Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari points out that humans create collective myths out of need. Religion is one. For instance, there are myriad different creation myths on the planet explaining how we got here.  But civil rights, as Harari point out, is another man-made myth. Same as human rights. There are no innate civil rights, it is just a way of thinking about human relations constructed by man.
Your premise that secular trumps religious quickly runs into trouble when names like Stalin and Mao are brought into the discussion.