To his credit, Eric Thomas, President of Humanist Canada thanked me for my comments and promised to circulate them with the Board. My hope was that Humanist Canada would engage with my critique and together we could work toward a stronger and more constructive statement. I have belonged to Humanist Canada in the past (I mostly don’t right now as I’m living in the UK) and, while Twitter is a glib medium, did hope my public criticisms would prompt action.

I knew at the time that sharing it publicly was a risk. It’s often better to respond privately in these situations but given this was the only statement I was aware of from a secular or atheist group (I later saw Secular Connexion Séculaire’s letter), I wanted in part to start a larger discussion about the issue in the atheist community in Canada. Given Eric’s initial offer, I was cautiously optimistic.

Now, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, a board member of Humanist Canada and author of the response, has doubled down on the statement in a comment on Canadian Atheist. Since I do care about the future of Humanism in Canada, I want to make the proper case now of why that statement and accompanying press release failed and how I believe it could have been a statement that put Humanist values in action.

Despite Lloyd’s assertion, I’m not “antipathetic” to Humanist Canada as an organization. My Tweets were born out of an incredible disappointment and frustration at what could have been something truly progressive, forward-thinking, and constructive. Instead, the leaders of freethought in Canada took the opportunity to simply bash religion, playing into the tired narrative that we have nothing more to add to the national dialogue.

This blog post is divided into several sections below. The first is my main point. Beyond that are nitpicks and specific disagreements and a dissection of the press release that went alongside Humanist Canada’s response. I’ve also restrained myself to avoid profanity as much as possible throughout this blog, as apparently it might come off as vulgar.

My core argument: Humanist Canada’s response was a missed opportunity

My biggest issue with Hstatement is that it was completely silent on the importance of reconciliation. It reads, on the whole to me, as a glossing over the core motivation for the report and like it was an opportunistic attack on religion. One of the most common and frustrating criticisms of Humanism is that it’s a purely negative and anti-religious.

I firmly believe Humanism has much more to offer than that. In the words of the Humanist Manifesto III: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” There’s the eloquent seven point definition of the Amsterdam Declaration. Even Humanist Canada’s own Humanism 101 page says:

Humanism is a philosophy or life-stance based upon a profound respect for human dignity and the conviction that human beings are ultimately accountable to themselves and to society for their actions. It is a deity-free worldview that affirms our ability to lead ethical and meaningful lives without reliance upon a belief in the supernatural. Humanists are guided by reason and scientific inquiry, inspired by music and art, and motivated by ethics, compassion and fairness.

While each of these is clear that Humanists don’t believe in the supernatural, they spend far more time saying that we do believe in human dignity and in our ability to make the world a better place through reason and compassion.

Humanist Canada’s Statement betrays those pretexts and instead focuses mainly on using the Commission’s Report as a chance to take a snap at religion. I base this on the press release, which should arguably highlight the organization’s key messages (but I’ll dissect it thoroughly later). Those points, from my reading are:

• Humanist Canada “has endorsed the broad scope” of the report.
• A call on the Government “to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples.” [sic]
• That the Commission “paid insufficient attention to the culpability of Canada’s churches.”
• That “spiritual violence” is a problematic term because it could lead to censorship of free speech.
• “All forms of religious indoctrination of children are a form of child abuse.”

The first is a platitude, the second rhetoric, and the remainder is spent bashing religion or the commission for not bashing religion more. I’ll respond to some of these in more detail later.

In my opinion, a meaningful Humanist response would involve actually internalizing the report, creating organizational actions that take some ownership of the issue, and suggest ways individual Humanists can work toward reconciliation. The point of the report was that there has been a systematic attempt to destroy a culture by successive Canadian Governments. The Commission goes as far as to term this cultural genocide.

This is based on five full years of top-level research, interviews, and investigations across the country. While I respect that Lloyd has firsthand experience with some of these issues, as Humanists we clearly need to distinguish between these anecdotal experiences and the systematic and arguably scientific approach that went into writing this report. While that doesn’t exempt the report from criticism, it should give pause and reflection when drafting a response. At very least, it should merit a conflict of interest statement if your statement might be coloured by the experiences of the author.

But let’s get back to the term cultural genocide because that should be a big obvious flag that these issues go far beyond religion or the actions of the churches. While the churches absolutely need to be held responsible, and Humanists certainly have a role to play in calling them out, it was a racist culture across the entirety of Canadian society that perpetuated the residential school system. A racism that continues to exist to this day.

