Humanism Revisited

"The living tradition which we share draws from many sources . . . [including] humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit." -from UUA Purposes and Principles

So . . . what’s wrong with humanism? To hear some of our more conservatively religious brothers and sisters talk over the last few years, you’d think that humanism was akin to devil worship --especially when the modifier secular is attached to it.

By religious fundamentalists, in particular, it has been blamed for most of the problems of contemporary society. Because among other things it honors the discoveries of science and understands religious literature to be of human origin, humanism is seen as the great enemy of God, Bible, and Church. Because it elevates human nature and human self-reliance and autonomy, it is seen as a threat to God’s authority--particularly to God’s "moral" laws. By some, it is even called a religion, one thought to be in competition with traditional values, though almost all humanists would argue that it is not.

About the time I entered the ministry in the early 1980s, there was a fairly serious debate taking place within our Association about the nature of Unitarian Universalism. Could one be a theist--that is, a believer in some kind of God--and still remain a Unitarian Universalist? Could one be a Christian? Called by some the "theist-humanist-Christian" debate, this mini-controversy actually reflected the extent to which humanism, in its religious form, had come to characterize Unitarian Universalism in the middle of the 20th century.

The debate also reflected the fact that after a fairly long love affair with humanism, Unitarian Universalism was beginning to look seriously at some of its other historical sources. It reflected a movement back toward the religious center--at least as we Unitarian Universalists would define that center--and it reflected a renewed interest in spirituality, particularly among more recent ministerial aspirants. It reflected, too, a rediscovery of our Universalist, and to some extent even of our Transcendentalist, roots.

But it reflected especially, I think, a sense that Unitarian Universalists were being left out of the contemporary religious discussion, because we no longer had the religious vocabulary to have a viable voice. We had left the field of theological debate to the conservatives, and as a consequence we had rendered ourselves almost irrelevant to that debate. Perhaps we had thought that the debate was settled, and that we had already won. If so, we could not have been more sadly mistaken.

The "theist-humanist-Christian" controversy, if it can really be called such, reflected the extent to which Unitarian Universalism, on both its Unitarian and its Universalist lines of development, had been influenced and indeed even dominated by humanism since at least the 1930’s. Unitarian and Universalist ministers had been among the signers of the original Humanist Manifesto in 1933. Some would say that humanism had become the main component of Unitarian Universalist faith by the 1960’s.

The place of humanism is clearly reflected in the hymnbook of that period, Hymns for the Celebration of Life (the so-called "blue hymnbook"), which was strongly identified with the writings of Kenneth Patton, whom we have already heard from this morning, a leading humanist proponent who came from the Universalist side of our tradition. (Other humanist hymnbooks from that period include the less well known Songs of Man. You get the picture: God and spirit were out: man, and life itself, was in.)

Humanism, in one definition, is the idea that values are derived from human beings and are not divinely revealed. It is true that some humanists are agnostics and some are even atheists. But others believe in a God who (or perhaps more accurately, "which") doesn’t hand down values from on high. At the heart of humanism is the question of whether human beings can control their own destiny. At its best, humanism is an ennobling or elevating of human nature: humanity at its best.

Interestingly enough, modern humanism has religious roots. As Robert Ross has written,

Historically, Humanism emerged from a philosophical movement in Renaissance Italy of the 14th century. This movement was a reaction to the sense that in the Middle Ages, something important had been lost. What was it? In its preoccupation with the divine and the realm of heavenly spheres, what had been subsumed and lost was human freedom and our rational autonomy. Renaissance thinkers looked to replace the importance of humankind in the natural world and history. In classical Rome, humanitas meant education or what the ancient Greeks called paideia--the liberal arts which differentiated humankind from other animals. The Renaissance Humanists sought a rebirth of human owner- ship over the realms of nature and history--realms that had been lost in the adoration of a divine hierarchy in which everything in the universe could ultimately be attributed to God.

Unitarian Universalism has been said to rest on three fundamental characteristics or ideas: those ideas, as delineated by historian Earl Morse Wilbur in his monumental History of Unitarianism, are freedom, reason, and tolerance. All three of these ideals come directly out of the Renaissance Humanism which Ross describes.

One of its best known exponents was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who carried on a famous debate about free will with no less an opponent than the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. For Erasmus and his contemporaries, there was nothing incompatible about humanism and Christianity. (Indeed, had not Jesus Christ himself been fully a man?) Ultimately, humanism saw an elevated role for man in bringing about the Kingdom of God here on earth.

Renaissance humanism as it developed within the Christian Church held the seeds of many of our religion’s and our society’s most cherished values: "free inquiry, independent judgement, and dissent from orthodox views and traditional authority" [Charles Grady] among them.

My colleague Fred Gillis has written that "Many who are humanists do think of themselves as religious humanists."

They accept the human origin of values, but their attitude and philosophy of life includes a sense of wonder and mystery similar, in function at least, to that of traditionally religious people. Unitarian Universalist groups include many who would be comfortable calling their humanism a religion.

Khoren Arisian, one of the best known humanist Unitarian Universalist ministers of the last half of the 20th century, has written that,

The rockbottom reason for my being an uncompromising humanist is not philosophy or rationalism; in the last analysis I’m a humanist because humanity--of which we are all equally members-- never ceases to be astonishing in its infinite range of possibility. I regard liberal religion as a religion of human possibility.

It is true, however, that many of us have a far less sanguine attitude about human perfectability and about humankind’s ability to solve all its problems, particularly since the occurrence of holocaust of the 1930s and 40s and the creation of the atomic bomb. Perhaps we are not quite as good as some humanists thought we were. Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams was especially critical of what he called liberal religion’s "lopsided optimism" in light of the horrors of WW II.

Charles Grady, author of the UU pamphlet from which I read this morning, and a former ministerial mentor of mine, speaks to this concern when he writes that

No shallow optimists, today’s humanists acknowledge the reality of evil, and the inhumanity which humans too often inflict upon one another. Yet humanists claim the fundamental dignity and worth of every human person, and our capacity to rise above ourselves to higher levels of being.

As I look back on the "theist-humanist-Christian" debate of my Divinity School days, I have come to believe that it is actually possible to embrace all three simultaneously, that none of them excludes any of the others. Though I certainly would not be considered a Christian in the most traditional sense, I am comfortable in the recognition that my religious worldview has been inescapably formed within the context of a cultural Christianity informed by the ethical teachings of Jesus and of the Christian Church down through the ages. Jesus still seems to me a worthy role model for one attempting to live a life of service and integrity. (Indeed, the more I learn about the radical Nazarene, the more relevant his life and teachings begin to seem to the contemporary world.) Though I freely admit my agnosticism, I also confess to having almost always had a sense of purpose, meaning, and companionship in my life which I have usually tended to ascribe to some power or force beyond myself: one of the classical definitions of theism, even if not of the "guy in the sky" variety.

But mostly, it is humanism which characterizes my religious world view, and which I proudly embrace: that idea, as Charles Grady writes, that takes as its departure ". . . the human species, starting with ourselves as we are, using the knowledge we have painstakingingly acquired about ourselves and the earth’s other creatures" in order to understand our world and to change it for the better. As Charles continues,

We have learned something about human cultures, and how they change over great spans of time. We have looked some little way into the depths of the human psyche. We understand something of the workings of myth and symbol. With such tools, the humanist may then try to formulate ideas about ethical values, moral authority, and the nature of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

May we go forth on this day secure in the knowledge that we are truly one, recognizing the power that all of us possess to make a difference for the better in our world, and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity that all of us share. May this knowledge give us the strength to carry on the good fight, on this day and in the days still to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock