talk.philosophy.humanism

Long-form reference · 8,784 words · about a 38-minute read

Where the name sits in talk.*

The master newsgroups file that the Internet Systems Consortium distributes to news administrators — the file from which a newsreader takes the one-line description beside each group name — carries thirty-one talk.* names. Two of them are philosophy. One of those two is this group, and its line reads, tab and full stop included:

talk.philosophy.humanism Humanism in the modern world.

Five words, and the same five that the 1994 call for votes told administrators to paste into their files. Beside them, in the companion active file, sits the flag y: postings accepted, no moderator between a poster and the network. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one talk.* names carry that flag; the two exceptions are talk.answers and talk.origins, where an article is not posted directly but mailed to a moderator who either releases it with an Approved header or declines it. Why this branch of the hierarchy so consistently declined moderation is a question for the parent page, which takes it up at length; the fact recorded here is simply that the group was created unmoderated and has never been anything else.

The address is the first piece of evidence about the subject, because somebody chose it. A group about humanism might plausibly have been filed with the community groups in soc.*, or as an academic subject in sci.*. It was filed instead in talk.*, the quarter that the Great Renaming of 1987 set aside for the contentious, high-volume subjects — religion prominent among them — that not every network wished to pay to carry. The design of that quarantine, and the accounting behind it, belong to the talk hierarchy page. What matters here is that the placement told a reader arriving from the newsgroup list what to expect: not a society, not a syllabus, but a standing argument.

The neighbours confirm the reading. Of the thirty-one names, nine concern religion or its denial: talk.atheism, talk.origins, six talk.religion.* groups — bahai, buddhism, course-miracle, misc, newage and pantheism — and this one. It is the only name in the hierarchy given to a self-consciously non-religious life stance, and one of the few whose subject is an organised movement that has issued dated, numbered statements about itself. That last fact is what makes this page possible: much of what the movement claims about itself it has published under a date, with signatures attached.

The group's own paperwork

The news.announce.newgroups archive holds one file under this name, about thirty kilobytes, ending with the result of 8 November 1994. It contains five documents: a request for discussion posted on 1 September 1994; a second, superseding request on 14 September; a call for votes on 14 October; a second call, superseding the first, on 24 October; and the result on 8 November. That is the whole formal existence of the group on paper.

The first request was not for this name. It asked for talk.religion.humanism, summarised as “Discussion of secular morality in the modern world”, with a charter of three paragraphs that said what the group was for, what it was not for, and how its participants were expected to behave. A fortnight later the proposal moved from the religion branch to the philosophy branch and the charter was cut to a single sentence. The parent page walks that manoeuvre through in full, and quotes the charter that was discarded; it is not retold here. The second request gives the reason for the change in its own words: the disagreement about the nature of humanism, it says, would jeopardise the creation of the proposed newsgroup, and the more neutral name would stand a better chance of general approval. The reason offered to the electorate for wanting the group at all appears a month later, in the call for votes, under the heading RATIONALE:

Humanism has been ineffective in our society because humanists have been unable to agree on the identity of humanism. This newsgroup would be an ideal opportunity for humanists to search for this identity and should be welcome by all who are eager to promote a greater humanist presence in our society.

A newsgroup proposal is not usually a diagnosis of its own subject. This one is. Before the group existed it was being advertised to voters as a room in which a word might be settled, and the first request had already been superseded because the same word could not be settled in time to survive a vote. Whether that was a fair account of the movement is not a question this page can answer; that it was the account given in the group's founding papers is a matter of record.

The proposal was posted where its likely readers were. The first request went to news.announce.newgroups and news.groups, as the rules required, and beyond them to alt.atheism and talk.religion.misc. The second request and both calls for votes added talk.philosophy.misc and soc.religion.unitarian-univ. That last address is worth holding on to. It is not an obvious neighbour for a secular group, and it becomes a good deal less surprising once the composition of the 1933 manifesto's signatory list is set out below.

Voting ran by electronic mail to an address held by a neutral third party posting under the banner of the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers, one ballot per person and one per account, with the addresses and votes of all voters to be published in the result — the ordinary practice of the period, and the reason the file is as long as it is. Balloting closed at 23:59:59 GMT on 4 November 1994. The result, posted four days later, was 145 in favour and 33 against: 178 valid votes, one abstention, and three ballots set aside, each recorded in the result as containing no vote statement. The Big Eight then applied two arithmetic tests, both stated in the call for votes: at least a hundred more yes votes than no votes, and at least two-thirds of the valid votes cast in favour. A margin of 112, with more than four votes in five cast in favour, satisfied both. The objection period ran its five days without incident, and the newgroup control message went out from the moderator of news.announce.newgroups on 14 November 1994 — reissued on 21 November, and once more on 14 December for sites that had caught neither. The body of all three is identical:

talk.philosophy.humanism is an unmoderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation by 145:33 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 8 Nov 1994.

