All the things a child may inquire about, and all the things a parent, such as myself, may struggle to answer, are explained in vivid yet digestible sections in this book. Each chapter begins with a question, for example, “When and how did everything begin?” Dawkins first explores non-scientific, mythical answers to his questions because, he writes, “they are colorful and interesting, and real people have believed them. Some people still do.” He then proceeds to explain what and why things really are. Science, he proves, is truly magical, and he takes the young reader (and his or her parents) on a journey of amazing facts, magical myths, and memorable anecdotes.

But for all of its wondrous information and Dawkins’ engaging style, The Magic of Reality would not be complete without the extraordinary illustrations by award-winning artist Dave McKean. Together, Dawkins and McKean have created the best science book this homeschooling family has ever seen.

Fair warning: the book is dense and, depending on a child’s age, can be a bit overwhelming. So, how should one use a book such as this? After all, it’s hardly a bedtime story. In my home, where we share The Magic of Reality with a ten-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, reading a chapter has become a regular Sunday morning activity. We take turns reading and follow up with a discussion about each fact and story. We ask questions, the kids try to answer, and vice versa. Our children offer amazing insights, and we all learn something new each time.

Dawkins, author of numerous books, including The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth, is the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist and atheist. He has spent his career educating adults about science and evolution, and has now successfully departed from that path to excite young people with the wonders of science.

“I hope you agree that the truth has a magic of its own,” Dawkins writes in the final sentence of the book. “The truth is more magical—in the best and most exciting sense of the word—than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.” I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment, and highly recommend The Magic of Reality to any parent eager to introduce the subject of science to their child.

Ute Mitchell lives, writes, and homeschools in Portland, Oregon. Check out her blog at http://humanistathome.blogspot.com for her latest musings.

In his 2010 book, The Hidden Brain, Shanker Vedantam indicates that we form biases in the early months and years of our life. He asserts that this process takes place independently of the parents’ influence. He states that children’s biases can develop no matter how hard a parent tries to shield his or her young ones from them.

I believe a major unfinished aspect of the Civil Rights movement is the need to face and overcome our own individual biases. We should realize that we need not be ashamed of biases formed years before we were able to keep them from our young, impressionable brains.

I personally have known that I’ve held a deep bias toward blacks for about sixty years. When I say this most people I know don’t believe it because they’re aware of my belief and activism in promoting civil and human rights. They may also know that I married Charlotte, an African-American woman, in 1953. We shared our biases with each other and we both had confidence that we could move past them.

Until recently, however, I wondered why I couldn’t get rid of my prejudice, which lies below the surface, until I see a black face as an anchor on TV. In a split second, I wonder why that face is black and not white. In another split second, I recognize that my initial perception is counter to my conscious belief system and I dismiss it as unwanted.

In a 2009 New York Times op-ed, Charles M. Blow referred to studies concluding that most whites have a hidden racial bias. Blacks were shown to have biases toward whites, though not as frequently. As Blow summarized it: “Researchers were able to ameliorate whites’ racial bias by teaching them to distinguish black peoples’ faces from one another. Basically, seeing black people as individuals diminished white peoples’ discrimination. Imagine that.”

After years of facing skepticism when I told people that my brain must be hardwired for a negative attitude, social scientists appeared to agree with me.

As a white man living in a black family for the last fifty-eight years, and having served people of color as a social worker in inner cities, I can attest to having prejudice toward blacks and learning how to act without it. The key, I think, is to fully acknowledge it. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this phenomenon in his 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. He quotes a psychologist, Keith Payne, who writes that, “When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” Gladwell goes on to write that when one of our own hidden biases flashes before us, “we need to wait a beat before identifying the object in an unbiased way… the giant computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work.”

A look at how police confront racial bias is very informative. There is now a method of training, recently implemented by the New York Police Department, that helps officers recognize and overcome bias. It uses research that indicates that when police officers believe their lives are in danger, they become so frightened that they are no longer able to recognize body language. When facing a person of color, officers too often think stereotypically and believe that the person is carrying a gun or a knife and is ready to use it.

