by Tom Flynn
We come to the crux: Is secular humanism a religion? An orientation document on the Council for Secular Humanism Web site says no: “Secular humanism lacks essential characteristics of a religion.”9 Everyday parlance assumes that religion has to do with a god or gods, life eternal, and similar supernatural claims. Yet thinkers as varied as John Dewey, Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and A.H. Maslow (1908–1970) sought to extend the definition of the words religion or religious so as to encompass “ultimate concerns” with or without transcendental content. In A Common Faith, Dewey chose to define religion and religious dissimilarly. Religion retained its common association with the transcendent or supernatural while religious was held to subsume any commitment of deep significance.10 (See the sidebar for etymological profiles of words important to this controversy.)
Still, common—that is, pre-Deweyan—usage holds that the genuinely religious necessarily involves the supernatural or transcendent. Common usage has its advantages, not least that it sustains discrete meanings for terms like philosophy and ethics. I still stand by a definition of religion I offered in these pages in 1996: Religion is a “life stance that includes at minimum a belief in the existence and fundamental importance of a realm transcending that of ordinary experience.”11
From this definition, it follows that in order to be a genuine religious humanist, one must believe in something that is unprovable in this world. One needn’t believe in a deity or a spiritual substance (though some religious humanists do)—one might simply cling to some historical or social proposition in which one’s faith outruns the available evidence. For example, Teilhardian or Tiplerian optimists who believe in the inevitable perfectibility or triumph of humankind would qualify as religious humanists. So would dedicated Marxists, ironically enough. And of course, there are human-centered thinkers who nonetheless believe in a fairly literal kind of spirit, in the human soul or elan vital, or in a disembodied system of karma: their claim to the term religious humanist is uncontroversial.
On the other hand, if my definition of religion is correct, then a great many self-declared religious humanists … just aren’t. I suspect that three principal processes make religious humanism seem a more popular option than it actually is.
The first process is improperly ascribing the word religious to a secularized “spirituality” from which all transcendence has been wrung. In the Summer 2002 issue of Free Inquiry, Matt Young and Malcolm D. Wise wrote eloquently that they had abandoned transcendentalism.12 For Young, religion had been reduced essentially to an ethnic and social heritage. Wise argued that a wholly this-worldly awe in the face of nature’s wonders served as “spirituality” for him. Based on my definition of religion, I respectfully disagree. If you have journeyed beyond the possibility of belief in any literal transcendence, congratulations—but please find another label. You are not religious, and “religious humanist” misstates your position.
The second process is less edifying and requires little comment. No doubt some who claim the label “religious humanists” simply find it a useful way to avoid having to admit their unbelief.
The third process by which I believe the prevalence of religious humanism is exaggerated is also the most interesting. Some wholly naturalistic humanists call themselves “religious” because their practice of humanism retains certain forms that echo congregational life. I have come to see this as a misnomer. Humanists vary in their enthusiasm for rites of passage, ceremonies, and similar communal symbolic activities. One could arrange us along a spectrum, from crusty freethinkers who disdain ritual in any form to enthusiasts who find humanist ceremonies deeply satisfying. It is tempting verbal shorthand to say that the curmudgeons are “more secular,” the ceremonialists “more religious.” The analogy seems to ring so true: the curmudgeons reject everything “churchly,” some of which the ceremonialists preserve. But this is profoundly misleading. After all, nothing prevents a thoroughgoing naturalist—by our definition, an irreligious person—from cherishing humanist ceremonies. The split between humanists who embrace humanist ceremonial and those who scorn it is not a split between religious and secular humanism; it belongs on some other spectrum. When we confuse genuine religiosity—that is, transcendentalism—with the mere taste for ceremonial, we misrepresent both. And we run the risk that secular humanists holding solidly naturalistic worldviews will mislocate themselves in the religious humanist camp solely because they relish ritual.
I’ll conclude my “pencil sketch” phase by offering two blunt conclusions:
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