A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (”You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
It’s been 18 weeks since Foundation Beyond Belief was born in a flurry of humanistic generosity. Through monthly donations in the amount of their choice, our 400+ members have contributed nearly $25,000 for such outstanding organizations as Refugees International, the Point Foundation, the National Center for Science Education, ActionAid International, SMART Recovery, and the Haitian Health Foundation.
If you’d like to learn more, or to join this great experiment in humanist philanthropy, click on the handsome new JOIN US! badge in the sidebar or to the right.
If you’d like to help promote the Foundation, grab one of 22 badges and banners for your own blog or website from our new Help Us Grow page.
Finally, if you can spare a few bucks to help keep the Foundation itself up and running, we’d be grateful for your support in the Summer Drive. Click here or on the big blue widget in the sidebar to give us a hand.
To help set the course for our parent community program, Foundation Beyond Belief conducted a survey of nontheistic parents in February of this year—the first of its kind, as far as we can tell. The survey was unscientific (e.g. subjects were self-selected and the survey was advertised on websites that skew in the direction of organized secularism), as is the following analysis. But the project has given us a fascinating and sometimes surprising window into the world of secular parenting.
A total of 1740 people completed the survey, including secular parents in 49 U.S. states (87% of total respondents), 10 Canadian provinces (6%), and 19 other countries (7%).
Respondents were primarily women (60/40)—interesting because organized freethought skews heavily male. Most respondents are raising 1-2 children (38 and 39%, respectively), most are in a two-parent home (89%), and the largest percentage (39.4%) are in a big city suburb.
The largest percentage of respondents (27.4%) report that they themselves were raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, followed closely by Catholic (24.3%) and a poetic tie between atheist and evangelical (11.6% each). These numbers are somewhat muddied by the fact that of the 23% of respondents who checked “Other,” about half listed a denomination that fit one of the listed categories. That’s what an unscientific survey design will get you.
Of those in mixed worldview marriages, 47.8% report very little tension between the parents over issues of parenting and religion, and 41.1% report some tension and occasional issues. Just 6.7% reported frequent issues and 4.4% experience significant, severe conflict over parenting and religion.
I was surprised and pleased to see that only 11 percent of mixed secular/religious marriages in the survey seem to be grappling with these issues on a frequent or severe basis. It’s no less troubling for those people, of course, but as the Foundation develops its parent support program, we can be more effective and efficient in offering solutions if we know the extent of the problem.
The next question also produced something of a surprise to me:
Just over a quarter of respondents (25.5%) report an extended family that is moderate to intense in its religiosity. My surprise is partly an artifact of reportage—the vast majority of my own correspondence and contact with secular parents comes from those in a deeply religious extended family.
Over a third of respondents (35.2%) are in an extended family that ranges from secular to mildly religious, while the largest proportion (39.2%) are in a situation of significant variety, either split along two or more sides of the extended family or scrambled up within the whole.
I think this can be an ideal situation for raising kids who genuinely think for themselves. If your extended family is too uniform (either strictly religious or strictly secular), a parent has to expend more effort to be sure other points of view are represented. When my wife Becca, a fairly conventional Christian believer for most of our marriage, came to self-identify as a secular humanist, it eliminated what small tensions we had over those questions but also deprived us of what had been a handy safety valve against unintended indoctrination. Fortunately we still have a variety of views in the extended family to provide that diversity.
Fewer than half of respondents report significant religious pressure or indoctrination directed at their kids. Family members, unsurprisingly, are the source of most pressure from those who do report it:
(Totals exceed 100% because respondents were free to choose more than one source of pressure.)
And what’s the pressure about? You can probably guess:
How do secular parents expose their kids to religion?
Another question asked about the parent’s feelings about his or her child’s eventual worldview. I’ve often said that it seemed to me that most secular parents are genuinely committed to raising their kids to make their own choices, and the survey seemed to bear this out. Even most of those who hope their kids choose atheism affirm a desire that the choice be their children’s own:
(Complete purple question, which was very carefully worded: “The choice is theirs, and though some religious identities would make me heartsick, others would be fine”)
Finally, two related questions that are of central importance as we build the Foundation’s secular parent support program:
The greatest need of nontheistic parents by far seems to be simply finding and connecting with other nontheistic parents. This result was profoundly influential for the Foundation. It became clear that our original plan to train seminar leaders would not meet the most common need. What is needed is ongoing support for local groups that can help remove the crushing sense of isolation that so many secular parents feel. What’s needed is not a lecture but an opportunity to socialize, to mingle, to informally share experiences and ideas—to simply be with other parents who are raising their kids with the same challenges and opportunities.