In the training, the officers are taught to wait a split second before determining whether or not to shoot. With repeated virtual training an officer is able to put his or her bias aside, recognize the person’s body language, and act appropriately. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently announced a sharp decline in shootings by police officers. We can presume that the bias training was an important factor in that reduction.

After white people assure themselves that they aren’t under the control of their bias, they may feel free to be as critical of individuals whose skin color differs from their own as they feel is warranted. This could lead to much more honest and even rewarding experiences.

So now you know my story. I do hope you find it worthwhile, and I hope the day will come when we can share our stories, not out of a sense of confession, but out of a sense of satisfaction and a sense of victory over our demons.

Abe Markman got his master’s degree in social work from NYU and spent his career finding creative methods and solutions involving youth and police behavior. He was the founder and former executive director of the Neighborhood Self-Help Older Persons Project in the South Bronx, and in 2010 was the recipient of the Community Service Award of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

For the Austin, Texas-based indie quartet Quiet Company, however, the humanist worldview is an integral part of their musical vision. And their new record, We Are All Where We Belong, very clearly incorporates humanism into more traditional musical themes of love and introspection.

On We Are All Where We Belong, Quiet Company integrates a sound reminiscent of both Sufjan Stevens’ album Illinois and The National’s Boxer with the overarching narrative of lead vocalist Taylor Muse’s journey from a conservative Christian upbringing and belief system to a celebration of the power of human potential.

The opening track, “The Confessor,” begins with eerie organs and the lyric, “I don’t want to waste my life.” It quickly flows into what could be a bluesy gospel number, with an authentic Southern Baptist-style choir cooing while Muse sings of lost faith. “I don’t want to waste my life,” Muse repeats, and then triumphantly arrives at the chorus: “I don’t want to waste my life, thinking about the afterlife.”

Sometimes the lyrics are reactions to religion: “I once had the desire to believe that our lives had been planned out by an unseen deity.” At other times they’re more focused on understanding and expressing his inner life in a godless, existentialist world (“Don’t let me go, I’m not prepared. I’m so damned scared that I’m almost there”). But throughout the record, Muse shows an impressive musical, intellectual, and emotional range, hitting the high notes of arena rock while singing about healthy living post-Christianity just as skillfully as he manages quieter reflections on fears of mortality and his desire to be a good father for the sake of his daughter, not in order to please God.

In the final track “At Last! The Celestial Being Speaks,” Muse celebrates a humanism even some of his religious neighbors in Austin could appreciate, with a tongue-in-cheek invocation of God’s voice: “I don’t see why you should believe that you needed me, because you all belong to the earth I put you on. So lift up your heads, don’t worry about death, you’re all gonna be just fine.” With this statement, surrounded by a series of hallelujahs from the choir, the record comes to a close. As listeners, we’re left to reenter the world with a newfound appreciation for this life, the only one we know we’ll get.

Citing influences as varied as Kurt Vonnegut and religious scholar Bart Ehrman, Muse hopes Quiet Company’s new record can be a window into creating communities for nonbelievers that could fill the holes of fellowship left behind with religion. “Humanism ought to be doing more to create communities that are recognizable,” Muse notes. “Humanity has such potential for kindness and intelligence, but also evil—all of those things are our responsibility, up to us to achieve or to prevent.”

So might the humanist movement be able to build on Quiet Company’s achievement? Muse thinks humanism could one day inspire just as much art as has religion. Just as Pink Floyd’s The Wall re-imagined notions of tyranny and oppression, future musical projects could help create a new understanding of what it means to be a humanist. After all, it isn’t just great scientists and thinkers who drive this movement, but great artists as well.

We had the opportunity to speak to Muse by phone in November 2011 about his humanist philosophy, his upbringing, and his band’s latest album.

The Humanist: Could you tell us a bit about your story, and the experiences this record came from?