Beneath that sentence the message gives the newsgroups line for administrators to paste into their own files — talk.philosophy.humanism Humanism in the modern world. — and then, under the heading The charter, culled from the call for votes, the group's entire constitution:

This newsgroup should serve as a meeting place for individuals who consider themselves humanists.

Fourteen words of charter, and they commit to nothing: no doctrine, no exclusion, and no test of membership beyond a person's own opinion of themselves. The longer charter had been set aside during a discussion in which, on the proponent's own account, the nature of humanism was the sticking point, and what went to the vote was the sentence with the least in it to vote against. The consequence for this page is exact: the group's own paperwork does not define humanism. It defers to whoever turned up.

The control archive holds five messages in all. Three are the newgroup messages of 1994. The other two are removal messages sent in the first days of November 2001, both calling the group bogus; the first states that it was never created in accordance with the accepted rules and methods for the hierarchy, and is plainly boilerplate written for a different hierarchy altogether, being cross-posted to biz.config and biz.control and signed by a self-described biz newsgroup authority. It also says, in terms, that it is answering forged newgroup commands, of which it counts more than a hundred. Nothing was removed. That episode and the forgery campaign behind it belong to the parent page; the outcome is that the name is on the master list distributed today, carrying the same description it was given in 1994.

Two humanisms, one word

The word the charter declines to define has two long-established senses and a third in common use, and the group's name inherits all three. Setting them out is not pedantry: the second request for discussion says in so many words that the disagreement about the nature of humanism was jeopardising the group, and the definitional tangle is the one part of this subject that a reference page can lay out completely, because it is a matter of dated usage rather than of opinion.

The older sense is a curriculum. In Italian academic usage of the Renaissance an umanista was a teacher or student of the studia humanitatis — grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy, built on Latin and Greek literature. On the standard scholarly account the programme continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages under a new and more ambitious name, increased the scope of the old trivium by adding history, Greek and moral philosophy, promoted poetry from a sequel of grammar and rhetoric to the most important member of the group, and excluded logic. An umanista in that usage held a teaching post, not a doctrine about God. The English word humanist follows the Italian into the language in the sixteenth century, first recorded in 1589, with much the same meaning.

The abstract noun is nineteenth-century and German. It is probable that the Bavarian theologian Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer coined Humanismus to describe a new classical curriculum he planned to offer in German secondary schools; the historians Georg Voigt and Jacob Burckhardt then adopted the term and applied it backwards to the Renaissance, which is why Renaissance humanism is a retronym for a movement that never used the label. Re-entering English, the word carried two distinct senses at once: an academic term tied to the study of classical literature, and a commoner use signifying a non-religious approach to life. In the twentieth century the second was refined again into its present meaning, a naturalistic approach to life with the well-being and freedom of human beings at its centre.

The compound is later still and narrower in circulation. On one scholarly account the qualifying adjectives attached to humanism in the twentieth century rest on false etymological and historical assumptions and were polemical in intention, and “secular” was first applied in the United States as an elaborator meant to amplify disapproval rather than as a neutral qualifier: the Archbishop of Canterbury was reported in 1943 warning that the Christian tradition was in danger of being undermined by a secular humanism that hoped to keep Christian values without Christian faith. The compound was afterwards taken up by humanist organisations themselves, and came to name the non-religious philosophy without heat. It remains chiefly an American usage: most European, African and Asian organisations use humanism with no adjective at all, and the international body's own house style, described below, strips the adjectives deliberately. A fourth sense — humanism as a box a person ticks on a form, a declared identity rather than a doctrine or a syllabus — is later again.

Which sense does the group's charter indicate? Mostly the modern one, and mostly by implication rather than statement. “Individuals who consider themselves humanists” is a test of self-identification, which the Renaissance sense does not admit: nobody considers themselves a teacher of the studia humanitatis in 1994. The newsgroups line, Humanism in the modern world, points the same way, as does the choice of rooms the proposal was posted into. But the charter excludes nothing, and on its face it would not have excluded a thread about Petrarch. The record is therefore ambiguous in a small, specific way, and it is more accurate to say so than to tidy it. The proposal itself anticipated the problem and left it open, noting that the group might ultimately reveal the need for more than one newsgroup, serving the different viewpoints about the nature of humanism. No second group was ever proposed.

The manifestos as documents

What the charter would not do, the movement had already done for itself, repeatedly, in public, and with dates on. This is unusual. Most philosophical positions have to be reconstructed from the works of their adherents; this one issued numbered statements, printed them in a magazine, collected signatures, and then superseded them. The manifestos are short published statements, not creeds with authority to bind anyone — the movement's own literature holds that they are not permanent or authoritative dogmas but are subject to ongoing critique — and the indefinite article in the first title was deliberate, predicting the successors that duly arrived. They are best read as a dated sequence.

