WHY I AM NOT A HUMANIST

When I started these essays, I meant to comment on "the humanist movement," meaning the small group of organizations, web sites, e-mail discussion lists, and publications that are run by and for people who do not believe in God. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Atheists are the people who don't believe in God. Humanists don't believe in God, but they have an entire philosophy, and it isn't enough to not believe in God if you want to be one of them, you have to share the philosophy. Unless, of course, you're a Humanist with a capital H, meaning somebody who studies the humanities. I am that kind of Humanist, since I have degrees in literature and sometimes teach it at the university level. A lot of people who do believe in God are capital-H Humanists.

If you're now thoroughly confused, I don't blame you. I'm thoroughly confused, too, and I've been trying to straighten this out for five years. Before that, I didn't realize it was a problem. I didn't believe in God. People called me a secular humanist. I assumed I was a secular humanist. Secular humanists were people who weren't religious. It was that simple. Then I got my first computer, and I got on the Net, and I found the Council for Secular Humanism--and there began a string of events that ended, around 1999, with me swearing that if I could talk myself into believing, I was going to become a Baptist.

Obviously, I didn't become a Baptist. Intellectual honesty wouldn't let me. Nor did I start voting conservative, celebrating advent, or campaigning for school vouchers. I did write a book, called True Believers, with a really nasty Professional Atheist as a character, but considering how that plot turned out, that may not count. What does count is that I got to the point where I wanted nothing to do with the humanist movement, or the freethought movement, or the atheist movement, or whatever it wanted to call itself--and that antipathy has lasted to this day.

On the other hand, I have calmed down some. I've resubscribed to all the publications. I'm on the reincarnation of my old e-mail discussion list. There's a humanist-atheist-freethought organization I like, and my latest atheist character, in a book called Conspiracy Theory, belongs to it. She's a thoroughly admirable character, even if she is a dumpy middle aged woman, which is something of a cliche on the atheist front. I've got an Evolvefish key chain. I've got a bumper sticker that says God is Just Pretend. I'm thinking of ordering a t-shirt that says Friendly Neighborhood Atheist, if only to stop people from assuming I'm not one.

I'm also in the middle of a discussion on that e-mail list about who is and who is not a humanist, so maybe it's time I outlined how I came to refuse to be one, and why. I have a feeling I'm not the only one--in fact, I know I'm not--and thereby hangs a problem for secularism and secularists in this country that isn't going to go away unless it's addressed by somebody.

If the census data and the poll data are anywhere near accurate, between 8% and 10% of Americans don't believe in God, and fully 14% do not adhere to any religion. That means, at the most conservative estimate, that there are over 21 million of us, more than there are Jews, more than there are members of all the oldline Protestant Churches combined--and just as many as there are self-described Christian conservatives. A constituency that large usually has a loud voice in public affairs. We have none. I run into people all the time who tell me, quite confidently, that they don't know a single atheist. They don't know what to do when I tell them I am one. We're living with the most aggressively religious Presidential administration in American history. The current President's father once said that atheists couldn't be good citizens and there was no reason to consider their rights. He was Vice President at the time, and he went on to win election as President.

Something is wrong here. We are a large constituency and we should be able to make our concerns heard. The fact that we can't is testimony to the further fact that only a tiny percentage of nonbelievers knows about the organizations that claim to be our voice, and of those who do know only a tinier percentage join. The Godless Americans March on Washington was considered a great success because 2,000 people showed up. They'd get ten times that number at the Wednesday evening prayer service at any evangelical superchurch in south Florida.

Where are all the atheists/humanists/freethinkers and what are they doing?

Where am I, since I'm not marching in Washington, and I don't even belong to the one organized freethought group I like?

Well, let's backtrack a little, and tell you where I was when I discovered, for the first time, that there was something called a humanist movement. Where I was is important, because it's where a lot of people are when they first go looking for, and then find, groups like the American Humanist Association and the Council for Secular Humanism. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they say a man won't go looking for help until he reaches rock bottom. In the real world, secular people don't go looking for other secular people until they get desperate. In June of 1997, I was desperate. I was also drowning in Mass cards.

For those of you who know little or nothing about Roman Catholic customs, a Mass card is a card, very like a greeting card, informing the recipient that a donation has been made to have a Mass said for a special intention. I was drowning in them because I was newly widowed, and my late husband's wildly extended and enthusiastically Catholic family was busy enlisting every monk in North America in the cause of the repose of Bill's soul.

