The Association's practical work is threefold. It certifies Humanist Celebrants, who are recognised in American jurisdictions to solemnise marriages and who conduct funerals and namings. It litigates and advocates on the separation of church and state, through a legal centre established in 2006. And it publishes.
The founding of a National Day of Reason in 2003, as a secular counterpart to the congressionally recognised National Day of Prayer, is characteristic of the method: not a demand that the religious observance be abolished, but an insistence that whatever the state offers, it offers equally.
Its membership is disputed in a small way worth recording. The Association reports over thirty-four thousand members; scholars examining the American secular movement have put the real figure lower, and certainly below fifty thousand. Its social media following is an order of magnitude larger, which is a fair illustration of the difference between a movement and an organisation.
Its most publicised recent decisions were disciplinary. It revoked the Humanist of the Year award given to Lawrence Krauss in 2015, doing so in 2018 following allegations of sexual harassment; and it revoked Richard Dawkins' 1996 award in April 2021, over statements about gender identity that it characterised as demeaning to marginalised groups. Both were contested inside the movement, by those who regarded them as necessary, and by those who regarded a humanist body policing opinion as a contradiction in terms. The argument running through them is the one that fractured New Atheism a decade earlier: whether a movement defined by the absence of a belief can also be defined by the presence of a politics.