Should Humanism Be Decolonised? | A Conversation with S.I Martin & Chris Cameron

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Welcome to Secular Sankhofa, a podcast of the Association of Black Humanists.
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A place where we speak boldly, think freely, and live consciously.
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Here we have honest and unapologetic conversations about race, belief, power and liberation.
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From a black and godless point of view.
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On today's show, we are joined by two distinguished guests, S.I.
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Martin and Professor Chris Cameron.
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S.I.
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Martin is a humanist, a British author and researcher for historical archives, and a teacher, specialising in black Buddh history and literature.
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His books include An Incomparable World and the Budd Slave Trade.
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Professor Cameron is a history professor at the University of North Carolina and Charlotte with research and teaching interests in African American and Early American history.
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He is an author, and his books include Black Free Thinkers, a History of African American Secularism, and he has just published, alongside Professor Anthony Pinn, Black Humanist Studies, History, Method and Application.
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He's also a co-founder of the Black Humanist Study Association.
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Welcome, the two of you, and we are most grateful here at Secular Sankopa for you taking the time to talk to us today.
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Now, on today's show, we are looking at what's going on around the world with the rise of the far right and the conversations that were taking place with immigration and deportation and citizenship.
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So today we here are asking the question: is modern humanism too rooted in Western colonial thought to really tackle and understand racism and the black experience?
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So, Steve, let me start with you.
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Can there be a genuine African or black humanist humanism that is not simply an imported European ideology?
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Easy answer, yes.
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There can be an African and or black variant of viable variant of humanism.
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But to what degree wouldn't it be impacted or affected by uh European ideas, symbology, just means of interpreting, experiencing the world, even if you do the easiest win here and build a model based around, say, ancestor worship, say, notions of uh Ubuntu and um collectivity, pan-Africanism, all of these are still, we're still carrying a lot of uh Western interpretations to these uh notions, unless we can access some sort of genuine pre-colonial collective idea.
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I think it's doable and I think it's desirable as well.
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I think it's something worth going for.
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But it would be a hard sell, given that each or any of those, sometimes all of those interpretations will inevitably be exclusionary.
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There will be population groups, interest groups, faith groups across the diaspora and within the continent who will have difficulty uh connecting with aspects of uh Pan-Africanism, say, or a resistance to pre-colonial realities of African society.
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So I think it can be done, and I think it's worth doing.
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I think it's a short-term, effective, probable win.
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But separate from, totally removed from European notions of humanism, I'm not sure.
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I don't know.
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Chris, what are your thoughts?
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Uh, yeah, I mean, I I do think we can't have black humanism that's that's not just imported from Europe.
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I think we get into a little bit of trouble when we assume that humanism can only be defined through one kind of specific European genealogy, right?
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We have traditions of um Buddhist humanism that are secular.
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We have, you know, the Karvaka school in India dating back to the ancient world, right, that expressed humanistic ideas.
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You know, if if we're going to define humanism only as a movement that emerged from particular enlightenment philosophers and uh later secular organizations, then yeah, it it looks Western.
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But if we're interested in humanistic ideas, right?
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Human dignity, ethical responsibility, human uh agency flourishing in this world, skepticism towards uh religious authority, then the landscape becomes a lot broader than that, right?
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One of the arguments I make in the first chapter of Black Freethinkers is that a tradition of secularism and a kind of proto-humanism emerged among enslaved people in the antebellum self that was really independent of the deist movements, of the kind of free thought movements that were going on in um the early 19, early to mid-19th century, right?
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These were individuals who were illiterate, not unintelligent, but illiterate because it was legally it was illegal for them to learn how to read, right?
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That they could get limbs cut off if they were caught uh learning how to read.
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Um, you know, Frederick Douglass writes in his autobiography that he basically had to steal uh literacy, like trick the local white kids into teaching him letters and teaching him the elements of literacy, right?
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So these are people who could not, by virtue of the law, by virtue of being enslaved, they could not engage with enlightenment philosophy.
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They could not read Rousseau or Voltaire or Payne.
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Yet when we read the slave narratives and we read later speeches and writings that they put together, folks like William Wells Brown and Douglas and others, uh, we see some of the same humanistic ideas that we get from the age of reason, uh, for example, right?
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So I do think there is a way that some of these ideas are kind of universal.
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Not that they've always been applied universally by folks controlling humanist institutions, but humanist thought, I think, has some universal elements.
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And so we can see a kind of distinctly black humanist tradition that has emerged separately from Enlightenment philosophy, from deism.
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And thank you for that.
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I think that's a really it it gives us the kind of foundations and the kind of opens up our mind to thinking outside of the box.
