Our Humanist Legacy
Seventy years of religious humanism
By William F. Schulz
God dies only for a few. Over time, God may well change form for many
people, from personal to vague to immanent, from transcendent to omnipotent
to limited. But in American culture, at least, God dies only for a few.
“Whither is God?” cried Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman.
“I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I.” But
the people only stared in astonishment. “I come too early,”
said the madman. “This tremendous event . . . has not yet reached
the ears of man.” (And that was in 1882!) Even so, the madman’s
cry has reached some ears in every generation since. And for those, the
madman had a question: “Must not we ourselves become gods simply
to seem worthy of [God’s death]?” When God is gone, faith
turns to humanity.
In the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, some heard
Nietzsche’s call and heeded Nietzsche’s question. Their story
is the story of religious humanism, a religious movement that
emphasized human capabilities, especially the human capacity to reason;
that adopted the scientific method to search for truth; and that promoted
the right of all humans to develop to their full potential. It is the
story of a movement that sought to construct what the Rev. John Dietrich
called a “religion without God,” shifting the focus of religious
faith from divinity to humanity. Clergy and journalists, philosophers
and scientists banded together, refusing to believe that human beings
could not be saved and insisting that they themselves would be the instrument
of salvation.
Perhaps in no denomination but Unitarianism, with its aversion to creeds
and dogmas, could such a frankly nontheistic movement as religious humanism
have arisen without provoking a schism, and even Unitarianism found itself
hard pressed to encompass the new thought. For more than a decade, from
1916—when Dietrich and another Unitarian colleague, the Rev. Curtis
Reese, began preaching “humanism” to their congregations—through
the 1920s, Unitarians debated the merits of a strictly human centered,
scientifically minded, ethically focused religion. The “humanist-theist
controversy” that exercised the American Unitarian Association had
largely abated by 1933, when a group of philosophers, Unitarian ministers,
and other religious liberals issued “A Humanist Manifesto”
to articulate a coherent statement of humanist principles. The Humanist
Manifesto of 1933, the seventieth anniversary of which we celebrate this
year, was consciously designed to encapsulate a religious faith, not just
a philosophy of life, and for all its religious failings, it represented
a heartfelt attempt to amalgamate intellectual integrity with religious
expression.
But religious humanism is not just a matter of historical curiosity,
at least as far as Unitarian Universalism is concerned. After all, 46
percent of Unitarian Universalists reported in 1998 that they regarded
themselves as theologically humanist—more than twice the number
who identified with the second most common perspective, nature-centered
spirituality, and far more than the 13 percent who called themselves theists
or the 9.5 percent who described themselves as Christians. And even those
Unitarian Universalists who do not identify with the religious humanist
category would be foolish not to realize that they, too, should pay it
tribute, for it provides a set of values that are due honor to this day.
The truth is that a lot of nonsense passes for religion in this twenty-first
century, as it has in all the preceding centuries. Religious humanism
is willing to call a charlatan a charlatan, and while reason is by no
means the only vehicle of religious exploration, we abandon it altogether
only at our peril. Where would we who cherish the natural world be without
religious humanism’s insistence that the world is a seamless garment
and that we humans are a part of the weaving? When the Unitarian Universalist
Principles revere the “interdependent web of all existence of which
we are a part,” they hark back to that fundamental humanist point,
the second point in the Manifesto, that human beings are “a part
of nature” and have “emerged as the result of a continuous
process.” Or consider religious humanism’s courageous faith
that the future of the world is in human hands—not those of an angry
God or inexorable fate. Humanism beckons us to believe that we can make
a difference to history. This is the source of my own passion for social
justice. In fact, human rights themselves, as articulated in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, are grounded not in the callings of the divine
or the imperatives of natural law but in the common experience of human
empathy transmogrified into a set of guidelines designed to effect a civilized
world. Finally, what kind of people would Unitarian Universalists be without
humanism’s generous contention that the blessings of life are available
to all, not just the chosen or the saved, and that they appear not in
the miraculous or extraordinary but in the simple dress of the everyday?
Religious humanism—particularly that version of it described by
the 1933 Humanist Manifesto—has its limits. Indeed, what system
of thought that is now seventy years old would not? Interestingly enough,
religious humanism contained the source of its own surpassing within its
faith stance. “Any religion that can hope to be a . . . dynamic
force . . . must be shaped by the needs of [its] age,” the Manifesto
proclaimed. There can be no doubt that the kind of religion the Manifesto
advocated is now outdated. (Even die-hard humanists found a need to issue
Manifesto ii in 1973, and earlier this year the American Humanist Association
issued Manifesto III!) But what has supplanted it is still not entirely
clear.
