American anti-religious activist print culture

Blog series Americas and Oceania Collections

Author Florian Zappe, 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow

In the past two years my work has focused on the cultural history of anti-religious activism in the United States and on the print cultures that carried it: pamphlets, manifestos, newsletters or organisational literature, produced and circulated fast in order to intervene in public debate rather than to endure in libraries. And yet, despite their intended ephemerality, many of these texts have ended up precisely there, preserved and catalogued.

During my 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship at the British Library, the breadth of holdings made it possible to access texts from a spectrum ranging from radical freethought polemic to the more institution-minded language of secular humanism, and it also made something clear very quickly: the three Humanist Manifestos, published between 1933 and 2003 in the intellectual and activist milieu of the American Humanist Association, would become my central case study to work on during my stay.

Initially, that was not the plan. I had expected to spend most of my time with the atheist-activist writings of Joseph Lewis (1889–1968), whose publishing and campaigning show freethought as an organised practice of agitation. Lewis still matters for my research, but once I began requesting items and following references, my attention kept returning to the Humanist Manifestos of 1933, 1973, and 2003. The British Library holds them in multiple editions, and preserves paratexts that illuminate their publishing histories, intended audiences, and the rhetorical compromises made by their author collectives as they promoted non-theistic worldviews in a country where religious language functions as default moral vocabulary.

These texts emerged from a distinctive cultural environment. Rooted in a providential founding myth that continues to cast the United States as ‘God’s own country’, constitutional secularism coexists with a public sphere in which explicit atheism has repeatedly been treated as socially suspect. Sceptical and atheistic voices have therefore often been pushed towards informal, marginal, or oppositional channels. The British Library’s collections make this media ecology visible, from organisational publications and polemical exchanges to periodicals, debates, and rebuttals.

Set within a public sphere structured in that way, the Humanist Manifestos appear distinctive. Unlike the tradition of anti-religious pamphleteers, who cultivate a rhetoric of confrontation, insult, and ridicule, the manifestos practise restraint: an insistently collective ‘we’, a programme-like cadence, and a preference for persuasion over provocation. Their radicalism is easy to miss because it is performed as moderation. Across the three statements, moral authority is relocated from the transcendental to the human domain, with ethics grounded in needs, responsibility, reason, mutual obligation, and lived experience, and the texts stay alert to what can be said, and how, in a public culture that still treats religion as the default setting. In my fellowship work I came to think of this as tacit radicalism, a refusal of theological premises articulated in a voice designed to sound reasonable.

I am very grateful to the Eccles Institute for the fellowship, and to everyone at the British Library who helped to make my work possible. Having proper time in the collections and an outstanding research environment allowed the project to settle into focus. This is a kind of academic luxury that cannot be appreciated enough.