NARR:   This is what religious humanists call Sunday School.  Rita Chawla sits in a circle with half a dozen kids at the Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  She’s holding a bowl in her lap filled with erasers with smiley faces printed on them. 

AX // RITA CHAWLA // We’re going to start out with our tradition of passing the bowl, saying your happiest moment. I saw Alexa’s hand first.
AX//Alexa// My happiest moment was going to Mexico and seeing my cousin Mattie…(0:30)
(fade down to ambi bed of Sunday School)

This is the kind of conversation religious humanists want their kids to be having.  Religious humanists say their happiest moments come through friendships and engaging meaningfully with the people around them.  So at this Sunday School you won’t hear stories about Jesus or the apostles.  Instead, today’s lesson is about Albert Einstein.  One student says she knows the most important element to Einstein’s success.

AX // Sunday School // It was his imagination that started all of this.
AX // Rita // Exactly…So what I want you to do is everyone gets a paper is go around the room and come up with 10 questions that you wonder about!    

Mainstream religious might balk at this kind of free-form exploration, especially in Sunday School.  Religious humanists acknowledge that they have no doctrine or creed—they want these children to be freethinkers. 

AX // Gilberto Santiago // From the sheer nature you’re being trained to move away from your roots and check out the world.  So that’s basically what the kids do—exactly what they’re trained to do. 
 
Gilberto Santiago is the parent of one of the children here today.  He says that there are unintended consequences when you teach children to be critical thinkers and question what they’re told. 

AX // Santiago // It works against the Society in the context that they lose the young people until, once again, they have children of their own and they say—where did I get my core values and they say, oh yeah, Sunday School, the Ethical Society—and suddenly they rediscover the humanist movement.  (0:24)

NARR:  It’s clear that young humanists do not always remain with the congregation.  Downstairs, the crowd gathering on this Sunday is mostly grey-haired.  And for a place that doesn’t talk about God, their meeting hall feels a lot like a church.  It’s a huge space—quiet and calm—and there are pews and stained glass windows. (fade up start of Sunday service under this track) Dr. Judith Wallach welcomes congregants to today’s Sunday service. (hear her welcoming underneath, and fade up to point in service where her act begins)

AX // Judith Wallach welcome to platform service // As humanists, we believe that we are as responsible for the formulating of our values and ethics through reason and compassion as we are for carrying them out in our daily lives.  (0:16)
(fade down a bit – ambi of service continues under next track)

NARR: Religious humanists DO believe in something larger than themselves.  But instead of looking to the heavens for guidance, congregants here look to each other.  And in the hymn they sing this morning, they directly question a focus on God. 

AX // Platform song // – volume up on lyric “Who can know the answers to questions of all time / Do you put your faith in God or faith in humankind?” (0:14 up and then fade down song under next track) 

NARR :  Do you put your faith in God or faith in humankind, is their refrain.   Some question why a group that doesn’t necessarily believe in God would gather on Sundays in this church-like setting.  Religious humanists say that gathering in this way is important – they come together to affirm their shared worldview, to support one another through life’s milestones.  And they say that being in the presence of one another is a tangible reminder that there is something larger than themselves, even if it’s not God.  Anne Klaeyson is a Leader of the Congregation.

AX // Anne Klaeysen // Religious humanists meet in communities and feel that is really part of who they are—they feel that there is something greater than themselves.  They don’t call it God necessarily but it could be community truth, beauty, love, but they feel it somehow.  (0:18)

NARR:  Humanists believe that we can’t know for certain about the existence of God or an afterlife.  So they say any focus on deities or the supernatural are irrelevant to their values or how they live their lives now.  The only thing that humanists say they know for certain is that which they can see before them here on Earth.  So they focus on how they can better this world, the only world they know. The writer Kurt Vonnegut was a well-known Humanist.  He said that, quote, “being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”

NARR: There are no reliable numbers about how many Americans identify as religious humanists.   The Pew Forum’s Religious Landscape Survey reported last year that 16 percent of Americans reported no religious affiliation. 