A Humanist Manifesto, 1933

Written primarily by the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars and the Unitarian minister Raymond Bragg; accounts differ over which of the two did the greater share, and the page says only that both were principals. Sixty-five people were asked to sign; thirty-four accepted, and a thirty-fifth signature arrived too late to be printed with the rest. About half the signatories — fifteen — were Unitarians, twelve of them Unitarian ministers, and the list is thick with clergy, theologians and professors: the philosopher John Dewey signed, alongside the secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference, the managing editor of the New Humanist, the director of the Boston Ethical Society, the educational director of the Ethical Culture Schools and a rabbi advising Jewish students at Columbia. The document appeared in the May/June 1933 issue of the New Humanist, with its release reported in the mainstream press on 1 May. It sets out fifteen affirmations covering cosmology, biological and cultural evolution, human nature, knowledge, ethics, religion, self-fulfilment and the quest for freedom and social justice, and it frames humanism explicitly as a religious movement fitted to a scientific age — a new religion meant to transcend and replace the older, revelation-based ones, and called in its own pages the religion of the future — while taking care not to set out a creed or a dogma. The fourteenth affirmation, which opposed “acquisitive and profit-motivated society” and demanded an egalitarian world community founded on voluntary mutual cooperation, proved the most controversial in the document, and was contested by humanists as much as by anyone else.

Humanist Manifesto II, 1973

Written by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, then respectively editor and editor emeritus of The Humanist, and published in that magazine's September/October 1973 issue. It opens by conceding that the excesses of Nazism and the Second World War had made the 1933 statement seem too optimistic, and answers with a seventeen-point statement, much longer and more elaborate than its predecessor; a good deal of the earlier optimism survives even so, in stated hopes that war and poverty would be eliminated. It was published with 120 original signatories and circulated to gather thousands more, and the American Humanist Association's website still invites visitors to add their names. A provision at the end records that signatories do “not necessarily endorse every detail” of the document, only its broad vision. The line most often quoted from it is “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves”.

A Secular Humanist Declaration, 1980

Issued not by the American Humanist Association but by the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, a body Kurtz founded in 1980 after leaving The Humanist the previous year; it is compiled by him and is, on the standard account, largely a restatement of the 1973 manifesto he had co-written. It is organised under ten headings: free inquiry; separation of church and state; the ideal of freedom; ethics based on critical intelligence; moral education; religious skepticism; reason; science and technology; evolution; and education. Like its predecessor it carries a disclaimer before the signatures, noting that those who endorse it “may not agree with all its specific provisions” but support its general purposes and direction. The Council now operates as the Council for Secular Humanism.

Humanist Manifesto 2000

The odd one out, and worth naming so that it is not confused with the series proper. Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for New Planetary Humanism is a full-length book by Kurtz rather than an essay-length statement, and it was published by the Council for Secular Humanism, not by the American Humanist Association. It restates much of the 1973 argument at length.

Humanism and Its Aspirations, 2003

Subtitled Humanist Manifesto III, a successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, and published by the American Humanist Association, which had it written by committee rather than by named authors. It is deliberately much shorter than either predecessor and sets out six themes: that knowledge of the world derives from observation, experimentation, trial and error and rational analysis; that humans are an integral part of nature and the result of unguided evolutionary change; that ethical values derive from human need and interest as tested by experience; that fulfilment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals; that humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships; and that working to benefit society maximises individual happiness. Twenty-two Nobel laureates were among its signatories, who subscribe to a formula weaker than assent: “We who sign Humanism and Its Aspirations declare ourselves in general agreement with its substance”.

Read as a sequence, the four documents record a movement changing its mind about one thing above all: whether what it was proposing was a religion. In 1933 it plainly said yes and used the word of itself throughout. By 1973 the tone is post-war and hard-headed. By 1980 there is a separate document, from a separate body, with separation of church and state as its second heading. By 2003 the successor to 1933 does not raise the question at all. That trajectory is one reason the definitional argument described above never closed, and it is also why the courts, when they came to the question, found respectable authority on both sides.

Amsterdam: 1952, 2002, 2022

The international line is separately documented and has its own numbered statements, issued from a different place and on a different schedule. Five organisations — the American Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, the British Ethical Union, the Vienna Ethical Society and the Dutch Humanist League — convened a founding congress in Amsterdam from 22 to 27 August 1952 and established the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Delegates adopted five resolutions, one of which was a statement of the fundamentals of what it called modern, ethical humanism; the final text was drafted into clear and simple language by the British humanist Hector Hawton, and it became known as the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952.

Between the declarations the body produced working texts of the kind a federation needs. In 1965 its board formulated ten characteristics of what ethical humanism stood for; the text was adopted at the 1966 congress and is known as the Paris statement. A Minimum Statement on Humanism was adopted in 1991 and revised in 1996, and is the shortest usable definition the movement has produced — member organisations are required by the membership regulations to have objects consistent with it:

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

A London office opened in February 1997, and in 2000 the union was granted special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. At the fiftieth-anniversary World Humanist Congress in the Netherlands in 2002 the general assembly passed, unanimously, an updated text known as the Amsterdam Declaration 2002, which the body described as the official statement of world humanism, and which defines humanism as a life stance that is ethical and rational, supportive of democracy and human rights, insistent that personal liberty be combined with social responsibility, and offered as an alternative to dogmatic religion. The 2002 declaration capitalises Humanist and Humanism throughout and uses both words without adjectives, a house style adopted to promote a unified identity and to avoid the compound terms discussed above; the practice is not universal among member organisations, though most observe it.

