The Secular Humanism Narrative
by Robert J. Nash
(Excerpted from R. J. Nash, Religious Pluralism in the Academy: Opening the Dialogue. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.)

I am able to find the meaning and the morality I seek in the work that I do, the people I love, the simple pleasures that life gives as a gift to me, and in the opportunity to learn from, and to help, others. Why is it, then, that I still think I need something more than this?

I am a restless humanist. At one time in my life, I was in search of a meaning beyond meaning. Gregory of Nyssa, the 4th century theologian, used a perfect word to express what I was looking for—epektasis. This is a “straining forward” toward mystery, toward a “luminous darkness,” toward an “unsatiated desire” to find the elusive biblical peace that “surpasses worldly understanding.” I wanted to discover the stillness in the center of it all that is Taoistic. I wanted the compassion and the quieting of my voracious worldly cravings that are Buddhist. I never found any of this, and I do not know if I ever will.

I have always been profoundly troubled by the presence of evil in the world. I am, for example, unable to explain the darkness that has enveloped the twentieth century —arguably the most bloody of a long line of very bloody centuries. This is a century that has produced 100 million casualites throughout the world as a result of wars alone. I want to make sense of war, cruelty, natural disasters, injustice, grinding poverty, slavery, suffering, and the very real personal death—most likely the extinction—that awaits me and all those I love. I want to unravel the impossible dilemma of why upwards of 80 billion people have been born, lived, and died since the beginning of human life on earth. I wonder: to what end? At whose pleasure or will? Or is it all a matter of blind, evolutionary chance, a cosmic roll of the dice, a monumental coincidence?

At an early point in my life, I was a totally conventional, churchgoing, Christian believer. Later, during my college years, I became an unconventional, church disparaging, disbeliever. Throughout most of my professorial career, I have retained a studied, intellectual skepticism toward the things I can not see, touch, taste, or submit to the test of reason. Today, I am relatively comfortable in what or me is an honest and respectful religious doubt—a kind of existential agnosticism. My “faith,” if this is what I can call it, is in line with Niels Bohr’s who once said about science and theology: “Every sentence I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question.”

I find much to admire in the humanistic faith of ethics scholar and theologian, Sharon Welch. For Welch, religious faith is less about God and more about intellectual curiosity, teaching, writing, service, political activism in behalf of social justice, and “meditative awareness.” Her test of her own faith is always to ask how, and in what tangible ways, it continues to transform her life, how it functions to make her a better human being, willing to act courageously on her highest ethical ideals. In fact, at one point, Welch, the Harvard-trained theologian and religious studies scholar, says that she can serve God without believing in God.

I can honestly say that I too, at this stage of my life, “know of no concepts, symbols, or images of God, Goddesses, gods, or divinity that I find intellectually credible, emotionally satisfying, or ethically challenging in the face of evil and the complexity of life.” I do know, however, that, for now, I am able to find the meaning and the morality I seek in the work that I do, in the opportunity to learn from, and to help, others, in the people that I meet and in those I love, and in the pleasures that the simple things I take for granted provide me. I am willing to admit that, in many ways, I am a thorough-going, here-and-now, postmodern secularist, but one also with an indefatigable curiosity about the possibility of something else, something post-postmodern and post-secular. Why is it that I think I need something more than what I've already got?

These are my words. I choose, somewhat self-indulgently, I admit, to tell a bit of my own story here, because I think it captures important pieces of the narrative that I am calling secular humanism. I can be reasonably certain that in every course and workshop that I offer on any philosophical or religio-spiritual topic, there will always be secular humanists of varying ages and stages present. I am obviously partial to the secular humanist narrative because it is my own, but I can also be critical of it when I need to be.

At this late stage in my career, I think I know where the narrative is appealing and where it is disappointing. I can see only too clearly its strengths and weaknesses in myself, and, as well, in all those humanists who find their way to my groups.

Most humanists in my seminars are asking my questions, making my assumptions, and are plagued, in their own ways, by my doubts about secular humanism, although many are reluctant to admit it. I actually relish this unwitting affirmation and refutation of the things I believe, whenever secular humanists in my dialogue groups talk about their convictions. This is one of the reasons I teach, I suppose—to hear in others’ constructions the sense and the nonsense in what I hold to be true and good.

