Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

The transformation of the Roman Empire from the classical period to a Christian society has been well studied. One estimate is that ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian by AD 300, although what it meant to be a Christian at this date is impossible to ascertain. The communities were scattered and each had a different relationship with sacred texts and Judaism, while their understandings of Jesus Christ were diverse.

An unexpected turning point came in 312-13 when the emperor Constantine used state authority to privilege his own understanding of Christianity above others (this was at a time when the majority of his subjects still followed traditional beliefs). At a council held at Nicaea in 325, there was the first formulation of a creed (a preliminary version of the Nicene Creed), although it was only in the reign of Theodosius (ruled 379-395) that Christianity became the state religion based on a Trinitarian doctrine in which Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God were seen as one. In 380, Theodosius declared that those of other Christian beliefs were ‘demented and insane’ heretics. This was what the historian Peter Heather calls ‘the Romanization of Christianity’ and it made Christianity an authoritarian religion entwined with the authoritarian Roman state. Yet recent scholarship has confirmed the weakness of the state in enforcing compliance. It was all very well issuing fearsome imperial decrees but ‘pagan’ and ‘heretical’ cults survived for decades. Recent works by Heather (Christendom, 2022) and Edward Watts (The Final Pagan Generation, 2015) chart the transformation.

After AD 380, a hierarchy of orthodox bishops attempted to enforce a canon of texts and doctrines such as the Trinity. Independent reasoning waned as the structure of Christian authority gradually emerged. In this sense, there was a true Closing of the Western Mind (the title of my study, published in 2002), though Christian theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose, the formidable bishop of Milan, still drew on ‘pagan’ texts for support. Basil of Caesarea went so far in the 360s as to argue that ‘young men’ should master these texts before embarking on biblical studies. Platonism, rather than being suppressed, provided the intellectual backbone of theology. Christians adopted Plato’s Timaeus with its ‘craftsman god’.

The spread of Christianity through Europe was a complex process, with some Christianities infiltrating peacefully (Ireland) and others succeeding by violent coercion (Saxony at the hands of Charlemagne). The late Valerie Flint in her The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991) showed how Christianity was forced to compromise with traditional pre-Christian customs to become embedded. It might not have been until 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, that Christian uniformity was fully imposed on Europe.

In The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), Catherine Nixey provides a vivid and passionate narrative of this transformation. She has little time for the political transformation from above—there is hardly a mention of Theodosius, who imposed the Trinity and completed the ‘Romanization of Christianity’. She bypasses the links between traditional Roman authority and the coming of the new religion.

Instead, her Christians appear to come from nowhere, like some fanatical sect emerging from across the Steppes. (Chapter One is aptly titled ‘The Invisible Army’.)  These Christians are tormented by demons. They destroy statues, burn books, and dismantle temples. Nixey highlights the minority of those dedicated to this destruction. ‘Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers’.  Monks were ‘vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent’. In Chapters Fourteen to Fifteen, Nixey portrays the joyless and aggressive behaviour of monks as if they all shared a commitment to overthrow the classical world. There are several passages in which Saint Martin of Tours burns ‘pagan’ shrines. In contrast, the influential Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) gets no acknowledgement for his advice to sprinkle holy water on ‘pagan’ shrines and reuse them.

In true journalistic style, Nixey dwells emotively on the destruction of ‘paganism’, muddling Latin and Greek Christianities and pre-and post-Constantinian Christianity. (There are very few dates she provides to establish any context, but her examples range from the second to the sixth centuries and across a variety of Christianities.) She assumes that the empire with its longstanding traditions and structures of authority was fragile, so that, by the sixth century, ‘an entire religious system [‘paganism’] had been all but wiped from the face of the earth’. Violence was part of everyday life in the late empire, so the activities of the more obsessive Christians have to be seen within that context. Papyrus scrolls are vulnerable to dampness and fire but the loss of classical literature is attributed by Nixey largely to the Church: ‘What ensured the near total destruction of all [sic] Latin and Greek literature was a combination of ignorance, fear and idiocy.’  Nixey assumes the Christian destruction of the library at Alexandria, even though it is probably mythical.