Best of all, nearly 1,000 respondents expressed an interest in being contacted if a secular parenting group formed in their area, and nearly a third of these were willing to help start such groups. Ute Mitchell, our parent community coordinator, is currently using the contact data from the survey to help form groups in the ten U.S. states with the most survey respondents (some obviously the result of higher population):
…after which we’ll continue with other states and provinces SOON. We’re also continuing to build the parent resource section of the Foundation website, which will launch in the coming weeks.
Thanks again to all participants! More surveys to come.
Atheists’ Collection Plate, With Religious Inspiration
BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
ALPHARETTA, Ga. –– Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.
Mr. McGowan went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.
Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.
All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice. And on that practice, this atheist felt lacking. To put it in church slang, he was convicted.
Rather than adopt faith, however, Mr. McGowan set out to emulate it, or at least its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate. By now, five years later, that impulse has taken the form of a nonprofit foundation that solicits donations from atheists and bundles them into contributions to organizations in fields like public health, environmentalism, gay rights and refugee aid.
Within the next week or so, Mr. McGowan expects to cut checks for a total of $12,025, the first benefits collected and disbursed by the Foundation Beyond Belief.
It’s been interesting to watch news of Foundation Beyond Belief spread around the blogosphere. Most of the descriptions I’ve seen are pretty accurate, but there’s one persistent misconception: that the sole purpose of our charitable giving program is to demonstrate the generosity of atheists and humanists.
Time to fix that broken meme.
Our mission statement includes not one but three main purposes—”to focus, encourage, and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists.” Demonstrating our generosity as a community is important, but it’s arguably the least important of the three. Far more important is focusing and encouraging that generosity and compassion in the first place.
FOCUS
“I am a humanist,” said Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country, “which means in part that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.” And most of the time, this is how humanism plays out—in a million individual acts of decency, generosity, and kindness. The Foundation exists in part to create from those million individual decent acts a powerfully motivated community of philanthropic humanists, making the world a better place not in spite of, but because of, their worldview.
ENCOURAGE
As I’ve noted before, when it comes to charitable giving, churchgoers give a much larger percentage of earned income to discretionary causes than non-churchgoers. Arthur C. Brooks (author of Who Really Cares) sees in this statistic “evidence of a gap in everyday virtue” between the religious and nonreligious (p. 40).
There’s a more obvious explanation. Fifty-two times a year, churchgoers pass a plate full of the generous donations of their friends and neighbors and make the decision whether to add to it or not. Non-churchgoers have no such regular and public nudge. So it seems reasonable that the difference in overall giving has much more to do with whether or not you have systematic opportunities for giving than some “gap in virtue.”
One of the central purposes of Foundation Beyond Belief is to create that opportunity, thereby building a systematic culture of giving among nontheists. By doing this, we hope to encourage humanists to be better humanists and to energize a previously under-represented sector of philanthropic giving.
It’s not a zero-sum game, taking dollars that individuals already donate on their own and “putting an atheist stamp” on them. The idea is to create new income for good charities by encouraging the nontheistic community to give more.
DEMONSTRATE
Our worldview makes our virtue no better or worse than anyone else’s. But when we focus our efforts and encourage each other to express the best impulses at the heart of our worldview, that will demonstrate to others the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists.
Tell your friends and family about the Foundation. And when you do, be sure to mention all three purposes. We’re not just looking for credit—we’re also creating a focused community of giving and encouraging each other to the best possible expression of our inspiring worldview. We think those are things worth doing and hope you’ll agree.
Foundation Beyond Belief has two sides — a humanist charitable giving program, and an education and support program for secular parents.
The intrepid and talented Ute Mitchell (of CFI Portland’s outstanding secular parent program) has signed on as our Foundation’s Parent Community Coordinator. Her first task is taking the pulse of the secular parenting world — finding out just who we are and what parents need who are raising their kids without religion in a predominantly religious world.
I’ve spent the last four years immersed in this topic — talking to hundreds of nontheistic parents across the US and elsewhere, reading, analyzing, hanging out on the PBB Forum — but now it’s time for something more systematic. We’ve created a 10-minute survey to get a better sense of who you are and what you need. The first of several, this one focuses on general questions including parents’ background and current attitudes, family practices, and specific needs. A survey next week will go to existing secular parenting groups to see who and where they are, what’s working for them and what’s not, and what they need in terms of support. Other individual surveys will focus on specific topics including science, dealing with death, and kids’ peer experiences.
Over 40060070011001400 1800 people have already taken the survey since it was posted two weeks ago. We’ll close it down shortly and let you know what we find.
