Guest Column

Vern Bullough

Vern Bullough is a Vice President of IHEU and Senior Editor for Free Inquiry. He is a Board Member of the Council for Secular Humanism (USA) and professor emeritus at the State University of New York. He is also currently a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. He is the author and co-author of approximately 50 books.

One of the issues of debate among humanists in America and apparently elsewhere is whether humanism is a religion. Most American humanists would probably argue that it is not, but not all would agree.

There is an American group which calls itself a society of religious humanists. The issue is complicated by the fact that the humanist movement in America was founded mainly by a group of Unitarian ministers, although some non-ministers also signed the original humanist manifesto. Most of these ministers looked upon humanism as the next step in religion and in fact the churches with which they were affiliated often changed their name to Unitarian societies as a sign of this. The dilemma earlier was faced by the Ethical Culture groups, also founding members of the humanist movement, who enjoyed a religious tax exemption although they did not consider themselves as a religion.

The American Humanist Association, the original umbrella group for American humanists, was listed as an educational non profit group for tax purposes, but in the 1970's changed to being a religion, only to change back to its original status in the late 1980s. The reason for the temporary change was that the AHA had established a humanist counsellor group which among other things performed weddings, presided at funerals, et al., but also did counselling. Much of the counselling was of Vietnam war protesters, but some went in for more personal counselling, and in order to do this and not being qualified to apply to the state for a license as a counsellor, they changed their status to a religion which exempted their counsellors from the licensing requirement. It also gave the counsellors the legal right to marry, something that in the United States judges and other secular officials can do, but outside of this hierarchy, only religious professionals can perform legal marriages, as distinct from simply having a non-binding religious ceremony. When the AHA changed back, some of the counsellors affiliated with the religious humanist group, others gave up their title rather than do so.

Not all American humanists followed the AHA pattern and the Council of Secular Humanism, the publisher of Free Inquiry and other publications, is, as the name implies, avowedly secular. But what does secular mean outside of the American context? The issue is complicated in countries like the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, where the state gives money to humanist groups as an alternative to the traditional religions. Does that make humanism an alternative religion? Some atheist groups have refused to affiliate with the IHEU because they regard it as a religion because of this.

The IHEU board has struggled with the issue and following the recommendation of Harry Stopes Roe came up with the term 'Life Stance' which might mean something in English but is not particularly translatable into other languages. Paul Kurtz has called humanism a eupraxophy, literally good practical wisdom. Many call it a personal philosophy but then this raises difficulty because each of us defines it somewhat differently. Some of these difficulties put humanists in a quandary, especially if they are secularists as I am. For example, in attempting to get a resident visa for Egypt (I was a Fulbright scholar there for a year), the official application for a resident visa asked for religion. Initially I wrote none. The Egyptians said that this was impossible, and they could not give me a visa. Finally after some negotiation they allowed me to classify myself as a humanist, and the ambassador who had intervened, said he didn't understand what all the trouble was about because after all we were all humanists. Clearly, regardless of what I claimed, humanism was a religion to them but a rather innocuous one which could include everyone. This is not what I wanted but since I could keep my own private definition and they could keep theirs, I went off to Egypt.

But the Americans complicate the issue even more. One of the larger humanist groups in the United states is the Society for Humanistic Judaism. These are individuals who observe many of the Jewish traditions and customs but are atheists or as they call themselves humanists. The problem they believe is that humanism, even secular humanism, is tainted with Christianity, and they want to keep a Jewish cultural identity. There is currently an attempt to establish a group of Islamic humanists in the United States, cultural Muslims but non-believers.

The issue is a serious one as exemplified by a person I met at one of the IHEU meetings. The woman, who came from Egypt, was absolutely thrilled with the meeting, and said she had been hunting for something like humanism all her life. We were rational, intelligent people, full of the joy of life. In talking to her, however, I found that she was still a believing Muslim, but since humanism gave her such a feeling of freedom, she also wanted to join with us as a humanist. The problem is then do we attempt to draw up rigid definitions to keep our purity and keep the secular humanists and atheists among us quiescent, or do we accept the fact that we might mean different things to different people. We obviously have a belief system which many people find attractive, but they approach us from their own cultural perspectives. Perhaps the only answer we can accept is that we are non-theistic, but then I am not sure all humanists, even organized humanists, would accept that. I have no easy answer and would be happy for others to join in the discussion. Personally I would insist on the term non-theistic, but how pure can an organization be?