Note

This article is based on research conducted during my stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library in London in summer 2025. I am sincerely grateful to the Institute for its generous support and stimulating research environment.

Introduction

Like any term that is employed to denote—among other things—a constellation of philosophical ideas, a historical epoch, an anthropocentric epistemology, a socio-political worldview, and an ethical ideal, humanism is marked by theoretical imprecision and demands taxonomic clarification.1 Tony Davies noted that “‘humanism’ is one of those words, like ‘realism’ or ‘romanticism’, whose range of possible uses runs from the pedantically narrow to the cosmically vague” (3).2

Despite this conceptual fuzziness, the concept—regardless of its specific formulation—is frequently understood as a worldview that is antithetical or even antagonistic towards religion. As David Kline observes, “humanism is about perceiving and experiencing reality from a human-centric point of view, where the human subject is given special status and value in relation to other non-human subjects.” In this perspective, ethical responsibility is framed not in terms of “absolute metaphysical or divinely given moral requirements” emanating from transcendental and non-human sources—such as personified deities or divine principles—but rather from the human subject itself and its freedom and potential to pursue a ‘good’ life in whatever form. While such an immanent orientation is not necessarily “hostile to the idea of religion,” it does entail, as Kline notes, “a decidedly human-centred approach to religion that frames it as serving the human and not the other way around” (Kline).

Particularly in the cultural context of the United States—a society not only marked by a higher degree of religious practice than Europe, but also by a socio-culturally normative and constitutive anti-atheism (see Klug 2022; Zappe 2026) that created “an environment […] less favourable to organized secularism” (Sägesser 65)—the equation of humanism with an essentially anti-religious worldview proved especially formative. In American public discourse, this association has often been negotiated under the rubric of “secular humanism,” a term embraced by its proponents as the manifestation of “the Enlightenment principle of individualism, which celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state, increasingly empowering individuals to set the terms of their own lives” (White), yet deployed as a “pejorative” (Klug 86), a “bugaboo” (Blankholm 689) or “political bogeyman” (Richter 13) by its religious-conservative opponents, most pointedly during the decade-long post-1960 culture war that Stephen P. Weldon has labelled the “Evangelical Antihumanist Crusade” (171–189, see also Schmidt 13-15; 174-184).3

Within the cultural and intellectual history of secular humanism in the United States, three activist texts have assumed a central role: the collectively authored Humanist Manifestos that were published in 1933, 1973, and 2003 under the auspices of the American Humanist Association and its predecessor organization, the Humanist Fellowship.4 Although the statement of the liberal lawyer, legal scholar and secular activist Gordon Gamm, according to which “[c]ontemporary humanism traces its origin to the Humanist Manifesto I of 1933” (23) is certainly exaggerated, the significance of the texts should not be underestimated, as scholars have widely acknowledged their vital role in the formation of secular humanism as a social movement in the United States (see Cimino and Smith 18-30; Fazzino and Cragun 65-66).

While the Humanist Manifestos have been examined from historical-political and sociological perspectives, one line of inquiry has received remarkably little attention: the reading of these texts explicitly as manifestos—as a particular textual form of strategic activist intervention in the American public sphere. There are several questions arising from approaching them from this perspective: Why did the author collectives behind the Manifestos choose precisely this particular form to articulate new universal ethical norms? Which specific affordances of the manifesto did they seek to employ to communicate their particular understanding of humanism within the social, political, and cultural landscape? How does the form itself enable a recalibration of normative statements, whether self-imposed or external, under changing historical circumstances? And finally, what role did the Humanist Manifestos self-declared status as manifestos play in shaping their reception?

This essay is an attempt to address these questions, and it argues that the cultural impact of the Humanist Manifestos depended to a large degree on their specific character as manifestos: statements designed to articulate—in programmatic form—new ethical norms grounded in human capacities, responsibilities, and solidarities rather than in metaphysical foundations.