Recent scholars of late antiquity have been disturbed by Nixey’s polemic. Yet The Darkening Age has also received rave reviews from those who enjoy feisty dissent from conventional views. The book is seen as challenging a still-rosy picture of Christianity spreading peacefully throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and some reviewers have drawn comparisons between Nixey’s Christians and religious fanatics of the twenty-first century. Yet, other than Julian, emperor for a short time (361-63), all emperors after Constantine were professed Christians and upheld Roman authority. As the works of Peter Brown have shown, a much more nuanced narrative of the narrowing of Western thought is possible.

To be sure, there were dour ascetics among the Christians, but others enjoyed married life and employed slaves. Fifth-century aristocrats such as Sidonius Apollinaris, later to be bishop of Clermont, decried the loss of Latin learning. There is very little of this in Nixey’s narrative and there is no distinctive treatment of the very different fate of the Greek East. I know many of the texts she quotes, and I used some of them in my The Closing of the Western Mind, but they ignore the gradual process by which most of the subjects of the empire accepted Christianity.

Emboldened by her success, Nixey has now written Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. This book is primarily an analysis of early tales about Jesus. As in The Darkening Age, Nixey too often assumes that she is breaking new ground, but I have a score of books on my shelves (notably those by Bart Ehrman) which contain similar, if less polemical, analyses.  (And, to give her credit, she does mention William Hone, who, in the nineteenth century, discovered many of the apocryphal gospels.) Despite her wide reading, Nixey has again failed to realise how Christianity was integrated within the Roman state. There is not a mention of Theodosius, who finalised and imposed the doctrine of the Trinity in 381 and attempted to ban ‘pagan’ practices in the 390s. Chapter Twelve, ‘On Laws’, discusses the late (438) Theodosian Code, a compilation of imperial laws since the reign of  Constantine over a hundred years earlier, but the relevance of this to her argument is unclear.

Without the impositions of emperors and the privileges it brought, Christianity was unlikely to have become as dominant as it did. Through councils over which they presided, the emperors brought order, and thus orthodoxy, to the religion. In fact, there were some previous attempts to consolidate the sacred texts, as in Irenaeus’ influential Adversus Haereses of c. 180 (which is mentioned by Nixey), which highlighted the four gospels as canonical, primarily because they were so early.  One cannot have it both ways. If Heresy is about the sheer variety of tales about Jesus and other ‘holy men’, one cannot complain about attempts to define which of these tales were orthodox and which were not. Nixey quotes Celsus’ second-century attacks on Christianity but she never mentions that these quotes are reproduced by the brilliant biblical scholar Origen, who also responds to many of them.

Nixey has a knack for evoking atmospheres and Heresy is full of lively images. She writes very well and many readers will enjoy her book. Heresy is more nuanced than The Darkening Age: there is a greater awareness of alternative views and she draws on more varied sources. However, this makes the book unstructured. Each chapter deals with a different theme. Rome, and Roman authors, are often described but there is little attempt to distinguish between the Greek world (of the New Testament texts) and the Latin West, where definitive translations of the scriptures had to wait until Jerome’s Vulgate in the fourth century. In Chapter Eight, ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, there is a well-written discussion of travel in the Roman Empire but, other than linking this diversion to the travels of Paul, it does not make any contribution to the argument. Chapter Nine, ‘Go into the World’, continues the theme with travel to the East. There are other diversions, too, for example with the historian and philosopher Plutarch’s account of the afterlife of Thespesius and the discovery by George Smith in the nineteenth century of part of The Epic of Gilgamesh in the cuneiform tablets he was deciphering. It often feels as if Nixey has exhausted her main theme and is resorting to padding.