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We've been presented with this idea of humanism and what it's supposed to be.
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And so actually including the rest of the world, then we can truly get to the heart of what humanism is supposed to be about.
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And I think that's a really, really good, um, good foundation.
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So just thinking about that.
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So if humanism is supposed to be universal, who has historically then been allowed to define what is human?
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Chris, let me come to you with that.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I I think this is one of the key questions that humanists have to confront, right?
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You know, humanism often speaks with the language of universal human dignity, of universal rights, universal freedom.
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And these ideas sound great, right?
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It's hard not to sort of get get on board with that.
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But of course, we know historically the category of the human has never been um kind of politically or intellectually neutral, right?
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Slavery depended on defining some people as less than human.
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Colonialism did the same thing.
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Scientific racism, uh, you know, phrenology, um, things like that in the 19th century tried to kind of rank humanity.
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Uh, later in the 19th century, with the kind of dividing up of Africa, imperial ideologies divided the civilized from uh the supposedly primitive.
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Gender hierarchies are also built around assumptions that about kind of who possesses reason, autonomy, or moral authority.
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So it's it's not enough for humanists to just say we believe in humanity, right?
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We also have to ask um who historically got excluded from that category and who had the power to define it.
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And this is where Black history is so important, right?
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Black thinkers, black intellectuals, black humanists have repeatedly forced uh Western societies to confront the contradiction between universal ideals and exclusionary practices, right?
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Abolitionists did this in the 19th century, civil rights activists did this in the 20th century, the Black Panther movement um in the UK, right?
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Black feminists, anti-colonial thinkers.
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So all of this gives us a good way of or a useful way of understanding Black humanism.
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I don't think the goal is to reject universalism, but it's really to kind of do what we're doing here.
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It's to interrogate it and also to kind of radicalize it, which means insisting that the promises contained in words like dignity or freedom or humanity actually apply to everyone, right?
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So really kind of articulating a kind of decolonialized humanism.
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Thank you for that.
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Steve, your your your thoughts.
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Yes, in two words uh there, Chris, in your closing statement, um, that was sums it all up.
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That this program, which is necessary and which I believe we're part of, of decolonializing humanism, because yeah, this great escape, which is absolutely necessary and we're all involved in it, still involves interrogating this basic set of notions, or the origins of this basic set of notions, which partially in Europe through the Enlightenment, which on one hand led to the abolition movement, but on the other, it institutes or establishes racial hierarchies and notions of modernity, of progress, what is history, what is a human being.
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And in all of those categories, uh people like ourselves were excluded.
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So moving towards that non-exclusionary or non-exclusionary definitions of human being, particularly nowadays, where we are, and this is just one of my obsessions, we're fast-forwarding to possible, probable transhuman extropiate futures.
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That question of uh what is humanity, what is a person, what is personhood, what are human rights, is top, front and center.
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And we really need to get on top of that yesterday.
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Wow, I think there's a whole other show that can be done just on that topic alone, because that is big.
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And as you say, it is right up there, front and center at the moment, with all that's going on with AI and who's going to control that.
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I always think that when we've got private business controlling those things, they're not interested in humanity.
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They're not interested in the person, they're interested in something else, they're interested in their own ego, they're interested in that kind of idea of look what I can do, and to replace human beings, because when you got, you know, anyway, that's a whole new show.
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So you don't don't get me started on that.
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But just thinking about humanism, and we were there just talking about what is a human being and who gets to define that.
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We're in this space at the moment where, as I said in the intro, we have the rise of the far right, and we're having, we're seeing this idea of who is who is an American, who is a citizen.
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And that all comes down to race.
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And so these big questions are questions that we as humanists should be looking at.
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So, what does racism reveal about the limits of reason?
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Chris.
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So, you know, I I think racism is is one of the clearest uh historical examples of why humanists should be careful about treating reason as though it is automatically liberating, right?
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So there's often this this kind of narrative or idea that superstition produces prejudice, right?
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Reason defeats it.
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Very simplistic, very kind of not complicated at all, but history, of course, is much more messier than that, right?
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Slaveholders made arguments, colonial officials made arguments, scientific racists collected data, eugenesis claimed scientific authority, you know.
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This brings to mind actually a really um a great recent book uh called Black Reason, white feeling by a um a German professor named Hannah Spahn.
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It was recently published, though, uh, with the University of Virginia Press.
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And I did a review of this book.
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And, you know, in American intellectual history, we've often held up figures like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson as a kind of epitome of an American Enlightenment, right?
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The original American philosophers, they traveled to Europe, they imported the European Enlightenment back to the United States.
