Opinion of Buddhist Modernism

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Buddhist Modernism was a movement, and is the legacy of a movement, within traditionally Buddhist societies that has attempted to produce a Buddhism that functions within a modern rationalist discourse by divorcing itself from social, ritual, and in some cases even ethical context and content, presenting Buddhism in entirely or almost entirely metaphysical, and usually also psychological, terms. Although it began life as an attempt to incorporate Western ideas into Buddhism, it's also associated, in Japan, with a type of cultural supremacy based on presenting to the world the notion that Japanese Buddhism can incorporate modern rationalist discourse more easily than Western religions and is therefore superior.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's not so much that metaphysics were involved as that very little else was. The idea was to provide a form of Buddhism that served a therapeutic function for the individual practitioner and supported rationalist and scientific discourses by situating them in a vaguely spiritual way. In its most extreme forms (there were more conservative types of Buddhist Modernism that only exhibited some of the above-listed features, or didn't exhibit them all to the same degree of salience) the temptation that some people seem to have is to treat it as a form of some sort of analytic philosophy that happened to use religious terms, but I'm not sure that's quite right.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How does secular or atheistic Buddhism relate to Buddhist Modernism?

The existence of deities is kind of orthogonal to it. It wasn't really a question that most of the leaders of this movement were very interested in. I don't know what 'secular Buddhism' is but it sounds depressing.

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That's at best a strongly Theravadin view that entirely discounts the Mahayana tradition's insights into what Shakyamuni did and did not teach, and at worst an outright misconception, similar to the misconception that he didn't teach literal transmigration of souls. The sutras present him in conversation and argument with people who did deny the existence of deities and souls. Buddhism elaborates the concept of dependent arising partly as a way to provide a 'scientific' (in the broadest sense of the term) account for things like deities and souls that doesn't involve denying their existence. There is not a single Buddhist tradition of which I am aware that is in fact atheistic. At most they don't purport to address the question.

It needs also to be reminded that the average South or East Asian person's conception of what a 'god' is is, or historically was, not ours.

The idea that 'add-ons' are definitionally undesirable or would inherently not be approved of by the religion's founder is also itself one that I think is a lot less obvious than a lot of popular discourse about religion, especially in societies that pay lip service to the ideals of the Reformation, would have us all believe.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

a more common description of Buddhism is nontheistic; the word implies something broader than atheism.

That's a fairer assessment, but still only really true of a surprisingly small number of Buddhist traditions, mostly within Theravada.