Humanist Manifestos and Declarations

Humanist Manifesto I appeared in 1933, drafted by a group centered on the journal The New Humanist and signed by thirty-four people, several of them Unitarian ministers, who wanted to state Humanism as a positive philosophy rather than only a rejection of theism. It affirmed the universe as self-existing, human beings as a continuous part of nature, and religion as properly concerned with human welfare in this life rather than a supernatural one. Humanist Manifesto II followed in 1973, authored chiefly by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson and published under the American Humanist Association's auspices, extending the first manifesto's claims into more explicit ethical and social territory, human rights, global governance, sexual freedom, in the language of the period.

Humanist Manifesto III, subtitled Humanism and Its Aspirations, was adopted by the American Humanist Association in 2003 as a shorter, deliberately less programmatic statement of the same underlying commitments, knowledge of the world derived by observation and reason, ethical values grounded in human need and experience, and a life of purpose found in service to human welfare rather than in the promise of an afterlife.

Outside the American organizational line, the International Humanist and Ethical Union, now Humanists International, adopted the Amsterdam Declaration in 1952 at its founding congress and revised it in 2002, stating the same broad humanist commitments as the official minimum position of its member organizations worldwide, a document distinct from the American Humanist Association's manifestos but built from substantially the same premises.

Across their different decades and drafting committees, the humanist manifestos and the Amsterdam Declaration converge on a small set of recurring commitments: that claims about the world should be grounded in observation, reason and science rather than revelation, that ethical values arise from human experience and need rather than from divine command, that human dignity and human rights hold regardless of religious belief, and that religious and secular institutions should remain constitutionally separate so that no single creed governs public life. Later revisions, particularly Humanist Manifesto III, tend to state these commitments more briefly and with fewer specific policy positions than Humanist Manifesto II, which had ventured detailed stances on nuclear disarmament, population control and economic planning that dated quickly.

Not every organization in the wider humanist and secular movement has adopted a manifesto of this kind. The Ethical Culture movement, founded by Felix Adler in New York in 1876, predates the manifesto tradition by decades and has generally declined to state its position as a fixed creedal document at all, holding instead to Adler's own formula, deed before creed, that right ethical action matters more than agreement on a stated philosophical position, and that Ethical Culture societies should remain open to theists and nontheists alike who share a commitment to ethical practice. Where the American Humanist Association and Humanists International each anchor their identity partly in a signed statement of belief, Ethical Culture's founding move was to decline exactly that kind of statement, a difference of method that runs deeper than any single clause either side might dispute.