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But we, if we actually really critically examine their writings, like Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia, for example, he advances a lot of propositions based upon race that that are really at foundation just his feelings about a race, and they aren't based on any sort of scientific data, objective data, anything like that.
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This is just how he feels about black people.
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Whereas when we look at the contemporary, the writings of his contemporaries, Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Prince Hall, David Walker, we can actually see the structure of their arguments and their logic adhering quite a bit more to classical standards of reason and sort of philosophical, like logical analysis, right?
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And that's that's all to say that there's not this kind of one-to-one correlation uh between sort of enlightenment, reason, science, and an attack on prejudice and superstition, right?
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The lesson isn't that we should abandon reason, but that reason needs to be situated within ethics, within history, within empathy and an understanding of power, right?
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So somebody can reason uh very efficiently toward a terrible end um if their assumptions are kind of racist or authoritarian, right?
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So when we're thinking about when we're thinking about an argument, for example, the question isn't just is the argument logical, but it's also kind of what assumptions are built into this argument, right?
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Whose experience is uh being ignored, who benefits, and who is being treated as fully human.
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Yeah.
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What's your response to that?
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Uh yeah, I think this is very important.
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I know the need to question, or more of a challenge, this um almost religious adherence to this idea, notion of the primacy of reason.
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I mean, reason, as uh Chris has outlined, uh, it depends, it becomes it's a tool whose use depends on the biases of um whoever is using or wielding that tool.
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And the examples given just perfectly outline that.
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And this is still a battle that we're fighting because it's very seductive.
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Reason is massively seductive, and you know, you can imagine the almost euphoric feelings that um would have been orgasming during the Enlightenment as people were experiencing this uh freedom from the strictures of the church and um the teachings of um men in frocks, to be crude about it.
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But we need to really take seriously who are uh wielding this tool or even the weapon of reason.
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And it should instruct us as well as we take the battle forward to um mold and shape our own thoughts.
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You know, earlier we were talking about genuine black humanism, and again, we should be guarding against establishing a sort of absolutely exclusionary, non-universalist ideas, which would be very, very easy and tempting to slip into, even just sort of a way of instinctive self-defense, let before we even go into notions of uh bias or unconscious bias, if we can be unconsciously biased.
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So uh, yeah, reason has no primacy, I would say, and it must always be challenged.
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Thank you for that.
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I think sitting here as three black people who are humanists, I want to look into racism just a little bit more.
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And just thinking about humanism.
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I think there's this kind of idea that if you're a humanist, you're automatically not racist.
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Do you know what I mean?
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That we've we've we've we've done all the work, and so therefore there's this idea that we're humanists, we're we're not we're not racist.
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But what should if that is the case, and what is it that humanists should be doing to actually show, prove, be clear about their non-racist thoughts and being more anti-racist, which I don't know if I've seen that in in in quite the same way.
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Steve, let me start with you on that idea of idea of humanists really being anti-racist.
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Did you say can or should?
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Should should but they should shouldn't they how are they they don't seem to be showing that they are anti-racist in quite the same way.
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No, well, I feel and know and see the same.
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And it it's a it's it's it's work for this to you know come to be, because the humanist tradition is still, as um exemplified by its membership, overwhelmingly uh middle to upper middle class uh white, inevitably.
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And there are many people, although they have and will introduce themselves as being anti-racists or non-racist, they are people who are who would have racism or the struggle against racism as something on the periphery.
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It wouldn't necessarily be a part of their lives.
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You know, they've not done the walk for a number of uh obvious reasons.
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So I think, you know, it's a bit this is an argument I think that we should carry initially and lay out the positions for um before we take it anywhere else.
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Because I think it's a bit of um a reach to expect privileged parties, and I think um many humanist organizations and individuals are, to be um instinctively aware of um all of these pathways that we've taken, which would be difficult for them to imagine.
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You know, this is something very, very um away from their experience.
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Yeah, well, uh you know, it's it's interesting because you had a little slip there where you mentioned non-racist, but you meant to say anti-racist.
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And I think that that is really a significant distinction and gets at the heart of probably how most uh humanists throughout American history have identified, right?
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They would have said that they themselves are not personally racist, right?
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Um, and that in that is in part because of their humanism.
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Yet what type of anti-racist work were they doing, right?
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It's not enough to just say that you aren't something.
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If you think that this is an important problem, then it should be something that you're actively opposing and that you're using your very big platform in the case of some of these humanist publications.
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I mean, we're, you know, going back to just the origins of the movement.
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I'm a historian, you know, so I'm always thinking about uh the 19th century.