In the final chapters of Heresy, Nixey returns to the main themes of The Darkening Age: Christians extirpating ‘paganism’ and committing violence between themselves. Her books are more journalistic than scholarly. They will appeal to those who have suffered an unhappy experience with Christianity but they risk being historically unbalanced, and even misleading. There were extremists who took delight in attacking the symbols of traditional Roman and Greek religion, but most conversions happened gradually and there were compromises with traditional values in which Christianity made little difference to social life—even to the continuing ownership of slaves (as Nixey acknowledges).

I felt that Heresy, in particular, failed to establish a coherent argument. If Jesus made an impact within the Greek world, it is not surprising that many sources elaborated on the legends that had accumulated around him. It was right that Irenaeus sought to establish orthodoxy from the earliest gospel texts, for Christianity would never have survived if it had not brought order to its theology—even if, to this writer at least, it also brought a closing of the Western mind. It is just that this narrowing was a much subtler process than Nixey would have it.

Related reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The post How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

Thank you American Atheists for the opportunity to address this convention, my first time doing so and hopefully not the last. I speak here not in my capacity as a board member of Humanists International but as a concerned atheist committed to seeing the flourishing of freethought around the globe. I speak here as a fellow human being determined to slowly undo whatever obstructs the free exercise of reason, the rights and liberties of non-believers, and the realization of a more secular world.

When I founded the Humanist Association of Nigeria in the 1990s, American Atheists was among the organisations that I contacted. Most of what I read about atheism and freethought mainly concerned what organisations like yours were doing: promoting the separation of church and state and equal rights for believers and non-believers. For many years I corresponded with the leaders of American Atheists and I received your magazines and read about your activities, including the challenges you faced trying to grow and organise atheism here in the US.

So make no mistake about it: what you do here in America, here at the American Atheists, inspires many people across the globe, including atheists who live in places like Sudan, Malaysia and, Egypt where atheism and humanism dare not mention their name.

While we may be continents apart, our destinies are shared. Christian nationalism is not only a threat to democracy and human rights here in the US but also in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. Many African countries face additional threats from traditional religious superstitions, Islamic nationalism, and separatism. That is why atheists need to rethink and reenvision how they organise around the globe, bearing in that atheism is not American. Humanism is not Western. The exercise of freethought is universal. The yearning for freedom without favour and equality without exception is global.

The world is undergoing rapid change. And as the world is changing, so must the way atheism is organised. The world has become more interconnected than at any other time in history. And as the world interconnects, so must the way we build freethought communities. Today more than ever, we must commit to promoting atheism without borders and secularism beyond borders.

As you are aware, two years from now, American Atheists will be hosting the World Humanist Congress. This international event brings together atheists, humanists, rationalists, secularists and, other non-religious persons from different parts of the world. The Congress provides an opportunity for non-theistic people to meet, socialise, discuss, and debate issues of common interest and concern. I am looking forward to that event and I believe that you are looking forward to it, too. As we convene here and warm up to congregate in Washington, D.C. in two years, let me share my hopes for the future and my thoughts on and visions for a new direction for the atheist and humanist movement.

When our forebears met in 1952 and founded the International Humanist and Ethical Union, now Humanists International, they knew that the values of church/mosque-state separation, the civil liberties of non-theists, and the freedom of religion and from religion would only grow and flourish on Earth if the non-religious constituency connected and networked beyond national borders. They knew that for atheism and humanism to flourish in their fullness, their outlook must be global and become transnationally effective. They knew that in the face of global inequalities, resources must be shared. They knew that freethinkers must be creative and innovative in organising. They knew that atheists must cooperate for their shared vision of shared prosperity to be realised.

But seven decades and two years after that meeting, the atheist/humanist movement has largely been consigned to one part of the world, the West, while religion rages with force and ferocity across the globe. Non-theism has not become a transnational effective alternative to dogmatic religion and supernaturalism as envisaged by our founders. And one of the regions where the atheist/humanist movement has fallen short of its promises is my continent, Africa.

