INTRODUCTION: The Stone Cold Here and Now
* * *
In my own work, I write not only what I want to read—
understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no
one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it
to my satisfaction—I write all the things
I should have been able to read.
—Alice Walker, “Saving the Life That Is Your Own:
The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” 1976
Feminism and atheism are dirty words that Americans across the
political spectrum love to hate and debate. Throw them into a blender
and you have a toxic brew that defies decency, respectability, and
Americana. Trot them out in debates about abortion or LGBTQI rights
and you can unite white conservative evangelicals and Black “Hoteps”
(Black folks who subscribe to a narrow version of Afrocentrism) in a
sneering, strange-bedfellows lovefest.
I came to feminism as a “baby” atheist growing up in South Los
Angeles. My first pangs of unapologetic godlessness were in Catholic
school. Sitting in dreary religion classes run by sanctimonious white
male teachers made me despise the Bible, its moral hypocrisies, and its
violent woman-hating language. It was inane to me that a centuries old
“good book” could dictate that I remain silent, bow down to
patriarchs, step back as chattel, and view my body as an impure vessel
of original sin redeemable only through self-sacrifice and submission o a male deity. It was madness that these atrocities could be justified
by the unquestioned moral righteousness of a Christian tradition
that condoned slavery, rape, and homophobia. The “beauty” and
majesty of the good book, and the omnipotent god at the cosmic
switch of the universe, were a patent lie in the face of all the suffering
and inequality I saw right in front of me. So, while some were able
to compartmentalize these fascistic tenets, cherry pick the good stuff
ad nauseum, and divorce the bad stuff from “God,” I decided that it
didn’t make sense to give the Bible—nor any so-called holy book that
gave supernatural beings dominion over “mere” earthlings—a pass.
Why not cut out the theological claptrap and chuck gods altogether?
Why not concede that the crazy quilt of theistic belief systems, creeds,
and dogmas that sprawl across cultures and nations was a far greater
testament to human artfulness than godly omniscience? As a twelveyear-
old, accustomed to hearing about how that conniving temptress
Eve screwed up folks’ residence in the Garden of Eden, it was clear
to me that much of the policing of femininity that I and other girls
encountered had a strong basis in Christian religious dogma. From
the moment we’re assigned the female gender at birth, girls’ sexuality
is a commodity, an object, an asset, and a “liability” to be marketed,
bought, sold, and controlled in a birth-to-death cycle in which girls
and women are straightjacketed by a litany of dos and (mostly) don’ts.
Don’t sit this way, walk this way, talk this way, dress this way. Don’t
go there, hang out with them, drink, smoke, act like a bitch, act like a
ho, act like a dude, get yourself raped or knocked up. And when you
get older, supposedly beyond the regime of the sexualizing male gaze,
don’t ever think you will be relevant, whether you have kids or not. At
every stage, organized religion, through the language of a grindingly
policing theism, is there to impose boundaries and limits.
The Catholic school that I went to for one year was a perfect
training ground for this dance of invisibility. In the Reagan years, it
was widely viewed by some middle-class Black and Latinx parents
as an antidote to the “bad” schools in South L.A. and neighboring
Inglewood (then a predominantly Black community that had been
largely white up until the late 1960s). On the surface, the school’s
virtually all-white faculty and ethnically diverse student body were
INTRODUCTION • 13
poster children for multicultural integration. Beneath that shiny
facade, the school had the usual cauldron of hierarchies: bullying
cliques, authoritarian religious bureaucrats, predatory jocks, and
favorites-playing teachers. Then, as now, private religious schools
were microcosms of a segregated two-tier educational system.
Middle-class and working-class parents of color desperate to give
their children a leg up bused them to elite schools hoping against
hope that the racial tensions that fueled post–Brown v. Board of Education desegregation battles wouldn’t affect their babies. These tensions were crystal clear at my high school. Upper-middle-class to affluent white students lived in tony single-family homes and condos
that dominated the multimillion dollar beachside community where
the school was based. Black and Latinx students crammed public
buses, traveling from the demonized “inner city” to the mostly
white Westside. The implications of this dichotomy would shape my
budding consciousness about public education, public space, race,
and gender. Institutional racism, sexism, and heterosexism were
critical to the disciplinary regime of the white savior patriarchs and
matriarchs who adopted a missionary mentality about youth of color
while policing girls’ bodies and conduct. Girls who violated the dress
code were shamed and forced to put on skirts provided by the male
dean (a double standard that was not imposed on boys).
Although Catholic dogma and Catholic hierarchy informed
this regime of power, authority, and control, I saw no significant
difference between these practices and those of other Christian power
structures that also enforced binaries of good/bad, self/other, male/
female, gay/straight, and Christian/heathen, while giving so-called
religious leaders a cover for immorality and bigotry. Very early on, I
was a humanist and feminist without necessarily having the language
to break it down that way. Being humanist and feminist demands
questioning received dogmas and slaying sacred cows whose very
existence depend on your erasure. To subscribe to a human-centered
notion of morality, ethics, and justice as a Black woman is an outlier
position that carries social, political, and professional risks. Much of
the emerging literature (including blogs and thought pieces) on Black
atheist and humanist experience chronicles the perils of Black folks’
14 • HUMANISTS IN THE HOOD
rejecting theism. According to the Pew Religion Research Forum,
87 percent of African Americans are religiously identified, making
them among the most religious ethnic groups in a nation that is itself
majority religious and Christian. Given these daunting stats, faith is
a strong prerequisite for political viability in the United States overall
and in the African American community in particular. The only
contemporary national-level politician of any ethnicity to declare his
atheism while in office was former California congressman Pete Stark
(who waited for several decades before doing so and was voted out of
office five years later).
Although a handful of whites in national office have since
proclaimed their humanism or refused to identify a theistic belief
system, running for public office as an openly identified humanist
nonbeliever of African descent is political suicide. For generations,
fledgling and veteran Black politicians have relied on a robust network
of Black churches and faith-based organizations to help launch or
sustain their careers. Megachurch congregations like West Angeles,
Faithful Central, and First AME in South Los Angeles are frequent
pitstops for African American and white politicians looking to curry
favor with Black voters. When former President Barack Obama
began campaigning in 2007 he strategically emphasized his Christian
religious beliefs and membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church
(Trinity’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was subsequently
accused of making racist comments—allegations that conservatives
used to try and discredit Obama). Obama’s eagerness to do so was
viewed as a way to dispel rumors that he was an atheist or Muslim.
It was also perceived as a bid to establish “race cred” with African
American voters dubious of his biracial, African and European
American background.
During the 2020 presidential race, Senator Kamala Harris, the first
Black female Democrat to run for president since Congresswoman
Shirley Chisholm in 1972, announced her candidacy to a crowd of
ecstatic supporters with the declaration that she had “faith in god.”
Insofar as faith is shorthand for being considered authentically
Black, god-fearing Black politicians are exempt from the knee-jerk
suspicions associated with nonbelievers, because being a Christian
believer is reflexively linked to having moral values in the American
mainstream.
Would Harris’ supporters have reacted as enthusiastically if she’d
said she had faith in humans and that this naturally superseded faith
in god? It’s all but guaranteed that she would have been vilified in
the press, hounded off the stage, and kicked to the curb politically,
branded as damaged goods. How dare a Black woman candidate
profess anything but unswerving devotion to Father God, Jesus, Him?
