The part of humanism most people actually encounter is not the manifestos. It is a celebrant at a funeral.
Humanist organisations train and accredit celebrants who conduct namings, weddings and funerals without religious content, and the demand for them has grown faster than membership in the movement itself. Funerals are the largest category by volume: a service built around the life that was lived rather than around a promise about what comes next, for a family that would find the promise hollow.
Weddings are where this has produced law. Scotland gave legal effect to humanist marriages in June 2005; there were 82 that year, and by 2019 there were more humanist than Christian marriages in Scotland, with figures above 9,000 a year by 2022. The Republic of Ireland followed in 2012. England and Wales still do not, so couples must hold a separate civil registration to be married in law. The Law Commission recommended change in its 2022 report on weddings law, and the government has since said it intends to legislate, but the reform had not been enacted as of late 2025.
The second practical face is pastoral care. Non-religious pastoral carers now work alongside chaplains in hospitals, prisons, universities and some armed forces, on the reasoning that a dying patient or a prisoner who wants to talk about their life should not have to accept a religious framework in order to be heard. Harvard has had a humanist chaplaincy since the 1970s, and the model has spread unevenly elsewhere, sometimes against resistance from existing chaplaincy structures.
Both developments make the same argument in institutional form: that the non-religious have the same needs at births, marriages and deaths as everyone else, and that a state which supplies those services through religious bodies alone is not neutral between beliefs.