For example, I admire secular humanists’ passion in affirming the value of life in the here-and-now, and in exhorting the rest of us to accept the reality that we are masters of our own destiny, left alone in the universe to decide our fates together. However, I also wince at their passion in refuting as ignorant superstition all supernatural forms of religion and spirituality. I think this attitude is too facile, even anti-intellectual, in that it discards in a flash 3,000 years of collective religious wisdom and resourceful narrative-making. When I use the term secular humanism in this section, I am not referring to Greek, Christian, Renaissance, academic, or therapeutic forms of humanism. While I value the utility and the legacies of all these expressions, I am using the term here mainly to represent a more general and cumulative worldview, a this-worldly (secular) approach to telling a particular story about reality. It is an approach based on the scientific worldview and on the efficacy of reason, and it tends to be highly suspicious of organized religion. It is also politically progressive. I prefer Corliss Lamont’s (1965) definition of humanism in general for my purposes here:

Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world, advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy. . . . Humanism is the viewpoint that men [sic] have but one life to lead and should make the most of it in terms of creative work and happiness; that human happiness is its own justification and requires no sanction or support from supernatural sources; that in any case the supernatural, usually conceived of in the form of heavenly gods or immortal heavens, does not exist; and that human beings, using their own intelligence and cooperating liberally with one another, can build an enduring citadel of peace and beauty upon this earth. (pp. 12, 14)

These points can be found in the various editions of “A Humanist Manifesto,” a statement of 15 principles, first published in 1933 (reproduced in Lamont, 1965), and signed by such intellectual luminaries as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Edwin H. Wilson, and many others.

It is striking how many of the principles stated in the 1933 “Manifesto” hold up even today, when viewed from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Although I have never met a single secular humanist student, administrator, or faculty member who has ever read the 1933 “Manifesto,” I am confident that each would enthusiastically support the central theme in the secular humanist narrative: “This life is all and enough” (Lamont, 1965, p. 81). They would also endorse the Manifesto’s persistent, this-worldly penchant. In addition, they would second the Manifesto’s ultimate faith in the power of human beings to solve their own problems by using their reason and science, along with their courage and vision.

It is important to understand that, since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, secular humanism has come to represent an atheistic or agnostic viewpoint. Ironically, these historical movements forced the Catholic and Protestant churches to put less emphasis on sin, redemption, and the afterlife and more on the intrinsic value, dignity, and intelligence of human beings (Rohmann, 1999). This loosening of traditional theology inadvertently set the stage for later, nonbelieving thinkers such as Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), who found the source of religion to be a group neurosis and the idea of God to be a father projection; and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who located the origin of human beings in natural selection, rather than divine genesis.

Despite secular humanism’s unrelenting critique of organized religion throughout history, however, it is intriguing to note that the signers of the 1933 “Manifesto” refused to expunge the word religion from their secular vocabulary. In fact they referred to their worldview as “religious humanism,” in order to connote what they thought was a natural progression from a God-centered universe to a human-centered one. They simply redefined religion to mean a “quest for abiding values, an inseparable feature of human life” (cited in Lamont, 1965, p. 286). Thus, they succeeded in de-divinizing religion, and, in the process, according to some critics (e.g., Connolly, 1999), inadvertently elevated science, technology, reason, nature, culture, politics, and democracy to near-God-like status throughout the modern world.

The 1973 “Manifesto,” and the 1981 “Secular Humanist Declaration,” no longer referred to Humanism as a religion, however. In fact, the 1981 “Declaration” upped the ante, making religious skepticism a major tenet of secular humanism (both documents cited in Nord, 1995). The latest “Manifesto 2000” advocates a “planetary humanism” as the wave of the future. This manifesto is particularly critical of postmodernism in universities, which, according to manifesto writer, Paul Kurtz, undermines the “basic premises of modernity and humanism, attacking science and technology, and questioning humanist ideas and values” (quoted in Cimino, 1999, p. 3).

