The Faith Dimension of Humanism

Abstract

Organised Humanism has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars of religion. One reason for this is that the parameters of scholarly concern have been mainly limited to traditions that include belief in a transcendent or trans-empirical reality and Humanists reject such belief. This dissertation critically examines the theoretical presuppositions of conventional Religious Studies scholarship and others in arguing that the time has come for a broadening of horizons. We use Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s histories of the words ‘religion’, ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ to demonstrate the importance of approaching the field from a personal attitudinal point of view rather than from the overly reified perspective of religion as a system. We focus on Smith’s contention that faith is an attitude of ultimate commitment, that it has been the fundamental religious category world-wide and that it has been expressed in any number of observable forms (beliefs, practices and institutions) known collectively as the cumulative traditions. We find a major implication of Smith’s argument to be that the common ground of conventionally defined religious and secular traditions is faith and that diversity on the level of cumulative tradition should not be mistaken for fundamental difference. We use the categories of faith and cumulative tradition to investigate a number of Humanist individuals of high international profile and who have been highly critical of relegation, namely Paul Kurtz, Corliss Lamont, Bertrand and Dora Russell. We similarly examine more thirty Humanist institutions worldwide but with particular interest given over to the United States where there are Secular and Religious Humanist organizations, the Netherlands where Humanism has its greatest numbers and New Zealand. In exploring the cumulative tradition we employ a variation on Ninian Smart’s six dimensions for analyzing religious and secular world views. We find overwhelming evidence for the existence and critical importance of faith in the Humanist tradition and for the common ground it brings to Humanists and traditional religionists. We also find that the Humanist movement has a distinctive and varied cumulative tradition to which a structural model such as Smart’s can be readily applied. We conclude that there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate the importance for Religious Studies of taking a serious interest in the Humanist movement. The Humanist tradition is a particular articulation of concerns occupying a growing number of Westerners in the so-called of “unfaith” or secularization. But further, it is an expression of the often unspoken and unexamined assumptions which permeate most public thought and activity in the Western world. The Humanist faith rejects the other-worldly concerns of a passing era and whole-heartedly embraces the this-worldly tendencies of the new in an attitude of primary commitment and hope.