American Humanist Association

The American Humanist Association is the custodian of a document series that has, three times in ninety years, tried to write down what humanists collectively think, and whose successive revisions are a more honest record of the movement's history than any narrative would be.

Humanist Manifesto I appeared in 1933, drafted by Roy Wood Sellars and Raymond Bragg and signed by thirty-four people including John Dewey. Its striking feature, usually forgotten, is that it describes humanism as a religion: a religious humanism, with the supernatural removed and the framework retained. It was also, in 1933, extremely optimistic about human progress.

Humanist Manifesto II, in 1973, opens by saying so. Its authors, Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson, described the first as far too optimistic in the light of Nazi atrocities and the war, and wrote a longer and soberer document containing the line for which it is remembered: no deity will save us, we must save ourselves.

Humanist Manifesto III, in 2003, is shorter than either and much less prescriptive, and was signed by more than twenty Nobel laureates.

The Association itself was founded in 1941, eight years after the first manifesto, out of the network of humanist fellowships that produced it. It is a nonprofit educational body with no initiation and no membership requirement beyond joining, and it works through more than two hundred and fifty local affiliates.

The word manifesto was chosen deliberately, and the documents read as manifestos: they state positions rather than argue for them, which is the point at which even sympathetic critics have found them thin.

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.