Taylor Muse: I was raised in the Bible Belt, where religion is really a part of every facet of our culture. Especially in East Texas where I’m from, if you don’t have a church to belong to, you just don’t have anything to do—it’s that engrained in the culture. My family is very religious—my brother is a minister, my grandfather was a church song leader—so it’s a big part of our family dynamic. I was a believer myself for a long time.

After I’d completed two years of college, and was living in Tyler, Texas, I decided to move up to Nashville, Tennessee. I saw living in a new city as an opportunity to reinvent myself. I started reading a lot more, all different kinds of things, and happened upon Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. That was when I first read Slaughterhouse Five, and something about the way Vonnegut wrote, and what he wrote about, and things that he clearly felt, really spoke to me on a level that nothing else had before. He would talk about humanism and socialism—and these were words that I knew very little about except from the church’s perspective, which was always very negative. The basic message was: humanism is the antithesis to religious thought.

The Humanist: And they used that word, “humanism”?

Muse: Actually atheism was the big word, and we were taught that atheists are bad people. Humanism was a word that I’d heard associated with atheism, but never really knew much about, other than the negative connotation. But when Vonnegut wrote and talked about it, it just made so much sense. It was beautiful to me the way he rationalized morality, much like Mark Twain, and I became obsessed with reading everything I could about and by Vonnegut. In turn this really got me thinking about morality, and why I believe what I believe. This was my first big step away from religious fundamentalism, and my first real foray into humanism.

The Humanist: What about this idea that we are all where we belong? That’s the title of the record, and similar lyrics pop up in several of the songs. You also spoke about the idea of everybody in Texas having a church to “belong” to.

Muse: Certainly in the church, and this is very much represented in Christian music as well, you hear a lot about how Earth is not our actual home, that Jesus will come down to bring us to our real home, where everything will be perfect. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this removes all incentive to make this world any better. That is, when you believe that all you’ve got to do is die and all of a sudden your problems will be solved, why bother?

I view this as a very harmful belief to hold, because it nullifies any inclination to work hard or to be better. So I really wanted to address that and say, no, you don’t belong anywhere else—here is where you belong. This home, this life, it’s all you can reasonably believe you’ll have, so it’s your responsibility to make it as pleasurable or as worthwhile as you can. One of the things I love so much about humanism is that it’s about taking responsibility for yourself and for your community. There’s just so much potential in humanity, and the more that I think about Christianity, I see it as a crippling belief that’s constantly championing weakness. This idea that “we can’t do anything and we’re not worth anything without our savior”—it’s so harmful.

There are a couple of lines on the record where we talk about belonging to the land and to the sea; I wanted to keep it very tied to the natural world.

The Humanist: We move away from religion and sometimes it’s a little bit isolating, but at the same time there are other ways to find community—you can find it through a music scene, or through your family or your friends. What do you think about the idea of finding belonging in a humanist community?

Muse: Community is one of my favorite things to talk about because we really strive to create one around our music. And it’s the most important thing in all of humanism, I think—this idea of creating and serving your community. I was recently on the Humanist website where Bart Ehrman had some really great things to say about humanism being out and open, and the need to create communities that are specifically humanistic for people to join. Ehrman believes we need to create some sort of recognizable community, in the way that churches are so easily spotted in any town. I think that’s really smart, and I’d like to see it happen.

The Humanist: Talk a bit about the subtitles of the songs on the record, such as: The Utterly Indifferent,” “This Is the Worst Crazy Sect I’ve Ever Been In,” and “The Harlot and the Beast are Dating!” You come up with some really interesting stuff here.

Muse: Some of them are kind of funny, some more serious; some allude to the context of the song, and some are entirely unrelated. A lot of them are references to [the animated Comedy Central series] Futurama (laughs). In an episode called “Godfellas,” the character Bender, a robot, gets shot out of a cannon and finds himself floating through space indefinitely and they can’t find him or rescue him. He ends up playing God to this group of tiny creatures that live on his chest, and eventually he kills them all. He then actually meets God and has a conversation with him—it’s just a very funny, clever episode, with so many quotable lines, and that’s where “This Is The Worst Crazy Sect I’ve Ever Been In” comes from, along with “You Were Doing Well Until Everyone Died.” So you see there’s nothing specifically deep about the subtitles.