Among other ways, the report provided evidence for this with quotes from Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A MacDonald, politicians through the 1920s, and the 1969 White Paper conceived by Liberal Prime Ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chretien (then Minister of Indian Affairs). Each of these, the report concludes, demonstrate an attempt to destroy or integrate aboriginal culture into the White Christian majority culture of Canada.

In case it’s not clear: every Canadian – including Humanists – was complicit in this system.

If Humanist Canada at the time stood up for the freedom and dignity of Canada’s First Nations, this would have been a chance to highlight that. If Humanist Canada was silent, this is the time to admit that we were wrong. In either case, it would then have to follow with how Humanist Canada plans to work toward reconciliation. You can’t endorse the report while ignoring the extremely clear calls to action.

As a bare minimum demonstration that Humanist Canada understood this, I suggested the statement ought to have highlighted some of the recommendations reflected in the core principles of Humanism (for example, the call to repeal the spanking law).

But beyond that, what’s desperately missing from Humanist Canada’s statement and is the biggest missed opportunity here, is any commitment to do anything following the report. Instead of being a leader on one of the main human rights issues in Canada at the moment, Humanist Canada had absolutely nothing to say on what it felt Humanists ought to do in light of this report. There was no promise to review its own policies and activities. No suggestions for members to add their suggestion. No promises to reach out to Canada’s aboriginal community. There was no ambition in it to make the world a better place. And that’s why I’m angry.

To give a really tangible suggestion, as many as 31% of aboriginals in Canada say they have no religion. That’s almost seven times as many as say they practice “Traditional (Aboriginal) spirituality”. And while that doesn’t mean they are all atheists or Humanists – early research into non-religion amongst aboriginals in Australia suggests many may eschew the word religion while still maintaining spiritual beliefs – undoubtedly some would share our values and would be eager to work with an organization promoting human dignity and secular values.

At the very least this presents an incredible opportunity for dialogue around what it means to be non-religious in contemporary Canada. We should be building bridges, starting discussions, and learning about these issues. In particular, there’s potentially much we can from the aboriginal perspective before we force our own ideas and campaigns on them.

For me this report generates so many important and interesting questions and I really wish it had done the same for the current leadership of Humanist Canada. These are questions that could lead to a larger, more diverse movement (something I hope Humanist Canada cares about). For example (these are really just illustrative):

• How do aboriginals view Canada’s non-religious communities?
• What can we as Humanists and secularists do to promote reconciliation?
• How many members of Humanist Canada are aboriginal? Why aren’t there more? What are their priorities?
• What do non-religious aboriginals believe in?
• What barriers do atheists and the non-religious face on reserves?
• How do aboriginal beliefs inform modern secular aboriginal people?

Finally, it’s a missed opportunity because it fails to engage with where Canadians are on this issue. Angus Reid’s poll, released last week, on Canadian’s reaction to the report shows strong support for the report – with younger Canadians most optimistic about the report bringing a better situation to Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

That’s not to say Humanist Canada ought to just follow the polls. We do have a place in challenging majority opinions, but that needs to come first from demonstrating an actual understanding of the issue and making the case why the majority is wrong.

Lloyd claims in his comment that “Instead of simply parroting the ‘me too’ line of some political parties, we added to it.” But I see no evidence from that statement that Humanist Canada actually grasped the issues at play before jumping in to say religion should have been bashed more.

A strong and constructive response could have shown how Humanist values of tolerance, compassion, and open secularism are not just relevant in this conversation but are those that could potentially offer the optimistic future that younger Canadians believe is possible.

In no particular order below are my more specific responses to Lloyd, the Humanist Canada statement and their abysmal press release. I don’t plan on spending any more of my time arguing about this statement. I’m not alone in these criticisms and I hope by now you can see why we find this position problematic. Nevertheless, I maintain my offer to help build a constructive response.

Spiritual Violence

“We are concerned that this term could be used to cut off reasonable discussion which is a clear infringement of free speech and personal evolution,” Lloyd said in the press release. The release claims the term spiritual violence “was defined as demeaning a person’s religious traditions.”

But just because someone uses the word spiritual doesn’t mean atheists should automatically throw up their arms in protest.

Despite Lloyd’s claim, the report is explicitly clear both about what definition of spiritual violence it was using and in when it’s something to be condemned. In the context of the report, spiritual violence is very clearly about an active government policy to destroy a culture. For example, the second paragraph of the report defines cultural genocide and identifies what would constitute spiritual violence: “Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed.”

If that’s not enough, they straight up define what the they mean on page 276. Perhaps Lloyd missed the rest of this because the statement says it’s defined on page 272.

