Secular Humanism

Secular humanism differs from atheism and agnosticism in a way that is easy to state: it has documents. Where the other two are answers to a question, humanism is a set of positive commitments, written down, argued over, revised, and adopted by organisations with members.

The main texts are a short list. A Humanist Manifesto (1933) set out a humanism explicitly described as religious, with God removed but the vocabulary of religion retained. Humanist Manifesto II (1973), drafted by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson and signed by figures including Andrei Sakharov, B. F. Skinner and Isaac Asimov, dropped that framing and was written in the shadow of the century's two totalitarianisms. A Secular Humanist Declaration followed in 1980, and Humanism and Its Aspirations in 2003. Internationally the reference text is the Amsterdam Declaration, first adopted at the founding congress of the world federation in 1952 and revised since.

What the documents share is a short and fairly stable core. There is one world and no supernatural agency in it. Ethics is a human undertaking, answerable to human and animal welfare, worked out by reason and experience and therefore revisable rather than revealed. Inquiry must not be fenced off by dogma. The state should be neutral among beliefs and should not privilege any of them, including this one. Meaning, purpose and beauty are to be found within a single finite life, which is the only one anyone gets.

Two internal tensions are worth naming. The first is whether humanism is primarily a fighting secularism, occupied with church and state, or primarily a life stance offering people something to live by; organisations lean different ways. The second is the older split between religious humanism, which keeps congregational forms, and secular humanism, which rejects them. Ethical Culture societies still sit on one side of that line and most national humanist bodies on the other.

The part of humanism most people actually encounter is not the manifestos. It is a celebrant at a funeral.

Humanist organisations train and accredit celebrants who conduct namings, weddings and funerals without religious content, and the demand for them has grown faster than membership in the movement itself. Funerals are the largest category by volume: a service built around the life that was lived rather than around a promise about what comes next, for a family that would find the promise hollow.

Weddings are where this has produced law. Scotland gave legal effect to humanist marriages in June 2005; there were 82 that year, and by 2019 there were more humanist than Christian marriages in Scotland, with figures above 9,000 a year by 2022. The Republic of Ireland followed in 2012. England and Wales still do not, so couples must hold a separate civil registration to be married in law. The Law Commission recommended change in its 2022 report on weddings law, and the government has since said it intends to legislate, but the reform had not been enacted as of late 2025.

The second practical face is pastoral care. Non-religious pastoral carers now work alongside chaplains in hospitals, prisons, universities and some armed forces, on the reasoning that a dying patient or a prisoner who wants to talk about their life should not have to accept a religious framework in order to be heard. Harvard has had a humanist chaplaincy since the 1970s, and the model has spread unevenly elsewhere, sometimes against resistance from existing chaplaincy structures.

Both developments make the same argument in institutional form: that the non-religious have the same needs at births, marriages and deaths as everyone else, and that a state which supplies those services through religious bodies alone is not neutral between beliefs.

Whether secular humanism counts as a religion is a live dispute, and unusually, both the people who say yes and the people who say no have practical reasons for their answer rather than merely definitional ones.

The argument has a legal centre of gravity in the United States. In Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), striking down a state requirement that officeholders declare a belief in God, the Supreme Court remarked in a footnote that among religions in the country not teaching a belief in God were Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others. The footnote was incidental to the ruling and settled nothing, but it has been quoted ever since by religious conservatives arguing that public schools, by teaching a curriculum without God, are establishing secular humanism as a state religion in breach of the First Amendment. Courts have not accepted the conclusion, but the argument recurs.

Humanists themselves are divided. Some accept a functional definition and are content with it: a movement with ceremonies, communities, pastoral care and a life stance is doing much of what religions do, and the legal parity that follows is worth having, since it brings equal access to chaplaincy, broadcasting time, school provision and charitable status. Others reject the label outright, on the ground that humanism makes no supernatural claim and that accepting the word invites exactly the confusion the movement exists to clear up.

Jurisdictions outside the United States have mostly sidestepped the question by widening the category instead of arguing about the boundary. British law protects religion or belief together, and philosophical convictions including humanism qualify. The European Court of Human Rights held in Kokkinakis v. Greece (1993) that freedom of thought, conscience and religion is a precious asset for atheists, agnostics and sceptics as much as for believers. On that approach it does not matter whether humanism is a religion, because the protection does not depend on the answer.