Two of the first songs we wrote for the record were “Preaching the Choir Invisible” Parts I and II, and I knew from the start I wanted to have parenthetical subtitles with them. We used “What Do You Think Happens When We Die?” with one and then switched over to “What Do You Think Happens When We Live?” for the other. We really liked the idea and figured it would be an interesting thing to continue throughout the record.

The Humanist: One song we really like is “You, Me and the Boatman.” You use the image of the Boatman on the front of the record, and there are several allusions to rivers in the lyrics. Does the Boatman become a symbol for humanism? How did you come up with that?

Muse: He’s more a symbol of death, meant to suggest Charon from Greek mythology, who ferries people from one bank of the River Styx to the next. I mean, what is religion really if not an organized panic about death? We just wanted to harp on that a little bit. So much of the record is about dying and how religion has been a disappointing comfort for that. So the Boatman makes a few appearances, especially in that song.

Love is another thing we sing about a lot. We tend to be pretty romantic, and I write a lot of songs for my wife. But you know, I think the best love stories are often set against the specter of death. And again, it’s humanistic—the sense that this world is all we have, this time is all we have together, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s make our lives worth living as much as possible.

The Humanist: Certainly the lyric, “Live to love and love to live” (from “You, Me, and the Boatman”) goes a bit deeper than your typical love song. It’s also about how to approach life in general.

Muse: My wife and I both feel very strongly that we have to make the most of the time we have together—that’s part of the reason I have such a problem touring and going out on the road for long periods of time. Our lives really revolve around how much we love each other, just like hopefully most people’s will at some point in their lives. I guess the two messages are really intertwined.

The Humanist: It’s an interesting message—you’re saying, “I could try to be a big rock star if I wanted to be, but I actually love my life, I love my family.” It’s not something that would typically be thought of as a humanistic message, since people often think of humanism as not having much to say beyond “There is no God.” But your statement about love could potentially be a very humanistic message. Do you think of it that way?

Muse: I think of it as the most humanistic message. Humanism to me is so much more than doubting if there’s a God. It’s also an entire structure for how to appreciate your life—not inhibiting yourself in any way. Loving who you want to love. Doing what you want to do, if there’s not a compassionate reason not to. To me, humanism is the most liberating, love-encouraging type of mentality to have. So when I think of love, it’s definitely in very humanistic terms.

The Humanist: Before we let you go—you talked a little bit earlier about how humanistic artists should actually try to pull their humanism into their art. What do you think the future shape of that should be? Do you think we should have humanistic choirs, do you think we should somewhat model religious music?

Muse: It’s so vastly different from religion, it’s not dogmatic at all—so I don’t see any reason why we should have to conform to that model. Humanism allows such an opportunity to be creative, and to push ourselves to artistic heights and reach our potential as creative humans. We should think about other ways we can express ourselves—obviously, music is always a viable option, and we can sing about how we don’t believe, but how long can we sustain that? One place I think faith gets so romanticized is in film, and I’d really like to see more filmmakers explore [the humanist] realm.

I don’t know that we need choirs or churches, but I think there are a million ways, if we apply ourselves, to create more opportunities for community.

Greg Epstein is the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of the New York Times bestseller Good Without God. Walker Bristol is an officer of the Tufts Freethought Society and an intern at the Humanist Community Project at Harvard.

The first few minutes of the revival movement film Elmer Gantry (1960) are a paean to the spit and gleam of Burt Lancaster’s Klieg-light teeth. Dancing shamelessly like a character unto themselves, they tell you everything you need to know about twentieth-century divinity and the meteoric rise of the evangelical shaman as an American idol. Based on Sinclair Lewis’ satirical 1927 novel of the same name, the film chronicles a midwestern rogue’s pursuit of Jesus, Inc., represented by a beatific revivalist preacher by the name of Sister Sharon Falconer (played by Jean Simmons).