The three manifestos constitute a rare instance in the history of the genre: a self-referential and evolutionarily adaptive sequence—one might describe it as an activist franchise5—with each new document superseding its predecessor as the currently authoritative statement. At three pivotal historical junctures—the early 1930s, with American capitalism in crisis and the specter of fascism increasingly materializing in Europe; the socio-political upheavals of the 1970s; and the post-9/11 era—the manifestos advanced successive reconfigurations of secular ethics, each reformulating its normative vision in response to the circumstances of its time. In so doing, they reclaim moral authority from metaphysical foundations and locate it instead within the human realm. This move situates them firmly within what Charles Taylor has described as the “immanent frame”: a cultural condition in which meaning, value, and legitimacy can be sought within human life and history, rather than exclusively in transcendent or supernatural orders. Yet such a reorientation, in the context of the United States—where ethical discourse is historically and institutionally entwined with religious narratives—amounts to more than philosophical repositioning. I will also argue that the Manifestos, while written in comparatively moderate rhetoric, nonetheless propagate claims which, within the specifically religiously inflected hegemonic discursive field of ethics in the United States, amount to demands that can be understood as a form of tacit radicalism insofar as they advance a fundamentally atheist position without explicitly identifying it as such.

The discussion in the following pursues three interconnected objectives. First, it examines the Humanist Manifestos as instances of the manifesto form, engaging with their formal strategies, generic self-labelling, and their self-referentiality in light of contemporary manifesto theory. Second, it situates them within the American public sphere, interrogating the ways in which their advocacy of immanent ethics has both confronted and accommodated the hegemonic religious framing of public morality. Third, it investigates their philosophical content, asking how these texts define, legitimize, and seek to universalize ethical norms without any transcendent reference.

The Manifesto as Form, Function and Force

The manifesto as a vessel for the circulation of political or philosophical propositions it is itself a form that developed over time. But it has always been bound up with the articulation of normative goals—first as declarations from positions of power, later as instruments of revolutionary discourse, and eventually as vehicles of avant-garde artistic provocation. In each of its configurations, the manifesto is at once a form, because it seeks to convey its aims through recognizable rhetorical and structural patterns; a function, because it intervenes strategically and with activist intent in public discourse; and a force, because its sharply articulated ideological antagonism towards a specific status quo demands radical and immediate specific social, political, or cultural transformations.

This oppositional and transformative function has not always been a defining characteristic of the manifesto. While the genre has long been situated at the intersection of hegemonic power and the public sphere, its orientation has historically shifted from affirming authority to contesting it. As Martin Puchner observes, the term etymologically “designates a declaration of the will of a sovereign.” In its origins, therefore, the manifesto was not an insurgent or rebellious form but an instrument of authority, a textual embodiment of established power. The revolutionary manifesto, by contrast, “must usurp an authority it does not yet possess” (Puchner 12).

Janet Lyon argues that this appropriation of the manifesto from below as a revolutionary-emancipatory medium aiming to exert forceful normative impact on the public, is inseparably connected to the social, political, and cultural upheavals associated with modernity and is “constitutive of the public sphere to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within modern political life,” recording “the breach between modernity’s promissory notes and their payment” (8). She observes that “manifestoes and related forms appear most often in clusters around those political crises that involve definitions of citizenship and political subjecthood” (16). Here, she explicitly defines a central capacity of the manifesto that will also prove crucial for the following discussion of the Humanist Manifestos: it is a reactive medium, capable of confronting the weaknesses, inconsistencies, exhaustion, or unresponsiveness of an established normative order in a specific historical situation with a pointedly formulated alternative that is intended to serve as a program for social actors previously excluded from the centers of socio-cultural or political power.

In order to exert its force within the public, and thereby within the socio-political sphere, the manifesto must mobilize distinctive rhetorical strategies. As Lyon observes, its

syntax […] is so narrowly controlled by exhortation, its style so insistently unmediated, that it appears to say only what it means, and to mean only what it says. The manifesto declares a position; the manifesto refuses dialogue or discussion; the manifesto fosters antagonism and scorns conciliation. It is univocal, unilateral, single-minded. (9)

This declarative, non-dialectical mode is not merely stylistic but constitutive, evoking authority precisely by denying ambiguity and deliberation. In a similar vein, Puchner stresses that “manifestos tend to present themselves as mere means to an end, demanding to be judged not by their rhetorical or literary merits—their poetry—but by their ability to change the world” (2). To write a manifesto is therefore an expression of belief in the agency of language as an instrument of agitation, grounded in the assumption that verbal declaration can mobilize actors, initiate individual and collective action, and thereby intervene in social or political reality.6

The key theorists of the manifesto emphasize the form’s inherent normative and socio-political agency. Lyon characterizes the manifesto as both “a trace and a tool of change”: a trace insofar as it “marks” precarious historical contradictions, and a tool insofar as it “generates […] a break in history” (16). For Puchner, equally it holds the potential “to create points of no return: to make history; to fashion the future” (2). This duality helps to explain the manifesto’s enduring currency in activist discourses: it is at once a socio-cultural and political seismograph and a medium of critique and transformation.