And yet, nothing in Harris’ platform required god belief or a theistic
outlook on the world. Indeed, a feminist humanist perspective on
the social construction of inequality, justice, and morality is critical
of faith-based belief systems’ capacity to articulate a moral universe
precisely because of the arbitrary nature of deity worship. As secular
scholar Phil Zuckerman writes in his book What It Means to Be
Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life, the
intensely subjective, changeable, and highly interpretive nature of
god-based morality (like certain animal species, there are hundreds of
different deity-based belief systems in the world) makes it impossible
for humans to know with absolute certainty what “God’s will” is and
what he/she/they/it deem to be ironclad, “beyond question” mores.
It’s become pro forma to note that Christians, Muslims, Jews, and
believers from other faiths routinely cherry pick what they like and
discard what they don’t from their holy books. Flipping it another
way; do gods give a damn about universal health care, access to
stable, affordable housing, and the right to earn a living wage with
benefits for everyone? What use are gods who don’t protect bodily
autonomy and the right to self-determination for queer, nonbinary
and gender nonconforming folks? What use are they if they don’t
protect these rights for women or folks with disabilities? What do
supernatural deities say about these specific socioeconomic, cultural,
and social issues? Why do they remain abjectly silent if they are in fact
omnipotent and omnipresent? Of course, the short, reductive answer
is that these are contemporary human matters that didn’t exist eons
ago when gods first dropped knowledge on the holy men entrusted
with codifying and relaying their wisdom to the unwashed masses.
But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers
to unpack and “screw up” interpretations of their doctrines across the
centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and
thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination
on the planet?
This line of questioning echoes Epicurus’ timeless critique of
the basic impotence and bankruptcy of theism. Omnipotent, “just”
gods who can’t ensure a universe free from evil, cruelty, and human
suffering are not omnipotent, just, or godly. One of the most powerful
forerunning feminist, atheist, humanist freethinkers to call out
this naked contradiction was the nineteenth-century white Jewish
suffragist and abolitionist Ernestine Rose. A socialist organizer and
mentor to suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
Rose infamously railed against religion in her public speeches and
commentaries. “Superstition,” she said, “keeps women ignorant,
dependent, and enslaved beings. . . . The churches have been built
upon their necks.” Rose’s blistering critique of the Bible, patriarchy, and
capitalism are an important link to contemporary feminist humanist
discourse and praxis. Opposing the appropriation of women’s
domestic labor, she and her fellow white suffragists advocated for
property laws that would have recognized and compensated women’s
household work in the 1840s and 1850s. Although Rose and her white
feminist contemporaries were aligned with the abolitionist movement
to end slavery, xenophobia, paternalism, and racism, white supremacy
dominated the first-wave women’s movement, laying the foundation
for the racial turbulence of twentieth-century feminism.
As historian Louise Michele Newman notes in her book White
Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States,
first-wave white feminists always framed women’s rights and individual
liberty in evolutionary terms. Even though white antislavery feminists
felt they had common cause with African Americans—frequently
drawing offensive parallels between their plight and that of enslaved
Africans—many of them believed that white women were morally and
intellectually superior to women of color and men of color. During
the Civil War, first-wave white feminist abolitionists supported the
Republican Party and the Union Army not only because they were
opposed to slavery but also because they believed that a postbellum
Republican government would prioritize women’s suffrage. After
the Civil War, some of these women opposed the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments due to what they perceived as the Republican
Party’s failure to make good on its tacit promise to (white) women.
The Fourteenth Amendment granted African Americans birthright
citizenship, while the Fifteenth Amendment gave men of color
the right to vote. In the racist view of some white feminists, these
amendments put civil rights in direct competition with women’s
rights, which was understood to be stewarded by white women.
The bridge between Black feminism and secular humanism has
been shaped by this conflicted history. Digging a little deeper in my
research on Ernestine Rose—who I’d long admired for her early,
unabashed atheist feminist stance and antislavery views—I discovered
that she too had trafficked in some of the nativist rhetoric espoused by
Stanton and Anthony. This rhetoric pitted “the other” against civilized
white women who were deemed to be more culturally equipped to lead
the nation than men of color from less-evolved cultures. Despite their
professed solidarity with abolitionism, being human for white women
meant not being Black, enslaved, or foreign. Despite their rejection
of god-ordained patriarchy and supernaturalism, being secular for
Protestant feminist freethinkers like Stanton meant being superior
to the “primitive” religionists of non-European, non-Protestant
countries. In the years after the Civil War, white feminists closed
ranks to ensure that their political interests were privileged in the
discourse around freedom, equality, and women’s self-determination.