I
was raised a third-generation Unitarian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by
two Unitarian parents—but Unitarian parents of the very old school,
theologically. My mother and I prayed together every night before I went
to sleep, and my father believed that after death he would be reunited
with his parents and other deceased family members in something resembling
heaven.
At age eleven, inspired by the election of John F. Kennedy and the burgeoning
civil rights movement, I became intrigued by politics and have remained
so ever since. But in my junior year in high school, thanks to the influence
of a brilliant, dramatic English teacher named Barclay Palmer (a former
Olympic shot-put athlete for Great Britain and great-grandson of the founders
of the Salvation Army), I discovered religious questions. The whys and
the wherefores began to supplement, if not displace, my interest in the
hows and the whats. Barclay introduced my classmates and me to debate
about the nature of the human creature, of evil, of death, and of God.
He taught us the Epic of Gilgamesh, Dante’s Inferno, and
The Heart of Darkness. He quoted from satirist Jonathan Swift
and ethologist Konrad Lorenz, as well as from Shakespeare, the Qur’an,
and the Bible. He took on the tough questions that other teachers seemed
to duck. Most of all, he appeared to live his life with a degree of intensity,
pathos, and passion that I had never seen in anyone before. And he did
all this while identifying himself as a religious person, albeit not a
conventional one.
My association with Barclay made me realize that it was time to return
to the Unitarian (now also Universalist) Church that I had abandoned when
I dropped out of church school in third grade. It was time to see what
this religion business was all about. For the next few years, I attended
Sunday services every week, read about religion voraciously, and talked
to as many clergy as I could corner. At the end of it all, I decided to
become a Unitarian Universalist minister.
There was just one problem with my newly chosen profession: I didn’t
believe in God. In fact, I didn’t believe in any of the religious
things my parents did, such as prayer or heaven, and I really wasn’t
very interested in the Bible. I was interested in religious questions
but not in the typical trappings of their answers. Could I possibly make
it in the ministry? A host of humanist ministers—including the minister
of my home church in Pittsburgh, the Rev. Edward A. Cahill, and the minister
I worked most closely with in college, the Rev. R. Lanier Clance (later
the founder of the First Existentialist Church of Atlanta)—assured
me that I could. The trick was to approach religion from the perspective
of philosophy.
But a little philosophy, it has been said, is a dangerous thing. By the
time I got to theological school, I was pretty well acquainted with the
existential philosophers, and during my years at Meadville Lombard Theological
School, the Unitarian Universalist seminary at the University of Chicago,
I enrolled in as many philosophy courses and as few theology and Bible
courses as I possibly could. I took particular interest in philosophy
of religion, and at one time, I could recite, almost by heart, the refutations
of each of Aquinas’s five proofs for the existence of God. My newfound
erudition convinced me that there was not even one respectable intellectual
argument for traditional Christian belief. “Aha!” I can still
hear myself cry. “But can God create a rock that is heavier than
God can lift?” Only a resort to unsubstantial faith could rescue
a theist from annihilation at the hands of a philosopher. I loved the
story of a conversation between a philosopher and a theologian in which
the theologian remarked that pursuing philosophy was as frustrating as
a blind person looking in a dark room for a black cat that is not there,
and the philosopher retorted, “Yes, and if I were a theologian,
I’d find the cat.” Such a retreat into irrationalism was not
for the faint of heart. My classmates in theological school took to calling
me “Bill, the Boy Humanist.” In 1973, when I was twenty-three,
I was rewarded for my nontheistic sanctity by being invited to become
the youngest original signer of Humanist Manifesto II.
It is hardly surprising, then, that when it came time to choose the
topic for my doctoral dissertation, the movement that had spawned the
1933 Humanist Manifesto—its history, sociology, and philosophical
underpinnings—held rapt appeal. Furthermore, six of the thirty-four
signers were still alive in 1974; I could therefore create a living history,
a work of some original research. I would set out in quest of elderly
humanists! The six all received me graciously and told me their stories.
(The result is my book, Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious
Humanism.)
But over the course of my four years at theological school, two other
developments in my life worked their ways with me. One was that I entered
psychotherapy, and the other was that my family started dying. The result
of the former was that I came to have a far deeper appreciation for the
irrational in every form and a far greater access to my own feelings,
limits, and yearnings than I had had before.