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Um you got papers like The Boston Investigator, which had an incredibly wide circulation, um, The Truth Seeker, um, which has been continuously published in the United States from 1876 until this day, it's still going a couple issues a year.
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And so these are platforms that reach thousands of people, right?
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Some of these uh humanist speakers in the 19th and 20th century crisscross uh the country giving talks uh about humanism.
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But what were they focusing on?
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They were focusing on the use of the Bible in public schools, right?
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After Darwin, they were focusing on uh evolution versus creationism.
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Um, since the the rise of the culture wars in the United States, they've been focusing on you know things like reproductive rights and and um the the teaching of certain things in in public schools, right?
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Science education, all of that is is well and good, but it's not necessarily going to be the best way to appeal to different different and diverse populations whose lives, um, whose financial livelihoods, whose health is colored uh by racism, whether in the United States, the UK, or the Western world, um more broadly, right?
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So, yeah.
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Yeah.
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Uh just to follow on, Chris.
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So, you know, uh that's the dynamic which you've outlined there is uh reflected and reproduced here as well, um, with the same effects that um an organization um whose membership overtly focuses significantly on issues of um education in school, sorry, of religious education in schools, um, euthanasia, even LGBT rights, women's rights, feminism, its appeal outside to minorities, to visible minorities, will be limited.
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It will be there, but it will be very, very limited.
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And, you know, that demand will always be present.
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You know, what are you doing to highlight and focus it on ideas of racism?
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Does your humanism extend to just exterminating, exorcising, can we say, this demon, can we say, from our midst?
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So um, I believe that's what we should be doing.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And I I do know another one of the questions that we wanted to get to, and I think this is really related, is why organized humanism has sometimes struggled to attract and retain black people.
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So if you want to start talking about that in the UK context, I can follow up with the United States.
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Yeah, well, I I think again, the UK context could be a global African, continental, and African diasporic one as well.
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In as much as the appeal is limited, we have to ask, you know, to whom is humanism uh, you know, uh who is it aimed at?
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And how is it packaged?
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And uh to what degree is humanism actually seen as a threat to um communities of belief?
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And it is a threat, um, unfortunately, especially the way that someone like me is going to be coming at um um communities of belief.
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So all of that has to be modulated, has to be better shaped, the approach has to be improved.
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But it can't retain a strong black cohort, again, going back to the previous question, if it's not really seriously looking at anti-racism.
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And yeah, this whole idea of um the anti-racist struggle being peripheral, that's just not going to take or retain black members in any humanist uh organization or structure.
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Yeah, so Audrey, while you um while you had frozen a bit, we went ahead and asked the question why has organized humanism struggled to attract attain, attract and uh retain black people?
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And you know, there's there's no one explanation for the United States.
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I I do think SI is correct in that the UK experience is probably a kind of global phenomenon when we're looking at humanist um institutions, but specifically in an African-American context, you know, black communities here have developed many, if not most of their strongest institutions through churches.
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Churches were not only religious spaces, they were political spaces, social spaces, educational spaces.
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They were mutual aid institutions, right?
00:26:00.880 --> 00:26:20.319
In early 19th century Boston, when African Americans were prohibited from attending the public schools that they were paying taxes for, the African Baptist Church, founded in 1805, stepped up and provided a function that the government was supposed to provide.
00:26:20.319 --> 00:26:38.960
And Primus Hall, the son of Prince Hall, the founder of the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Primus Hall, Thomas Dalton, and Thomas Paul, the minister, they organized a school for black children in Beacon Hill in Boston to be able to get their education, right?
00:26:38.960 --> 00:26:42.079
Uh in the basement of that African Baptist church.
00:26:42.079 --> 00:26:47.680
And that really provided a model for other Black churches throughout the country, right?
00:26:47.680 --> 00:27:03.519
If if you were um indigeno and you know a close family member passed away and you could not afford to pay for the funeral, the black church would that you attended would often step up and serve that function for you, right?
00:27:03.519 --> 00:27:14.559
So it's not like people were just or only attending these churches because they agreed with the theology, because they thought they they were going to hell if if they didn't, right?
00:27:14.559 --> 00:27:19.200
There were actual real-world uh reasons for attending that mattered.
00:27:19.200 --> 00:27:24.640
So if you left religion, it's not that you're just changing your opinion about God.
00:27:24.640 --> 00:27:28.960
You could be leaving a whole social infrastructure.
00:27:28.960 --> 00:27:36.640
Now, at the same time, many atheist and humanist organizations have been disproportionately white.
00:27:36.640 --> 00:27:46.720
And sometimes they acted as if religious belief or religious disbelief by itself should be enough to create a shared identity.
