Humanism Ancient & Modern: can we forge a new synthesis?

By David Warden

In this article, David reflects on where humanism has come from and where it might be heading next. He suggests that modern humanism, a syncretic fusion of Enlightenment rationalism and elements of social radicalism derived from Christianity, now faces an existential test: whether it can evolve from being primarily a reactive, political movement into a fuller philosophy of human flourishing, drawing on its classical resources.

Modern humanism is often understood as a child of the European Enlightenment: a movement shaped by the drive to free human beings from the authority of church, patriarchy, and inherited tradition, and to place individual reason and conscience at the centre of moral and social life. From Denis Diderot to Richard Dawkins, humanist thinkers have sought to expand the space in which people can think, speak, and live for themselves.

More than two centuries on, that emancipatory project has brought undeniable gains. Intellectual freedom from dogmatic religion, the full participation of non-believers in public life, the advancement of women’s rights, sexual freedom, and the widening expectation that people should be able to shape their own lives rather than inherit them ready-made are among its most visible achievements. In this sense, contemporary humanism continues to see itself as part of a wider struggle for human rights, equality, and social progress, often pressing to remove what it regards as the remaining privileges of religion in public institutions.

Cultural critics have long noted, however, that this emancipatory vision also carries a deeper inheritance. Writers such as John Gray (a British political philosopher and cultural critic) have claimed that modern humanism is a secularised version of Christian eschatology: the hope for a transformed world in which justice prevails, hierarchies are overturned, and human dignity is fully realised. (Matthew 20:16 — ‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last’.) Humanism, on this reading, becomes a syncretic tradition – combining Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism with a vision of an ideal society shaped by Christianity – and expressing this synthesis in the familiar claim that ‘we can live good lives without God’.

These assumptions are woven into much contemporary humanist self-understanding. A recent example is Understanding Humanism (2023) by Andrew Copson, Luke Donellan, and Richard Norman, which presents a vision of humanism grounded in reason, rights, and social progress. The question I want to explore is whether this emancipatory model now carries limits of its own. What if the effort to free individuals from traditional structures has also contributed to a more fragile moral and social landscape – one marked by loneliness, insecurity, and a persistent search for meaning and belonging? What if human flourishing depends not only on freedom from constraint, but on the presence of shared practices, stable institutions, and forms of moral formation that help people learn how to live together?

My argument is that modern humanism has tended to define itself primarily through critique and liberation, and that in doing so it has sidelined an older, classical strand of humanist thinking concerned with the formation of character and the cultivation of civic life. Traditions such as humanitas – the Roman ideal of becoming fully human through education, virtue, friendship, and participation in the life of the community – point toward a vision of humanism less focused on what must be resisted, and more on what must be patiently built.

This essay is an attempt to place these two inheritances of humanism – emancipation and formation – into dialogue, and to ask what a renewed humanism might look like in a cultural moment shaped as much by a hunger for belonging as by a desire for freedom.

Dialogue and the two inheritances of humanism

Humanists are familiar with the language of dialogue, and this is actively promoted within the movement, particularly in engagement with religious communities. In his book Truth is Two-Eyed (1979), the theologian John A. T. Robinson offered a helpful way of thinking about what dialogue involves. He contrasted dia-logue – to ‘speak across’ the space that separates – with de-bate, understood as an effort to batter down and defeat.

Robinson suggested that each of us lives from a kind of moral and intellectual ‘centre’, surrounded by boundaries that can become hard and defensive. The purpose of dialogue, he argued, is not to abandon those centres, but to soften the edges – to open frontiers rather than fortify them. He captured this with the image of an ellipse with two foci: not a single point of truth to be imposed, but a creative tension between distinct positions that can deepen understanding on both sides. Authentic dialogue, Robinson warned, is not safe. It exposes our assumptions to challenge and, at times, to change. But it is precisely this willingness to be unsettled that allows understanding to grow rather than collapse into mutual suspicion.

This way of thinking has usually been applied within humanism to conversations with religion. Yet it also has relevance for tensions within the movement itself, particularly where different visions of humanism’s purpose come into contact. If humanism is to hold together both its emancipatory impulse and its concern for formation and belonging, it requires a style of engagement that treats disagreement as a relationship to be sustained, rather than a problem to be eliminated.

At a more general level, this points toward a view of society itself as structured by enduring tensions rather than final resolutions: between freedom and belonging, individual and community, liberty and equality. A healthy moral and political culture is not one in which one pole triumphs over the other, but one in which both are kept in view, in creative and dynamic balance.