Much of the Manifesto’s humanism seemed pinched, even arrogant,
and certainly too quickly dismissive of the vast realms of human experience
that could not be reached by cognition alone. In a paradoxical kind of
way, this type of rationalism seemed suitable only for the meek—that
is, for those afraid to make the journey into the interior haunts of the
unconscious, of guilt, passion, and pain. I knew from my experience with
psychotherapy that the only way to get through emotional despair was to
dive right into the midst of it, frightening as that might be. But humanism
seemed to think (yes, that was the right word) that there might be a way
around it.
For me, that confrontation with despair became most poignant in the quick
succession of deaths of three of the five adults who had formed me as
a human being, including my mother. An only child with but two remaining
close blood relatives, I found the world a far more bleak and lonely place
than the brave words of the Manifesto would allow: “Man will learn
to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness
and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education
and supported by custom.” While I retained great respect for early
religious humanism after I had finished the dissertation and graduated
from theological school, as indeed I do today, these experiences crystallized
its limits for me.
Over
the years, I have seen those limits ever more clearly, as the Manifesto
implicitly predicted that I would. While the 1933 document had encouraged
the “creative in man” and had proclaimed “nothing human
[to be] alien to the religious,” it had also ardently insisted that
“the way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities
is by means of intelligent inquiry” and that “religion must
formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and
method.” One of the signers, Oliver Reiser, had captured the essence
of this perspective perfectly in a parody of a prayer:
Thou Cosmic Movement, Cosmic Continuum! We petition thee to lend auditory
discrimination to these, our laryngeal contractions. . . . May our cortical
pathways always keep vigilance over our lower reflexes. May our endocrines
not hypertrophy nor our hormones become toxic. . . . Increase our opsonic
index. And though we walk through the valley of depressed metabolism,
may we secrete no useless adrenaline.
Hard-edged, objective science could answer almost any question put to
it. Werner Heisenberg had discovered his uncertainty principle in 1927,
six years before the Manifesto was written, but quantum theory, with its
profound implications for the limits of objectivity, had not yet gained
the renown or acceptance it was to claim in later years. Yet challenges
to the Manifesto’s presuppositions were easy to see.
If nothing human was truly alien to the religious, for example, then
what are we to make of all the human experiences whose meanings could
not be completely captured in scientific terms—dreams, for example,
emotions, religious aspiration, wanton cruelty? And what are we to think
of the animal world? Are even the greatest apes nothing more than automatons?
Of course, all this could be reduced to physiological phenomena, as Roy
Wood Sellars, the Manifesto’s original author, suggested they should
be, but anyone who tried to capture the holistic significance of love
or loyalty, guilt or grandeur, in terms of brain cell functioning alone
could be rightly accused of displaying a pitiful paucity of imagination.
A brain-imaging machine called SPECT has recently been used to identify
changes in the top-rear part of the cerebellum brought about by meditation.
When it is deprived of sensory input, the so-called orientation area—the
part of the brain that monitors where the self ends and the rest of the
world begins—quiets down, and the individual is left with a feeling
of being one with God or with the Cosmos. A traditional humanist might
cite such research as evidence that the experience of God is illusory,
but the evidence could just as easily be read to support the notion that
the phenomenon of feeling one with the Whole is a profound reality with
arguably beneficial side effects, the full meaning of which cannot be
captured by intelligent inquiry alone. Surely, this is what poet Wallace
Stevens was pointing to when he said that “the truth depends upon
a walk around a lake.”
Science is by no means an enemy of imagination. As Alfred North Whitehead
pointed out as early as 1929, science begins in wonder and is advanced
through the audacity of intuition. But the humanists tended to be the
practical sort, whose first question of any new scientific development
was: And what can this do for us humans? This left them extraordinarily
vulnerable when the answer came back: It can kill you. With the coming
of the Second World War only a few short years after the Manifesto was
published, the world would be reminded—in the form of the Nazi’s
v2 rockets and efficient gas chambers, to say nothing of the Allies’
atomic bomb—that science and technology could foster massive amounts
of destruction as readily as they could relieve human suffering. A few
of the religious humanists had anticipated technology’s terrifying
possibilities, but the general tenor of the movement, convinced as it
was that salvation lay largely in molding nature to human needs, was unrestrained
in its enthusiasm for technological manipulations and unprepared for the
devastating consequences such manipulation could unleash.
