Secular humanism, from Victorian positivist churches to ethics without God
Victorian London briefly had a Church of Humanity, complete with sacraments, founded by followers of the French thinker Auguste Comte. It was one odd branch of a family tree that grew into secular humanism, the view that people can live ethical lives through reason alone, without belief in any deity.
The core claim is simple: morality needs no supernatural foundation. Humanists neither assume people are naturally good or wicked nor place them above nature, but stress that humanity bears responsibility for the consequences of its choices, and that every ideology, religious or political, deserves individual scrutiny. The label itself is contested. It is mostly American, while Europeans, Africans and Asians tend to say simply humanism. Oddly, Anglican priests were using the phrase by the 1930s, and in 1943 Archbishop William Temple warned it might keep Christian values while discarding Christian faith.
George Holyoake coined secularism in 1851, meaning concern only with questions that could be tested by experience in this life. The Leicester Secular Society appeared that same year, and regional groups merged into the National Secular Society in 1866. Holyoake was influenced by Comte, who predicted society would move from theological to metaphysical to fully rational stages and proposed a religion of humanity. Richard Congreve met Comte in Paris after the 1848 revolution, founded the London Positivist Society in 1867 and set up the church in 1878; a rival faction soon opened its own centre, Newton Hall, off Fleet Street.
A parallel stream was the ethical movement. Felix Adler founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1877, holding that morality is independent of theology and that educating the young matters most. Similar societies sprang up in Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis by 1886.
Britain's first such society came the same year. More than fifty existed there between 1905 and 1910, and their union became a charity in 1928, the British Humanist Association in 1967 under Harold Blackham, and Humanists UK in 2017. Worldwide, a federation started by biologist Julian Huxley with the Dutch thinker Jaap van Praag now links over a hundred groups in more than 40 countries under a Happy Human symbol.
Source: Secular humanism
