“For too many people, the choice is between a religious community, or no community at all.” So said Kate Lovelady, leader of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, one of few thriving Humanist communities in the USA (and perhaps the world).
She’s right. That’s why the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard today launched the Humanist Community Project, an effort to bring freethinkers together to share resources, ideas, and aspirations toward the construction of real Humanist communities across the United States and the world.
For many years now, the most significant non-commercial community space outside the home and the workplace has been the church, the temple, the mosque, and the synagogue. Religious people who, through the course of their life, come to reject their faith and embrace Humanist values, are faced with what is often a difficult choice: continue to participate in their religious community while not really believing in the worldview promoted there (what Humanist author Jennifer Michael Hecht calls the “drop by and lie” approach), or hold firm to their integrity and leave the community behind, often losing friends, family-members, and other social benefits and privileges in the process.
Depending on where they live, the budding Humanist may have an atheist meetup group or a Skeptics pub brunch to welcome them, and these groups are an integral and valuable part of the broader freethinking community. But what Humanists lack (unless you happen to live in St. Louis) are institutions, with their own buildings, which play the sort of existential and community-building role that places of worship offer to the religious.
At first glance this may seem a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. You might think that nonreligious people, lacking the sort of commitments religious people share, don’t need or want a space to explore, deepen and affirm their values. Many in the broader freethinking community feel this way. Furthermore, many nonreligious people in the USA are nonreligious now due to the harm and misery caused by their religious communities, and they want nothing to do with any space which might seem remotely “religious.”
While I understand these potential objections, I find them unconvincing. Humanism offers a set of values just as powerful and worthy of communal expression as any religion, with great potential to shape the world for the better. The tendency to see Humanists and freethinkers as “nonbelievers” who have “lost their faith” is an unfortunate manifestation of religious privilege, which tends to shadow the positive commitments that Humanists share – we become known for what we don’t believe in, rather than what we do believe in (I’ve addressed this before).
The Humanist commitment to reason, compassion and hope for the future of humankind can, in fact, be seen at the root of every major advance in human living ever accomplished by our species. There is nothing more worthy of celebration in community than that truth.
Being a Humanist is difficult, too. Expanding the circle of our compassion and advancing in the application of our reason is a challenging process, for which we may often need assistance. Humanism is a target we strive to hit, not something we achieve the moment we put God away. Having a community who shares our values surrounding us helps make us better Humanists – the inverse of “growing in faith”.
Furthermore, religious community spaces offer something of real value to the people who frequent them, despite the criticisms Humanists mount at their metaphysical foundations. It is clear that many (though not all) people welcome the opportunity to join with other members of their community to demonstrate their commitment to each other, to a set of shared values, and to the world at large.
Some of the religious spaces I have visited in preparation for the launch of the Humanist Community Project have been the warmest, most welcoming, most beautiful spaces I have ever encountered. I have been to churches, mosques and synagogues I would gladly become a member of – were they not committed to a set of beliefs I find troubling or simply wrong in addition to many which I find life-affirming and positive.
Indeed, in a wide-ranging study of church websites I conducted to give Humanist community leaders advice on website design (some of the fruits of which can be found here), I found, remarkably, that it was precisely the broadly Humanist elements of religious commitments which the largest, most effective churches foreground: happy people working together to make the world a better place. God was often a very small part of what they seemed to be offering, hidden in the digital backwaters of the site.
We believe it’s time to make spaces where God is no part of the offering. Reason, compassion and hope can stand alone without supernatural assistance. At the Humanist Community Project we intend to demonstrate that this is so, by providing the best resources, the best ideas, the best advice, the best thinking, the best strategies, to build Humanist communities. And with those communities, a better world, where reason, compassion, and hope reign supreme.
This photo was taken by KellyK and accessed in accord with her Creative Commons License via FlickrCommons.
Sounds good to me!
Hi James,
I hope that all is well. One of the ideas that I find somewhat surprising is that you seem (at least based on the flow of the passage) to juxtapose religious people and “freethinkers.” Given the significant streams of “free thought” within all of the traditions I’ve encountered — not to mention rationalist streams — isn’t this a lot to presuppose?
More personally, I would also like to suggest that my tradition (Judaism) does not conflate the idea of a “faith” and a “religion.” One can be Jewish religiously, ethically, socially, and even nationally without being a person of “faith.” So I would like to suggest to you caution about assumptions related to people of “religion,” much as I would caution to people of “religion” about humanists.
I do, however, like the idea of a humanist endeavor to create communal spaces. Community is certainly something we all need. Please do keep the SoF Community abreast of these very important developments within the Humanist community.
All the best,
Josh
Hey Josh! I think, as so often, we suffer from terminological differences here. “Freethinking” is a term within the nonreligious community used to describe ourselves – people who are religious skeptics, almost always (by the standards of their time) nonreligious. The sorts of people who are profiled in Susan Jacoby’s “Freethinkers”. The term is not used to disparage religious believers by comparison, but as an inside term to describe the community of nonreligious people and religious skeptics. It’s a sort of inside-identifier.
As for whether religion and faith are separable, I think that’s a very interesting question indeed. Many theologians and sociologists have suggested so, and there is a strand of “religious Humanism” (promoted by Dewey, for instance) which tries explicitly to naturalize religion.
Ultimately, although I respect the nuance in such arguments, I’m not convinced. I don’t think that the use of the term “religion” to mean anything other than “a worldview which includes some supernatural elements” is at all widespread outside of academia (and a very small slice of academia at that), and I write to be understood by as wide an audience as possible, which means sometimes I court objections like yours. I look to people like Greg Epstein for my guidance in this – a rabbi, certainly Jewish, but a secular Jew who does not describe his cultural identity as “religious” (for the sorts of reasons I’ve described). I believe that most people, when I use the terms “religious” and “nonreligious” as I do, understand my meaning.
An odd question – what happened to our logo? I have the right to use it, I promise! 😉