Religion persists in Africa, not because Africans are hardwired to be religious, not because Africans are notoriously religious. No, not at all. Religion persists not because there is something uniquely fulfilling in the Christian or Islamic faith. Religion is widespread in Africa because an effective alternative to these religions is missing; because the atheist and humanist movement has failed to organise and address the needs of the non-religious constituency in the region.

Faiths that Western and Eastern religious imperialists introduced to much of Africa centuries ago still have the adherence of the majority of the population because the atheist and humanist movement has been unable to match the power, influence, and funding of the Euro-American evangelicals and their Arab, Middle Eastern Islamic counterparts. Based on my experiences over the years, I am offering a pact for a global rebirth of the atheist/humanist movement. This pact provides a pathway to a better and more exciting future, allowing us to use what is right with our organisation to fix what is wrong with the movement. It is based on the ideas that we can do more and we can do better, that we are in this together, and that no matter how we choose to describe or identify as non-religious, we are one family and one community. 

The statistics say that the non-religious constituency is nonexistent in most African countries. Why? Because in these places, blasphemy and apostasy laws exist and force millions of atheists and humanists to live in closets and pretend to be religious. Millions cannot express their non-belief in the Christian or Islamic god due to fear of being attacked, persecuted, imprisoned, or even murdered with impunity. I offer you a pact that will help us confront this disturbing trend and ensure that the next 70 years of atheism will not be like the last. This pact, which enables the connection and representation of the known and the unknown atheists, the visible and the invisible atheists, and the recognised and the forgotten members of the global atheist/humanist community, rests on four pillars: education, leadership, cooperation, and community, 

The atheist/humanist movement values education and has in its ranks distinguished scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals. Unfortunately, the educational facility has been underutilised. Those who are non-religious or are indifferent to religion seek knowledge and nourishment for an ethical and responsible life. We must commit to delivering an effective educational program that satisfies this need.

For too long we have operated on the assumption that those who come on board and join the movement know enough and understand enough about who we are, how to be, and how to belong locally and internationally. This way of operating has yielded limited results. It has not worked for the movement in Africa and the global south. It has not made us internationally effective. We can no longer continue to operate on the assumption that everyone is educated or knowledgeable enough to be and to belong. Joining the movement should include a process of education about the movement, including information about what we do, how we live, where we live, the challenges we face in various places, and how we are grappling with these challenges beyond the concerns and interests of our local groups. We need to put in place mechanisms for continuous international education and reeducation.

Part of education entails doing away with those crude stereotypes of people from other races and regions, abandoning those prejudices and misrepresentations that have hampered our ability to galvanise energies, seize opportunities, and organise atheists and humanists in other parts of the world. At the moment, we know very little about ourselves and others, and because we know very little, we are less involved and less engaged. So we have to commit to establishing and strengthening departments that address local and international educational needs.

This pact also urges the atheist movement to invest in leadership training programs because there are many problems around the world today that, to be solved, require the kind of leadership that humanists, atheists, and secularists can provide. We can no longer continue to operate as a global organisation and community without having in place resources to train our future leaders. We need to establish and run faculties that train and graduate spokespersons and representatives every year. The atheist and humanist movement needs an international program that equips aspiring leaders with communication, conflict resolution, team building, and problem-solving skills, as well as other competencies that they need to be effective representatives. The issues that atheists face in the world today are complex and sometimes life-threatening. They require expertise and the atheist movement cannot continue to rely on ad-hoc, self-appointed, and self-taught leaders to handle these issues.

For too long, we have operated on the assumption that anyone who says ‘I am a humanist leader’ is a humanist leader. In many cases, an email or postal correspondence makes one a leader to be entrusted with local and international roles and responsibilities. We need to review this approach and put in place mechanisms that will attract our best and brightest to lead. Unfortunately, what we have at the moment is not working. In Africa, most young people are unemployed or underemployed. They are looking for paid employment, not volunteer jobs and opportunities. Most young people cannot volunteer. It is the same with the elderly. Most of them retire into poverty and bankruptcy. Tired and demoralised, they cannot offer free services. So we cannot sustainably grow based on ad-hoc leadership and volunteerism. 

