays at home. Historians use it a lot about Europe over the last few centuries, when church and state were slowly pulled apart. It is a heavy, formal noun. In speech people more often say that something has become secular, or that religion no longer runs that part of life. Though actually, secularization does not mean ‘everyone became an atheist.’ Faith can stay private while the government, the universities, and the law become ordinary civic things.