And if you haven’t yet joined the Foundation itself, now is the time! Our webmaster has installed a brand new, fully-secure donation system (now including a PayPal option) and made several other lovely upgrades to the site. Help us meet our April 1 goal of 1000 contributing members supporting ten charities working to improve this life and this world.
Foundation Beyond Belief — a non-profit charitable and educational organization created to focus, encourage and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists and to provide a comprehensive education and support program for nontheistic parents — is alive.
Foundation membership is now open, and our first slate of beneficiaries is in place.
And what a slate it is. There’s an organization of scientists committed to biodiversity, another providing health care to marginalized communities on five continents, and a secular alternative for addiction recovery. There’s a non-profit bringing safe drinking water to five countries in desperate need, an advocacy group for refugees fleeing war, and an advocacy group for asylum seekers fleeing torture. There’s a scholarship fund for GLBT students who have been disowned by their families, an organization protecting children in war zones, and another protecting the environment by working toward “greener” buildings and cities.
Selecting these has been a challenging and powerful experience. In the end, we chose a wide range of organizations in size, budget, mission, and scope. Members will now in turn choose which of these organizations they will support with a percentage of their monthly donations—which in turn will inform our future selections.
It’s a chance to watch the evolution of humanist philanthropy.
UPDATE: As is to be expected with a site and project as complex as FBB, we’ve had some technical hiccups. If you’re having any trouble signing up, give it a couple of days and our brilliant webster Airan will have it all ironed out.
We’re getting ready for a big blog bonanza to announce the full launch of Foundation Beyond Belief on January 1.
An estimated 1.4 zillion bloggers will receive the text and video for the announcement on December 29 to be posted on New Year’s Day.
If you’d like to help make the big cyber-yawp that announces the Foundation to the world, go here to give us your contact information and we’ll send you the post on the 29th.
Nothing seems to come out of Charlie’s Playhouse — whether blog post, newsletter, toy, shirt design, or just plain idea — that isn’t clever and fun. Yesterday Charlie’s boss Kate Miller announced a new project called Ask the Kids:
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s amazing book On The Origin of Species is coming up this month. To celebrate, we’re starting a conversation about evolution with kids everywhere…
We’re asking parents to pose one question to their kids: ‘What is evolution?’ …and let us know the very first answer.
Kids’ first thoughts are wonderful — charmingly wrong, spot-on accurate, or revealing what is really important. (”Evolution is candy,” said one 3-year-old.)
We’ll weave their answers into a short, fun video and release it to the world on November 24th, the 150th anniversary of “Origin of Species.” Your kids will be the stars!
Deadline is November 16, and there are parental releases to be signed and such, so don’t put it off! Click here for more.
IN OTHER NEWS: Application forms are now online for volunteer positions with Foundation Beyond Belief. We’re looking for
MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANTS to build the Foundation’s membership prior to the full launch on January 1 launch. Especially seeking those with knowledge of/access to Unitarian Universalism, Ethical Culture, local and/or national atheist and humanist organizations, general parenting groups, Atheist Nexus, or existing forums or groups devoted to our cause areas.
CHARITABLE GIVING ASSISTANTS to assist our Charitable Giving Coordinator in gathering information about potential featured charities, managing and organizing charity nominations by members, and working with featured charities to select video, graphics, and text to present the best information for members during the feature period.
FORUM MODERATOR beginning January 1, 2010 to manage an active forum for discussion of our ten charitable categories, philanthropy in general, and humanism.
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR with significant experience as a user and/or administrator of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Atheist Nexus, YouTube, etc. to monitor, coordinate, and update the Foundation’s many social media accounts.
PARENT EDUCATION COORDINATOR to help plan and execute the first stages of our program of parent support communities nationwide AND to establish a parent resource center on the website (Informal volunteer position to start. On January 1, 2010, we hope to open a formal search and convert to a paid quarter-time position.)
PARENT EDUCATION RESOURCE ASSISTANTS to staff our online parent resource center (including downloable documents, curricula, reviews, and family ideas for our parent education program) in conjunction with our Parent Ed Coordinator and Webmaster.
PARENTING COMMUNITY LEADERS to form groups of ten or more nontheistic parents in their local communities with a dual social and educational purpose. Leaders will receive training from me via web-based conferencing and financial and material support to get their communities off the ground.
Two of the corners of my life in which I am the least siloed — in which perspectives and opinions bump against each other more than anywhere else — are family and Facebook.
In most other ways, my family and Facebook are different, even antithetical. My extended family’s mix of perspectives is a received fact, and one for which I’m grateful, especially as a parent. (More on that eventually.) By contrast, the diversity of my Facebook friends results from my own choices.