We need a strategy to incentivise leadership that aligns with the needs and realities in Africa and the global south. We need a training institute where aspiring leaders from different parts of the world can come together, learn together, and train together. This leadership school will deliver its programs online, offline, or in a hybrid form. Part of this leadership mechanism includes mobilising resources to sponsor, support, and manage aspiring leaders. I am working with Kevin Jagoe and the education department of the American Humanist Association to put together an international leadership course that meets the needs of our time. And today I urge you to support this initiative and help give the atheist movement the leadership that it deserves.

There is very little cooperation in the humanist/atheist movement. And it hurts. As a global minority, atheists must collaborate to maximise their limited resources, grow, and become a force to be reckoned with. If we understand each other and have programs where our leaders learn and train together, then we can work together more efficiently. Our organisations can more effectively collaborate. There is very little cooperation in the global atheist movement because there is limited understanding. Because we know very little about one another, we do very little with one another. Because there is little cooperation, the global atheist/humanist movement has yet to live up to its full potential.

Because we know very little about ourselves—about our needs, intentions, and aspirations—and because we sometimes rely on prejudices and stereotypes to relate to one another, we trust very little and we care very little. And with a low level of trust, a robust community cannot be formed. The challenges that atheists and humanists face in other parts of the world seem very distant and are designated as ‘their’ challenges, not ‘ours’. But if we learn to see the problems of other atheists as our problems, their risks and dangers as the risks we all face, then their progress becomes our progress. If we learn to treat each other with love and respect rather than contempt and condescension, we will forge a sense of solidarity that will be the envy of the world.

25 years ago I travelled for my first World Humanist Congress in India. Since then, I have been to many countries in Europe and Asia, and I have been to Australia and New Zealand. I have been to over 15 states here in the US. I did not go to these places because I wanted to go on a holiday. I did not go to these countries because I wanted to use the opportunity to migrate or seek asylum. I travelled to these places because I was driven by a burning desire to understand, connect, and collaborate with people of like minds. I travelled to these places to forge communities of reason, compassion, and critical thinking. That yearning persists as I speak here. That desire burns in the hearts and minds of other atheists and humanists that I have met in the past 28 years, including those in countries where the statistics claim that there are very low percentages of non-believers.

This century beckons on the atheist movement to respond to the yearnings and aspirations of freethinkers and secularists across the world with a renewed sense of hope, vision, and commitment. Let us be that generation that worked and connected atheists in ways that had never before been the case. Let us be that generation that forged a sense of solidarity too often missing, too often ignored, but so much cherished. Based on a commitment to all and responsibility from all, let us work to fulfil that need to belong and to be loved that lurks in the hearts and minds of non-theists across the globe.

There are risks and dangers associated with atheism. It is in addressing these risks that the atheist movement has grown. The risks that atheists face in places like Sudan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia are not dangers that we should flee from but threats that we must confront and face down. They are opportunities that we must seize, to test the power of our ideals and values. Let us answer this call to duty, rally our energies, and realise a more effective global atheist movement. Let us overcome the complacency that has limited the growth and development of freethought and stop making excuses. This is our chance. Our moment is now. Let us provide leadership and forge a sense of fellowship and community that befits an outlook which finds its plenitude in this one life that we have. 

Atheism in the 20th century was judged based on the progress that freethought and secularism made in the West. In this century, it is different and it will be different. Atheism and freethought will be judged based on the progress we make in places like Africa, Papua New Guinea, Bahrain, and the rest of the global south. And this progress can only be realized if atheists do more and do better. And we will!

Further reading on freethought in Nigeria

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death, by Emma Park

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed? by Leo Igwe

Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’, by Hank Pellissier

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

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