This white supremacist legacy continues to inform contemporary
feminism. Humanists in the Hood takes on these contradictions, in
an effort to explore the promise of intersectional, Black feminist–
identified approaches to humanism that are grounded in the everyday
realities of living in hyper-segregated communities of color. For years,
the rap on feminism among most Black folks was that it was a white
woman’s thing. White feminists, from first-wave nineteenth-century
white suffragists, to second-wave stalwarts in the postwar “feminine
mystique” era, routinely ignored, erased, and misrepresented Black
women’s experiences and social history. While white women at the
height of the so-called Baby Boom decried their “enslavement” to
patriarchy, domesticity, and motherhood in Ozzie and Harriet–
style homes, Black women were mopping their floors, washing their
laundry, and wiping the butts of their children. While college-educated
white women deplored corporate America’s glass ceiling, working
class women of color were languishing in low wage non-unionized
jobs. While white liberal women stormed the barricades for abortion
and “choice,” Black women fought for a more encompassing platform
of reproductive justice, framing abortion, contraception, and family
planning as critical to Black liberation struggle in a capitalist economy.
And while professional white women saw their careers boosted under
Clinton administration affirmative action policies, Black women and
Latinx women were routinely demonized by right-wing media for
mooching off of government “handouts.”
Indeed, the fractured relationship between Black and white
feminists has always shaped the women’s movement in the United
States, often obscuring the movement’s value to communities of
color. Longstanding racial schisms over white female privilege, white
women’s racism, and middle-class respectability continue to inform
Black women’s experiences in the women’s movement. In an interview
in the 2018 book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee
River Collective, collective co-founder Barbara Smith reflects on how
she began to come into a feminist awakening during the late sixties.
Disconnected from white women’s experiences, she initially wondered,
“What did [they] have to complain about? They have been terrorizing
us in their homes and in their kitchens for centuries now. . . . They
are responsible for the pandemic of lynchings.” Like many Black
women who later embraced feminism, Smith initially viewed it as
irrelevant to Black women’s lives. Her view shifted as she became
more conscious of the toll sexist, racist, heterosexist oppression took
on Black women’s access to jobs, housing, reproductive health care,
and basic human and civil rights.
In 1977, the Combahee River Collective confronted these issues
head on with their landmark statement outlining Black feminist
principles and priorities. Challenging the vacuum that existed in the
white-dominated women’s movement, Smith and fellow Black lesbian
activists Beverly Smith and Gloria Hull crafted a Black feminist
“manifesto” critiquing white feminist racism and Black patriarchy.
The statement advocated a radical socialist restructuring of the U.S.
economy to redress the racial segregation and wealth disparities that
all but enshrined Black poverty. Articulating an intersectional vision
(which shaped Kimberle Crenshaw’s coinage of the term), Combahee
foreshadowed the visionary Black feminist criticism of writers like
Michele Wallace, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins,
and Barbara Christian. It also complemented the work of womanist,
humanist author Alice Walker, who has consistently challenged
organized religion and gender orthodoxies in her novels and critical
theory. Walker’s coinage of the term “womanism” was a strategic
counter to the Eurocentric orientation of mainstream American
feminism. In her anthology In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, she
defines a womanist as a “black feminist or feminist of color . . . who
appreciates and prefers women’s culture . . . emotional flexibility
. . . and strength . . . committed to survival and wholeness of entire
people, male and female.” (Walker, 1983)
All of these seminal Black thinkers were influenced by the social
thought and activism of the late nineteenth-century writer and
educator Anna Julia Cooper. Rising to prominence after the Civil War,
Cooper’s intersectional conceptualization of Black women’s agency
emerged from her rebuke of white supremacy, white nationalism, and
Black patriarchal notions of power and authority. As Black feminist
writer Brittney Cooper has argued, Anna Julia Cooper grounded her
feminist theory and practice (or praxis) in the everyday realities of
Black women’s bodies and the racial, sexual, gender, and class politics
that shaped their lived experiences.