Spiritual violence occurs when:

• a person is not permitted to follow her or his preferred spiritual or religious tradition;
• a different spiritual or religious path or practice is forced on a person;
• a person’s spiritual or religious tradition, beliefs, or practices are demeaned or belittled; or
• a person is made to feel shame for practising his or her traditional or family beliefs.

There is plenty of evidence to support our conclusion that spiritual violence was common in residential schools

There are four separate definitions there and it’s clearly not about restricting anyone’s freedom to criticize religion. The entire report is about the abuse of aboriginal peoples by the state. It’s about the government having a policy to tell people they’re wrong, what you can and can’t believe, and often trying to – sometimes literally – beat and torture your beliefs out of you. Take this section, which makes it clear (p 282, emphasis added):

To have a right that you are afraid to exercise is to have no right at all. The Declaration asserts that governments (and other parties) now have an obligation to assist Indigenous communities to restore their own spiritual belief systems and faith practices, where these have been damaged or subjected to spiritual violence through past laws, policies, and practices. No one should be told who is, or how to worship, their Creator. That is an individual choice and, for Indigenous peoples, it is also a collective right. However, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people need to be assured that they do indeed have the freedom to choose and that their choice will be respected.

In his comment Lloyd says that “To ignore inconvenient facts in support of a political narrative, especially when accompanied by rants to silence dissent, is a definition of totalitarianism.” I’m sorry Lloyd, but the stuff I said wasn’t totalitarian, it was critical of Humanist Canada. This stuff, about government policy to destroy cultures, that’s totalitarian.

Instead of supporting the right to freedom of religion for aboriginal peoples and for secularism (ie the government not telling you what to believe), this is “The one commission recommendation [Humanist Canada has] questioned.”

That recommendation, number 60, calls on church leaders to be sensitive to this historic abuse to prevent it from happening again (particularly related to attempts to destroy their culture). That sounds sensible to me. Anyone going into schools in a position of authority ought to have some modicum of understanding of their students, particularly if there are generations of abuse from people in positions of authority.

On signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Humanist Canada’s press release and statement “Call on the Government to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples [sic].” But as I pointed out in my Storify, you literally can’t sign it after the vote. That’s just not how it works.

Yes, the Harper Government has dragged its heels at every opportunity and continues to delay meaningful action. The Huffington Post article Lloyd linked to, discussing Canada’s objections raised at a 2014 meeting to the language used in a small number of clauses is a red herring. It’s literally not a document we can sign.

The report recommends:

43. We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.

44. We call upon the Government of Canada to develop a national action plan, strategies, and other concrete measures to achieve the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Read it again and compare it with what Humanist Canada says.

They are clearly different calls. The Commission talks about adopting and implementing the Declaration. If the Government could sign the Declaration, they would have made it recommendation number 1 (or at least one of them).

If that recommendation – that Canada should adopt and implement the Declaration as a framework for reconciliation – is what you meant, you should have said that. Language matters in these situations. At best you look naïve when you release an official statement asking for things that cannot happen. It’s a good way to destroy the credibility of your organization and – why I’m extra incensed – of our movement.

Lloyd says “Curiously, Mr. Bushfield approvingly posted a letter from Secular Connexion Séculaire” citing the SCS document I put in my Storify. What Lloyd missed was where I said, “though [SCS] still mistakenly calls on Canada to sign UNDRIP when we already have.” So I really can’t see what’s confusing Lloyd unless he hasn’t actually read what I wrote.

I completely agree that the Government shouldn’t have voted against the Declaration in the first place and the continued objections are embarrassing to our country, but we still can’t sign it.

On “good experiences” in residential schools

In his response on Canadian Atheist, Lloyd says I tweeted “that the HC document ‘reads like a Catholic apologist.’” The good thing about the internet is that I can show you exactly what I said:

This is the worst from @Humanist_Canada. It reads like a Catholic apologist http://t.co/CihZ1Ipsd1 #TRC pic.twitter.com/lQfrJcAnIi

— Ian Bushfield (@ibushfield) July 2, 2015

Maybe Lloyd’s not familiar with Twitter but basically there’s a 140 character limit which means complex thoughts and ideas have to be summarized in very short form. This is why (as you can see) I took a screen-cap to quote one specific sentence from the statement:

We are disappointed that the Truth and Reconciliation Committee failed to report on aboriginal people who had good residential school experiences as reconciliation cannot be achieved without balanced reporting.

And I compared that specific section with a Catholic apologist arguing that we need to talk about the people who had good experiences in residential schools.

To go from my Tweet, which even within Twitter’s limits I think still gets across the point I wanted, so saying I dismissed the entire statement as Catholic apologetics is worse than anything Lloyd accuses me of.