00:27:46.720 --> 00:27:48.720
And that's just not the case.
00:27:48.720 --> 00:28:05.839
For many black people, race, family, community, culture, politics were often just as, if not more important for their identity as religious uh belief or disbelief, right?
00:28:05.839 --> 00:28:10.559
You know, right now I'm writing a book on African Americans and Unitarian Universalism, right?
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:16.400
A very liberal religion, a religion where, you know, you're actually free to not believe in God.
00:28:16.400 --> 00:28:33.359
One of the interesting things I found about some of the earliest black converts to Unitarian churches, people like the um black uh writer and activist Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, or the first uh black socialist in the United States, uh Peter H.
00:28:33.359 --> 00:28:35.039
Clark out of Cincinnati.
00:28:35.039 --> 00:28:43.359
When they joined Unitarian churches, they still attended their AME churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Churches, right?
00:28:43.359 --> 00:28:54.720
So they they joined the Unitarian church because they had become deists or non-believers or very liberal in their theological ideas, right?
00:28:54.720 --> 00:28:59.119
And so that's where they went for a sort of intellectual sustenance.
00:28:59.119 --> 00:29:05.119
But for everything else, for the politics, for the culture, for the music, right?
00:29:05.119 --> 00:29:08.720
Maybe even for the food, they went to the black church, right?
00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:18.400
They went to the AME church in Cincinnati or Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, which uh Francis Ellen Watkins Harper belonged to, right?
00:29:18.400 --> 00:29:21.119
Then there's also a question of agenda.
00:29:21.119 --> 00:29:44.240
So if I'm a black non-believer and racism is something that I experience as a concrete reality, and again, you walk into these secular or humanist organizations, and they're just concerned with like debating Christians or church-state separation, you have to wonder if that's really reflective and if it's going to speak to your experience.
00:29:44.880 --> 00:29:45.440
Yeah.
00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:47.519
That was really, really interesting.
00:29:47.519 --> 00:29:58.960
As you're speaking, Chris, I was just relating what you were saying to the status, the positioning of the black church, uh, particularly in the UK, which is in a very, very interesting position.
00:29:58.960 --> 00:30:09.599
Because my observation is that generationally, all of those community pillars which you have outlined are fragmenting in terms of being based in the church.
00:30:09.599 --> 00:30:23.359
You just see second generation, third, now fourth, a creeping fifth generation, who are significantly moving away from the black churches in my hometown of Bedford.
00:30:23.359 --> 00:30:30.720
The church, I've got to be careful what I'm saying here, but uh the church, it was a Kojik church, uh, Church of God in Christ.
00:30:30.720 --> 00:30:46.319
And it is has an overwhelmingly elderly membership congregation, and an increasingly a lot of um young men from Central Europe looking for black wives seem to attend as well.
00:30:46.319 --> 00:30:49.359
Seems to be, I've noticed this in other uh black churches.
00:30:49.680 --> 00:30:51.599
Yeah, we need another episode on that.
00:30:51.599 --> 00:30:52.559
Yes.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:56.640
Two more shows coming out of the bit.
00:30:56.960 --> 00:31:11.839
So um uh yeah, long story short, it's I mean, that bond between the black community uh and the church, particularly in a frankly skeptical and pagan, irreverent based culture like the United Kingdom, it's broken.
00:31:11.839 --> 00:31:22.720
And what you do see in terms of um engagement with humanism is a lot of independent and organic work, which is going on outside of humanist organizations.
00:31:22.720 --> 00:31:32.799
Um there's a group of young women, a growing group of young women, they are on Instagram, who organize, you know, black women who've been brought up in the church who are just moving away from it.
00:31:32.799 --> 00:31:34.319
Secular sisters.
00:31:34.319 --> 00:31:36.799
Yeah, secular sisters, that group.
00:31:36.799 --> 00:31:53.359
And you know, there is a whole galaxy of young black people, not just in the United Kingdom, but particularly here and elsewhere, who are taking up or taking up that cudgel and um, you know, challenging the position of uh the black church.
00:31:53.359 --> 00:32:03.680
So I think there in an organic way rather than here in an institutionally organized way will be the way forward.
00:32:04.079 --> 00:32:08.240
Yeah, yeah, we have an interesting thing, uh a kind of similar thing going on in the US.
00:32:08.240 --> 00:32:23.039
Um, so if we're looking at those uh black people who identify as as no particular religion at all, that has increased from roughly 6% in 1990 to about 22% presently.
00:32:23.039 --> 00:32:28.559
So uh almost 400% growth in in those identifying as nuns.