Seen in this light, dialogue is not simply a technique for managing disagreement. It becomes a civic and humanist virtue – a way of inhabiting the space between competing goods without reducing one to an enemy of the other.

Represented graphically, the two contrasting styles could look like this:

Figure 1. Polarisation: positions defined by separation rather than relationship

Figure 2. Dialogue: positions defined by relationship rather than separation

Experiments in humanist formation 

If the tension between emancipation and formation runs deep in humanist ideas, it is also visible in the movement’s repeated attempts to turn those ideas into lived communities. Religions such as Christianity address a wide range of human needs at once: they offer a story about where we come from and where we are going; they provide frameworks for guilt, forgiveness, and moral repair; they soften the fear of death and separation; and they embed individuals in communities that offer continuity, care, and belonging across generations. Whatever one makes of their truth claims, they function as comprehensive systems for making sense of human life.

Some early humanist pioneers recognised that dismantling religious belief without offering any comparable structures of meaning and community carried social and existential risks. Again and again, attempts were made to construct secular alternatives that could retain the formative and communal dimensions of religion without its supernatural foundations.

Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason during the French Revolution. Image by Peter Haas. Creative Commons – linked to licence.

The first wave of such experiments emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The brief transformation of Notre-Dame into a ‘Temple of Reason’ symbolised an ambition to replace religious devotion with rational and civic commitment. In nineteenth-century Britain, the industrialist Robert Owen pursued a more practical version of the same impulse through his Rational Society and the network of ‘Halls of Science’ that combined education, culture, ceremony, and social life for working-class communities. At their height, these societies drew tens of thousands of members before overreach and financial collapse brought them to an end.

A more systematic attempt followed in France with Auguste Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’, a highly developed blueprint for a secular moral order centred on science, altruism, and social duty. Though often ridiculed for its quasi-Catholic forms, Comte’s vision influenced a number of thriving positivist communities, including the London society led by Frederic Harrison, which for two decades offered lectures, festivals, choirs, and a structured ethical life recognisably similar to that of modern humanist groups.

In the United States, Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture movement took a different path, presenting itself as a ‘religion of deed rather than creed’. Several of the ethical societies he inspired still survive, and in Britain Humanists UK stands in direct institutional continuity with the movement.

The most sustained British attempt to develop a secular church model was the Ethical Church in Bayswater, founded in 1914 and led by Stanton Coit. Under his successor, Harold Blackham, however, the movement decisively turned away from the language and structures of religion, embracing a more explicitly secular and rationalist identity that would shape organised humanism for the rest of the twentieth century.

This pattern has reappeared even in recent decades. The rapid rise and equally rapid decline of the Sunday Assembly – with its promise to ‘live better, help often, and wonder more’ – suggests that the appetite for non-religious forms of community and moral uplift persists, even if sustaining them over time remains difficult.

Taken together, these episodes point to a recurring ambivalence within humanism itself. On the one hand, there is a desire to avoid anything that looks like dogma, ritual, or ‘religion by another name’. On the other, there is a repeated recognition that human beings are not sustained by critique and freedom alone, but also by shared practices, moral formation, and durable forms of belonging.

The challenge, then, is not to recreate religion in secular form, but to recover a richer understanding of humanism as something more than the absence of belief. Humanist traditions stretching back to classical ideas of humanitas offer a vocabulary of education, virtue, friendship, and civic participation that can speak to this need without reverting to supernatural frameworks.

Recent experience at the local level suggests that this is not merely a theoretical concern. Even in a cultural climate shaped by digital connection and social withdrawal, humanist groups find that people still respond to opportunities for face-to-face community, shared purpose, and ethical reflection. The question is whether the wider movement is willing to treat such formative work as central to its identity, rather than as a peripheral or optional activity.

Humanism beyond the humanist movement

These modern experiments sit within a much older and wider humanist inheritance, one that reaches far beyond the organised movement of the last two centuries. Humanists sometimes lose sight of the fact that humanism is older and broader than the modern humanist movement itself. For all its achievements, it represents only one recent expression of a much deeper civilisational tradition. As Alan Bullock’s The Humanist Tradition in the West (1985) quietly illustrates by disregarding the modern movement altogether, humanism’s influence is often felt more in culture, science, education and moral outlook than in formal institutions that carry its name.

In its earliest Western form, humanism took shape in ancient Athens and Rome, where philosophers, dramatists, and statesmen placed human agency, reason, and civic responsibility at the centre of public life. Thinkers such as Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca treated the formation of character and the cultivation of practical wisdom as inseparable from participation in the life of the city.