But let’s look at what Lloyd, speaking as Humanist Canada, actually says in that line. And let’s set aside the weasel words of “balanced reporting” which are more often used by conservative media outlets to give space for climate change denialists or to some puffed-up theologian in a piece about atheists.

The reason this line was “the worst” is because it obscures what the point of the entire report was. I pointed this out in my very next Tweet and in the article I linked to in my Storify.

Surely there were some nice schools & people involved but it misses the point that the system was designed to deny dignity: a Humanist value

— Ian Bushfield (@ibushfield) July 2, 2015

If, as Lloyd says, he has “also worked with clients who viewed residential schools as ‘safe havens’ from abuse suffered in their families of origin,” then the answer, the Humanist answer, is surely not to simply change who the abuser is. It must be to challenge human rights abuses wherever they occur. That some people saw residential schools as not better but less bad than their home-life is surely another sign of our continued failure as a country to protect indigenous peoples?

So Lloyd quote-mined a Tweet to argue that I didn’t read his statement. And I’m the one who’s being “disingenuous.”

My “most disingenuous suggestion”

Lloyd says “Probably Mr. Bushfield’s most disingenuous suggestion is that HC is opposed to those recommendations not directly mentioned in our two page response paper.”

The only problem is I never said that.

I said, as I’ve repeated in thorough detail above, that Humanist Canada missed an opportunity by not mentioning any of the recommendations or reconciliation. But that’s not even in the same universe as accusing Humanist Canada of being opposed to any of them. I wrote about what an actually meaningful response would look like. There were a whole bunch of recommendations in there, but all Humanist Canada had to say was it “endorsed the broad scope” of the report.

And that doesn’t mean a Sagan-damned thing.

Having made up what I said, Lloyd continues, “He uses this ruse to falsely accuse HC of supporting the spanking of children.”

Go back and read my Storify. Again I never said any of that.

On spanking, I asked rhetorically, “Surely Humanist Canada isn’t pro-smacking children?” I clearly didn’t do this to imply that Humanist Canada endorses spanking. Read the context of what I said.

I was arguing that Humanist Canada should have used the statement as an opportunity to show common ground with the recommendations and Humanist values. Spanking is something I assume most Humanists oppose (based on the evidence and morality), so I clearly didn’t “use this ruse to falsely accuse HC” of anything.

The press release

Before I address the press release itself, I want to establish my credentials. I’ve spent much of the past 8 years campaigning, in voluntary and professional capacities, for secularism and science. In that time, I’ve written and helped write countless media releases which have landed front page newspaper coverage as well as radio and TV interviews. Some of my early work was undoubtedly helped by the novelty of atheism, my more recent and focused work has been on the strategic thinking on building and framing of a story so as to make the greatest impact possible.

As campaigning has become my profession, and this blog has already run way too long, I’m not going to break down everything that’s wrong (from a public point of view) with Humanist Canada’s release. I’m not going to do their work for them for free. But here’s a quick run-through of why I consider it to be amateurish and damaging to the credibility not just of Humanist Canada but potentially of the broader Humanist movement.

This release went out three weeks after the report. There is almost no point in putting out a press release that late. No one’s going to care because it’s not news.

The first line actually needs to say something newsworthy. That Humanist Canada is a “a National, Secular, Non Profit and registered Charitable Educational Organization” is not. It is redundant (all charities are registered non-profits in Canada) and grammatically incorrect (none of those words should be capitalized). That stuff all belongs in a footnote with a description of what Humanist Canada is.

There’s no story in this release. Pick two, maybe three main points at most and centre a narrative around that. Imagine you’re writing the newspaper article for them. Walk them through the story.

Too many ideas are crammed into each paragraph. Just make them nice, clear and short (even just a couple sentences each). Give the quotes their own space.

Link directly to the statement. This was an electronic press release, sent over the internet. You don’t need to say “find this thing here” you can link directly to it or even add it as an attachment.

Give an email address for contact. It’s 2015, most of the journalists that follow up with me send an email.

Don’t pay for it! This was released on MarketWired, a professional wire service. I don’t know for a fact that Humanist Canada paid for this release but I do know that there are free wire services. Nevertheless, in my experience it’s generally far more effective to send a release (by email) directly to news desks and journalists. Like other non-religious charities, Humanist Canada is funded almost entirely by donations, so it’s just wasting donor’s money. A better use of funds would be to pay someone professionally to do your communications, who might have foreseen many of these criticisms.

Also, Peoples in “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples” should be capitalized.

Update 16 July 2015:

I’ve made some minor copy edits to the post and cleaned up the later sections. None of my arguments have changed substantively.