00:32:28.559 --> 00:32:33.279
Now, that of course doesn't mean that they're all atheist or agnostic or or whatnot.
00:32:33.279 --> 00:32:45.440
Some, you know, many still consider themselves religious, spiritual, or or something like that, but they're just not uh attending church like like their parents and and their grandparents used to do.
00:32:45.440 --> 00:32:56.400
So there's there's clearly a kind of vacuum there that humanist institutions can fill if they have the will and the desire to do so.
00:32:56.400 --> 00:33:05.599
And I think increasingly we're we're starting to see some of that in in the United States, especially with the American Humanist Association.
00:33:05.599 --> 00:33:12.240
Um, I was really excited to see their new website, for example, that they just debuted a couple of days ago.
00:33:12.240 --> 00:33:22.319
And uh I was actually consulted about it because they had profiles of 12 historical humanists um on the website.
00:33:22.319 --> 00:33:27.119
Five out of those 12 uh are black humanists, right?
00:33:27.119 --> 00:33:35.599
Um, which is really great to see that they're trying to appeal to a kind of more diverse audience and and bring in other folks.
00:33:35.599 --> 00:33:44.799
This actually um it reminds me of our our just our conversation about kind of reason and logic and and all of this, right?
00:33:44.799 --> 00:34:01.839
For previous directors of that organization of other secular organizations, they might have logically been able to say, well, okay, black people are 1% of humanists in in this country.
00:34:01.839 --> 00:34:06.880
So if we have 12, we should have one black representative, right?
00:34:06.880 --> 00:34:09.280
And that would be seen as logical, right?
00:34:09.280 --> 00:34:12.000
This is proportionate to the population.
00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:14.480
Well, fish stark just threw that out, right?
00:34:14.480 --> 00:34:23.679
And he considered other things, like not just this uh proportionality, but what are we trying to do with this website?
00:34:23.679 --> 00:34:32.480
It doesn't have to be reflective of the numbers right now, it could be reflective of the numbers that we want to see um moving forward.
00:34:32.480 --> 00:34:44.800
So asking this question, kind of what kind of world uh we want to live in, I think, can be this really powerful antidote to the ties between sort of reason and racism that we've historically seen.
00:34:45.519 --> 00:34:46.239
Thank you for that.
00:34:46.239 --> 00:34:48.880
I just, I mean, I'm just sort of moving on from that.
00:34:48.880 --> 00:35:07.119
When you were talking, um, Chris, about the origins of the black church, I was thinking of the Caribbean, and it started very much in the same way, the Baptists, my my grandparents were Baptists, and the Baptists and the Quakers and the Moravians were very big within the Caribbean, setting up schools, setting up hospitals, all of these things.
00:35:07.119 --> 00:35:16.800
So that's how they made inroads because those were the spaces where black people could be, and they got all the support that the wider, you know, world wasn't going to give to them.
00:35:16.800 --> 00:35:22.320
So this is the foundation of why black people are so religious, because that was the place you had to go.
00:35:22.320 --> 00:35:24.159
You needed to be there.
00:35:24.159 --> 00:35:30.719
So I think that sort of answers the question of why black people are are considered to be so religious.
00:35:30.719 --> 00:35:56.719
But then that leads us to the question of does humanism need to take on more of those wider religious aspects to be more uh appealing, to be more incorporating of the wider world or of black people to get them to understand in the same way that religion has has used itself to get grassroots, does humanism need to get more grassroots to be considered?
00:36:00.480 --> 00:36:02.239
I'm greatly uncomfortable about this.
00:36:02.239 --> 00:36:21.440
I think there are several traps which can very easily be fallen into here by uh taking this, you know, almost a homeopathic level acquisition of the you know, aspects of the practices and the forms of um, you know, religious observance.
00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:37.039
Um although I do think that there are some useful, there's some good can come out of it in terms of, for example, personally, I had the benefit of a a non-believing celebrant at a funeral, which is a very, very important point of transition for me.
00:36:37.039 --> 00:36:44.719
So I know that it can serve some good, but it needs to be controlled very, very tightly because where does it end?
00:36:44.719 --> 00:36:48.400
You know, do we end up with active congregations?
00:36:48.400 --> 00:36:51.119
Will there be a hierarchy within these congregations?
00:36:51.119 --> 00:36:53.440
Will there be all sorts of singing?
00:36:53.440 --> 00:36:55.599
And what kind of awful music?
00:36:55.599 --> 00:36:57.840
What's wrong with singing?
00:36:58.079 --> 00:37:01.920
Singing is a communal theme of the orders to you.
00:37:02.480 --> 00:37:04.320
Yeah, I'll give the example of hymns.