The asserted authorship of manifestos often takes the form of a rhetorical construction of a collective cultural or political will, which leads the reader to believe that, even when individual authors are explicitly named, the manifesto speaks on behalf of an entire movement, social group or ideological discourse, often articulated through an -ism that takes the role of what might be described, in Foucauldian terms, as a collective author function. At the center of this performativity stands a rhetorical “we,” a device that calls into being the very collective it claims to represent. Yet, as Lyon cautions, this collective “we” can obscure as much as it reveals: “the ‘we’ of a manifesto is an inherently colonizing construction. Manifestoes that lay claim to multivocality may in fact be primarily the work of one or two persons, or may speak with unearned authority for the many” (26). The “we” of the manifesto, in other words, risks projecting an imaginary critical mass or collapsing plural voices into a falsely unified position. Nevertheless, this rhetorical gesture is integral to the manifesto’s force, since the collective “we” also generates a discursive authority indispensable to its political efficacy.

The historical persistence of the manifesto as a form of activist writing is further based on its directness and its capacity to distill complex issues into understandable declarative and programmatic propositions. At the same time, the manifesto is, while certainly always linked a specific historical moment, an adaptive form: manifestos can be reissued, rewritten, and recontextualized, reformulating their programmatic and normative claims in response to shifting political, social, and cultural conditions. The Humanist Manifestos provide a particularly telling illustration of this dynamic. Spanning seven decades, they articulate secular humanism not as a fixed or static doctrine but as an evolving project, continuously renegotiating its ethical and political commitments in light of historical change. And it is precisely through the affordances of the form—its declarative authority, its normative intentions, and its claim to represent a collective subject—that their authors make their interventions intelligible and effective.

Framing Immanence

Lyon notes that “[n]o manifesto can be understood outside the specific historical conditions of its production and reception” (51). In the case of the Humanist Manifestos, the relevant conditions were shaped not only by the specific historical contexts in which they were written, but also by the broader cultural framework of post-Enlightenment modernity. Charles Taylor, in his extensive study A Secular Age, terms this the “immanent frame” defined as the realm within which the normative claims of secular humanism could be formulated and publicly expressed.

For Taylor, this framework marks the experiential and discursive horizon within which the modern individual exists. It is, in his words, “a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame.’” Ontologically, the frame delineates “a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one” (542). This space did not emerge through a sudden rupture but was the cumulative outcome of long historical transformations. The consolidation of a secular order was bound up not only with intellectual developments but also with lived experiences of “disenchantment” (539)—the classic Weberian trope to which Taylor repeatedly returns throughout his theory of secularity—within the cultural processes of modernization following the Enlightenment. As he explains, “the new science gave a clear theoretical form to the idea of an immanent order which could be understood on its own, without reference to interventions from outside […] the life of the buffered individual, instrumentally effective in secular time, created the practical context within which the self-sufficiency of this immanent realm could become a matter of experience” (543) The notion of the “buffered self” or “buffered identity” of the modern individual as central to Taylor’s understanding of secularity. He defines it as “a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos” that is “not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers […]. [I]t took more than disenchantment to produce the buffered self; it was also necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering” (27).

The immanent frame is therefore not an intellectual construct but a lived condition. Taylor underlines this by noting that “we come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order; or better, a constellation of orders, cosmic, social and moral” (543). This constellation provides a comprehensive horizon in which human beings locate themselves and their ethical commitments. Importantly, Taylor resists the suggestion that this horizon automatically or fundamentally excludes metaphysics. Instead, he insists that “what I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West […]. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it” (543–44). The immanent frame describes a cultural condition that permits both secular and religious understandings—what Taylor repeatedly calls “construals”—of existence, since religion no longer exercises uncontested authority but appears as only one option among others.