The congresses kept issuing statements after the group's active life, each named for the city that hosted the assembly: a Paris Declaration on state secularism in 2005, an Oslo Declaration on Peace in 2011, an Oxford Declaration on Freedom of Thought and Expression in 2014, an Auckland Declaration on the Politics of Division in 2018 and a Reykjavik Declaration on the climate crisis in 2019. Two changes of a different kind came in the same period. In 2017 the general assembly passed a resolution mandating a change of name, and in February 2019 Humanists International was adopted as the organisation's operating name. In 2022, at the seventieth-anniversary general assembly in Glasgow, delegates replaced the 2002 text with the Amsterdam Declaration 2022, also published as the Declaration of Modern Humanism. There have therefore been three Amsterdam declarations, in 1952, 2002 and 2022, each replacing its predecessor; a reader working from a source written before 2022 will find only two.

The American organisations and their dates

Behind the documents sit institutions whose dates are a matter of public record, and much of the confusion the group's founding paperwork complained about comes from running them together. Two American strands need keeping apart.

The older is Ethical Culture. Felix Adler, then twenty-six and lately deprived of a rabbinical career after a sermon that never mentioned God, was invited to lecture in New York and on 15 May 1876 argued for a religion that would unite all humankind in moral and social action without the trappings of ritual or creed, uniting theists, atheists, agnostics and deists in the same cause. Weekly Sunday lectures followed within a few weeks, and in February 1877 he incorporated the Society for Ethical Culture. The programme has long been summarised as “Deed before creed”, and it was practical from the start: in 1878 Adler founded a free kindergarten, to which elementary grades were added in 1880 under the name of the Workingman's School, and which survives as a school today. Further societies followed in Chicago, Philadelphia and St Louis before the end of the century, and were federated under the American Ethical Union, which in 1952 was one of the five founding members of the international union described above. On belief the movement declined to legislate — individual members may or may not believe in a deity, and Adler's own formula was that Ethical Culture is religious to those who are religiously minded and merely ethical to those who are not — while organising congregationally: Sunday meetings with a half-hour Platform address, Sunday school for children, life-cycle ceremonies, and certified Leaders engaged much as a Protestant congregation calls a minister.

The younger strand is explicitly humanist and begins in Chicago. A Humanist Fellowship was founded there in 1927 and from 1928 published the New Humanist, which ran until 1936 and printed the 1933 manifesto. By 1935 the Fellowship had become the Humanist Press Association, the first national association of humanism in the United States. In July 1939 a group of Quakers, inspired by the manifesto, incorporated the Humanist Society of Friends as a religious, educational and charitable nonprofit authorised to issue charters and to train and ordain its own ministry, whose ordinands were then accorded the rights and privileges granted by law to the clergy of theistic religions — a detail that looks like antiquarianism until the question of who may lawfully solemnise a marriage comes up, at which point it becomes the whole point. In 1941 Curtis Reese led the reorganisation and incorporation of the Press Association as the American Humanist Association, which began printing The Humanist; it was headquartered in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then San Francisco, then from 1978 Amherst, New York, and later Washington, D.C. In the late 1960s it secured a religious tax exemption to support a celebrant programme, allowing humanist celebrants to officiate at weddings legally and to perform chaplaincy functions; in 1991 it took control of the Humanist Society, which runs that programme still, and afterwards returned to an exclusively educational tax status. In 2006 it established a legal arm, the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, to argue humanists' constitutional position in court.

The third American body is the sharply secular one, and its history is a set of mergers. Kurtz founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976 and the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism in 1980; in 1991 he established the Center for Inquiry, which brought the two together under one roof, and which was registered as a tax-exempt nonprofit in April 2001. In January 2016 the Center announced a further merger, with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Three foundings, one holding structure, and a name on the 1980 declaration that no longer matches the name on the building.

The British organisations and their dates

The British line is longer, differently shaped, and begins in a chapel. The congregation that became what is now described as the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world traces to 1787, when a nonconformist group under Elhanan Winchester rebelled against the doctrine of eternal damnation; known as the Philadelphians or Universalists, it secured its first home at Parliament Court Chapel, on the eastern edge of London, on 14 February 1793. William Johnson Fox became its minister in 1817, and by 1821 the congregation had decided to build again and issued a call for “subscriptions for a new Unitarian chapel, South Place, Finsbury”, which went up in 1824. In 1888, under Stanton Coit's leadership, the South Place Religious Society renamed itself the South Place Ethical Society. In 1929 it built new premises in Red Lion Square and named them Conway Hall after Moncure D. Conway, the American who had led the society from 1864 to 1885 and again from 1892 to 1897, during which time it moved further away from Unitarianism, and who spent the interval between the two terms in the United States writing a biography of Thomas Paine.