That classical inheritance did not vanish with the rise of Christianity, but it was preserved, translated, and reinterpreted through long and complex cultural journeys. Islamic scholars in centres such as Baghdad, Córdoba, and Toledo transmitted Greek and Roman learning back into Western Europe, where Renaissance figures such as Petrarch and his contemporaries reanimated the studia humanitatis – history, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and moral reflection – as a counterweight to purely theological education. This revival was later deepened by the influx of Greek scholars and manuscripts into Italy following the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

This rediscovery of classical humanism helped shape the Enlightenment and, through it, many of the institutions and ideals of the modern world: science, democratic governance, civil liberties, and human rights. In this wider sense, humanism is not simply a movement or a set of beliefs, but a recurring attempt to place human understanding, responsibility, and moral agency at the centre of cultural life.

Seen in this light, humanism is not a fully worked-out ‘system’ comparable to Buddhism or Quakerism, with a fixed body of doctrine or practice. Its strength lies precisely in its openness: its willingness to draw on the whole range of human insight – from philosophy and literature to psychology and the sciences – in the ongoing task of understanding what it means to live well together. Practices as diverse as meditation, ethical reflection, and civic engagement can all find a home within this broad, exploratory framework.

At the same time, humanism has its own powerful story to tell about the human condition. We are a species that emerged from deep evolutionary time, fragile, mortal, and often divided by fear, competition, and unequal fortune – yet also capable of extraordinary cooperation, creativity, and care. We have built cities and microscopes, written poems and constitutions, cured diseases and crossed oceans, even as we continue to struggle with violence, injustice, and the limits of our own nature.

Shakespeare captured this ambivalence with enduring clarity:

What a piece of work is a man!

How noble in reason!

how infinite in faculties!

The paragon of animals!

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Humanism, at its best, does not resolve this tension, either by idealising humanity or despairing of it. It treats the human condition as something to be understood, worked with, and gradually shaped through education, ethical practice, and shared forms of life.

From this perspective, the task of building humanist communities is not simply to articulate a set of positions about the world, but rather to develop the ‘cultural software’ that helps people learn how to live: how to balance freedom with responsibility, individuality with belonging, aspiration with limitation. Past attempts to create humanist alternatives to religious institutions have often faltered, but the persistence of these efforts suggests that the underlying human need has not disappeared.

The question, then, is not whether humanism can ever function as a substitute for religion, but whether it is willing to take seriously its own civilisational inheritance as a tradition of formation – and to experiment, patiently and creatively, with what that might mean for human lives and communities today.

A delegate at the World Humanist Congress in Copenhagen, August 2023. Photo by David Warden.

The times are a-changin’

Dorset Humanists, the group I currently lead, was founded in 1996 and, for much of its history, followed the familiar model of public lectures and talks. In recent months, however, we have begun to experiment with different forms of gathering, shaped less around the traditional 50-minute lecture and more around participation and interaction. We are moving from what might be called a ‘consumer’ model of humanism, in which members pick and choose which interesting events to attend, toward a more explicitly ‘community’ model, in which people are invited to meet, talk, eat, walk, and reflect together on a more regular basis. Talks and lectures have not been banned but the balance has shifted towards more café-style discussions and forums, with shared food and occasional music, augmenting our existing programme of pub socials and local walks. In addition, we maintain a small hardship fund, informal pastoral support, and charitable projects, and continue to engage with the wider civic life of the area through education and public commemorations.

What we are trying to explore, in modest and practical ways, is whether humanism can be experienced not only as a set of intellectual positions and campaigns, but as a shared way of life – one that encourages ethical reflection, mutual support, and a sense of belonging without abandoning intellectual openness and critical independence. You can read more about our experimental approach in the accompanying report entitled ‘Humanist Café – a new way of doing humanism?’

If experiments such as these prove sustainable, they raise wider questions for the movement as a whole. Can humanist groups develop forms of leadership, training, and institutional support that take this formative role seriously, rather than treating it as an optional extra? Examples elsewhere – from the Humanistic University in Utrecht to long-established ethical societies in the United States – suggest that this is not an impossible ambition, but one that requires patience, resources, and a willingness to think of humanism as more than the mere absence of religion.

The ‘Little Fight’ and the ‘Great Fight’

The tension between critique and cultivation also shapes how humanists think about their role in public life and institutions. As early as 1966, the Dutch humanist Jaap van Praag suggested that the ‘little fight’ for the public recognition of atheists and agnostics had largely been won in the Netherlands, and that humanist organisations should turn more of their attention to what he called the ‘great fight’: helping people to develop a coherent humanist framework of meaning for their lives, in much the same way that religious communities have traditionally done for their members.

