Spirit of the Age: An organised faith in humanity

I HAVE wanted for a long time to meet Nicolas Walter. He is the chap who writes combative, dare I say tetchy, letters whenever I suggest that there may be a link between the decline of religion and the growing sense of insecurity and anxiety in the modern world. Morality, he insists, can exist independent of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in which our secular values grew. It would be nice to think so.

Mr Walter is part of the cadre of militant activists who are not happy with the mere drift of society towards greater secularisation. They want to push it along and tidy it up, so that all the anomalies of our religious heritage are placed in the intellectual museum where they belong.

There was a huge stack of books on the ground floor of the offices of the Rationalist Press. Nicolas Walter, after 20 years at the organisation's helm, is about to retire and is moving out of the flat at the top of its Islington office. It has not been an easy place for him in recent times. Chemotherapy for a cancer has severely crippled him and he can make the arduous progress down and up the stairs only once a day. Next year he will move to the country, with as many of the books as he can fit into his new place there.

But his atheism is far from a sublimated railing against a malign divinity responsible for his unhappy infirmity. Mr Walter is, in the circumstances, a rather jovial, bearded chap, with a ready laugh and an agreeable manner, who traces his anti-religious dispensation to a childhood which he describes as occurring in a family that, he said, was "left-wing, non-religious, optimistic but angry, and very sharply and explicitly critical of the world around them."

The irony about the avowedly non-religious Ethical Rationalist Humanist Secularist Movement to which he belongs is that it resembles nothing so much as a religion itself. This is not its official title, but you have to include that many abstract adjectives if you are to cover the range of its belief without leaving anybody out. This is largely because it has been riven by as many splits and schisms as any religious denomination could respectably hope for. It began with a Victorian Ethical Society, and mutated into the National Secular Society and then the Rationalist Press Association before merging into the British Humanist Association, only for the rationalists to withdraw because they felt their position was being tainted by the quasi-religious temperament of softy ethicists.

There is something terribly old-fashioned about all this, much as there is about Nicolas Walter's litany of the founding fathers of secularism whose names - GJ Holyoake, Richard Carlile, RD Owen, Charles Bradlaugh - mean little in today's thoroughly secularised era, which they could only long for.

Prominent figures in the movement are aware of the paradox. Mr Walter gave me a copy of his association's magazine, New Humanist, which carried a wealth of articles with titles such as "Jesus the Fanatic" and "Another Look at Miracles". The lead piece on "The Future of Unbelief" began with the quote: "One of the most obvious and regrettable things about contemporary humanism is that it has become quaint - a movement out of step with the times it has helped to create."

Partly, the writer said, this is because it insists on fighting again battles it has already won: the war against religion, the battle for intellectual freedom, the defence of moral choice, and so on. But he also said that organisations that call themselves secularist, rationalist or humanist nowadays seem old, tired and sadly ineffectual. Most significantly, humanism has been supplanted as the Church's most effective critic - by, of all things, liberal theology.

But it has another problem, too. The movement's beliefs extend well beyond mere utilitarian notions about achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of the population. It makes statements - about the goodness of humanity, freedom, mutuality, art, music, laughter and love - that, ultimately, are based on assertions and instincts rather than empirical fact. Its faith in humanity is, in the end, no less a matter of belief than is any religion.

Nicolas Walter disagrees. "Humanism is not a faith. I don't have faith in freedom, I just want to be free; there's a difference," he says. Similarly, the feelings aroused by the majesty of nature share nothing, as many suppose, with the instinct of religion: "I feel stirred, and brought to tears, but it's not by the transcendent. Reverence for the universe, as Einstein said, makes no sense. I just try to explain it in biological terms. Why are we musical? What, in Darwinian terms, is it for? Why does it help?"

Darwinism is a double-edged sword here. Biogenetic structuralism now suggests that human beings are genetically programmed for music, language, dance... and religion. We insist on making patterns - of harmony, rhythm and meaning.

More than that, epidemiologists now suggest that people who believe in God are happier than average and live longer. Religion, it seems, has an evolutionary point.

"Yes, but civilisation goes through stages - and we've reached the stage where we can think for ourselves," says Mr Walter. And there are battles yet to fight. "Christianity still has privileges enshrined in the law. There is the issue of Islam and state schools. And there is all the mumbo- jumbo of the New Age. There are still lots of things still worth arguing about - and if organised humanists don't, no one will."

Whether or not it is "organised humanism" - or the majority of the population's rootless drift along the "line of least resistance" - which has been the real force for secularisation, is matter for another debate. I await the letter with interest.