I want to add that in my Storify, and for as much as possible here, I directed my critiques at Humanist Canada’s statement, albeit sometimes in the tongue-in-cheek format of social media. I did this on my own, independent of any organizations. Lloyd, however, repeatedly and blatantly misrepresented my arguments and resorted to personal attacks. And Lloyd speaks as “the board member who prepared the draft position adopted by HC.” Even if his comments aren’t endorsed by Humanist Canada, this is the only communication I’ve received from them (albeit indirectly) since they promised to review my notes.

While I will continue to be an active supporter of the Humanist movement in Canada, I’m incredibly disappointed by the behaviour of “Canada’s national voice for humanism” and its current leadership.

It was an interesting discussion despite being, as Alex said, “in danger of everyone agreeing with one another.” That agreement included:

1. Electoral reform
2. Lowering the voting age to 16
3. A citizen-led constitutional convention for the UK

While some non-humanists see tradition as a way to keep society structured, the humanists on the panel agreed that we should critically evaluate our political structures and apply a more rational design, based on evidence and tested against other countries. Humanism is about rejecting dogmas and putting the state in service of the individual. We should ask what we can do to enhance one another’s lives.

They also worried about some of the bitter nationalism seen during the referendum debate. Andrew Copson reminding us that Bertrand Russell frequently spoke out against nationalism, saying that it offered simple silver bullet solutions to all of life’s problems (like Scottish Independence or leaving the EU). Nevertheless, the speakers were optimistic about the engagement generated by the referendum.

The most disagreement in the night came from the questions posed by some members of the audience. One worried that we are just “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” by not dealing with the problem of big business’ influence on politics. Another said we should have compulsory voting – to which Gary said he was against anything compulsory as a humanist and Alex pointed out that compulsory voting in Australia had failed to drive up turnout rates at the local level (where it isn’t compulsory). Another questioner asked how you keep small parties out of government in in proportional representation, and he pointed to Israel where (in his words) the Jewish far right has wielded so much influence their airlines can’t even fly 7 days a week – the answer is given by countries across Europe which have threshold levels before a party gains any seats.

The bet comment of the evening though has to go to Andrew Copson, who said the venue, the Palace of Westminster, “was the least democratic building in the Western world, architecturally.” A point I tried to illustrate recently.

Good afternoon,

Thank you for your email and for sharing your views with regards to Humanist marriages. My apologies for the delay in getting back to you but I was waiting for a clarification of the situation on this issue.

What I feared became reality: it was reported on Sunday 14^th December that the Conservatives will be blocking the legalisation of humanist weddings because they see it as a ‘fringe’ issue that could muddy their key messages ahead of the General Election.

As you know, Liberal Democrats believe that two consenting adults should be able to marry, and in a ceremony that reflect their personal values and beliefs. This is why we are in favour of the legalisation of humanist ceremonies in England and Wales.

I appreciate that humanist weddings appeal to an increasing number of couples who are non-religious, but who are not attracted by the option of a civil marriage ceremony. As a Liberal Democrat, I strongly support the principle of individual freedom and personal choice.

The current law in England and Wales means that anyone who has a humanist wedding must have an additional ceremony, in a registry office or another approved venue, before their marriage can be recognised. We want humanist weddings to be legally recognised.

When the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill was debated in the House of Commons last year, several of my Lib Dems colleagues suggested amendments that would have allowed this to happen. Unfortunately, these amendments did not get enough support to be included in the Bill. However, the Coalition Government did agree to give this issue further consideration.

Section 14 of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2014 placed a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review into whether belief organisations, including humanist celebrants, should be allowed to solemnise marriages. The Act stated that the outcome of this review has to be published no later than 1st January 2015.

I have now written to the Prime Minister on your behalf, highlighting your concerns and asking for them to be addressed. Please find attached a copy of my letter for your information.

I shall of course come back to you as soon as I receive a response. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to get in touch again if you would like to discuss this further or if I can be of any other assistance as your MP.

Kind regards,

Lynne Featherstone MP

Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Hornsey and Wood Green

Here’s her letter to the PM:

Dear David,

RE:  Humanist weddings

I am writing on behalf of a number of my constituents who have expressed concerns regarding the legal recognition of humanist weddings.

My constituents are concerned that the Government has not published the promised review with recommendations over this issue yet. They are worried that there is very little time left before the General Election and that this short timetable could slip leaving them in the same unequal situation.

My constituents outlined that if the state can recognise the weddings of an unlimited range of religious organisations as marriages, there is no reason for it not to similarly recognise those conducted by a humanist organisation. They believe that the legal recognition of humanist marriages would be simple, popular, and would remove unreasonable disparities between different parts of the UK.