Around it, an ethical movement rose and fell within a single lifetime. In 1885 an American sociologist distributed pamphlets by a Chicago ethical society leader to a group of British philosophers; one of Adler's colleagues, Coit, then visited London to explain the aims and principles of the American arrangement, and in 1886 the first British ethical society was founded. By 1896 four London societies had combined into the Union of Ethical Societies under Coit; between 1905 and 1910 there were over fifty societies in Great Britain, seventeen of them affiliated to the Union. Seventy-four societies were started between 1886 and 1927. Ten were left in 1934. Four were left in 1954. A sociologist writing in 1971 suggested that one could say that when the South Place society discussed renaming itself the South Place Humanist Society in 1969, the English ethical movement ceased to exist — a characterisation, not a fact, and offered here as his.

The surviving institutions changed their names steadily and their objects with them. The Union of Ethical Societies became the Ethical Union in 1920 and was incorporated in 1928. The South Place Ethical Society joined the Ethical Union in 1950. The Ethical Union appointed its first executive director in 1963, after a decade of discussions that had nearly merged it with the Rationalist Press Association and South Place and that produced, in 1963, an umbrella Humanist Association covering the first two; in 1967, during the presidency of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, it became the British Humanist Association, the legal successor body to the Union of Ethical Societies, and in May 2017 it began operating as Humanists UK. South Place kept its own name until 2012, when it became the Conway Hall Ethical Society, and on 1 August 2014 it became a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with a new charitable object. The two objects are worth setting side by side. The old one was “The study and dissemination of ethical principles and the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment”. The new one is “The advancement of study, research and education in humanist ethical principles”. The rational religious sentiment, as the account of the British cases below records, had by then been through the courts.

Religious humanism and secular humanism

The distinction the group's own paperwork could not settle is, in the movement's literature, reasonably clear, and it is a distinction between two ways of organising the same stance rather than between two stances. Religious humanists characterise the non-theistic humanist life stance as a non-supernatural religion and structure their organisations congregationally, with rites and community activity centred on human needs, interests and abilities. Secular humanism is described in the same literature as a non-religious approach to life, without that characterisation and without that structure. The terms are not interchangeable, which is why the 1933 signatories can accurately be called religious humanists in a document that later secular humanists count as founding, and why fifteen of those thirty-four signatories were Unitarians, twelve of them ministers, without any contradiction arising.

The congregational strand has a traceable American history, and Unitarian ministers are most of it. One of them, John H. Dietrich — ordained in the Reformed Church in 1905, defrocked in 1911 for failing to affirm primary Christian beliefs, and afterwards called the father of religious humanism — took up the word for his own preaching in the 1910s, at Spokane and then, from 1916, at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. That Minneapolis society, where the term was first used in its pulpit, has latterly rebranded the movement as Congregational Humanism, precisely to stop the word religious from implying a supernatural or theistic component. Surveys of Unitarian Universalist congregations have historically found half or more of members identifying as humanists, and a humanist association exists within that denomination. This is the context in which cross-posting a humanism proposal to soc.religion.unitarian-univ in 1994 is an obvious thing to do rather than a strange one.

In Britain the movement went the other way, though not at once. Coit worked to give his own West London society the trappings of religious practice as well as the substance of Ethical Culture, renaming it the Ethical Church in 1914 and turning its meetings into services, on a personal theory of using theological terms in a humanistic sense so as to reach irreligious people with strong cultural attachments to Christianity; he went on to argue in a series of books for converting the Anglican Church into an Ethical Church, and failed. His successor at the London Ethical Church consciously removed the church-like trappings and advocated a humanism that was not akin to a religion, and in the middle of the twentieth century the British ethical societies rejected the church model outright while continuing to provide weddings, funerals and namings on a secular basis. In Scandinavia the parallel bodies styled themselves human-ethical associations; Norway's retains that name, Human-Etisk Forbund, while the Swedish association, founded in 1979 as Human-Etiska Förbundet, took the more international name Humanisterna in 1999. Writers on religious humanism routinely warn readers to keep it apart from Jewish humanism, Christian humanism and secular humanism, and then note that confusion arises anyway. It arose in the newsgroup too.

Humanism in the courts: the United States

The church-and-state thread had a documentary spine, and the decisions are worth naming exactly, because they were cited constantly and usually at second hand. They divide into two kinds, which turn on different questions: tax cases, which ask whether an organisation functions like a church, and establishment-clause cases, which ask whether particular ideas or symbols are inherently religious. Commentary on the American cases draws the distinction expressly: an organisation can function like a church while advocating beliefs that are not, in themselves, inherently religious, and an answer to the one question is not an answer to the other.

