The American Humanist Association as Custodian

The American Humanist Association has no single founder, having formed by consolidating existing humanist associations rather than emerging from one figure's ministry, and the Oxford Handbook of Atheism names Curtis W. Reese and Edwin H. Wilson among its formative organisers. The association's role as custodian of the Humanist Manifesto tradition sits alongside its practical work certifying humanist celebrants and chaplains to perform weddings, funerals and other life-cycle ceremonies without invoking a deity, and campaigning for the separation of church and state in American law, activities the primary manifestos themselves treat as extensions of the same underlying commitment to human welfare and reason rather than as separate causes. Stephen LeDrew's history of the modern secular movement situates the association within a wider and often internally contentious American secular landscape, one that includes explicitly atheist organisations, humanist associations and Ethical Culture societies whose relationships to one another have shifted over decades of overlapping and sometimes competing membership. The association's custodianship of the manifesto tradition has functioned, in that landscape, as one of the few fixed points of continuity, the revised text itself changing across 1933, 1973 and 2003 while the institutional body responsible for issuing it has remained the same.