00:37:04.320 --> 00:37:05.599
I mean, who is organizing this?
00:37:05.599 --> 00:37:12.480
Who's gonna be the who will be the music masters here for those in Peril on the sea and music of that order?
00:37:12.480 --> 00:37:15.280
That's an offense to art.
00:37:15.280 --> 00:37:36.639
But anyway, seriously though, uh how much of the those that framework can be sustained until the essential, the more essential and I think toxic elements of faith and belief, particularly with um established regularly meeting assemblies, um, will surface.
00:37:36.639 --> 00:37:38.800
I'm just very, very uncomfortable.
00:37:38.800 --> 00:37:43.280
It needs some it's something that needs to be contained and control.
00:37:43.280 --> 00:37:53.039
And the also the idea of that being a doorway to greet towards greeting expanded black uh membership and audiences.
00:37:53.039 --> 00:37:55.760
Again, I'm not comfortable with that.
00:37:55.760 --> 00:37:57.519
Why do we need this?
00:37:58.480 --> 00:38:00.239
Chris, your response.
00:38:00.239 --> 00:38:02.719
Yeah, yeah, I I would disagree with that.
00:38:02.719 --> 00:38:11.519
I think this is one area where some secular organizations have have just been too a little too reluctant to learn from religion.
00:38:11.519 --> 00:38:20.800
So religious communities often understand something very important about human beings, namely that we need belonging.
00:38:20.800 --> 00:38:25.440
We need rituals, we need spaces where we are known.
00:38:25.440 --> 00:38:35.119
People need ways to, you know, as you noted, Mark, births, deaths, marriages, losses, major points of transitions.
00:38:35.119 --> 00:38:43.519
And we also need institutions that show up when we're sick, when we're grieving, lonely, or struggling.
00:38:43.519 --> 00:38:53.360
And I think there's a way that that humanist organizations and even humanist congregations can do this without theology, right?
00:38:53.360 --> 00:38:58.880
So, you know, the Sunday Assembly kind of took off in the UK, is spread to the US.
00:38:58.880 --> 00:39:01.840
We've had some other similar organizations here.
00:39:01.840 --> 00:39:07.280
I've actually given a couple of talks at a group called the Houston Oasis.
00:39:07.280 --> 00:39:11.599
And really the only way to describe this is it's a secular church.
00:39:11.599 --> 00:39:24.239
Like everything about it is like church, except there's a professor like me who comes in to give the sermon, as opposed to a minister talking about how you need to live your life, right?
00:39:24.239 --> 00:39:37.280
Like their sermon is a lecture on history or philosophy or even somebody talking about really interesting travels and kind of what they learned about humanity from that, right?
00:39:37.280 --> 00:39:45.039
And they're a lot shorter to, yes, they sing songs, but they're they're not hymns, they're they're just regular songs.
00:39:45.039 --> 00:39:49.679
We've even got uh what is I forget the name of it.
00:39:49.679 --> 00:40:00.480
I think it's our free thought gospel choir, or not gospel, but we have we have a some sort of free thought choir that the Freedom from Religion Foundation uh runs.
00:40:00.480 --> 00:40:03.519
Dan Barker is part of it.
00:40:03.519 --> 00:40:08.079
Uh Mandisa Thomas uh sings, sings in it.
00:40:08.079 --> 00:40:14.480
We've got a couple of very prominent Black humanists and free thinkers who are part of this.
00:40:14.480 --> 00:40:31.599
I mean, they're not singing anything religious, they're they're singing uh either regular songs or they're singing like Dan Barker has created like some secular songs that that are you know highlighting uh reason and science and and humanism.
00:40:31.599 --> 00:40:36.880
So so these are just ways of expressing our kind of shared values.
00:40:36.880 --> 00:40:40.559
They're they're ways for us to to learn from each other.
00:40:40.559 --> 00:40:46.800
Um they they provide ways to to kind of be in in community with each other too.
00:40:46.800 --> 00:40:52.880
You know, that this also reminds me of some of the discussions from the World Humanist Congress.
00:40:52.880 --> 00:40:59.760
And I was uh really honored to serve as ABH's delegate to that Congress.
00:40:59.760 --> 00:41:09.360
And Fish Stark from the American Humanist Association made a point that, you know, humanists can't just be opposing Christian nationalism.
00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:17.920
We need to be the opposite of it by serving people and and by kind of creating spaces of belonging.
00:41:17.920 --> 00:41:32.079
So that's some of the way where we can learn from religious institutions without replicating the sort of authoritarian ideologies or needing to believe in their theologies, right?
00:41:32.079 --> 00:41:35.760
How do they go about building communities with people?