Finally, I am sure that secular humanists on the nation’s campuses would celebrate the 1933 Manifesto’s ultimate moral and political objective: the achievement of economic, cultural, and ethical happiness for all humankind—irrespective of nation, race, politics, or religion. Friedrich Dürrenmatt (quoted in Rohmann, 1999) captures the Manifesto’s secular intent in concise language: “What the world needs is not redemption from sin but redemption from hunger and oppression; it has no need to pin its hopes upon Heaven, it has everything to hope for from this earth” (p. 185).

There is increasing evidence that, at the present time, a cadre of young secular humanists is beginning to organize on campuses throughout the country. While the overall number is comparatively tiny—consisting of no more than a few thousand members—it is growing. A national group called the Council for Secular Humanism, based in Amherst, New York, under the aegis of its founder, the aforementioned philosopher Paul Kurtz, has been active on more than 70 campuses in supporting a sense of community, identity, and security for student atheists and agnostics. The college chapters at these institutions are known as the Campus Freethought Alliance. Although, at this time, the chapters have little influence on other students, and attrition through graduation and dropouts is predictable, student interest continues to intensify at such places as Marshall, Harvard, SUNY at Buffalo, Maryland, and Webster. These chapters offer such bonding activities as Superstition Bash Day, Darwin Day, Banned Book Week, and Freethought Day (see Cimino, 1999).

Derek Araujo, president of the Freethought Alliance at Harvard, typifies the kind of secular humanist who would join such a group (Reisberg, 1998). He says: “Religious extremists have demonized atheism to the point where declaring one’s non-belief is like admitting to eating babies. Christians feel free to display their faith by wearing crosses, but even I would not feel comfortable walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘Atheist’” (p. A44).

Typical too is Gabriel Carlson, a once-devout Italian Catholic, and current political liberal, who supports racial equality, women’s rights, gay and lesbian liberation, sexual freedom, environmentalist causes, and the separation of church and state. He declares:

I really tried to convince myself that there is an afterlife. My dad was a psychologist, so I used a writing assignment as a pretext to ask if, under hypnosis, people could be convinced to believe in the afterlife. I tell that to Christians a lot: If I could believe and have any intellectual integrity, I’d do it. Human mortality is a very positive thing, actually, since it really forces me to seize every day. (quoted in Nussbaum, 1999, p. 35)

And listen to D. J. Grothe, who came out as both a homosexual and an atheist at Ambassador University, an evangelical Christian college in Texas. After clandestinely reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (1993) in his dormitory room late at night, and realizing that God appears to be nothing but a human construct, differing from culture to culture and time to time, he began to seriously question his Christian faith. He says:

I found Nietzsche. When you begin having a dialogue with yourself, the whole thing crumbles. If God exists, you ain’t gonna prove it on paper. You need personal experience. And I never had it. God never spoke to me. When I came out as an atheist [which he reports caused more turbulence at his college than coming out as a gay man], I wasn't exactly shunned, but it was a shock, and it sent ripples. I got e-mails saying “you of all people; this is a test of your faith; you'll be a minister, just wait and see.” (quoted in Nussbaum, 1999, pp. 35-36)

D. J. Grothe is now a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, and a proud member of the Washington University League of Freethinkers. At Washington University, his organization and the local Campus Crusade for Christ often cosponsor friendly debates with each other, demonstrating, at least on this campus, that genuine religious pluralism is possible and that it need not necessarily result in Christian or atheist bashing.

In October 1999, the highly respected journal of academic life, Lingua Franca, ran a cover story on what it called “the campus crusade for secular humanism” (Nussbaum, 1999). The article tells the story of how many agnostic and atheistic students on college campuses throughout the United States are feeling great pressure to be “spiritual,” as the more conservative religious revivals on college campuses begin to take on a huge momentum of their own. Campus Crusade for Christ, for example, numbering about 25,000 students nationally, has been known to villainize atheists, depicting them as immoral and anarchistic. Other evangelical campus ministries are also ratcheting up their efforts to proselytize and convert students, increasingly spreading the message that secularism, atheism, and agnosticism are the true enemies of a Christian way of life (Nussbaum, 1999; Reisberg, 1998).

