The Case for Spiritual Humanism

(Or Why Secular Communities Fail)

Photo via Woody Kelly

In the mid-2010s, publications across the United States were buzzing about the rise of secular churches. “Atheists are starting their own global church,” wrote The Week. “A church for the godless picks up steam,” wrote NPR. “The world’s newest major religion: No religion,” wrote National Geographic. 

Within just a few years, however, many of these communities had either shrunk or withered. As The Atlantic recounted in 2019, one of the premier secular churches — Sunday Assembly — fell “from about 5,000 monthly attendees in 2016 to about 3,500 in 2018” and “the number of chapters is down from 70 three years ago to about 40 this year.” Other secular humanist groups, such as Oasis, saw a similar fate.

It seems that people appreciate these secular communities in theory but don’t care for them so much in practice. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s an old story. 

More than 170 years ago, the French philosopher Auguste Comte started the Religion of Humanity, a secular community that replaced revelation and faith with science and reason. He celebrated love, order, and human progress, adopting the slogan “love as principle, order as basis, progress as end.”

The Religion of Humanity built chapels and employed a trained clergy, but the project struggled to take off. Growth stagnated. Today there are no chapters of the Religion of Humanity in the United States and very few in other places. Even in France, it’s little more than an interesting historical artifact. 

Why is this? Why have secular humanist communities that orient around shared values and meaning so frequently died over the past 170 years?

I’ve been sitting with this question inside and outside of a variety of communities (including a struggling chapter of Oasis in my city) for years, and I have a hunch: I believe that by reducing the entire human experience to science, logic, and reason, secular communities deny the poetic power of the world’s wisdom traditions.

To understand what I mean by this, take Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, the night before he was murdered. 

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” King said. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Look at all the language here that secular communities would likely find off-putting. The mountaintop? God’s will? The promised land? The coming of the Lord? It’s all too… religious. Too Christian.

But Martin Luther King, Jr. knew what he was doing. He’d been through a faith crisis in college, and he understood that the Bible was not a literal account of history. Yet he also recognized that it still held power. He wrote, “I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape.” In other words, he used the poetry of his tradition to speak truth to power. To do otherwise in his particular context — to only use science and logic and reason to make his case about injustice — would have been unpersuasive. Sterile. Lifeless. 

This doesn’t mean, of course, that all human beings must embrace the words of the Bible. King himself wasn’t a religious zealot who demanded that everyone bow to the dogma of the Christian church. On the contrary, he celebrated spiritually motivated activists of all traditions, endorsing a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize. 

As it so happens, Thich Nhat Hanh used Buddhist language to a similar end as King did, advocating for a form of engaged Buddhism. “When bombs begin to fall on people,” Hanh once said, “you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time. Meditation is about the awareness of what is going on — not only in your body and in your feelings, but all around you.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh used the language of their tradition while also reaching beyond it.

Many other religious adherents have similarly reached beyond their own tradition. Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu who wrote that “a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.” Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister but also “a student of Catholic mysticism, Buddhism, Judaism, and other faiths,” according to his biographer. And Florence Nightingale wrote at length about her expansive view of religion in the service of helping others. 

And then there are all those who’ve held reverence for wisdom despite not belonging to a particular tradition, including the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, the author Ursula K. Le Guin, and the poet Mary Oliver. 

The point is that regardless of belief or disbelief, these people valued spirituality while also extending empathy beyond their tribe. They saw, in the words of researcher Brené Brown, that “spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us.” They also believed, in the words of the World Humanist Congress, that they had “a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” 

In short, these people valued spirituality and all of humanity.

They were spiritual humanists.

I can imagine some readers saying that spiritual humanism is a contradiction in terms since, they might say, humanism is by definition secular.

But history doesn’t bear this out. From the outset, the study of the humanities during the European Renaissance was all about merging spirituality with a variety of traditions. Students supplemented their study of Judeo-Christian texts with a greater attention to writers like Plato, Cicero, Sophocles, Euclid, and Lucretius. Religion and humanism existed side by side and even blended together, as is most visibly evident in the era’s sculptures, which envisioned figures like Moses and David in form of ancient Greek and Roman art. 

Humanism has a long history of merging wisdom traditions, as seen in statues of Judeo-Christian figures sculpted in the form of ancient Greek and Roman artists.

This was humanism, and it existed long before “secularism” was coined in 1846.

This same spiritual humanist project is still alive. 

It’s alive within traditional religions when adherents use their religious language in a poetic sense without aggressively holding a literalist or tribal worldview. It’s alive within expansive religions such as the Unitarian Universalists or Franciscan Catholics when adherents pull from a variety of wisdom traditions. It’s alive within “spiritual but not religious” communities such as meditation groups, book clubs, retreat centers, etc. It’s alive within service centers such as New York Society for Ethical Culture, which encourages believers and nonbelievers to unite around ethical causes. 

Spiritual humanism is alive, and it’s powerful.

By not positioning itself against religion, spiritual humanism opens itself up to the best of all traditions. It values the parables of Jesus, the paradoxes of Lao Tzu, the dialogue of the Bhagavad Gita, the poetry of Mary Oliver, the speeches of MLK, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the wisdom of Rumi, and on and on. It integrates wisdom wherever it surfaces. As such, it has roots, a lineage, a canon, a connection to the past. It places human beings in a story full of meaning, a story that instills a duty to pass along wisdom to the next generation in the hope that the future will bring more light to the mystery of life.

By positioning itself alongside and even within religion, spiritual humanism also sidesteps the self-congratulatory feelings and conversations that frequently underlie secular humanist circles. As such, spiritual humanism doesn’t get bogged down with tribal arguments of any stripe, recognizing that all traditions — yes, even spiritual humanism — have flaws and must therefore be held lightly. 

In addition, spiritual humanism is rational, backed by science. Based on his findings, the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg writes that “spiritual practices, even when stripped of religious beliefs, enhance the neural functioning of the brain in ways that improve physical and emotional health.” And Lisa Miller, professor of psychology at Columbia University, writes that “children who are raised with a robust and well-developed spiritual life are happier, more optimistic, more thriving, more flexible, and better equipped to deal with life’s ordinary (and even extraordinary) traumas than those who are not.” The emerging science supports certain kinds of spiritual practices, including forms of meditation, chanting, expressing gratitude, connecting to nature, and more. To deny all spiritual practices, then, is to deny rationality.

Finally, spiritual humanism allows people to value their own spiritual experiences (which are frequently considered among life’s most meaningful moments) alongside the experiences of those in other traditions. In this way, spiritual humanism celebrates all experiences that help people feel generous and fully alive. It encourages people to seek out this liveliness together in community.

My hope is that spiritual humanism will continue to thrive, whatever form it takes. I share the vision of former pastor Brian McLaren in his book Faith After Doubt when he writes about religious and nonreligious people joining together. 

“Imagine if these religiously connected people join with their nonreligious counterparts,” McLaren writes, “not simply to become happy consumers in the suicidal economy but rather to see ‘beyond self-interest, attachments to organizations and countries and our species.’ Imagine that they integrate the best resources they can find from religious traditions, brain science, education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and art, gleaning anything of value from anywhere they can find it, systematically helping people to achieve the most advanced forms of moral development possible.”

It’s a beautiful vision, a future full of life.