The tax cases came first, and both were decided in 1957. In Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda, 153 Cal.App.2d 673, an organisation of humanists sought an exemption on the ground that it used its property solely and exclusively for religious worship; despite the group's non-theistic beliefs, the court found its activities, including weekly Sunday meetings, analogous to those of theistic churches and allowed the exemption. The case discussed humanism; it did not use the phrase “secular humanism” at all. In Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 249 F.2d 127 (D.C. Cir. 1957), a society that functions much like a church while regarding itself as a non-theistic religious institution had been refused exemption as a religious organisation; the Court of Appeals reversed, defined the society as a religious organisation and granted the exemption. The society terms its own practice Ethical Culture. In both, the decision turned on the function and form of the practice rather than on the particular beliefs of the practitioners, and the most that follows from the pair, on the standard commentary, is that a religion need not be theistic to qualify as one under those tax provisions.

Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, was argued on 24 April 1961 and decided on 19 June. A Maryland notary public's appointment had been revoked because he would not declare a belief in God, as the state constitution required of anyone holding an office of profit or trust. The Supreme Court held unanimously that the requirement violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments; Justice Hugo Black wrote for the Court. The holding concerns religious tests for office and nothing else. What made the case famous in this argument is an aside — the eleventh footnote, which cited the two 1957 tax cases and observed that “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.” A footnote is not a holding, and two later courts said as much in terms, as the paragraphs below record.

The phrase had a brief statutory life as well. The Education for Economic Security Act of 1984 emerged with a clause excluding federal magnet-school grants from being spent on “any course of instruction the substance of which is Secular Humanism”. Neither the senator's staff who added it, nor the Senate committee, nor the Department of Justice could produce a definition of what such a course would be, and the determination was left to local school boards. Within a year Congress passed an amendment deleting every reference to secular humanism from the statute.

It was tested directly in Alabama. On 3 March 1987, in Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, 655 F. Supp. 939 (S.D. Ala.), a federal district judge held that secular humanism was a religion, that forty-four school textbooks at issue — among them books on home economics, social science and literature — unconstitutionally promoted it, and that they had to come out of the classrooms. The Eleventh Circuit reversed unanimously on 26 August 1987, at 827 F.2d 684, holding that even assuming secular humanism to be a religion for establishment-clause purposes the plaintiffs had failed to prove a violation, and finding that the books in question conveyed neutrality: they “neither endorse theistic religion as a system of belief, nor discredit it”.

Two later decisions addressed the footnote directly. In Peloza v. Capistrano School District, 37 F.3d 517 (9th Cir. 1994), a science teacher argued that being required to teach evolution forced him to teach the religion of secular humanism. The court answered: “We reject this claim because neither the Supreme Court, nor this circuit, has ever held that evolutionism or Secular Humanism are ‘religions’ for Establishment Clause purposes.” The Supreme Court declined to review it, at 515 U.S. 1173 (1995). In Kalka v. Hawk, decided by the District of Columbia Circuit in 2000, the court addressed the Torcaso passage head-on: the statement “does not stand for the proposition that humanism, no matter in what form and no matter how practiced, amounts to a religion under the First Amendment”, the Court having offered no test for what qualifies, and the most that may be read into the footnote being that a particular non-theistic group calling itself the Fellowship of Humanity qualified as a religious organisation under California law.

One later case is worth recording because a humanist organisation was the named party rather than the subject. In American Legion v. American Humanist Association, 588 U.S. 29, argued on 27 February 2019 and decided on 20 June, the Supreme Court considered a forty-foot cross-shaped First World War memorial at Bladensburg, Maryland, built with private funds on private land in 1925 and later standing on government-owned land. The district court had upheld the memorial in 2015; a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit reversed in October 2017 and the full circuit denied rehearing en banc in March 2018 by eight votes to six; the Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit by seven votes to two, holding that the memorial, having stood for decades without controversy, did not violate the establishment clause and could remain. Those are the decisions. What they settled, and whether they settled it, was among the things argued about in the group, and this page does not join that argument.

Humanism in the courts: Britain, and the marriage question

The equivalent English question arrived through property, marriage and charity law rather than through the constitution, and it was asked of the same Red Lion Square building described above. In 1935 twenty members of the South Place Ethical Society signed a document stating that Conway Hall was their regular place of worship, and the hall was accordingly certified for marriages by the Registrar-General. It held that certification for four decades, during which the Society also conducted secular funerals, memorial ceremonies and namings there.

The law then moved, and it moved in a case about somebody else. In 1967 the Church of Scientology of California applied to have a chapel at its English headquarters registered as a place of meeting for religious worship under the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855; the Registrar General refused, the Queen's Bench Division dismissed the challenge in November 1969, and on 7 July 1970 the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal in R v Registrar General, ex parte Segerdal. Lord Denning held that the phrase meant a place of which the principal use was as a place where people came together as a congregation to do reverence to a deity, and the court found that the practices before it “did not reveal any form whatever of worship”. Following a report in the winter of 1975 that a marriage had been solemnised at Conway Hall, the Deputy Registrar-General ruled in 1977 that the hall could not be used for weddings under the 1855 Act, probably influenced by the 1970 ruling.