Lancaster tears into the title role with lupine brio. Barely ten minutes into the film, a dirty and disreputable Gantry, freshly sprung from a hobo brawl on a musty boxcar, lands at a Negro church. Gantry’s own brand of religion marches lockstep with sex, lies, moonshine, and doe-eyed indolence. Before his date with destiny he staggers around, selling cheap vacuum cleaners, toasters, and any other sundry fare he can get his hands on. He’s desperate for a quick fix, a ticket out of obscurity. Is there no better place for a miscreant white man to jam his foot in the door of redemption than a Negro church?

If Hollywood cinema is America’s shepherd, there isn’t. In the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, ex-cons Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, respectively) embark on their back-flipping “mission from God” with a send-off from preacher James Brown and choir member Chaka Khan. Robert Duvall’s turn as a charismatic preacher in the 1997 film, The Apostle, begins and ends in steamy clapboard black churches. In Jim Crow America, white people enter black sacred spaces strategically yet innocently, and their presence is seemingly unquestioned. They enter and are indelibly transformed, their souls becalmed—the lynch rope that would surely greet a black interloper in a World War I-era white church unthinkable.

In Elmer Gantry, Lancaster hears the peals of “On My Way to Canaan’s Land” as he walks along the train tracks. He follows the sound and enters the church with the service going full bore. The singing stops as he enters. Gradually, as he lends his powerful tenor to the song, the all-black congregation’s initial wariness gives way to some kind of acceptance. Of course, images of black folk rapturously belting out gospel songs are standard fare in American nostalgia. But the Gantry scene intrigues because of the striking figure of a little girl standing next to him in the congregation. She gives him the once over, her disrupted body language conveying caution and bewilderment with the inimitable honesty of a child. This quizzical little girl is the visual anchor of the scene, the adults swept up in euphoria—grinning, clapping, and singing with soulful abandon. Again, the Negro church is a crucial point of spiritual entry for the dissolute white man. The embodiment of natural, primitive spirituality and devoutness, its congregants are an important space of projection for Gantry’s personal journey from ignominy to (partial) redemption. Gantry later becomes Sister Sharon’s spiritual lieutenant and lover and a quasi-folk hero in the lily white, corn-fed world of Pentecostal tent revivals. Tellingly, there are virtually no other people of color featured in the entire movie after the Negro church scene.

Thus, the little girl serves as a silent commentator on the reality of black subjectivity in the midst of racial apartheid. Yet she is also a symbol of the complex faith rituals in black communities. These rituals are a tacit part of the traditional African-American upbringing. The camera frames her shock at the white interloper’s presence but it also suggests her potential defiance. Even in the sanctuary of the church, black children were taught that whiteness signified power; that white space carried a special authority and terror, and that Jesus looked not unlike Elmer Gantry.

Blue-eyed Jesuses float spectrally from my own childhood. It was a period in which the Los Angeles Police Department’s murder of a single black woman in her own home solidified the city’s police-state status. In the still smoldering political climate of the 1970s, the walls of friends and relatives’ homes were often graced with the somber “trinity” of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and an ethereal blue-eyed Jesus. Still, attending all-black elementary schools in South Los Angeles, discussions of faith were not that frequent; it was simply presumed that all black folk were religious in some respect. Because of the prominent street presence of black Muslims, other religions were fleetingly visible, yet Christianity was unquestioningly the default position. Coming from a rare secular African-American household, dominated by a formidable literary and historical library, the Bible was something I was only cursorily familiar with. During a brief foray into world religions, my father brought home a copy of the Koran, but the Bible was essentially an alien and mysterious document. (Fleeting fascination with a storybook depiction of Moses’ epic battle with the Pharaoh and the parting of the Red Sea was one of the few vivid childhood memories I have of the majesty of Old Testament lore.)

