The Fall 1996 issue of Free Inquiry has as its chief topic the issue of "Defining Humanism," a perennial topic among humanists, represented in this case by eleven authors, including one fundamentalist. These articles taken together paint a picture of how humanism is interpreted by various people within and outside, and they also suggest that the diversity of humanism is such that there will probably never be a definition or set of propositions that will please all humanists as a definition of humanism.

Considered as a "big tent," humanism today includes religious humanists (most obviously, Ethical Culturists, and many members of Unitarian and liberal churches) and secular humanists. Historically, religious and secular humanism share a number of common features, among them distrust of divine revelation, a concern for critical thinking, and a conviction that morality is best understood as a human need that does not require the apparatus of divine blessing or unchanging moral codes. The differences, however, are significant, and while I believe they should not prevent cooperation between humanists on matters of common interest, they should not be brushed under the table either in a search for a dubious show of unity.

What I would like to suggest is that the differences between religious and secular humanism are best understood as reflections of differing cultural and individual temperaments. Culturally and historically, religious humanists operate and have their origins in institutions which are basically "churchly." Institutions like Ethical Culture and the Unitarian churches follow closely the models of liberal Protestant churches: regular services (usually on Sunday), quasi-liturgical trappings (hymnody, vestments, candles), an "ordained" ministry, and built-in provision for ceremonies like weddings and funerals. While many leaders of secular humanism came from or spent time in such institutions, many others found and continue to find the culture of religious humanism vibrant and satisfying. For such persons, "religious" and even "spiritual" are positive words that humanists should not hesitate to claim as their own. The heritage of this culture is with such figures as Kant (who wanted philosophy to make room for religion), early Unitarians like Channing, and the New England Transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker).

The culture of secular humanists has in many ways a different origin. While religious humanists sought to save religion from the onslaught of scientific ways of understanding the world (a process that began with the Deists in the seventeenth century), their secular counterparts abandoned the whole project and opted instead for varieties of atheism, agnosticism, and what came to be called "free thinking." The heroes of this culture include the French philosophes (with Voltaire as chief), Thomas Paine (a Deist remembered far more for his attacks on religion than for his failed attempts to rationalize it), Robert Ingersoll, Nietzsche, and Mark Twain.

In some ways, the temperamental differences between religious and secular humanists resemble those between Catholics and Protestants. The "Catholic" (religious) humanists appeal to an ancient tradition that stresses the cultivation of social consciousness and emphasis on improving the human community by "selfless" service to others and to lofty moral ideals. The "Protestant" (secular) humanists focus instead on science, a rugged individualism, and a commitment to admit in their belief systems only those views that pass the iron tests of reason and evidence. Of course, one should not make too much of these differences, but I do believe they reflect a very fundamental difference in the way individuals understand humanism.

Ultimately, temperamental differences are individual. William James spoke of two kinds of philosophical temperaments: the tender-minded and the tough-minded. The tender-minded are those of an idealistic, optimistic, and religious bent who try to understand the world through a set of grand principles, always on the lookout for "deeper" meanings, however vaguely understood. The tough-minded are the skeptics by nature, congenital doubting Thomas's, comfortable with disorder and plurality, delighting in irreverence and individuality. My suspicion is that most of us have our feet planted firmly in one of these camps or the other by the time we reach early adulthood, and that we are not likely to change, although we can go a long way towards understanding each other and towards cooperation and mutual goals.

The fundamental cultural and temperamental differences between religious and secular humanism convince me that the two wil1 never be fully reconciled, nor should they be. I believe the tent of humanism should include room for both cultures. While my own temperament is firmly in the secular camp and I cringe at the religious language of "salvation" which, as the fundamentalist critic David Noebel aptly observed in his Free Inquiry article, still crops up from time to time in allegedly secular pronouncements, I do not see secularism as a kind of crusade against softer headed ways of thinking. Our best hope for maintaining a viable humanism is to keep the dialog open between both parties, each neither afraid to criticize nor reluctant to identify common ground. An understanding of the two cultures of humanism is at any rate a prerequisite for dealing with the issues of defining humanism in a way that goes beyond the tired rehearsal of doctrine from either camp.

--Don Evans
WASHline, December 1996
Newsletter of the Washington Area Secular Humanists