I would be most grateful if you could comment on the specific issues that have been raised. Thank you for your kind attention in this regard and I look forward to your response.

Kind regards,

Lynne Featherstone MP

Labour and the Greens also support extending the marriage act to humanists. The Sunday Times revealed on December that Number 10 has intervened to block humanist marriages.

Now regardless of the utility of a word, I think it’s important for organizations to choose language that will be widely understood. If a word has little cultural understanding, then it may be too difficult for any one organization to aim to reclaim it or to bring it to prominence.

Consider the following graph from Google’s Ngram viewer.

Thanks to Google’s book digitization project, we can search the frequency of certain words and phrases over the decades.

From this we can look at long-term historical trends and consider whether a word is hip or not.

Comparing “atheism” and “humanism” we can see that both have wobbled through the years. Atheism was surprisingly relevant in the 19th century (perhaps partially as a pejorative), while humanism reached a peak in the 1960s – likely when it was widely adopted in various academic literatures – and had a resurgence in the early 1990s (which roughly corresponds to the peak of “secular humanism”, coined by Paul Kurtz). We can even see the emergence of “New Atheism” after 2000, while humanism has been in free fall for the past twenty years.

For more contemporary usage, we can use Google Trends to track news mentions of both terms – though here I used “atheist” and “humanist” which were slightly more frequent – and again, we see a rise in atheism and a small decline in humanism.

Perhaps to illustrate my underlying concern, let’s look at two related other examples.

The Ethical Culture movement was founded at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. It had a quick rise with successful groups established in New York and the Eastern United States. A few decades earlier, freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll were lecturing across the USA and rallying for secular values. Both of these initial trends can be seen in the Ngram.

It’s interesting to note that the Ethical Culture movement gained the most attention right as Freethought reached its peak. Both fell just before 1900 but Ethical Culture found a renewed strength, despite the declining usage of “freethought.”

All good things come to an end though, and by the start of the cold war, both terms started to fall into disuse (note the scale and that neither of these achieved the success of atheism or humanism). We do see a slight growth in freethought in the 21st Century, following the New Atheist prominence, while ethical culture has flat-lined.

Language isn’t static and it’s useful, I think, to keep long-term trends in mine as we position our movements. There’s a reason that the Sunday Assembly does not market itself with terms like “humanism” or “ethical culture” – neither is particularly relevant anymore. Atheist, however, has renewed strength and was a useful choice (though not officially branded an “atheist church”, it was a useful term to get some initial press).

I’ll leave you with one more graph that might hint at perhaps the next wave of secular identities.

I encourage you to download and read the entire 244 page report online and support your local IHEU Affiliate.

I thought though, given my current country of residence, that I’d focus on the United Kingdom’s status, which coincidentally to Canada is Systemic Discrimination.

While it’s quite easy to live your life as an atheist in Britain – up to two-thirds the country may be non-religious – the report focuses on laws and state institutions, which the UK does quite poorly on. Specifically, they list the following issues that are a bit more extensive than those in Canada.

• There is an established church or state religion
• Systematic religious privilege
• Discriminatory prominence given to religious bodies, traditions or leaders
• State-funding of religious schools
• Religious schools have powers to discriminate in admissions or employment
• Religious groups control some public or social services
• Official symbolic deference to religion
• State-funded schools offer religious instruction without secular alternatives but it is optional

Bold points are the “Systemic Discrimination” tests while the other two are merely “Mostly Satisfactory”

It’s very similar to the issues facing Canada – religiously privileged school systems – plus the existence of the Church of England/Scotland as state churches and the seats reserved for Bishops in the House of Lords.

What’s particularly troubling is that after years of meddling by the government of England and Wales, the education system is in such a mess that further “reforms” are being pushed by the Coalition government to bring in more Free Schools – most of which are run by religious organizations. Whereas a few years ago most schools were either state of Church of England run, an increasing number are being run by different religious groups, including Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews.

Scotland is the brighter point, where the fewest state-funded schools are religious (still 14%) and they are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion. Perhaps Scottish independence wouldn’t be such a bad direction?

The report also notes that schools in England and Wales are required to hold daily prayers. I’m not certain that this law is followed closely but, as in Canada, it likely means that rural and more conservative areas are able to enact greater pressure on those who don’t conform with the dominant religion.

Additionally, a concern is raised about government funding for the Church Conservation Trust charity. This organization works to preserve historical churches across the country. Most of those churches are still property of the Church of England but at the very least are made accessible to the broader public and as a secular charity, the CCT allows any group (even the Sunday Assembly!) to rent their spaces.