So when I was practically cornered and sharply questioned one day by “Angie,” a school bus acquaintance, about whether I attended church on a regular basis I was embarrassed to confess that I didn’t. The questioner had more than an impartial interest. She was a pastor’s daughter and a sixth-grader well known for her sage counsel and commentary on the knuckleheaded exploits of back-of-the-bus screw-ups. My non-churchgoing flippancy and oddball upbringing were greeted with eye-rolling incredulity. Seeing a lost soul and potential convert, she recommended that I check in with the Bible and begin to “talk” to God. Painting a picture of God’s benevolence and 24/7 accessibility, she encouraged me to practice this new form of supernatural correspondence as soon as I had a moment to myself.

I have vivid memories of attempting this experiment in the privacy of my own room. I balanced an inward sense of the futility of the enterprise with an earnest hope that it would yield something. If “God” was in fact omniscient, why would I have to talk with him, her, or it? Why wouldn’t my deepest thoughts and desires already be known? And how did this relate to my own actions? How would I, in fact, know that I’d been heard or acknowledged? And what about that jealous, unforgiving God of the dimly remembered, interminable sermons I’d had to sit through at my grandparents’ church? Wouldn’t he be pissed off at my fairly new and grudging entry into his global 24/7 psychic Tower of Babel? For ten years, while all those other folk were praying and going to church and dutifully dropping their tithing envelopes into the collection plate, I was morally adrift in a loving household filled with books. This, then, is the rub for the nonreligious and nontheistic. Why is it necessary for children raised in secular homes to be indoctrinated with the codes and mores of any given religion when they are already steeped in a moral life? And why would anyone want to be associated with a religion that made such an arbitrary and artificial distinction, condemning children as sinners? Why, indeed, would children be compelled to profess belief, especially when they look around them and see that the world is overpopulated with adult believers flaunting their immorality?

So “talking” to God in the safety of my room, I was unmoved. In the pell-mell world of elementary school cliques and neighborhood bullies, every day was a lesson in moral judgment. The temptation to lie, cheat, steal, and/or knock someone upside the head for no apparent reason was present at every turn. Prayer only offered a quick and dirty escape hatch from the messy human circumstance of immoral acts. Without the reinforcing compass of God, my evangelist friend, Angie, worried that I would fall into an abyss of amorality. I would be paralyzed, unable to distinguish the delicate ethical nuances of sticking a grasshopper leg in the ear of a snoozing classmate or informing on a neck-craning cheater who was cribbing answers from my spelling test.

What would it mean for children to view morality within a context in which the common humanity of different individuals is not only emphasized but actual value is placed on the complexity of those differences?

For children in a Christian tradition, the insularity of prayer is the linchpin to becoming moral. Prayer—atomized, isolated, viewed as one small drop radiating through a big God-roiled pool—is something that even little kids can do with minimal effort or expenditure. Prayer becomes a moral device, a tool, and a treadmill. If I send out well wishes for a certain person, cause, or catastrophe, the thinking goes, it will reverberate and have some tangible effect. And so prayer gives one a temporary pass for not actually doing something in the real world or fundamentally changing one’s perceptions of “others.” For a few inexpensive moments a day I can plug my chip into the circuit board of the divine, holding out hope for resolution. I can pray that God will cure the HIV-infected kid in my fifth-grade class whose homeless parents can’t afford to buy food much less health insurance or even the latest designer shoes. I can then go blithely on my way without having to linger on whether there actually is a higher power that can make such a whiz-bang change. I can weigh the inequitable human social order with the mystery and moral justice of the divine. For if this social order is not human inspired, then naturally there must be some moral reason why the child suffers. There must be some causal connection between the child’s condition and the moral failings of the parents. The hand of God must be somewhere, benevolently pulling the strings.