Cooper and other first-wave Black women activists like Ida B.
Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Fannie Barrier Williams laid the
foundation for a progressive Black feminist politics based on Black
self-determination, human rights, and educational justice, which was
reflected in Combahee’s socialist ethos. Nonetheless, forty-plus years
after Combahee, feminism is still perceived by many Black folks as
too white-identified, too alien to the needs of the community, and
too out of touch with Black folks’ specific circumstances. Indeed, it
is still common for Black folks to dismiss gender justice resistance
like #MeToo, reproductive rights, and LGBTQI equity movements as
subsidiary, or even irrelevant, to the “more urgent” program of ending
police brutality and mass incarceration. As filmmaker and activist
Aishah Shahidah Simmons once noted, “We cannot wait until the
police and white citizens stop killing black people before we address
child sexual abuse, adult rape, and ableism in our communities.”
This seemingly simple yet powerful statement vividly characterizes
the divide in thinking that separates “single variable” organizing
from intersectional organizing. Imagine someone approaches you
and says you will have to choose to be exclusively Black, rather than
female, pansexual, or any other identity that defines you. Making that
choice will determine if you’re able to eat dinner for the week. The
patent absurdity of having to make such a choice, while excluding
one’s other identities, is at the heart of single variable politics, which
reduces complex social movements, identities, and experiences down
to what the dominant culture deems to be the privileged identity.
For generations, the modern civil rights movement suffered from
the single variable plague, as Black women’s resistance to sexual
violence, domestic violence, and wage theft was marginalized in
order to promote the falsehood that charismatic Black male leaders
spearheaded the movement struggle.
At the same time, faced with a bleak economic landscape in
which Black women’s wages are stagnant and Black wealth continues
to plummet, many Black women believe movement feminism has
failed to provide a consistent platform for progressive social change.
The white middle-class race divide that dogs movement feminism
continues to be a deal breaker. In a 2014 Feminist Wire interview I
conducted with writer and activist Thandisizwe Chimurenga, former
host of the L.A. radio show Some of Us Are Brave (after the Barbara
Smith–Gloria Hull anthology of the same name), she noted, “There is
also a disconnect [with feminism] due to class differences. Much of
feminism appears to be an intellectual undertaking—that is, essays,
books, and lectures—instead of on-the-ground engagement. Many
young Black women and women of color come into contact with
feminism through higher education, which is a marker of privilege
and class mobility. Many young, low-income Black women who
disdain feminism are not represented in these centers of higher
learning, in addition to the fact that they have a reference for feminism
that comes from popular culture which has no interest whatsoever in
empowering young women of color [or the communities they come
from].” Echoing this sentiment, Bridgett Crutchfield of the Black
Nonbelievers of Detroit, noted:
I recall hearing conversations from Black women who spoke
of feminism in a manner that was disconcerting. These women
were married and religious. Those conversations proved
confusing as these women benefited from the work of feminists.