00:41:35.760 --> 00:41:38.880
How do they serve their communities?
00:41:38.880 --> 00:41:43.920
What are the functions that humanist institutions can take on from churches?
00:41:43.920 --> 00:41:56.559
Um, even before Fish Stark said this at the Congress, I mean, um Sakivu Hutchinson wrote about this, I think, 14, 15 years ago in her book Moral Combat, right?
00:41:56.559 --> 00:42:13.360
She's talking about the heavily religious context of Los Angeles and how you see a church on every corner, and that if humanist institutions and secular institutions want to be relevant in a place like Los Angeles, they need to engage in some of the same functions, right?
00:42:13.360 --> 00:42:24.239
They need to be doing prisoner re-entry programs, they need to be matching people up with jobs, they need to be helping people find uh free clinics, right?
00:42:24.239 --> 00:42:28.400
Taking on some of these social services to be relevant.
00:42:28.800 --> 00:42:29.119
Yeah.
00:42:29.119 --> 00:42:31.679
Yeah, I sorry, I just have to jump in if I can.
00:42:31.679 --> 00:42:37.920
Yeah, so I mean, I I I like uh what you said in your closing statements again, Chris, about work in the world.
00:42:37.920 --> 00:42:39.199
That makes sense.
00:42:39.199 --> 00:42:50.400
But I'm still suspicious about that sort of weaponization of these elements of joy, which they're not subject to interrogation.
00:42:50.400 --> 00:43:07.039
I just think this should be subject to interrogation because um I just have a terror, uh a holy terror, of any sort of edging towards uh you know, back towards behaviors in uh faith systems and assemblies of belief.
00:43:07.039 --> 00:43:12.000
But yes, I do like the notion of work in the world being central to all of this.
00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:14.639
And I'm still also skeptical about the hymns.
00:43:14.639 --> 00:43:17.679
I'm going to be listening to this, your Dan Baker.
00:43:18.239 --> 00:43:19.199
Godless Gospel.
00:43:19.199 --> 00:43:20.400
Godless Gospel, that's the name.
00:43:20.400 --> 00:43:21.199
Godless Gospel.
00:43:22.239 --> 00:43:23.440
I'll bring my tambourine.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:24.079
Yeah.
00:43:24.320 --> 00:43:26.000
Oh, this sounds wonderful.
00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:32.800
If everyone who's listening, if they could see Steve's face when this was talking about the music, it was great.
00:43:32.800 --> 00:43:40.000
I want to thank you both as we come to an end to this really fascinating and important conversation that we've had today.
00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:42.400
I think it's one that we need to continue having.
00:43:42.400 --> 00:43:44.800
So I may be calling on you guys again.
00:43:44.800 --> 00:43:47.199
Um, and we need to think about how we expand that.
00:43:47.199 --> 00:43:54.079
And this idea of being, you know, grassroots of being in every community is one that we ABH have had for a long time.
00:43:54.079 --> 00:43:56.239
But just the three of us, it's been really hard.
00:43:56.239 --> 00:44:01.440
So we may be needing to tap into other resources, but it's a very important one.
00:44:01.440 --> 00:44:10.000
So to conclude, I want to thank you both as my guest today for your insights and your knowledge on this topic.
00:44:10.000 --> 00:44:14.960
We're grateful here at Secular Sankofa to discuss this important topic.
00:44:14.960 --> 00:44:22.719
I'm gonna ask Chris and Steve to put anything that they're doing at the moment to leave some links so that we can put them in.
00:44:22.719 --> 00:44:27.119
Chris, I know that you're co-founder of Black Humanist Studies Association.
00:44:27.119 --> 00:44:30.400
We will put those links in the bios for you.
00:44:30.400 --> 00:44:32.320
Thank you for listening.
00:44:32.320 --> 00:44:34.800
Thank you for being part of today's show.
00:44:35.519 --> 00:44:36.880
Thank you again for having me.
00:44:36.880 --> 00:44:37.440
Thank you.
00:44:37.440 --> 00:44:38.400
All of us.
00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:38.960
Good.
00:44:39.199 --> 00:44:45.599
And as we close, if you've enjoyed today's episode, please do follow us, um, Association of Black Humanists.
00:44:45.599 --> 00:44:49.199
Tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell everyone about us.
00:44:49.199 --> 00:44:54.639
Or you can follow us on Meetup and we're on Facebook on all the usual platforms.
00:44:54.639 --> 00:44:57.360
Um, this has been Secular Sangkofa.
00:44:57.360 --> 00:45:04.159
Until the next time, speak boldly, think freely, and live consciously.