For the purposes of understanding the Humanist Manifestos, this distinction between “open” and “closed” construals is essential. As I will elaborate in more detail below, they exemplify an articulation of a closed interpretation of the world within the immanent frame by fundamentally rejecting metaphysical or transcendent foundations for ethics and by advocating for a radically human-centered ethical authority. They do so, however, within a specific cultural environment: The American context is crucial for understanding why these manifestos assumed their particular form and why such declarations could scarcely have emerged with comparable urgency elsewhere. As scholars have noted, the United States occupies a distinctive place within the secular history of the West, insofar as construals open to religious metaphysics retained cultural dominance, whereas “closed” worldviews—such as affirmative atheism—have been subject to persistent cultural ostracism (see Klug 2022; Zappe 2018; Zappe 2026). Taylor seems to have a similar perception given that he cites the United States as his paradigmatic example an “open” construal in which transcendence remains not the only but the dominant option. To illustrate this, Taylor draws on Robert Bellah’s influential notion of “civil religion,” describing it in the following terms:

[…] the ‘civil religion’ of the U.S.A. [is] a foundation [of openness]. Here we have the Providentialist reading of the plan that we should follow. God (or Deistically, the architect of the universe) is whom we are following in erecting our social order. The general feature that I want to extract from this example is that for many Americans then (and for lots still now) their very sense that there was something higher to aim at, some better and more moral way of life, was indissolubly connected to God. (544)

Taylor’s point is that in the American moral imaginary, ethical conduct has been historically bound to a transcendent frame, and this nexus continues to shape the cultural horizon of modernity in the United States.

In this sense, the counter-normative force of the Humanist Manifestos becomes evident. Their claims are not merely directed against religion in general but against the deeply rooted civil-religious logic that ties morality to transcendence. If, as Lyon has argued, manifestos are constitutive interventions in the public sphere, then the Manifestos must be read as interventions in a sphere structured by civil religion, where the very grammar of moral authority is framed theologically. Their declarations of human solidarity, responsibility, and immanent ethical grounding function as counter-statements, rejecting the assumption that moral endeavor must be authorized by transcendence. In Taylor’s terms, they seek to orient American public discourse towards a “closed” and distinctly non-metaphysical construal within the immanent frame, one in which the sources and values formative for a positive conduct of life are located within human capacities themselves.

1933: A Humanist Manifesto (Humanist Manifesto I)

Humanist Manifesto I is, in many respects, a manifesto par excellence. In its goals, it formulates what Weldon describes as an “ambitious program of action” with the aim to bring “humanism to the attention of the wider public” (47; 53). Moreover, given its origins in Unitarian circles, the first Humanist Manifesto can also be read as a document of gradual radicalization within the history of liberal religion in America, as the consolidation of a normative vision in which moral authority is transferred from the transcendent to the immanent, from reliance on providential design to confidence in scientific rationality and human agency. Or, to say it in Taylor’s terms, it signals a shift away from the liberal religious positions out of which it emerged7—positions that remained “open” to metaphysics—towards a “closed,” empirically grounded, and explicitly secular humanism.

The first manifesto appeared in the May/June 1933 issue of The New Humanist under the title A Humanist Manifesto whereby the use of the indefinite article already signaled the text’s non-dogmatic, provisional character. It was endorsed by thirty-four individuals, primarily drawn from progressive academic and liberal religious circles which makes it apt to speak of it as a project of the intellectual middle-class. Among the signatories were several philosophers, with John Dewey undoubtedly the most prominent. Strikingly, roughly half of the signatories were Unitarians, a fact that emphasizes the formative role of that denomination within the landscape of early twentieth-century American religious liberalism (see White; Blankholm 692-693; Klug 49).

The first drafts of the manifesto were produced with the decisive involvement of the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars and the liberal Unitarian theologian Raymond B. Bragg.8 The self-designation of the text as a manifesto, together with its structure and its mode of address to a potential readership, makes it obvious that the authors were consciously aware of the tradition and the political potential of the form, and that they sought to appropriate these for their own purposes. Bragg’s editorial preface—significantly, the only part of the document explicitly attributed to a single author—mobilizes the agitational force of the rhetorical “we,” lending the document the political authority of a collective voice, while at the same time underscoring the non-dogmatic and transient nature of what is being proclaimed: “The Manifesto is a product of many minds. It was designed to represent a developing point of view, not a new creed.”

The authors behind Manifesto I diagnose a central cultural-historical rupture within modernity which ultimately became their impetus step into the public sphere with their text: The moment in which traditional metaphysical concepts, together with the epistemic frameworks they provided and the moral regimes through which they addressed fundamental ethical questions of human conduct, could no longer be adapted to contemporary conditions. The manifesto declares explicitly that “[t]he time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs.” Faced with this perceived collapse of inherited religious frameworks, the manifesto positions itself as a constructive response, filling the vacuum created by metaphysical rupture with a new -ism: “in every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism” (Manifesto I).