But more than half of Americans said that it’s necessary to believe in God in order to be moral.    Humanists reject the notion that morals and values require God.  And Klaeysen says polls about Americans and God are inherently difficult to interpret. 

AX // Anne Klaeysen // If you were just to say, do you believe in God or not, you would get a lot of affirmative answers.  But when you dig in a little bit and you say, what is your God image, how do you imagine it, how do you see God, then you get a lot of different answers.  (0:17)

NARR: And you get a lot of different answers about God here, at the Society for Ethical Culture. Some firmly declare their beliefs that God does not exist…others aren’t so sure. They don’t even agree on whether or not they consider it a church.  But there is one uniting factor that brings people here:  this is a place where they fit in, no matter what.   On a typical Sunday here at the Society for Ethical Culture, you’ll run into people who were rejected by other religions.  Josh Adams came to the Society while looking for a religious congregation that would perform a same-sex marriage ceremony for him and his partner.

AX // Josh Adams 1 // I come from a traditional Orthodox Jewish background and being gay doesn’t really work in that community, so it was nice to find kind of a religious group that was so inclusive.

NARR:  Adams says his belief in God faded when he realized the religious community he grew up in would not allow him to be both openly gay and a member of the group.  But he missed religious fellowship, and says he was thrilled to find a community of faith that believed what he did--that a spiritual source can be found in relationships with one another.

AX// Josh Adams // The only thing that’s really important is that you realize that everyone has worth and dignity and that you act to elicit the best in others and that you’ll bring out the best in yourself.

NARR: But Anne Klaeysen says there might be a danger in a community that defines itself mainly around tolerance and accepting—that without some process of determining how to act, the group could devolve into self-indulgence.

AX // Anne Klaeysen // I think we don’t challenge each other enough, frankly.  There’s something that I call toxic niceness, where sometimes you can be so nice that you’re not really challenging the other person to be good.    (0:10)

Klaeysen says that members of a robust humanist community aren’t necessarily like-minded all the time, but instead push one another to really examine what’s good.  Critics of religious humanist groups like this one say that emphasis on examination through reason and science shows that it’s not a religion, in the normal sense.   

Paul Kurtz is the chair of the secular humanist Center for Inquiry and editor of the journal Free Inquiry.  He says that humanists are of course free to consider their belief system a religion if they want to…. 

AX // KURTZ // But there’s a significant percentage of humanists who insist that they’re non-religious and they think that it’s a kind of selling out to a notion in America that you must have a religion—who are you, what is your religion?  (0:15)

NARR:  Kurtz says that all belief systems and value systems don’t need to be called religions. 

AX // PAUL KURTZ // It’s an alternative to religion.   There’s a difference between philosophy and religion.  There’s a difference between science and religion.  There’s a difference between ethics and the arts and religion.  And so there’s a separation there, and so there ought to be a separation between church or temple and secular practices and values. (0:20)

NARR:  Even so, Kurtz says he’s not opposed to humanists coming together in groups.  He just objects to the religious trappings.  People have a social impulse to get together with other people like themselves.  Many at the Society of Ethical Culture would agree with Kurtz---they  acknowledge they’re here for mostly social reasons.  (bring up social hour ambi)  For many here, the best part of Sunday is this lunch, which takes place down in the basement after service. 

Congregants eat lunch in a room full of vinyl tablecloths and folding chairs.  Muriel xxLASTNAMExx are among them.   xxLASTNAMExx was raised in an orthodox religion, but says she was always more interested in questioning her own actions and her own conscience than simply following the dictates her religion prescribed. 

AX // Muriel // That also then poses the question to me—while I may have been brought up in another religion, was I always an ethical culturist at heart?  And are we so much converts or rather have we just found what is the right place for us?

NARR:  Her friend Carol Chamblin sits next to her and nods.  As she says, this place was in her way before she joined. 

SOC:  Maura Walz, Columbia Radio News