I have a vivid memory of the first time I became aware that children could die. It was early evening in the leisurely dusk of summer. After eating with my mother at a local coffee shop, we passed by a newspaper vending machine outside. A child victim, kidnapped, murdered, and disposed of like garbage, stared ominously out at me from the front page of a newspaper in grainy black and white. I remember my sense of horror when my mother told me that the child, who was approximately my age, would never see his parents again. Associating death with old people, I was stupefied by this seeming contradiction. Alone in my bed that night, my friends’ prayer-saturated social universe smacked me down, and I wondered how “God” could have countenanced such unspeakable evil.

Decades later there is an aching space where this child’s life would have been, his personhood, his bundle of tics, idiosyncrasies “frozen” at abduction. Violent death by homicide at an early age is a grim reality for many youth of color. Gangsta rap romanticizes it and dishes it up for the voyeurism of white suburbia. Mainstream media ignores it or relegates it to social pathology. Every semester when I ask my students if they’ve had a young friend or relative die violently at least half will raise their hands. Their tattoos, notebooks, and Sidekick phones are filled with vibrant mementoes for the dead. Such are the killing fields of disposable youth. It is not necessary to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other theatre of American imperialism to experience this devastation. And yet, in urban communities there is God at the precipice, dangling children and fools over the side, manufacturing faith.

Sikivu Hutchinson is a senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, and the forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels. She is also the founder of Black Skeptics Los Angeles and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

We imagine we understand why. African-American and Hispanic communities are without freethought traditions, we argue, and longstanding religious orientations are built into their cultures. Therefore it’s up to us to bring humanism to them and hopefully overcome a longstanding bias against it. But, it turns out, that would be like bringing cheese to Wisconsin.

There is already a robust freethought tradition in the black community, for example. We can go back at least as far as abolitionist Frederick Douglass. NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois is another prominent example. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1940s through the ’60s the leader of its well-established secular wing was journalist and union organizer Asa Philip Randolph. He organized the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Randolph was later recognized in 1970 by the American Humanist Association with its Humanist of the Year Award. Another such activist was Freedom Ride organizer James L. Farmer Jr., founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and the 1976 AHA Humanist Pioneer. Beyond social justice advocacy, we find the arts overflowing with prominent black freethinkers. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through the ’40s, writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Richard Wright could be counted among them. Emerging later were jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie “Bird” Parker, author James Baldwin, and novelist Alice Walker, who was named the 1997 Humanist of the Year.

Among Hispanics, far and away the most famous freethinker is Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of South America. Later, the humanistic Positivist Church had a strong social influence across the continent and left its mark on the Brazilian flag with the slogan, “Order and Progress.” Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic Church remains a ubiquitous presence in Hispanic communities, leading nontheistic Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes to note, “In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.”

Still, the question remains: Why are minority communities so lacking in an overt humanist presence today? And what can be done about it? Norm Allen Jr., founder of African Americans for Humanism, has struggled with these questions. Writing in a forthcoming special issue of Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, he acknowledges his inability to answer. “For twenty-one years I had been the only full-time African American humanist activist traveling the world to promote secular humanism. Yet I still cannot unravel the mystery.”

But over the past year, likely answers have begun to emerge, provided courtesy of a new breed of minority humanists. Before we can understand their response, however, we need to better understand the present situation and how it came to be that way.

According to the 2009 Pew Forum study, “A Religious Portrait of African Americans,” 87 percent of those in the U.S. black population describe themselves as “religious” and 88 percent say they are “absolutely certain God exists.” Latinos have had similarly high figures in Pew surveys. Also in 2009, the Barna Group reported that 92 percent of African Americans identified as Christian, were more likely than whites to regard themselves as “born again,” and had a faith that is “moving in a direction that is more aligned with conservative biblical teachings.” Similar findings were reported for Hispanics. “Born agains” in that population “were more likely than all born-again Americans to contend that they have been greatly transformed by their faith.”

These realities make overt atheism largely taboo in such communities. Ethelbert Haskins has identified a contributing factor. Being an African American who was a leader in both the Civil Rights and humanist movements of earlier years, he notes that there are indeed many nontheistic people of color, but they don’t feel comfortable coming out as nonbelievers “until grandma dies.” They fear their irreligion would prove painful for older relatives and thereby estrange them from the family. Which means that black atheists and humanists are often fairly old themselves before the time is right, and by then it seems unnecessary to join a group, living comfortably as they have for so long in the closet.