Behind this distinction lies an important anthropological insight. Human beings rarely flourish as isolated moral agents. We depend on families, communities, and institutions to sustain the stories, practices, and values through which we make sense of our lives. This is as true of our ‘meaning frameworks’ as it is of our social and economic lives more generally.

From this perspective, a purely negative or minimalist form of secularism – one that focuses primarily on removing religious influence without cultivating alternative forms of moral and communal life – may be insufficient. The question is not simply how to protect individuals from imposed belief, but how to support people in the shared work of ethical formation and belonging.

Different countries have responded to this challenge in different ways, ranging from strongly secular public cultures to more pluralistic arrangements that recognise a variety of religious and non-religious communities as part of the social fabric. These differences raise a broader question for the humanist movement: whether its future lies chiefly in campaigning and critique, or in the slower, less visible task of building institutions and practices that can sustain humanist ways of life over time.

If humanism is to be more than a set of arguments about the world, it may need to take more seriously the work of community-building, leadership, and long-term support. The persistence of religious traditions across centuries suggests that ideas endure most powerfully when they are embedded in lived forms of association – not only in books, campaigns and declarations.

Conclusion: the next hundred years

Humanism stands at a moment of reflection as much as decision. One path continues the long work of securing freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and a public culture in which no one is excluded because of belief or non-belief. This emancipatory inheritance has achieved a great deal, and its work is not yet finished.

Another path places greater emphasis on what humanism can offer as a lived practice: the cultivation of character, the creation of communities of belonging, and the development of shared frameworks of meaning that help people navigate the ordinary and extraordinary moments of human life. This formative inheritance has appeared repeatedly in humanist history, often hesitantly and sometimes unsuccessfully, but it has never entirely disappeared.

The future of humanism may not lie in choosing between these paths, but in learning how to walk down both of them at the same time. A movement that protects freedom without neglecting formation, and that champions critical independence while also nurturing solidarity, is better equipped to respond to a world marked by both unprecedented possibility and deep uncertainty.

The Amsterdam Declaration of 2022 speaks of a ‘widespread demand for a source of meaning and purpose to stand as an alternative to dogmatic religion.’ Meeting that demand will require more than statements of principle or campaigns for reform. It will call for patience, imagination, and a willingness to experiment with new ways of expressing and realising humanist values and virtues – in education, in community, and in the wider culture.

Sources and suggested further reading

• Humanist Café – a new way of doing humanism? (2026) by David Warden in this issue of Humanistically Speaking.

• ‘Humanism as a Worldview and Way of Being’ by David Warden in Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: Exploring Myth, Metaphor, Magic for Sustainability (2025) edited by Maureen Ellis (Routledge).

• The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists (2023) by Callum G. Brown, David Nash and Charlie Lynch.

• Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (2021) by Ray Argyle.

• 'Humanism in Europe' by Stefan Schröder in The Oxford Handbook of Humanism (2021) usefully analyses the two types of humanism I have identified as secularist and pillarised, noting the tensions between them in a number of European countries.

• ‘The Future of Humanism’ by Peter Derkx in The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism (2015) edited by Andrew Copson and A.C.Grayling.

• Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003) John Gray

• ‘Has Humanism any Future?’ (2003) a lecture by David Warden at Conway Hall Library, published in the South Place Ethical Society Record and republished in this issue of Humanistically Speaking.

• Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity (2001) Andrew Wernick, Cambridge University Press.

• Robert Owen: Social Visionary (2000) by Ian Donnachie.

• ‘Has Humanism a Future?’ in The Humanist Tradition in the West (1985) by Alan Bullock.

• The British Ethical Societies (1986) Ian MacKillop

About the author

David Warden was an evangelical Christian from childhood until the age of twenty-three when he lost his faith. He has a bachelor’s degree in theology from the University of Kent and a master’s degree in human resource management and development from Bournemouth University. He joined the humanist movement in 2002 and has led Dorset Humanists, a Partner Group of Humanists UK, since 2009. He was made an honorary member of Humanists UK by Andrew Copson for services to humanism in Dorset. After retirement in 2016 from a career in business training he qualified as a humanistic counsellor. Until 2020 he co-led a Christian-humanist dialogue group in Dorset and from 2020-2024 he was humanist advisor in the Faith & Reflection Team at Bournemouth University and Arts University Bournemouth. He was part of the team that set up Humanistically Speaking in 2019 and from February 2023 he took over as editor. In 2025, his chapter ‘Humanism as a Worldview and Way of Being’ was published by Routledge in a multifaith anthology entitled Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: Exploring Myth, Metaphor, Magic for Sustainability edited by Maureen Ellis.