That was, in part, because early religious humanism lacked a clear doctrine
of human freedom—not political freedom, which it wholeheartedly
endorsed, but free agency, what was traditionally called free will. Hence,
it lacked an adequate understanding of evil. Indeed, it is curious that
the Manifesto makes not a single mention of the human capacity for free
choice. On the contrary, it seems to suggest a brand of cultural determinism
in its affirmation that “man’s religious culture and civilization
. . . are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction
with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual
born into a particular culture is largely molded to that culture.”
If that is all there is to it, then the religion embodied in the Manifesto
is little better than a product of cultural dictation. But quite apart
from this confoundment, without a belief in some measure of free choice,
the Manifesto was hard pressed to fully account for human evil. Not surprisingly,
it had little to offer in the way of consolation from anguish. It tended
to forget that religion was not just about insight but also about poetry,
that culture was reflected not only in its worldview but also in its music.
In all my conversations with the signers of the Manifesto, none of them,
except the Rev. Lester Mondale, ever talked about religion in terms of
experience; they talked exclusively in terms of beliefs. But religion
is also about longing and lament, laughter and light. As George Santayana
put it, “Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of its
impotence.” Moreover, it requires a resource suitable to the plight
of Winnie the Pooh who, when stuck in the doorway of Rabbit’s house,
made a simple request: “Would you be so kind as to read a Sustaining
Book such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in a Great Tightness?”
In large measure, humanism lacked such a “book.” It could
explain Pooh’s plight—maybe even tell him how to extract himself
from it. But humanism fell mute on those occasions when Pooh was good
and truly stuck, in the face of evil and heartache and death, when the
only response worthy of the occasion was to curse the human plight and
be determined to dance nonetheless. While humanism gave a nod to art,
it lacked an aesthetic sense; its language was crisp, but its rhythm was
flat. It had little, if anything, to offer to those who brooked consternation
before chaos or treasured awe before vastness. Some of the early religious
humanists, including Lester Mondale and John Herman Randall Jr., recognized
this, but they belonged to a distinct minority.
The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher once concluded a sermon with a magnificent
peroration describing the Angel of Truth holding a spear tipped with a
star. Afterward an admiring parishioner exclaimed, “Oh, Dr. Beecher,
how did you happen to think of the star, the spear tipped with the star?”
Beecher replied, “I didn’t think of it; I saw it!” Most
of the early religious humanists, finding metaphor dangerous, would have
had no idea what Beecher was talking about.
Critical
as I became of the traditional humanist stance, a brand of religious humanism
has, nonetheless, accompanied me throughout my ministry, my service to
the Unitarian Universalist Association, and, indeed, my years at Amnesty
International—all of it presaged by the early religious humanism
of the 1930s. That is one reason I accepted from the American Humanist
Association (AHA) in 2000 the Humanist of the Year Award, previous recipients
of which include far greater luminaries than I, such as Isaac Asimov and
Stephen J. Gould. I felt a little guilty accepting the award on two counts:
First, I am often uncomfortable with the kind of humanism, reflected in
some quarters of the AHA, that holds religion in general in disdain. (On
the other hand, I am closer to the humanist perspective than to that of
the evangelical Pray 365 Project, which quite inaccurately named me one
of the world’s 365 most influential people just a few weeks before.
I figured the AHA designation would help balance things out.)
The second reason for my guilt is that Unitarian Universalism, by becoming
a home for religious humanists, has contributed to the difficulty humanism
has experienced in its efforts to flourish as a stand-alone movement.
It was, after all, the dream of many humanist pioneers to found a potent
humanist institution independent of any other. But that dream has not
been realized. The AHA today has but a few thousand members. Unitarian
Universalism has over 200,000, 46 percent of whom, as we have seen, identify
themselves as humanists. And I have contributed to that assimilation.
As president of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1985 to 1993,
I tried to make humanists feel at home in the Association, which, despite
their considerable numbers, they often do not. As Unitarian Universalism
has discovered spirituality and made room for a variety of religious lexicons,
those of traditional humanist persuasion have often become uncomfortable.
Why is that?
Part of the answer is that many of the traditionalists are now elderly
(the 1998 survey of Unitarian Universalists revealed that the older the
respondent, the more likely he or she is to be a humanist) and fear that
the number of humanists is dwindling. Other explanations include the traditionalists’
negative experiences with other religious traditions and their understanding
of the heritage they embody as one that rejects all things religious.