Another difference: Families don’t often talk openly about beliefs and opinions. As Stephen Prothero put it, they do religion like mad but rarely talk about religion. Facebook, on the other hand, is all about sharing opinions (and every other thing that crosses the cortex. Seriously, pass me one more goddam virtual mojito and I’ll pour it on your motherboard).
I’ll get to family later in the series. First Facebook, in two parts.
I’m a Facebook Slut. I climb into friendhood with anyone who asks. My 600+ Friends fall mostly into five groups: Family, K-12 friends, College friends, Post-college friends, and Readers of my books.
It’s interesting that those five groups are roughly arranged in both the order I entered them in life AND in increasing order of siloing. The older I get, the more they’ve reflected my own choices. My extended family is mostly religious, though they vary in intensity. My K-12 friends mostly differ from me in religious and political views, but not as much as family. Friends met at Berkeley are about half secular and half religious, though almost all politically progressive, as are post-college friends. And readers of my books are naturally pretty secular and (as far as I can tell) mostly progressive politically. See how the silo narrows from left to right?
It’d be easy to cull this list down to a comfortable silo of 400 who would tend to nod at my every Facebook status and post and link. But I’ve been in enough of those situations to know it’s not good for me. Makes me lazy. Gives me the queasy feeling I used to get as I stood in chuckling clutches at this or that atheist meeting, basking in the glow (at last, at last!) of people who saw the world as I did.
It’s helpful at first. Then it gets really old.
About two years ago, my writing and my speeches to like-minded groups began centering on the need to spend a bit of our seemingly boundless other-critical energy on a peek in the mirror. An example was a post titled “Six things Christians do (much) better than secularists.” Some loved it — others were pissed. I considered that a good sign.
I continued in my talks to humanist groups around the US, noting that churches ironically do humanistic community better than we do, and that we can and should fix that. Then in my first announcement about Foundation Beyond Belief, I pointed to the statistical fact that the average individual religious believer gives more to charitable causes than the average nonreligious individual — and was met again with both support and outrage. Never mind that I was making the larger point that it’s pretty clearly a structural problem, not a moral one — that churches have created a “culture of giving” by providing regular and easy opportunities to give. Still a bitter pill for some. And again, I thought that a fine thing.
So I guess I’m involved in a two-part communications project here. I want to hear and be heard more effectively outside of my silos, but I also want to stir up the complacency within my silos. I’ve been doing the latter out loud for a couple of years now. As for the former, I’ve been doing it but not sharing the experiment, until now.
So again — Because of my slutty tendencies, Facebook is one of my main opportunities for adventures in unsiloed communication.
No, I’m NOT talking about deconverting anyone. Haven’t spent a lick of energy on that in years. I realized that people will think about worldview questions on their own schedule and under their own control or not at all, and that active attempts to force the issue usually drive them the other way. No need to “give” anyone reasons to believe or not believe. The reasons are scattered all around our feet, just a click or a thought away. At best, we can spur each other’s curiosity –How interesting, an ethical atheist. How fascinating, an intellectual evangelical– by dismantling preconceptions. And the best way to do that is by being out and normal.
(Funny thing — since I stopped trying to change people’s minds, I’ve started receiving emails from people whose minds I’ve changed. Lots and lots.)
Facebook is one of the places I can be out and normal. It’s also possible to use Facebook to create a silo, of course, and I know many people do just that, consciously or not. Befriend a like mind here, defriend an unlike one there, and pretty soon we’ve built ourselves another echo chamber.
As a result, unlike my more siloed corners, I know when I post something on Facebook that it will be seen by several of the most prominent atheists and humanists in the world AND my wife’s extended Baptist family, by Republican neighbors AND Democratic friends — by hundreds of people I love and respect, including many who see the world in a profoundly different way from me. It causes me to take just that little extra bit of care to be accurate, to be fair, but also honest — to be myself, but also to improve myself. I’m not interested in pandering — instead, I try to say things of substance in such a way that I can be heard by multiple human audiences at once.
Next week I’ll give a recent example — a Facebook exchange that illustrates what I think I’ve learned about hearing and being heard.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker. 
by Dale McGowan, Executive Director, FBB
Nothing seems to come out of 
IN OTHER NEWS: Application forms are now online for volunteer positions with 
Two of the corners of my life in which I am the least siloed — in which perspectives and opinions bump against each other more than anywhere else — are family and 
Facebook is one of the places I can be out and normal. It’s also possible to use Facebook to create a silo, of course, and I know many people do just that, consciously or not. Befriend a like mind here, defriend an unlike one there, and pretty soon we’ve built ourselves another echo chamber.