A note about libel reform – which was championed after the British Chiropractic Association’s vindictive lawsuit against science writer Simon Singh – concludes the report. While the situation has improved with the new laws, Northern Ireland still lags the rest of the UK and maintains onerous requirements for defenders of free speech.

Two cases are highlighted to conclude the report. The first notes that a Christian charity receiving public funding was discriminating against non-Christian employees and that similar organizations are likely permitted within the law to do the same. The second discusses an atheist who was threaten with arrest for an anti-religious sign in his window.

Overall most countries don’t fare very well on the report. Of the roughly 200 nations in the UN, only 15 receive a grade of “Free and Equal”: Belgium, Kosovo, the Netherlands, Fiji (tentatively based on its new constitution), Kiribati, Nauru, São Tomé and Príncipe, Benin (with broader concerns about human rights), Niger, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Uruguay, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Many of the “atheistic” Northern European nations fail for perpetuating state religions or for keeping blasphemy laws on the books.

It’s also worth noting that a survey that covers the entire world is bound to have limits. Many local conditions are impossible to document by a lone, underfunded NGO. In some cases this will mean missed discrimination (the Canadian section is missing a few examples) and in others, they may have overestimated the effect of unused laws that remain on the books.

Nevertheless, it’s a valuable report and hopefully it inspires other secular groups to produce similar documents and to act in favour of secular human rights.

After attending Imagine No Religion 3 this past spring, I had wanted to challenge the trope of Gypsy Fortune-Tellers that was tangentially brought up on a couple occasions by conference speakers. I don’t suspect and malice or intentional racism on the part of the speakers but the myths should be debunked and consciousness should be raised.

Looking a bit into it, I discovered a 1999 article by famed skeptical investigator Joe Nickell that quotes James Randi describing Gypsies as:

an ethnic group who “essentially live outside the cultures of the countries in which they choose to reside” and who often treat non-gypsies as “fair game for their fortune-telling, curse-lifting and other superstitious ministrations” (Randi 1995).

While I couldn’t track down Randi’s ‘95 reference, it appears he makes a fairly extreme claim about an entire ethnic group without evidence.

This is called racism.

So I started looking wider into the issue, and given my extremely limited background in social sciences, I recruited Edwin Hodge, the skeptical political sociologist, to assist me. Together we drafted the article over the course of a couple months (we’re both really busy) and submitted it to a leading skeptical magazine.

We were advised that it was a good topic to cover, we should shift the tone from an editorial to a more research-based piece (a legitimate request and expected given all of my writing is editorial). However, given recent concerns about the leadership of the various organizations which publish the major skeptic magazines, we opted to publish the article electronically as-is instead.

I hope you’ll share the article as you can. The Roma face a ridiculous amount of discrimination, especially from the Canadian government who, Jason Kenney in particular, view them as dirty thieves.

At a recent skeptics conference and during a discussion of the sorts of charlatans and frauds that are best known for peddling woo, a couple of speakers drew upon the image of the ‘conniving Gypsy fortune-teller,’ a stereotype that has frequently been used to describe – and villainize – the Roma people for almost as long as they have lived in Europe.

The story is an old one: a caravan of vagabonds arrives at the edge of town. An elderly crone sets up her shop in a dimly-lit wagon, eager to part the townsfolk from their hard-earned wages. Lured from the safety of the city by the bright lights and raucous music of the travellers’ camp, a local approaches the wagon and is invited in, motivated by a hope of connecting with lost relatives, or eager to learn the secret of gaining wealth, power, or some other desire. The Gypsies, due to their nomadic nature, won’t stay long; just enough perhaps, to swindle the locals and perhaps steal a child or two.

Over time, suspicion  grows, and the townspeople begin to accuse the Roma of bringing crime to the community, or of leading their children astray. Suspicion soon turns to resentment, then threats of violence, and the Roma are driven out of town.

Yet like myths of revealed religions, skeptics ought to question whether this Gypsy stereotype truly holds up for the Roma people. This question becomes especially pertinent in Canada and the United States where many Roma are applying for asylum after facing persecution in Eastern European countries. In Canada, and in light of the growing number of asylum seekers, the Harper Government has recently taken drastic efforts to curb what it considers “bogus” claims by Roma refugees. Yet for all this, few people actually know much about the Roma, and fewer still know anything with any certainty about their history.

The term Gypsy derives from Egyptian, yet the best available evidence suggests that the more accurately termed Roma people emigrated from Northern India toward Europe around the twelfth century.