Crucial for the plausibility of this diagnosis is the text’s performative use of the collective “we” (“we, the undersigned”; “we assert that humanism will,” etc). As Bragg emphasizes in his preface, the signatories stand as representatives of an intellectual avant-garde “forging a new philosophy out of the materials of the modern world” (ibid.). This vanguard attitude is not merely expressive of the self-understanding of a particular social or cultural milieu but also performed rhetorically in the manifesto’s declarative voice, which asserts authority precisely by embodying a break with tradition and by projecting itself as the voice of a new cultural horizon. In this sense, the document exemplifies what Lyon identifies as the constitutive function of the manifesto form: the performative declaration of a new collective subject which claims to assume “the voice of vatic authority” (24). In this sense, the rhetorical “we” points to the fact that, despite the manifesto’s sober and deliberately unpolemical style, it nonetheless articulates—at least implicitly—a radically confrontational worldview. This becomes clear if one draws on Lyon’s observation that, since the French Revolution,

the discursive terrain in the manifesto between ‘we’ and ‘you’ or between ‘we’ and ‘they’ becomes increasingly uninhabitable: ‘we’ (i.e., the signatories of or consenters to the manifesto) occupy a public position of high moral ground (even if only in the subjunctive mood), in part by being rhetorically and semantically opposed in a Manichaean fashion to ‘they;’ the blind opponents, who act as a textual repository for corruption or vice. (24)

Read in this light, the rhetorical “we” through which its authors and signatories of Manifesto I speak betrays the tacit radicalism of their intentions. As with any avant-garde, this one exists to overthrow a status quo in favor of something new—but it draws not on a polemical taboo breaking register but uses moderation as a pragmatic strategy. Nevertheless, despite its measured tone, the “we” claims to speak from a position of cultural superiority, with the clear aim of eradicating outdated doctrines of metaphysical religiosity—an implicit discursive antagonist, not articulated rhetorically through an explicit “they,” yet clearly present in the text—and of replacing them with their own truth claims. In that, the document’s opening assertion that it represents a “developing point of view” is addressed primarily to its own ideological constituency, in order to subject its ethical propositions to a critical and self-reflexive discourse. It is, however not conceived as an invitation to a public discussion of transcendental religious truth claims, which are regarded as indisputably obsolete and false.

In this context, the manifesto’s strategically instrumental use of the term “religion,” which it retains in what Weldon has aptly described as a highly “ambiguous” fashion (55), is particularly notable. Following the Unitarian tradition, the term is not rejected outright, but only when it denotes openness to metaphysical or—what the manifesto itself calls—“supernatural” epistemologies.9 When employed instead to designate a system of ethical orientation within a distinctly scientific-rationalist and radically immanent worldview closed to metaphysical appeal—the concept is not discarded but rather regarded as communicatively useful. It serves to demonstrate that the immanent system of ethics and epistemology being advanced assumes functions previously fulfilled by traditional religion. Accordingly, the rhetorical “we” throughout the manifesto speaks in the name of “religious humanism,” with “humanism” here signaling a decisive break from transcendence. Edwin H. Wilson, who, in his function as the editor of The New Humanist, was central to the drafting and publication of the first manifesto, characterized religious humanism as “naturalistic in philosophy, socially activist in sympathies, and scientific in orientation” (88).

The fifteen theses of Humanist Manifesto I express these attitudes. Its opening declaration is unequivocal: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.” This claim is underlined by an appeal to evolution—still a charged issue in the early 1930s, when the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, less than a decade past, continued to cast its shadow: humanity, the manifesto affirms, “has emerged as a result of a continuous process” and is “a part of nature” (Manifesto I).

The manifesto is, in consequence, firmly situated within the tradition of scientific positivism, stressing that “the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” Value and meaning are instead to be grounded in “intelligent inquiry” and “the assessment of their relations to human needs.” Religion, if it is to endure, must “formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.” Here again, religion as a concept is not fundamentally rejected but radically redefined as an anthropocentric pursuit of “those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious” (ibid.).

At its ethical core, the manifesto maintains that the “complete realization of human personality” constitutes “the end of man’s life.” Rejecting ascetic or otherworldly ideals, it advocates “development and fulfilment in the here and now.” Worship and prayer are displaced by “a heightened sense of personal life and […] a cooperative effort to promote social well-being” (ibid.).

