Discussion Group Report

"Humanistic scholarship has been of decisive importance in the history of Western culture," says the Encyclopedia Britannica. "It inspires a mental and moral attitude...that makes human consciousness the alpha and omega of all thinking." "Man is the measure of all things," said Protagoras in the fifth century BCE; the individual is the center of all values.

Humanism has undergone several declines and rebirths since the time of the poet Homer. The latest rebirth began in the 1890's, as recounted by Edwin H. Wilson, who had been a founder of the American Humanist Association, editor of The Humanist, and a minister of the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, in an article in the January-February, 1991, issue of The Humanist.

The modern humanist movement emerged from liberal religious change. The influence of the enlightenment, Darwin and biblical criticism encouraged liberal trends in Unitarianism, Universalism, the Ethical Societies, and Reformed Judaism. A growing literature reflected the influence of evolutionary thought, especially in the rejection of the Bible as the source of revealed truth. Religious radicals and independents gravitated to an organization known as the Free Religious Association, with Ralph Waldo Emerson as its first president, and Felix Adler, founder of the American Ethical Societies, and others as members. The forerunners of our evolutionary, naturalistic humanism, they were humanistic theists. Keeping theistic terms, they redefined them. A controversy broke out between east and west, between those who wanted to pin down Unitarianism to its Christian antecedents and those who wanted a free association with no dogma or creed. It culminated in the establishment of the right of the lay doubter to membership in Unitarian churches, and the principal issue became the right of ministers who no longer believed in a supernatural god or immortality to fill Unitarian pulpits.

Born in 1898, Wilson, as a young man, observed the passing on of ignorance and superstition from generation to generation in Catholic and fundamentalist churches. He began to think of the liberal church as an educational instrument for change. He heard U.S. Prison commissioner Sanford Bates state, "There is not one belief that I hold that I would not change on five-minutes notice if I ran into a new fact."

The strategy of the liberal religious traditionalists in dealing with change was to ignore it. Humanism was a forbidden word in establishment talk. In his article, Wilson opined, "How a religious organization deals with change is one test of its ultimate integrity and its adaptation to changing needs in a changing world. Unitarians have done well with change. Tolerance and pluralism are built into its creedlessness." While studying in the Unitarian Theological School in Meadville Pennsylvania, Wilson spent his spare time avidly reading everything about humanism he could lay his hands on. He concluded, "That is it! Humanism has time, science, and human need on its side. I'll stick with it!"

Later, while at the University of Chicago, he was turned off by behaviorists who disclaimed any compassionate interest in how their research was used and by graduate students planning to go into private industries as advisors to profit-makers. Curtis W. Reese helped him reach the conclusion that he could best serve his goals in the liberal ministry. At this moment the beginning of an organized humanist movement occurred.

Following Reese's publication of a series of books including Humanist Sermons, Humanist Religion, and The Meaning of Humanism, a deluge of humanist scholarship occurred. Important books published were John Dewey's A Common Faith, Julian Huxley's Religion without Revelation, Roy Wood Sellars' Evolutionary Naturalism and The Next Step in Religion, A. E. Haydon's The Quest of the Ages and Corliss Lamont's The Illusion of Immortality and Humanism as Religion. An annual bound series of selected sermons called Humanist Pulpit was published by John Dietrich and received commendations from Albert Einstein and Charles Francis Potter. From 1927 to 1938 the Meadville students put out a mimeographed publication called The New Humanist with a regular column by Wilson. This column evolved to show how humanist ideas were expressed in society at large in many ways. Harold Buschman was the editor and Wilson the managing editor. This magazine was the true forerunner of The Humanist.

Under the inspiration of Professor Haydon, a Humanist Fellowship was organized with members from the University of Chicago, Meadville, and other adjacent schools; but with graduation and campus transience, it later disappeared. The New Humanist published "A Humanist Manifesto." Raymond Bragg, Reese, Haydon, and Wilson circulated a revised first draft written by Sellars and incorporated many invited comments. It became a consensus document and was then published separately as Humanist Manifesto I. They looked for new and promising young writers to supplement the publication's academic content, avoid a narrow dogmatism, keep abreast of the literature, and involve important writers in the movement. Now more than just a publishing organization, they were a fellowship of like-minded supporters of a cause generating commitment. The name of the sponsor of the magazine was changed to the American Humanist Association, and the word New was omitted from the publication's name. The signers of the Manifesto were all secularists. They had washed their hands of the supernatural, saying, "The time has passed for theism."

"However," says Wilson, "secular versus religious is a false issue. By doing some homework-specifically, by reading Julian Huxley's Religion without Revelation or John Dewey's A Common Faith, we could do much to dissolve this divisive issue among humanists. The dictum of Terrence-'I am a man; nothing that relates to man do I deem alien to me'-suggests a resolution within a pluralistic humanism. The North American Committee for Humanism, through its Humanist Institute and Humanist Weekends is promoting much-needed unity and cooperation among humanists. As a movement...from many backgrounds...gradually finding itself, we are now coming together for the good of all."