Three years later the Society was in court on its own account. In Re South Place Ethical Society, decided in 1980, the Society — whose object was then “the study and dissemination of ethical principles and the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment” — applied for charitable status under the head of advancement of religion. The judgment drew heavily on Segerdal, defined religion for the purpose as requiring faith in a god and worship of that god, and drew the line in a sentence that has been quoted in English law ever since: “Religion, as I see it, is concerned with man's relations with God, and ethics are concerned with man's relations with man. The two are not the same, and are not made the same by sincere inquiry into the question: what is God?” That definition governed for a generation, and was relied on again in 1999 when the Charity Commission refused the Church of Scientology charitable status. The Supreme Court overruled Segerdal on 11 December 2013, in a case brought by that same church, and substituted a definition of religion as a spiritual or non-secular belief system, held by a group of adherents, which claims to explain mankind's place in the universe and its relationship with the infinite and to teach adherents how to live in conformity with that understanding.

The marriage question was then answered jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and the dates are worth having in one place, since the position differs within the United Kingdom itself:

• Scotland — following a June 2005 ruling by the Registrar General, celebrants belonging to approved humanist associations have been permitted to conduct legally binding weddings; the first was held at Edinburgh Zoo on 18 June 2005. By the middle of the 2010s humanist weddings in Scotland outnumbered those conducted by the Church of Scotland or by any other single denomination, and the Humanist Society Scotland's status as a provider of them was reflected in statute from 2017.
• Republic of Ireland — humanist ceremonies have been legally recognised since 2012, and humanist celebrants perform valid civil marriages and civil partnerships. In 2015 humanist marriages accounted for about six per cent of all marriages in Ireland, some six times the number conducted by the Church of Ireland.
• Northern Ireland — a humanist couple challenged the refusal of legal recognition in the High Court in Belfast, which in 2017 ordered that the words “or belief” be read into the references to religion in marriage law. In 2018 the Court of Appeal held that refusing humanists legal marriage rights was unlawful discrimination, but quashed the order compelling that reading, holding that the state could avoid incompatibility by registering humanists as civil celebrants; celebrants were authorised shortly afterwards, and the first humanist marriage under the new arrangement took place on 25 August 2018.
• Jersey and Guernsey — humanist celebrants can conduct legally binding marriages in both bailiwicks. In Jersey the change accompanied the marriage-law reform that took effect on 1 July 2018.
• England and Wales — a humanist ceremony still has no legal effect on its own; the couple must also obtain a civil marriage or partnership through a register office. An amendment secured in 2013 to the same-sex marriage bill required the government to consult on allowing humanist celebrants to conduct legal marriages; the consultation was held and its result strongly indicated that legalisation should go ahead, but ministers have so far declined to use the order-making power.

As of 2021 legally binding humanist ceremonies were also conducted in Norway, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States, under arrangements that vary by jurisdiction. In Italy they have no recognition in their own right, though a civil wedding may be officiated by the mayor or by anyone the mayor delegates, provided that person is an adult Italian citizen with active and passive suffrage, which lets a humanist ceremony carry legal effect by a different route; in 2020 the Italian standards body published a document laying the basis for a recognised celebrant qualification.

Pastoral care without a chaplaincy

The parallel institutional question — who visits the non-religious in hospital, prison or barracks — produced no litigation of note but a documented sequence of administrative decisions, mostly recent. In the United States the mechanism was in place early and by accident of incorporation: the Humanist Society of Friends, incorporated in 1939, was authorised to charter and to train and ordain its own ministry, whose ordinands were thereby accorded the rights granted by law to the clergy of theistic religions. The successor body endorses celebrants on that footing today.

In Britain the sequence is later and administrative. Since 2015 NHS England has recommended that every hospital in England offer a non-religious pastoral carer, whether employed or voluntary; the first humanist appointed to such a post within an NHS chaplaincy took up the position at a Leicester trust on 4 January 2016, funded at first by a hospital charity and from January 2017 by the NHS. In the same year Humanists UK set up a pastoral-care network, first under the name Humanist Care and afterwards as the Non-Religious Pastoral Support Network, which maintains a body of roughly 150 trained and accredited volunteers working in hospitals, hospices, prisons, universities and other settings in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; its members prefer the title non-religious pastoral carer to chaplain, and the project was prompted by evidence that non-religious patients and prisoners often declined support from a chaplain. Prison work began with a pilot at one prison and has since extended to several others, in cooperation with the prison service. In 2018 a humanist was appointed for the first time to lead an NHS chaplaincy team, at a Buckinghamshire trust. In 2023 the Ministry of Defence granted endorsing authority status for humanist pastoral carers to serve alongside religious chaplains in the army, navy and air force, and the first such appointment in the armed forces followed in 2025; the Welsh Parliament has appointed a humanist pastoral carer of its own.

None of this existed when such groups were busiest. A reader going to an archive expecting to find the arrangements described above will find instead the period in which they were still hypothetical.