What emerges is an ethical vision of a responsible and solidary individualism that is carried into the socio-political domain. The manifesto condemns the “existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society” as “inadequate” and calls instead for “a socialized and cooperative economic order […] that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible” (ibid.). Though certainly not Marxist, this critique of capitalism clearly responded to the failure of the system that produced the Great Depression. In the context of 1933, it can also be read as endorsing both the reformist politics of the New Deal and at least not rejecting more radical leftist currents, which in the United States were often viewed with suspicion as dangerously subversive.

In its concluding paragraph, the ethical imperative of the manifesto finally finds its normative condensation:

So stand the theses of religious humanism. Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task (ibid.).

Read in light of Taylor’s conception of the immanent frame, the radical implications become clear. The manifesto sought to “close” the metaphysically grounded ethics hegemonic in the American context by relocating moral aspiration entirely within human agency.

That the principles and the redefinition of the concept of religion advocated by the first Humanist Manifesto represented a direct challenge to their authority in matters of ethics and epistemology was evident the religious traditionalists of various denominations, whose influence remains in the American public and political sphere. The reactions from that segment of society were correspondingly vehement. In his memoirs, Wilson remarks with irony that “the spirit of the Inquisition was not lacking even in the early days of this century. In the name of the gentle Jesus, doctrinaire Christians—even in 1933—were ready to use violence to support their beliefs” (109). Of course, this violence was verbal. Wilson cites several illustrative examples, among them John Van Schaick, editor of the magazine Christian Leader, who interpreted the manifesto as a declaration of war: “Here are men on the offensive. They are not in the church to be tolerated. They are in the church to make it over. […] They have no apologies for the use of the word ‘religion.’ […] These humanists do not want God and they will not have God” (qtd. in Wilson 113). A similarly polemical rejoinder appeared in an editorial in Christian Century, which dismissed the manifesto as “an astonishing exhibition of irrelevant and immature statements touching philosophical subjects” and deemed Dewey’s endorsement of the document “unbelievable” (qtd. in Wilson 122). Such harsh responses from the apologists of an “open” construal indicate the extent to which they recognized the manifesto’s implicit radicalism.

1973: Humanist Manifesto II

Humanist Manifesto II, published in the September/October 1973 issue of The Humanist10represents the realization of the promise made by the first document to offer only a provisional program subject to reformulation under altered conditions. This revision was drafted primarily by Wilson and Paul Kurtz, who was at the time one of the most prominent public advocates of secular humanism in the United States and the founder of Prometheus Books, a publishing house known for its critical stance on religion and its activist orientation. It responded to three distinct factors: first, a critical assessment of the continuing validity and practical efficacy of the principles articulated in the original manifesto against the backdrop of the course of world history in the four decades since its initial publication; second, the immediate historical conditions of the early 1970s; and third, the status of secular humanism within the United States, which by then had consolidated itself as a multifaceted political movement.

Like the first Manifesto the text begins with a short preface which is—again—the only section that is assigned to individual authors. Here, Wilson and Kurtz note that the 1933 version appeared “far too optimistic” when measured against the subsequent course of world history. They point to the devastating record of the four decades since its publication: the Holocaust, the totalitarianisms of the age, the erosion of democratic standards in contemporary America, the entrenched racism of its society, and “other abuses of power by military, political, and industrial elites” have discredited the affirmative conception of human progress that was framed in almost teleological terms in the first manifesto. At the same time, the overenthusiastic scientism of the 1930s version is rendered at best ambivalent, given the acknowledgement that “[s]cience has sometimes brought evil as well as good” (Manifesto II).

The authors exploit not only the manifesto’s quality as an adaptive and reactive form but also evoke once again the authority of the rhetorical-performative “we.” Confronted with the crisis (not the failure) of the religious humanist agenda of the first document, the “we” insists that new contexts require new programs, point that is expressed with considerable pathos: “As we approach the twenty-first century, however, an affirmative and hopeful vision is needed. Faith, commensurate with advancing knowledge, is also necessary. In the choice between despair and hope, humanists respond in this Humanist Manifesto II with a positive declaration for times of uncertainty” (ibid.).

Here the collective voice connects the document to the present and stress the immediate urgency of a reformulation of humanist ethics in their own historical moment. Indeed, 1973 was a politically overdetermined year in American history: Vietnam and Watergate had profoundly discredited political authority; the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade, one of the most controversial decisions in its history; and on a global scale the oil crisis rendered visible to a broader public both the economic and the ecological precariousness of fossil capitalism.