I didn't really mind the Mass cards, at first. Bill's family is full of good people who mean well. Bill's mother is a sweetheart. They were watching one of their own die, and I understood they were doing what they were doing with the best of intentions, and to comfort themselves as much as they were trying to comfort me.

Maybe, if the cards had stopped coming a week or two after Bill's very nonreligious memorial service, I would never have found myself sitting at my brand new computer at five o'clock on a June morning, typing the words "secular humanist" into a search engine and wondering what would come up. Bizarrely, the cards had not stopped coming. It had been over seven months. I went to my mailbox six days a week to find four or five more Sacred Hearts bursting out of Jesus's chest, each one topped with a glowing, golden Crown of Thorns.

The computer was not only new, but the first one I'd ever owned. It had been sitting on the work desk in my office for six weeks. I had tried writing a few things on the word processing program. I had played endless games of solitaire. I had avoided thinking about getting on the Net, because I was sure it would be too complicated for me to do on my own. Then, that morning, for no reason I could ever ascertain, I actually read the section of the instruction booklet on how to hook up the modem. Five minutes later, I had an AOL account. A minute and a half after that, I found the Council for Secular Humanism.

This is important: secular humanism was the first thing I went looking for on the Internet. Faced with a nearly limitless supply of information on a nearly infinite number of subjects, secular humanism was the one thing I wanted to find.

If there was ever a person primed and ready to be recruited into organized humanism, it was me.

What I got recruited into at first was an e-mail discussion list called Sechum-L. I didn't know what a "listserv" was, but I thought "discussion" sounded good, and discussion with a group of people not one of whom would ask me if I'd accepted Jesus as my personal savior sounded even better. And, for a while, it was good. There was a lot of neutral conversation--announcements of meetings and lectures and conventions, discussions of math and computer problems, links to some of the odder religious web sites. There were a few utilitarian threads about how to counter a creationist drive in your local school district or get the clerk to leave out "so help me God" when swearing you in for a jury. There were personal notices about births and deaths and moves and jobs and bad storms that tore down power lines and ruined backyard fences.

There were also a few real arguments, and from the beginning what happened in those made me uneasy. It wasn't just that I was as far removed from the beliefs of my chief opponents as I was from the beliefs of my Catholic in-laws. It wasn't even the dogmatism with which such positions were laid out, although that should have given me a clue. What stopped me dead were the tactics.

I'm nobody's shrinking violet. I can give as good as I get, and I have an advantage over most people in that I've learned not to take debate personally. What I cannot do, and have never been able to do, is declare and enforce orthodoxy. Declaring and enforcing orthodoxy was the weapon of last resort for a small but extremely vocal minority on that list. Argue them into a corner they couldn't get out of, and they would declare: nobody who thinks like you has any right to call herself a humanist.

What brought push to shove, so to speak, was a casual comment I made during the Clinton impeachment hearings that Clinton himself was to blame for the trouble he was in. You'd have thought I'd suggested installing the Pope as absolute dictator. The firestorm was immediate, and in most cases completely irrational. A web columnist who up until that time had been almost embarrassing in her efforts to cultivate my off-list acquaintance posted a message that I was "obviously" anti-sex and phobic about oral sex to boot and that she wouldn't stay on the same list with somebody who thought like me. At least five people posted diatribes insisting that nobody could be a humanist who wasn't a socialist, or at least a strong New Deal liberal. Somebody else suggested that I was a "mole"--not really secular at all, never mind a humanist, but a "religionist" who had only signed up to destroy the list.

The list was not destroyed--and would only die, many months later, when its sponsoring organization got tired of it--but I did decide it was time to check into what the humanist organizations were saying, instead of assuming that supporting them had to mean I was supporting a cause, meaning secularism, that was important to me.

I went back out on the Net--and I was appalled.

This is what I found, reading through the material available online, and the books I could order from the organizations themselves or from Amazon.

First, in spite of their insistence that they are politically neutral, and that they take no official positions on most political matters, both of the two main organizations produce magazines that are unrelentingly left of center on nearly every question. From gun control to welfare policy, The Humanist and Free Inquiry are entirely predictable and entirely unbalanced. If there is a humanist case to be made for the privatization of social security, you won't read it in either of those publications, or on the web sites of their parent organizations.

Second, both magazines, and their parent organizations, redefine several philosophical issues as conflicts between "church" and "state." That practice extends to many of the smaller organizations as well, like the Institute for First Amendment Studies. Abortion and euthanasia are presented as if no one could ever object to either if they didn't believe in God. Questions about funding abortion through Medicaid or providing condoms to students in public schools turn on presenting the "pro" case as secular and the "con" as purely religious.