In the face of what they perceive to be mostly subtle, but nevertheless insidious, pressure to become theists, many secular humanist students I know propose a counternarrative they would like to enact in the academy. Like Derek Araujo, Gabriel Carlson, and D. J. Grothe, whom I quote above, they want it known that students ought to place their faith, not in revealed gospel truths or church dogmas, but in the awareness that they alone—not popes, prophets, or messiahs—are the social constructors of their religions and spiritual realities. What matters, therefore, is what works best for individuals and groups, not what is given by some transcendent force or ecclesiastical superauthority.

For these students, grand, all-enveloping religious and spiritual narratives are not only out of fashion; they can be dangerous. They too often weaken students’ resolve to stand on their own two feet. They offer false hopes of an afterlife, thereby distracting students from the hard work they need to do to make this world a safer and fairer place. They provide a bogus sense of consolation at a time when young people need to face their problems head-on, if they are ever to solve them. Worst of all, though, they too often become aggressive in trying to make converts, and in the process, they risk turning universities into warring religious enclaves.

Some secular humanists in my courses and workshops have a tendency to be obstreperous in their disdain for all absolutisms, especially the religious kind. They relish going on the attack. They often remind me of Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-1995), at one time the most famous atheist in America, who never overcame the stereotype of antireligious rabble-rouser in the public’s eye. I think it is safe to say that O’Hair (1970), for all the good that she did, probably set back the cause of secular humanists in this country several decades because of her unrelenting and obsessive denigration of religion. She always seemed clearer about what she hated in organized religion (e.g., school prayer, tax-exempt churches) than what she stood for. Her invectives drowned out her convictions, and these were increasingly expressed in a number of court cases she initiated against local school districts, the Internal Revenue Service, the media, and the United States Government.

During her lifetime, O’Hair was an unrelenting and notoriously uncivil propagandist for atheism and separation of church and state. I think of self-righteous secular humanists like her, with vindictive scores to settle and ideological battles to wage, as atheistic militants, the orthodox believers of disbelief. Although I may agree with many planks in their platforms, I for one do not appreciate it when they cross over the line that separates civility from outright hostility.

More attractive to someone of my temperament and philosophy, and also to those who join them in classes or in workshops, are the secular humanists who have no need to scream their truths at others. Let me call them the existential humanists with an ironic postmodern flair. Confident, but not smug, about their narrative, and genuinely open to dialogue with the opposition—like D. J. Grothe at Washington University—they go about their lives with a quiet assurance that they have discovered an important truth: What makes life truly worth living, both privately and publicly, is that it is full of contingency, irony, and doubt. Because God has long since disappeared from the scene, no truth or revelation can ever be divine or final. However, this is no reason to despair, because now life can be full of incredible possibility, surprise, opportunity, and hope.

Existential humanists appreciate the autonomy they have to doubt, to question, and to suspend judgment in the face of all religious, political, and scientific claims to absolute truth. This, they believe, is a radical, individual freedom that empowers them and others to construct their own lives, according to their own best judgments. I find something resonant and touching in this humanist affinity for existential ideas, even though few young people I know today bother reading such classical existential thinkers as Kierkegaard, Sartre, or Camus in the original texts. I once asked a dialogue group of students, staff, and faculty to answer the following question in ten different ways: Even if you are postmodernists, what do you think are the “givens” in life that are inescapable for all of us, regardless of our unique interpretive frames, genetics, backgrounds, present situations in life, and future possibilities? Only the secular humanists consistently mentioned those perennial existential themes related to human finitude (see Yalom, 1989, for a similar take on existentialism):

•the inevitability and finality of death awaiting all of us someday and how to cope with, and overcome, the anxiety usually associated with this reality;

•the dilemma of how best to use our hard-won freedom from the older, dominating myths in order to create ourselves and our world in the absence of gods and authority figures—to whom we have looked for answers in the past;

•the isolation and solitude that are the inescapable destiny of each and every human being, and the challenge to reach out to others in order to form relationships and community, in spite of this isolation and solitude;

•and the double paradox of needing to find a meaning in a life that has no intrinsic meaning and to realize that meaning-making is largely a by-product of living a life of activity and purpose rather than something consciously sought.