Only a few of these women were truly “submissive” to their
spouse. It wasn’t until I grew older that I looked at feminism on
a macroscopic level and was disappointed by the cold and bold
betrayal of white feminism. [White women’s] blatant disregard
for their “sisters” was not and is not lost upon us. We’re family
when white feminists tap us for our labor and relegated to the
basement when they have no use for us. . . . Several white women
in my life were shown the door when such realizations dropped
into my head. (Crutchfield, interview 2019)
And yet, “feminism” as a term has become a hot counterculture
commodity on blogs and social media, as well as in advertising and
celebrity branding. The virtual embrace of feminism among the
millennial generation has gained even more strength in the face of
Religious Right and Trumpian backlash against women’s rights and
human rights. However, according to the 2018 GenForward survey
of millennial respondents (over 1,750 individuals between the ages
of 18–34 were surveyed), Asian Americans were more likely overall
to identify as feminist, while more whites, African Americans, and
Latinx respondents didn’t identify with feminism in any capacity.
Only 21 percent of African American women and a scant 12 percent
of Latinx women identified as feminists. Perhaps most revealingly,
over 70 percent of African Americans believed that the “feminist
movement” has benefited or improved the lives of white women,
but only 35 percent of African Americans believed that the feminist
movement has had some benefit for women of color. The survey also
revealed that few millennials across race and ethnicity believed the
feminist movement has had any significant impact on improving the
lives of poor women. Reading between the lines, the view that the
feminist movement is MIA on economic justice and class divisions—
and that its greatest beneficiaries are white women—is an implicit
indictment of the racial entitlement and privilege of white women.
Of course, what qualifies as the “feminist movement” is open to
debate and interpretation. In reflecting on some of the major gender
justice uprisings of the past twenty years, feminist social change has
been represented by movements such as the fight for reproductive and
abortion rights, the fight for equal pay for equal work, and the fight
to end sexual harassment, sexual violence, and child sexual abuse in
the home, community, and workplace. It has also been represented
by the #SayHerName movement against gender-based police violence
and resistance against mass incarceration. Taken as a whole, these
movements have been vital to countering institutional sexism and
securing equal rights for women. However, it can’t be argued that
they constitute a coherent feminist movement with a clear political
agenda, platform, and organizing strategy. When feminism is not
visible as a movement it’s easy for it to be dismissed as amorphous or
as a flash in the pan.
That said, the GenForward survey also highlights the gap between
celebrity culture and folks in “real time”—a gap that is embodied by
the frequency with which women of color “influencers” like Beyoncé
and Ariana Grande may proclaim their unabashed “feminism” while
the average young woman of color might not openly identify as
such. This disconnect is also prevalent in the secular world when it
comes to identification with atheism and humanism among people
of color. Although surveys suggest that the number of nonreligiously
identified African Americans is rising, the share who openly
identify as humanist or atheist is still comparatively small. For the
layperson, understanding atheism seems easy enough. It’s straight-up
heathenism, the final countdown, the dance with Satan, Beelzebub, and
any other force that embodies destruction, apocalypse, and moral rot.
But what is humanism? How might it be an important and necessary
transition for women of color and communities of color? What are
the implications of a humanistic worldview in a nation where Black
women’s bodies have never been considered human? What are the
implications of a Black feminist humanism when women’s centurieslong
fight for bodily autonomy continues to be challenged by white
supremacist Christian fascist heterosexist patriarchy on the one hand
and Black heterosexist patriarchy on the other?
Recently, my daughter’s teacher, who is also African American,
implored them not to become a goth who worships Satan. The
popular caricature of gothic culture is that of black-clad, ghoulishly
pale, antisocial teenagers with a Columbine jones, romanticizing
murder and mayhem. Although this particular teacher has been
largely supportive of my daughter’s budding atheism and queerness,
her assumption that they would resort to Satanism was typical of
the misguided view many folks have about atheists. In the seeming
absence of a defining belief system codified in centuries-old books,
teachings, and multibillion-dollar religious institutions, humanism
is a cultural blank for the average person. Humanistic feminism or
feminist humanism are even more dicey in the eyes of a mainstream
America oozing fake piety out of every pore.
