National Day of Reason

The National Day of Reason is a secular observance kept in the United States on the first Thursday in May, on which humanist, atheist and secularist groups hold public events, blood drives, food collections and civic ceremonies, and press local and state authorities for proclamations. It was established in 2003 by the American Humanist Association, together with the Washington Area Secular Humanists, and it is deliberately timed to coincide with the National Day of Prayer, which falls on the same day and which its organisers regard as an improper government endorsement of religion in tension with the constitutional separation of church and state.

The day is framed positively, as a celebration of reason, of science, and of the First Amendment's separation of church and state, rather than as an attack on religious belief; its promoters present it as an inclusive alternative for the non-religious and as a defence of secular government, and use it to encourage civic and charitable action. It has no rites of its own, and its observance is a matter of events, statements and advocacy. As a self-consciously oppositional yet constructive observance, the National Day of Reason illustrates how the modern secular movement in the United States has developed its own calendar of days, often defined in relation to the religious observances it seeks to counterbalance.

The National Day of Prayer that the National Day of Reason was created to counterbalance carries a federal statutory basis, a 1952 law requiring the President to proclaim a day of prayer annually, and every modern president has issued that proclamation as a matter of course, giving the religious observance a level of formal federal government backing the National Day of Reason has never received and has never sought through the same legal channel, since its organisers frame it explicitly as a civic and secular counterpart rather than as a claim to equivalent state establishment.

Recognition for the National Day of Reason has instead come piecemeal, through occasional congressional resolutions introduced by individual members of Congress and through mayoral or gubernatorial proclamations in some cities and states, several of which have later been withdrawn after public objection from religious constituents, a pattern of contested and unevenly granted local recognition that stands in sharp contrast to the National Day of Prayer's settled, uncontroversial federal status and that its organisers point to as itself evidence of the uneven treatment secular civic observance receives compared with religious observance in American public life.