Unlike the aphoristic style of the 1933 document, the second manifesto is more elaborate, outlining its program in seventeen theses grouped under the headings “Religion,” “Ethics,” “The Individual,” “Democratic Society,” and “World Community” and offers a concluding section entitled “Humanity as a Whole.” While it reaffirms central claims of its predecessor—such as a naturalistic ethic that founded in human needs, interests and experiences, and the coupling of individual autonomy with social responsibility as an ideal—it simultaneously advances a more distant stance regarding the concept of religion. What becomes particularly evident here is the influence of Kurtz, who, as Schmidt observes, was driven by the conviction that “the future of humanism meant forswearing the church as a model of organization and ending the imaginative dalliance with religion” (183). Consequently, the manifesto’s revised humanism is positioned far more explicitly and deliberately within the spectrum of closed immanent construals. In the opening of the “Religion” section, the rhetorical “we” aligns itself with “nontheists” while acknowledging the diversity of humanist traditions such as “scientific,” “ethical,” “democratic,” “religious,” and “Marxist” humanism (Manifesto II). Nevertheless, the manifesto explicitly distances itself from variations of humanism that retain structural patterns of religious thought and practice. These “‘God is Dead’ theologies,”11 it warns, risk perpetuating “old dependencies and escapisms” and becoming “obscurantist, impeding the free use of the intellect.” With the much-quoted statement “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves” (ibid.), the manifesto affirms that humanism must also, at a structural and rhetorical level, break away from religion in order to make its inherently closed immanence clear.

The reformulation of the principles of humanism also entails a notable thematic broadening, perhaps, as Weldon suggests, as part of an effort to “best present the movement to a new generation” (183). Manifesto II introduces elements that had been either absent or only marginal in 1933, seeking—in a strategically pragmatic register of linguistic moderation—to establish connections to the issues that drove some of the radical emancipatory movements that had gained momentum since the 1960: civil rights, the sexual revolution, environmentalism.

Among the new claims is an explicit affirmation of sexual self-determination: the manifesto asserts that individuals “should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their lifestyles as they desire,” provided this causes no harm to others. In doing so, it distances itself both from traditional religious moralism and from earlier humanist answers on questions of personal and individual autonomy and diverse expressions of personhood.

This expansion of humanist ethics to other fields is also evident in the manifesto’s cosmopolitan and ecological orientation. The section on “World Community” articulates a planetary perspective, presenting the Earth as a single ecosystem and emphasizing the need for coordinated global responses to environmental degradation, population growth, and persistent poverty. It advocates international planning and assistance to developing regions, reflecting a moral universalism grounded in shared human responsibility. The final section, “Humanity as a Whole,” reinforces this perspective by calling for the transcendence of parochial and sectarian attachments in favor of a common ethical horizon. Here, the text integrates its immanent ethic into a global framework, positioning secular humanism not only as an alternative to religious morality, but as a comprehensive program for global survival and cooperative flourishing (Manifesto II).

The reactions to Humanist Manifesto II make evident that secular humanism, by the early 1970s, had consolidated itself as a more differentiated andestablished movement. Unlike the relatively peripheral reception of the 1933 text, the second manifesto entered the public sphere with considerably greater resonance, receiving attention even in leading media outlets such as The New York Times (see Weldon 183). This consolidation is reflected in the changing composition of the manifesto’s supporters, a collective “we” that is significantly more diverse, secular, international, and prominent than in 1933. Among the signatories were only a few theologians and ministers, but a considerable number of scientists (including several Nobel laureates), as well as famous figures such as the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, the psychologist B. F. Skinner, and the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. The inclusion of such voices marks a decisive step away from the narrowly denominational origins of American humanism and signals its emergence as a public philosophy capable of articulating ethical claims beyond its original vanguard cultural milieu.

2003: Humanism and Its Aspirations: Humanist Manifesto III, a Successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933

The third, and to this day most recent, of the humanist manifestos, published in 2003 under the title Humanism and Its Aspirations: Humanist Manifesto III, a Successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, constitutes the most concise version within the sequence. Composed of six thematically grouped theses, the text, authored by an anonymous committee appointed by the AHA, abandons the more elaborate argumentative scope of its 1973 predecessor and instead returns, with obvious deliberation, to the economical rhetoric and thematic focus of the original 1933 manifesto. Its structural minimalism can be read as a calculated response to the ideologically intensified discursive conditions of the early twenty-first century, marked by the resurgence of theologically inflected rhetoric at the center of American political life in the context of rising Evangelicalism and the literally ballistic impact of religious fundamentalism with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In such a climate, short and concise theses promised greater public visibility and rhetorical traction, especially in the emerging online public sphere.