Black feminist humanist literature, especially that which is by
and about Black feminist humanists, is still inchoate, still rising from
a forest of often chest-thumping books by secular white folks. How
different might it have been for Black girls braving the antiseptic
hell of suburban Catholic school to read literature that spoke to and
affirmed a secular humanist worldview beyond stifling Black faith-based
orthodoxies? What would it have meant during this era of Jerry
Falwell Moral Majority posturing to envision and imagine this world
in books? Toni Morrison once said that we must write the books we
want to read if they don’t already exist. In the 1976 essay, “Saving the
Life That Is Your Own,” Alice Walker expanded on Morrison’s quote,
noting how Black women must also become models for their own
imagined literary worlds, essentially “doing the work of two.” Walker’s
declaration was framed in terms of her discovery of freethinker,
anthropologist, and author Zora Neale Hurston, whose work had
fallen into obscurity in the seventies when Walker led the literary
revival that launched Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God
into the American canon.
With Humanists in the Hood, I’m writing not only the book that
I’ve wanted to read but also the book that I (to quote Walker) should
have been able to read. I argue that Black feminist humanism is a
vibrant alternative to the woo-woo spiritualism, Jesus fetishism, and
goddess worship that characterizes progressive feminist belief systems
that revolve around theism. I also make the case that Black feminist
humanism based on the complexity of multiple identities and subject
positions is a critical lens for addressing race, gender, class, and sexual
inequity in the United States. In so doing, I will consider fundamental
questions about the ideological underpinnings of gender and social
justice humanism from a Black feminist perspective. What is the
practical value of humanism for folks of color? Is humanism relevant
to the specific socioeconomic and political conditions in communities
of color? What are we talking about when we say humanism and
gender in the same sentence? How is humanism related to Black
feminism and feminism(s) based on the lived experiences of women
of color? What does Black humanist cultural production in academic
scholarship, entertainment, and literature look like? And how is
humanism relevant under conditions of economic injustice and
capitalism? Finally, do humanists have an obligation to articulate, and
fight for, an economic justice platform?
As the U.S. undergoes epic political changes catalyzed by the
2020 presidential election, the stakes for a secularist, feminist, queer,
pro–social justice, and anti-capitalist ethos of American values are
perhaps greater than ever before. Across the nation, hundreds of
GOP–initiated laws aimed at restricting or eliminating abortion, birth
control, and basic family planning have taken effect, particularly in
the Midwest and the South. These measures represent a death-by-athousand-
cuts assault on the 1973 Roe v. Wade and the 1992 Planned
Parenthood v. Casey Supreme Court decisions granting and upholding
women’s constitutional right to abortion. In K–12 education, laws
favoring privatization and expanded corporate investment in charter
schools have eroded public schools. At the same time, draconian
anti-LGBTQ policies, instituted by the Department of Justice and
the Office of Civil Rights, have undermined Obama-era protections
for queer, transgender, and nonbinary youth and adults. In all of
these sectors, the Trump administration’s appointment of federal
and Supreme Court justices, policymakers, Cabinet members, and
department heads from the radical Religious Right is evidence that
theocracy is in full flower. It will more than likely take decades to
undo the damage.
Liberal and progressive Christians, Muslims, and other theists all
tell us that they have the “right” and just way to equality through their
version of Jesus/God/Allah/Yahweh, etc. It’s the fundamentalists who
deal in distortion. Yet, any ethical foundation that places supernatural
morality, heaven, and deliverance over humans in the stone-cold naked
here and now is fatally flawed and bankrupt. As the sixties
rock band The Doors once sang, “The future’s uncertain, the end
is always near.” What could be more wondrous, awe-inspiring, and
enigmatic than the human capacity to turn that lyric of doom truism
about our inevitable finitude into art, politics, education, history,
and a million other endeavors (for good and ill) that make humans
the most relentlessly self-aware and self-documenting species on the
planet? This is not some cheerleading public-service announcement
for anthropocentrism but rather an acknowledgment that, in the pellmell
run-up to “the end,” gods are sorely outmatched by the humans
who invented them.