I am never exactly sure how to respond to the overtures of those secular humanists who will sometimes ask me to become more actively involved with them as a group outside of classes and workshops. Knowing that I lean philosophically in their direction, some of them sense a kindred spirit in their midst. A group of undergraduate and graduate students once sounded me out on the possibility of my being an unofficial adviser for a chapter of the Campus Freethought Alliance in the event that they were able to start one on my campus. I thought a long time about their offer, but eventually I turned them down. Admittedly, I was concerned about publicly affiliatiating with any religiospiritual group because I did not want to be seen by other students as taking sides. I was also fearful of losing whatever pedagogical neutrality toward religion and spirituality I might be able to muster in the classroom and in my consultancies. For a very long time after I said no, however, I honestly did not know whether I had made the right decision.

Then one day, I happened to read the following poetic lines from Sara Maitland’s book A Big-Enough God: A Feminist’s Search for a Joyful Theology (1995): What I am suggesting here is that an honest, open-minded inspection of the creation, intimately including our own selves—with blood on its paws and death in the pot for the living’s food—will not reveal directly the sort of God that we might like. For every pretty rainbow and golden sunset there is a child-abuser, a parasitic worm, a senseless randomness, or a lethal power. There is also, more confusingly, a terrible tenderness. It is as much our love as our malice and thoughtlessness that intrude into nature’s careless but passionate commitment to change and growth, to evolution. We spare the mutants, treat the infertile, heal the sick, feed the hungry, breed pet dogs, cherish our teddy bears, stalwartly refuse to expose brain-damaged babies on mountain sides. Where does it come from, this dangerous compassion, for we did not learn it from nature, nor from the voracious black holes that spin and suck out there. (p. 37) (italics added)

I have no idea where “this dangerous compassion,” “this terrible tenderness,” come from, but I cannot stop thinking about Maitland’s question. I also want to understand how it is that each of us can still commit to live a life of integrity, decency, and joy, knowing that, in the end, there are no definitive answers to the existential givens I mentioned above. Perhaps my need to understand these dilemmas is a residual narrative theme left over from my abandoned Catholicism. Perhaps not. I do know, however, that, amidst my own personal dither about the unanswerable questions of theodicy, I am still not ready to give up on the unlikely possibility of catching fleeting glimpses of transcendence in the universe.

To be sure, I am an existential humanist, secular to the core, with a postmodern flair, but I am also a closet explorer, always looking, forever on the prowl for something more. Pulitzer-Prize winning Annie Dillard (1999) once said that, despite writing all her best-selling books about spirituality and nature, she still “didn’t know beans about God” (p. 169). In my opinion, the most eloquent and honest answer that anyone can give to the problem of evil, to the countless incidences of human woundedness that appear preventable but are not, to the nadir of the mystery of a God who drops out of sight when Her creatures are most in need of Her loving presence, is Dillard’s. “I don’t know beans about God.” Her wonderful book, For the Time Being (1999), ought to be compulsory reading for adherents of each of the narratives I recount in these last two chapters, because Dillard is an important reality check on all our narrative excesses.

Further, I would say, no one else knows beans about God either—not the orthodox believers or the activists, and not the mainliners or the humanists. Every narrative, in its own way, is full of beans. This is what makes so many of them appealing and alienating at the same time. They are the best we can do, and so we need to be wary and humble, skeptical and grateful, whenever we are tempted to herald their virtues.

Frankly, I do not meet many secular humanists who give one whit about Maitland’s “dangerous compassion,” or signals of transcendence. However, I give more than a whit, and I always will, even though I continue to be the first one to challenge all the too-easy religio-spiritual answers to the truly complex questions that my students ask about meaning. This is why, after much soul-searching and many second doubts, I think I did the right thing in turning down those secular humanists who wanted me to be their adviser.

