What is a Humanist?

A long answer to a short question

Greetings, readers old and new! Some of you have found me in the past week thanks to my interview with John Anderson, just out. Special welcome to anyone who’s decided to take a chance on a paid subscription. It’s much appreciated, and I hope today’s exclusive post helps you to feel like your money has been well invested.

At the beginning of our interview, John asked me a question I’ve gotten before: Why do you call yourself a humanist? When John thought “humanist,” he associated it with “atheist,” people like Richard Dawkins and friends. So why did I claim the title? There were many different ways I could have answered that, but in a nutshell, I said that the business of Christianity is really the business of stealing humanism back. I also pointed to the work of thinkers like Viktor Frankl, who was Jewish but didn’t explicitly ground his humanistic project in theism. However, God inescapably lurked in the background and gave the work its depth. I didn’t have time to say more, but the question is so interesting that I think it’s worth taking up at some length here, contextualized with more references to various ideological friends and enemies. But first, I’ll tell a funny story.

Back in February, just after recording this talk with John in London, I attended the ARC conference in London (and brought back a report in several parts). I had a great time, and I came stocked with fresh business cards thanks to a local friend. They included the tag for this Substack, “Notes from a Christian humanist.” After the conference, I handed one to Andy Ngo, a young atheist journalist known for taking on far-left bullies. He glanced at the card, saw the tag, and said “Humanist? But aren’t humanists super woke?” Like Anderson, he was confused, although his confusion had a slightly different source. Where Anderson’s mind went back to New Atheists, Ngo was thinking of the sort of “humanists” who took away even Richard Dawkins’ humanist card. People tracing the rise and fall of popular atheism have called this tribe “Atheism+.”

When I told my mom this story, she was very amused and made an unlikely comparison: Years ago, when my dad was finishing his philosophy degree at U of Scranton, one of his professors gave him the glowing recommendation that he was going to be “a true humanist scholar.” The Jesuits who ran the school’s liberal arts program prided themselves on their devotion to the “eloquentia perfecta,” the joining of rhetorical skill with wisdom and broad knowledge. That ideal was still there even as the postmodernist rot set in. (God knows what the place is like now.) By “humanist,” the professor certainly didn’t mean anything in tension with Christianity—to the contrary—only that Dad was going to carry on the grand tradition of devoting himself to the best that had been thought and known.

However, this confused my dad’s saintly fundamentalist Baptist mother. She was pleased and proud to read the recommendation but gently said she thought the professor was “wrong about your being a humanist.” Mom reflected that Andy Ngo couldn’t possibly be more different from my dear grandmother, yet the idea of a humanist who was neither aggressively secular nor “woke” (not that “woke” was as much of a thing in my dad’s time) left them both at a loss.

Out of curiosity, Mom pulled her big 1968 Oxford English Dictionary off the shelf and looked up its definition of the word: “Devotion to those studies which promote human culture; literary culture, especially the system of the humanists.” This usage goes back to 1832. Another edition defines “the system of the humanists” as “the study of the Roman and Greek classics which came into vogue at the Renascence [Renaissance].” Mom’s shorter OED adds that the term is “applied to later disciples of the same culture.” It then appends a very interesting quote from the 19th-century skeptical writer Matthew Arnold, about the great John Milton: “Milton was born a humanist, but the Puritan temper mastered him.” It’s debatable whether that’s actually true, but the quote fascinatingly brings out the idea of a tension between humanism and at least one particular strain of Christianity—the same strain that inspired some foolish people to superglue together the “pagan myth” pages of an old stargazing book on our shelf.

Maybe Dawkins would like to think of himself as a humanist in the mold of Matthew Arnold. But Andy Ngo isn’t wrong that the idea has been hijacked beyond even that connotation. One of those hijackers, a secular humanist university chaplain named James Croft, has been having an ongoing debate with an evangelist friend of mine, Glen Scrivener. (Watch their original debate here, then followups by Glen here and James here.) By chance, I myself have debated James before, back when Justin Brierley was still hosting the Unbelievable program. James still pops up every so often to fuss about what Justin’s doing lately, and it’s always amusing to see what his latest spin is. (I was vaguely aware that he was blogging about me at some point after hearing me on Justin’s new podcast, under the belief that I was some far-right Christian nationalist something-something.) Anyway, Glen and I are working in roughly the same spaces, and like me, he’s more than happy to identify as a Christian humanist. Both he and James are very clear debaters and thus make good contemporary avatars of Christian and secular humanism, respectively. So I’ll use some of their points and counterpoints to frame an expansion of my personal definition of humanism in this context: the recognition of mankind’s intrinsic value.

Glen’s challenge to the secular humanist is two-fold: 1) Christianity is “the air we breathe” as Westerners, Christian or not, and 2) Christianity is the true humanism. I agree on both counts, although the debate seemed to oscillate between the two ideas when it might have been helpful to tease them apart more explicitly, because they aren’t the same claim. One is a sociohistorical claim, the other philosophical. The philosophical is the one I’m most interested in discussing here.

It’s important to note two distinctions upfront—between epistemology and ontology, and between metaphysics and religion. I want to point readers to a helpful essay by my mom on human exceptionalism in the public square, which makes these distinctions very clear. This piece will nick some of her points as I go.

A major point my mom hammers home in that essay is that we shouldn’t make natural law hard. We can actually know—in the sense of having a true, justified belief—that man is exceptional whether or not we accept the truth claims of Christianity. (As we’ll see, Glen and James importantly disagree on whether humanism equals human exceptionalism, but I’m with Glen that it should.) So, rhetorically, I am never in a particular rush to pin non-Christians down and make them “tap out” by admitting they have no rational justification for their humanism, because I don’t actually think that’s true. I reject the “presuppositionalist” Christian approach, whose proponents make an annoying habit of constantly shouting “BY WHAT STANDARD?” over people. Glen certainly isn’t that sort of presuppositionalist, though perhaps he might identify as the winsome sort who doesn’t shout at people.

In response to Glen, James mounts three objections—an objection from pre-Christian sources, an objection from anti-Christian sources, and an objection from non-Christian sources. Let’s take them on one by one.