Discussion Group Report

"In 1933 The humanists who joined in Manifesto I set out to reconstruct faith in the modern world," says Howard Radest in a chapter with the same title as this article in The Devil and Secular Humanism. "Without apology they described their enterprise as 'religious humanism.'"

In 1980 some humanists led by Paul Kurtz issued A Secular Humanist Declaration, which explicitly rejected the idea of a "religious humanism." They accused those who retained the adjective of intellectual confusion, sentimentality and even opportunism. The Declaration identified religion with: "The reappearance of dogmatic authoritarian religions; fundamentalist, literalist, and doctrinaire Christianity; a rapidly growing and uncompromising Moslem clericalism in the Middle East in Asia; the re-assertion of orthodox authority by the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy; nationalistic, religious Judaism; and the reversion to obscurantist religions in Asia."

"Religion was the enemy and humanist flirtation with it ensured confusion at best and surrender at worst," laments Radest. "Clearly the climate of the humanist neighborhood had changed...The polemic and the anger...were addressed to the enemy within. Humanism seemed intent on destroying itself."

He says that the 1980s found humanists as antagonistic toward their fellow humanists as to Fundamentalists and right-wing Christians. Since then another manifestation of fragmentation in the humanist movement has been the attempts by other groups to distinguish themselves from the American Humanist Association. These have included Ethical Culture, the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, and the Committee for Democratic and Secular Humanism (organized by Kurtz). Rationalism, free thought, and atheism went their separate ways. Countervailing attempts to bring humanists together were the Conference on Science and Democracy and the North American Committee for Humanism, which had only minor success. Manifesto II, published in 1973, Radest argues, was a long and puzzling essay, lacking the clarity, directness, and assurance of the 1933 document and was symptomatic of the unresolved issues.

Meanwhile America was pushing toward secularization. Religion on the left had developed a moralistic tone and center. The pulpit addressed itself to social criticism as much as it did to salvation. Its efforts were often in the secular world and its energies devoted to social reform. Biblical scholarship, the "higher criticism" and archaeology revealed the worldly sources of cult and text; and science held sway in the academy and the marketplace. There was a widely felt need to bring religion into the modern world.

This cultural pattern was an appropriate home for the appearance of humanism. Edwin Wilson, an important leader in organizing the humanist movement, recalled that it first came to self-awareness as a movement among Unitarians. In a meeting of the Western Unitarian Conference in Des Moines in 1917, The Reverends John Dietrich and Curtis W. Reese found that they both had been presenting " a revolution from theocracy to humanism, from autocracy to democracy." "The humanist movement was born at that moment," said Wilson.

Radest opines that the reason humanists are polarized is that "we avoid working on the question, 'What is humanism up to,' and instead play a game of 'either/or...our thinking is distorted by the fact that we like to choose sides. Humanists, more than most, are given to an argumentative game by temperament and by history...we lose ourselves in the joys of argument and forget that it is only argument. In the heat of argument it is easy to turn 'faith' into a caricature of itself and then identify all faith with superstition. When such a mood seizes us, we embrace its complement, a simple-minded secularism that denies any value to a move beyond the immediate...it is all too human to invest ourselves in our arguments and then to be unable to retreat. Losing the argument comes to feel like a loss of self...we are given to the game of 'either-or' precisely because the ambiguities of experience have become nearly intolerable. The authors of Manifesto I could speak with confidence about the world to come. They had not yet seen science perverted into holocaust and nuclear destruction. They had not yet seen democracy turned into populist conformism...In the midst of chaos, it is much more satisfying to separate into sheep and goat, saved and damned."

Like everyone else, humanists, he continues, tend to revert to a mythic past where matters were simpler, clearer, and more assured. So it is that when humanism meets Fundamentalism, it responds in Fundamentalist style with a "raucous humanism." The angers of Fundamentalism and the confusion of sects confess to a widely shared anxiety of spirit...both Fundamentalism and raucous humanism are only symptomatic, and the game of either-or attends only to the symptoms. When we are lost...we seek out a villain...within the debates is hidden the question: How shall human life be purposeful and joyful in a universe where human life seems only a chemical and biological incident? Humanism is not yet. This arises from the fact that the game of either-or and not the accidents of history blocks the reconstruction the signers of Manifesto I proposed.

Radist suggests that, although humanism is worldly and secular, the qualities of experience to which humanism must address itself are those that have legitimately been called religious. He says humanism is "where the action is, all of the action, including that which has historically been religious action." For the humanist the "sacred," the name given to that which is untouchably precious, departs from its separate universe to inform this one, the only one we have. Thus both sacred and secular are transformed under the aegis of a humanist naturalism.

Whether the reader agrees with Radist's analysis or not, he broaches an important question for humanism.