Here are the types of questions that secular humanists often hear from others in my classes and workshops:

•If it is true that theists have demonized secular humanists, how can secular humanists avoid demonizing theists? Put another way, is the secular humanist narrative capacious enough to embrace the theist narrative, or is it more likely to be the other way around? Or are both narratives forever destined to be at war with one another, because of the radical incompatibility of their basic beliefs?

•How can secular humanism avoid the temptation to become simply another religion, with its own “sacred scriptures,” “chapels,” rituals, conversion tactics, cliquishness, and money-raising? Or is this creep toward institutionalization on campuses an inevitable byproduct of trying to establish a corporate identity?

•Is the secular humanist narrative mainly reactive rather than proactive? At what point should it emphasize the values it stands for rather than the ideas it repudiates? Is the narrative likely to draw the support it needs on campuses in order to stay alive, if it is seen only as a critique of Christianity or other theistic religions? Or are critique and confrontation what make the secular humanist narrative genuinely unique and attractive, given the hegemony of Western religions on most college campuses?

•If some secular humanists feel threatened by the hegemony of theistic religions on their campuses, is it possible that some theists feel threatened by the habitual naysaying of the more militant, atheistic humanists? In some ways, do theists and atheists mirror each other’s weaknesses and strengths? Do they fear the same things about each other?

•Are atheist fellowships, freethought alliances, and freethinker associations simply euphemisms for churches for the unchurched? Or is the need for community and affiliation so basic to human beings that both disbelievers and believers would be missing something vital without it?

•How can a secular humanist be moral without a belief in God or without belonging to any organized religion? If there is no Divine reward or punishment for behavior, why be good at all? Are all secular humanists moral relativists, who choose an ethic depending on whether it makes them feel good? Or does the secular humanist narrative actually tell the best story of ultimate personal responsibility, because, absent a Deity, individuals alone must be held accountable for their own behavior?

•Is secular humanism just an excuse to deify human beings? Is this naive, given the propensity of human beings to commit the most atrocious acts against one another? Or is there something truly God-like in all human beings, thereby rendering invalid the need to look to the heavens for a God?

•How is the secular humanist explanation for the presence of evil in the world an improvement over the explanations offered by all the world’s religions? In the end, isn’t the test of which narrative is best how comforting it might be to those who suffer? Or is the secular humanist explanation the most consoling of all because it says that some evil is simply a product of blind chance (a design flaw in natural selection) and, therefore, uneliminable, while some is correctible, given the will and the resources? Therefore, it is up to us to know the difference.

Before I close this chapter, I want to mention some assumptions I automatically make about religio-spiritual narratives and the people who tell them, whenever I teach a course, design a workshop, lead an all-campus dialogue group, or give an interactive lecture. I find that once I get clear about my own assumptions, then the subsequent teaching process seems to go a little more smoothly:

•People have religious stories they want to tell me (Bruner’s “itch” to share construals of meaning), particularly if I can create a safe and mutually respectful space for this to happen.

•To this end, I must always ask these questions of each and every person: What do you believe? Why does this belief have such strong appeal to you? Where, in your opinion, is your belief strongest and weakest in its storytelling appeal? Where, in your opinion, is my belief strongest and weakest in its storytelling appeal? What, in your narrative, do you think might, and might not, work for me, and vice versa?

•What is more, people want their religious stories to be heard, understood, and appreciated —before they are evaluated—by me. •What is more still, it is possible that in the mutually empathic exchange of religious stories my own religious story might be deepened and enlarged, maybe even challenged, better, maybe even lived more genuinely.

•And if it is, wonderful; and if it is not, what have I truly lost? What am I afraid of? What have I got to prove? Why?

•After all, the religious story I hear from any storyteller is the story that makes sense to that storyteller. Thus, the most honest and respectful question I can ask of the storyteller is why? The most honest and self-respecting question I can ask of myself is why not?

However, the two questions I must always remember to ask of both the storyteller and myself are these:

• Why does any story have to be the only true story?
• What does your particular need to have others adopt your religious story tell you about yourself (and the rest of us)?

Copyright 2001 Peter Lang Publishers