Third, both major organizations--and most of the small ones--hold fast to a philosophical and scientific paradigm that is out of date anywhere else on the planet. Science may have abandoned the blank slate and environmental determinism decades ago, but organized humanism still loves them both. That love has consequences. It means that organized humanism is still promoting "relativism" in morality, not merely by rejecting absolutism--which would make sense--but by denying that morals have any objective basis at all. It means that organized humanism denies any basis for political and civil rights except the whim of the society that chooses to grant them. And, most importantly, it means that organized humanism is still fatally attracted to social engineering. If environment is everything, and rights don't exist except when society decides to give them to you, it makes sense to push for the control of children and their upbringing and education. That's how you "effect change" for "the good of society."

I've probably given the impression that the two main humanist organizations are virtual clones. It's not true. The American Humanist Association is far more one sided than the Council on Secular Humanism. At least, CSH's magazine does occasionally print other viewpoints on at least some issues. Nor is CSH anywhere near as, well, old-fashioned in its approach to politics and culture as AHA. Reading The Humanist is like time travel. You go all the way back to 1968 and beyond, into a world where all capitalism is evil, the United States is always and everywhere wrong, and the only reason we don't already have socialism is because those evil American capitalists have brainwashed the people into thinking they want McDonald's instead.

At base, however, we're still left with a situation where a secular American who believes, as most Americans do, that neither rights nor morals are entirely social constructs must put those convictions aside to join a humanist organization. The same is the case for Americans who are supporters of free market philosophies, or even modified free market philosophies. In fact, in some cases, secular Americans who hold views like that have to learn to keep their mouths shut. With one exception, every humanist discussion list on the web is "moderated," and what "moderation" comes down to is a very effective way of marginalizing points of view that may be mainstream enough in real life, but that upset the hell out of the true believers.

I have no idea why a "[c]ommitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry...in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions," as CSH's What is Secular Humanism page puts it, should lead inevitably to support for assisted suicide or the conviction that there is no objective basis for morality--if you ask me, it should lead straight to the opposite conclusions--but I do know that I am not willing to support organizations that promote policies I think are wrong.

I understand that many people who feel as I do bite their tongues and join up anyway, hoping to change the organizations or to support only those policies having to do with the rights of secular Americans, but I've been there and done that. I got tired of the endless stereotyping and mispresentations and outright hostility to any point of view labeled "right wing," even when the "right wing" point of view being excoriated would have been considered irredeemably left wing by any conservative.

If you're a left-liberal member of one of these groups who thinks I'm exaggerating, well--what can I tell you? By now I've heard so many protestations of fairness by so many members of groups and moderated discussion lists--we're not like that! we're interested in all points of view!--and found them to be so flamingly wrong, that I can only conclude that you honestly don't realize when you're misrepresenting the positions of people who are committed to ideas you do not hold.

As for being part of the solution or part of the problem--the problem, from my point of view, is that most "secular" organizations are political organizations first, and secular only as an afterthought. If I'm going to contribute to a political organization, I'll contribute to the ones whose philosophies and goals I can actually identify with most of the time. The ACLU is good. So is the Reason Foundation.

If the secular movement wants to grow, it has to be a secular movement, not a left-liberal movement that tacks on secularism. That means not only making sure that the house organs publish more than one point of view when they address political questions, but that they spend more time concentrating on secularism than they do on politics. It also means doing something about the nearly monolithic cultural climate in secular groups and on secular discussion forums.

Most of us who go looking for humanism do so because we've been fighting a rear-guard action against what feels like a deluge of religiosity. We're not looking for a war. We're looking for a home. When we walk into a group or wander onto an e-mail discussion list to find that the mere suggestion that socialized medicine might not be a good idea subjects us to an onslaught of hysterical ranting about how we can't be humanists because we're meanspirited, self-absorbed jerks, we're not going to get into one more fight. We're going to wander out again in search of groups that won't declare us heretics for being in the mainstream of modern American political thought.

And, of course, most of us have, myself included. I'm on my one, unmoderated secular humanist discussion list. I read all the magazines and newsletters. I belong to not a single secular organization, and I stay as far away from most humanist groups on the Web as I can get. I have neither the time nor the inclination to refight the Cold War. I'm certainly not going to do it just to say I belong to a "humanist" organization.

Oh, by the way. The one secular organization I like? It's called the Freedom from Relgion Foundation. It's small, and it seems to operate on a shoestring next to the budgets of the two big names in humanism, but it's focused, it's sane, and it sometimes seems to be actively seeking all points of view within the secular framework.

Long may it wave.

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