The decision to publish the manifesto online, on the website of the AHA, shows the shifting modalities of public engagement. The text was issued at a threshold moment, when the internet could still claim democratic potential of discussion in blogs, forums etc., and was not yet defined by the algorithmically shaped attention economies of social media that would come to dominate civic discourse in the years that followed. The manifesto addresses a general public in the traditional sense, presuming a shared discursive space that has since become increasingly segmented. Its form, while strategically concise, still presupposes a reader capable of reflection.

By omitting any explicit reference to Humanist Manifesto II and instead positioning itself as the direct “successor” to the 1933 document, the manifesto signals a tacit disavowal of the overtly political and at times polemical register of the 1973 version. In reclaiming the stylistic restraint and ethical sobriety of the 1933 manifesto, Humanism and Its Aspirations positions itself firmly within a resolutely secular imaginary, however pointedly dispensing with any reference to the notion of a “religious” humanism. Its central commitment to an immanent ethical framework—rooted in human needs, lived experience, and shared responsibility—is articulated in a register that is assertive without becoming polemical. The manifesto reaffirms both a scientific understanding of the world (“Knowledge of the world is derived from observation, experimentation, and rational analysis”) and the ethical anthropocentrism of its earliest predecessor: “Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience” (Manifesto III). Read through the lens Taylor’s “immanent frame,” the text offers once more a paradigmatic articulation of a closed anti-transcendental construal. The universalism it projects rests entirely on human capacities: reason, empathy, and mutual obligation. And while its claims may, by the standards of early twenty-first-century liberalism, appear philosophically uncontentious, they remain discursively defiant within a public sphere still shaped by the enduring grammar of civil religion and the revival or religious rhetoric in the American public sphere at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Among the signatories, the presence of Richard Dawkins—who, at the time, was on the verge of becoming one of the most prominent public preachers of New Atheism—indicates that the text, despite its moderate rhetoric, was by no means incompatible with more radical forms of anti-religious activism. Although Stephen LeDrew has persuasively argued that the ideological rigidity of New Atheism—defined by its “bare-boned empiricism bereft of real humanist philosophy” (60)—marks a clear difference from secular humanism, certain affinities remain evident. What distinguishes the New Atheists—Dawkins above all—is their refusal to adopt the pragmatic rhetorical moderation that characterizes the manifestos. Instead, they thrust their claims into the American public sphere with a polemical intensity that the manifestos, despite comparable ideological foundations, consistently resisted.

Conclusion

To write a manifesto after Marx and Marinetti is always, if not an act of radicalism, then at the very least a gesture towards it. As I have tried to show, this also applies to the Humanist Manifestos of 1933, 1973, and 2003. While these texts avoid the confrontational polemical style that characterizes the tradition of American atheist pamphleteering (see Zappe 2026), they draw on the declarative force of the manifesto form to intervene in public discourse and to actively seek to redraw the ethical coordinates of American modernity. What lends this intervention its particular force is the fact that the radicalism of the manifestos does not primarily reside in polemical excess, but in their formal decision to speak in the univocal and programmatic register of the manifesto, a genre historically associated with rupture and normative change.

As Sägesser has noted, their project was “to demonstrate compatibility between atheism and morality in a country where godless people were generally looked down on as people of weak morality” (65). While the author collectives behind the manifestos—like many critics of religion operating under the cultural pressure of American anti-atheism—conspicuously avoid the term “atheist,” certainly also for strategic reasons, they nonetheless affirm what is expressed in Nietzsche’s phrase “the death of God”: that religious transcendence can no longer be sustained as credible within the conditions of modernity and that this obsoletion of the religious paradigm refers the basic existential, epistemological and ethical questions back to humanity and, in the end, to the individual human being. They do so with radical conviction, leaving no room for deliberation or compromise. Each of the three documents responds to a specific historical moment, yet all articulate their claims from within a distinctly anti-metaphysical position situated inside the immanent frame. The inclusive tone and collective voice may suggest moderation, but they are also instrumental in the attempt to displace the transcendental assumptions that continue to structure large parts of the American moral imaginary. The manifestos do not express their rejection of religion with the inquisition-like confrontational fervor of atheist polemicist ranging from H.L. Mencken to the New Atheists, yet they are just as forceful in their claims, even though their radicalism remains tacit rather than overt.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 852205). This publication reflects only the author’s view, and the Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

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