The Roma remained nomadic into the 15th century as they migrated into Western Europe. As local cities linked rising crime with the influx of Roma, anti-Gypsy laws began to be drafted, marking the start of centuries of persecution.

The historical accounts of the Roma and their activities deserve proper skeptical consideration; given the almost equally long history of anti-Roma prejudice and bigotry the Roma have faced. History, it is often said, is written by the victor, and like other ethnic and cultural minority groups throughout European history, the Roma have had precious few opportunities to write their own.

Even accepting the traditional accounts of Gypsy crime, one cannot discount the xenophobia that existed across Europe that would have prevented the Roma from attaining productive employment. Such systemic bias creates a negative feedback loop where people are forced to turn to begging and crime when no one will hire them because they believe they are by nature beggars or criminals.

Similar cycles exist in most marginalized communities, whether it’s African Americans or the indigenous people of North America.

Through the 15th to 17th centuries the Roma faced increasing legislated persecution across Europe, with penalties ranging from expulsion to death for even “befriending a Gypsy or Bohemian.”

The persecution of the Roma people arguably hit its peak during the Holocaust. Facing a similar fate of Jewish Europeans, the Roma were viewed as racially inferior and upwards of a quarter million were murdered by the Nazis. It was only in 1979 that the Parliament of West Germany found that persecution of the Roma by the Nazis was racially-motivated, years too late for many survivors who had died in the interim.

Roma in Europe today have largely settled, with only a few nomadic caravans remaining, and among the settled Roma, many have opted to bury their cultural heritage – even going to far as to change their names – in order to escape the anti-Roma bias that has come to permeate many European societies.

Even in an age when news organizations strive to maintain standards of ‘objectivity’, or ‘neutrality’, anti-Roma sentiment continues to creep in, as media outlets – perhaps unconsciously – grant greater weight to reports or accounts that reinforce the majority opinion, in this case the opinion that the Roma are not to be trusted.

One of the most pernicious forms of bias that manifests in discussions about the cultural or behavioural practices of an alien or ‘other’ group or culture is the belief that the crimes, faults, or failings of an individual from that group is indicative of a widespread cultural, or even a genetic failing within the group as a whole. This bias is known as the ‘outgroup homogeneity bias’, and it is used against many different groups, not just the Roma. If someone ‘like us’ commits a crime, we do not feel that we are culpable; their crimes are theirs alone and have no bearing on how someone ought to treat the rest of ‘us’. But when dealing with groups that we know little about – like the Roma – we tend to generalize. We see the crimes or failings of one member as the crimes or failings of the entire group. In the United States for example, crimes committed by African-Americans are frequently blamed on a “black culture” that stereotypically prizes “violence and criminality”, but whenever a white person is arrested for murder or some other crime, rarely do media outlets question the role of “white culture” in the motivations for the crime. And as atheists, this sort of shoddy thinking should matter to us as well.

Atheists, having been subjected to millennia of persecution at the hands of the religious, should tread lightly when discussing a demographic as maligned as the Roma. Our approach should be based on a commitment to compassion and human dignity. We must recognize that no person ought to be characterized based on myths about their ethnicity, whether those stories have any basis in reality.

By unskeptically repeating stories of Gypsy fortune tellers, we empower the racist stereotypes that continue to oppress millions of innocent people.

As skeptics and humanists we must do better.

References

Erjavec, K. 2001. “Media Representation of the Discrimination against the Roma in Eastern Europe: The Case of Slovenia.” Discourse & Society, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 699-727.

Goldston, J. 2002. “Roma Rights, Roma Wrongs.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, pp. 146-162.

Livingstone Smith, D. 2012. “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others”, St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY

Mendizabal, Z. et. al. 2012. “Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-wide Data.” Current Biology, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 2342-2349.

Petrova, D. 2004. “The Roma: Between a Myth and the Future.” European Roma Rights Centre, May, [Online] http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=1844. Accessed: 10 June 2013.

About the authors

Ian Bushfield is the outgoing executive director of the British Columbia Humanist Association and has a master of science in physics. Edwin Hodge has an MA in Political Science and is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Victoria with an interest in hate groups, race, and gender.

In my view, it is important that Secular Humanist groups in Canada maintain their historic commitment to feminist values and human rights that were championed by Dr. Henry Morgantaler and the founders of our movement decades ago. Today, this means we have less fights to do at the policy level but more effort needs to be turned inward to ensure that equality exists within our own ranks. Accomplishing this means working toward diverse and inclusive communities, reflecting the changing communities we live in. It also means standing against those who would stifle the voices of the marginalized. I am proud to sign this petition and to do my best to champion these values in the organizations that I am involved in.

I encourage you to sign as well.