Why the subject suited talk.*

A position that defines itself in relation to religious claims, in a hierarchy built for arguments that do not end, was well placed. Four kinds of thread recurred, and it is the kinds rather than any particular exchange that a reference page can honestly report, because the kinds follow from the subject and the mechanics of the medium.

The first was the grounding question: whether ethics can be given a foundation without theology, worked through utilitarian, Kantian, contractarian and evolutionary answers and against the standing objection that none of them binds anybody. The manifestos supplied a target here, since they assert in terms that ethical values derive from human need and interest as tested by experience, which is a claim that can be denied. The second was church and state, where the American litigation set out above supplied recurring occasions and where a great deal of the citation was at second hand. The third was meaning and mortality — what a naturalistic account of death leaves in the way of consolation — which tended to produce the least combative writing in the group. The fourth was definitional, and it never closed, for the reasons the previous sections give: several referents, one word, and a charter that declined to choose.

The group was also a border town, and much of its traffic was not native to it. Cross-posting — one article naming several groups on its Newsgroups line, delivered to all of them at once, with follow-ups flowing back to each — meant that a thread begun in alt.atheism, talk.religion.misc or talk.origins could arrive fully formed, carrying its own participants, grievances and history. The scriptural end of that argument, conducted between literalists, liberals, atheists and scholars, has its own page at alt.bible; the creation-and-evolution end is covered at alt.evolution and on the talk hierarchy page. The evolution groups eventually answered their own recurrence with a standing document rather than with posts: from 1994 the separately posted FAQ files of talk.origins were gathered onto a single anonymous FTP site, and in 1995 the collection became the TalkOrigins Archive on the web. No comparable document for this group appears in the surviving record.

The arguments were long and frequently unproductive. Exchanges about the origin of morality, the authority of scripture or the establishment clause ran on, cycled through familiar positions, and tended to end when the participants tired rather than when anything was resolved; the same claims and the same rebuttals came round again later, put by new arrivals who had not seen the previous round. That is a description of the record and of unmoderated discussion generally, not a verdict on the participants, and it was the ordinary weather of talk.*. Having no gatekeeper meant that every position was represented, including the ill-informed and the plainly bad-faith, sitting in the same threads as patient exchanges between people who agreed on nothing. An archive of the period holds both, unsorted, in the order they were posted.

Its active life ran with the rest of Usenet's: busiest in the 1990s, thinning through the 2000s as this kind of argument moved to mailing lists, weblogs and web forums whose hosts could set terms. The news2mail gateway carried the group between 2000 and 2004, near the end of that arc, which is why the address is in this directory at all.

What the record does not show

This directory preserves an address, a description and a body of context. It does not preserve messages, and no message archive for this group is held here. Nothing on this page should be read as a summary of what any individual wrote.

Specifically, the record consulted for this page does not show: how many people read the group, or subscribed to it, at any date; how many articles it carried, in any month or in total; any thread title, any participant, or any quotation from a posting. The 1994 result published the names and electronic-mail addresses of everyone whose ballot was accepted — 179 lines, the 178 valid votes and the single abstention — as the rules of the period required, but a ballot is not a posting, none of those people is named here, and there is no way to know from the file which of them ever wrote to the group. The administrative archive holds no periodic FAQ under this name, no charter revision, no moderation proposal and no removal that succeeded. The second newsgroup that the 1994 proposal thought the subject might one day need was never requested.

The archival position generally is the ordinary one for a Usenet group of this vintage. The commercial archive of the period began in March 1995, four months after the group was created; Google acquired it in February 2001 and by the end of that year had supplemented it with donated collections reaching back to 11 May 1981, and in February 2024 it withdrew the Usenet gateway from that service while leaving the existing archive readable. Coverage of any particular group in any particular year is uneven, and gaps in it are not evidence about the group.

Scope and limits

This page describes an organised movement, its published documents, its institutions and its legal history. It endorses no position on religion, on humanism, or on any of the questions argued in the newsgroup, and it is written to read the same to a reader who agrees with secular humanism and to one who does not. Where a characterisation appears — that the English ethical movement had ceased to exist by 1969, that a 1980 declaration is largely a restatement of an earlier manifesto, that a footnote will not bear the weight put on it, that the adjectives attached to humanism were polemical in intention — it is attributed to whoever made it.

Everything quoted from the group's own paperwork is quoted verbatim from the archived request for discussion, call for votes, result and control messages, or not at all. Dates, tallies and citations have been taken from those documents and from published sources; where two accounts differ, as they do over which of the 1933 manifesto's two drafters did the most work, the page says what is agreed and leaves the rest. No living person is named, and the individuals who appear in the group's paperwork — its proponent, its vote-taker, the moderator who issued the control messages, the senders of the 2001 removal messages — are referred to by role. Where the record is genuinely ambiguous — and on the central definitional question it is — the page says so rather than resolving it, which is what the group's founders declined to do as well.