But this last perception is simply wrong. Most of the early religious
humanists were not interested in abandoning religion but in transforming
it. Moreover, they did not want to impose their views on Unitarians. Their
goal, as I have said, was to form a separate organization. What those
who identified themselves as Unitarians asked of their denomination was
not that it rid itself of other theological perspectives but that it make
room for theirs. How ironic, then, that some of humanism’s contemporary
practitioners would be the most resistant to an evolving faith, and how
paradoxical that some of those whose humanist forebears fought the battle
for theological pluralism within the Unitarian fold are today the agents
of a narrow sectarianism.
I have long thought that if all of us understood better where religious
humanism came from—the battles it fought, the assumptions it purchased,
the victories it claimed, and the limits it fostered—we would be
better equipped today to integrate its theology into our religious worldview,
to draw the best from its inspiration, and to avoid the pitfalls to which
it once succumbed. Besides, the story of the birth of religious humanism
is a fascinating one, ripe with drama and tinged with humor. It is philosophically
challenging and sociologically revealing.
the
humanist-theist controversy has long since been over, not just within
Unitarian Universalism but, indeed, the larger world. In one sense, that
is because Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are right: The basic principles
of humanism have come to pervade our larger culture. In a recent pamphlet
on humanism, one of its practitioners listed its basic tenets as these:
- Showing love to all humans.
- Immortality is found in the examples we set and the work we do.
- We gain insight from many sources and all cultures. . . .
- We have the power within ourselves to realize the best we are capable
of as human beings.
- We are responsible for what we do and become.
Of course, nothing is wrong with any of these affirmations. I agree
with all of them. But I would venture to say that so do millions of other
Americans, who would be shocked to learn that they are thereby considered
humanists. I doubt if there is a single theist, Christian, or advocate
of earth-centered spirituality within Unitarian Universalism today who
would not affirm these tenets. Most of them would just not stop there.
Informed by such latter-day influences as feminist theology, Zen Buddhism,
deep ecology, and new models of cosmology introduced by science itself,
most religious explorers today would want to go further, use richer language,
and wrestle with deeper questions. And therein lies another reason the
humanist-theist controversy is behind us: The religious world—and
not just the Unitarian Universalist religious world—has largely
said to such explorers, “Go to it.”
That sanction includes a willingness to employ a wider lexicon of traditional
religious language than that with which the early religious humanists
would have been comfortable. Thomas Carlyle said, “Life is one long
quarrel with God but we make up in the end.” My life has followed
that trajectory as well, although in a far different vein than Carlyle
intended. It is not particularly important to me anymore whether I or
anyone else uses “God talk.” What is of supreme importance
is that I live my life in a posture of gratitude—that I recognize
my existence and, indeed, Being itself, as an unaccountable blessing,
a gift of grace. Sometimes, it is helpful to call the source or fact of
that grace God and sometimes not. But what is always helpful and absolutely
necessary is to look kindly on the world, to be bold in pursuit of its
repair, and to be comfortable in the embrace of its splendor. I know no
better term for what I seek than an encounter with the Holy.
Someone has categorized religions along a spectrum from the monkey-hold
type, on one end, to the cat-hold brand, on the other. In monkey-hold
religion, the babies cling to Mama as she strides through the world; whether
they live or die depends, in good measure, on their own dexterity. In
cat-hold religion, Mama holds babies by the scruffs of their necks, dangling
them over the abyss; their calling is largely to take on a healthy dose
of trust and enjoy the scenery. Early religious humanism was monkey-hold
religion, through and through. Today, we recognize more readily the wisdom
of the feline faith.
Having said all this, I return, in the last measure, to appreciation.
For of course, early religious humanists had to be bold in their pronouncements
and brash in their claims. They were seeking nothing less than to save
religion itself—from the modernists, on the one hand (whom they
thought would turn it to mush), and the futilitarians, on the other (whom
they knew would throw it out altogether). In that task, they succeeded
by carving out a spot for an intellectually respectable faith. And for
that, every one of us owes them our thanks.
The Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz
is the executive director of Amnesty International USA and a former president
of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He is the author most recently
of Making the Manifesto:
The Birth of Religious Humanism, published in 2002 by the UUA’s
Skinner House Books, from which this essay was adapted. Available from
the UUA Bookstore, (800) 215-9076; $18.
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