If this seems like a weak point, because the same thing can be said for many whites who come from traditionally religious families, one needs to understand that the situation is statistically less frequent for the latter. After all, as the most populous and dominant group in the United States and Canada, whites enjoy greater latitude. Their raw numbers, varied cultural origins, and social mobility result in a wider range of acceptable religious (and hence nonreligious) choices. This makes white culture broad rather than insular, permissive rather than restricted. And unlike minorities living in oppressed neighborhoods, or working hard to gain middle-class acceptance, whites generally lack the bunker mentality or out-group status that tends to promote cultural conformity and identity politics.

Feminist/atheist activist and author Sikivu Hutchinson dives further into this in her 2011 book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.

The legacy of Jim Crow and de facto segregation has limited black residential mobility, creating socioeconomic conditions in which blacks of all classes, incomes, and education levels live in close proximity to each other. Hence, African Americans remain the single most segregated racial group in the United States.

This leads to an insular culture where Christian verbal expression flourishes in tandem with the dominance of churches as social institutions. In this context, certain humanist values are perceived as out of step with black experience. Hutchinson adds that “in communities plagued with double-digit unemployment and cultural devaluation, self-sufficiency and ultimate human agency may be perceived as demoralizing if not dangerously radical.” So a philosophy of dependency promoted by Christianity takes precedence. In such an environment, a concept of black “essentialism” or identity politics has developed that explicitly includes opposition to secularism. In her 1990 essay, “Postmodern Blackness,” feminist and social activist bell hooks has objected to this trend.

We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. . . . This discourse created the idea of the “primitive” and promoted the notion of an “authentic” experience, seeing as “natural” those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or stereotype.

Hutchinson shows just how far this has gone: “While there is tolerance for the very public bigotry of the Black Israelites, African Americans collectively view atheism and atheists as distasteful… [and] have some of the most negative views of atheists among all groups.” Why? Because, says Hutchinson, in a nation that remains racist, “the otherness and deviance associated with atheism is at odds with the elusive quest for assimilation [by racial minorities].” As a result, black atheists are closeted and invisible and represent only 1 percent of the black population.

This is why it has proved so difficult for many to come out as atheist, agnostic, or humanist. The New York Times reported on their struggles in “The Unbelievers” by Emily Brennan, published November 25, 2011, noting that many have turned to interactive websites and online social media: “Feeling isolated from religious friends and families and excluded from what it means to be African American, people turn to these sites to seek out advice and understanding.”

A different situation, however, seems to be the case for Hispanic immigrants. In a 2007 New York Times article, Laurie Goodstein found that “increasing percentages of Hispanics are abandoning church, suggesting to researchers that along with assimilation comes a measure of secularization.” But, again, because the Roman Catholic Church remains a strong presence in Hispanic neighborhoods and a significant part of Hispanic identity, overt expressions of irreligion or nontheism remain frowned upon.

It is for these reasons that the simple notion of humanism’s doors being open to all comers can be seen as naive. Communities of color really are quite different places from white communities. And people of color who come to nontheistic conclusions really are in a significantly different position from whites who have done the same thing.

But there’s more. The actual needs of minority humanists differ just as significantly. And this means that mainstream humanist groups, in addressing the interests of the demographic they currently serve, can’t help but miss the mark for minority populations. Why, for example, would someone living in the inner city—dealing with the hard issues of economic survival, epidemics of drug abuse and AIDS, violent crime, urban blight, and other social problems—find it useful or even interesting to work her or his way through a cumbersome public transit system (designed to keep those from minority and poor neighborhoods balkanized) to reach the middle-class white suburbs and attend a humanist lecture or discussion about some abstract philosophical, scientific, or cultural matter or engage in social action on a mere symbolic issue like ceremonial deism? After only a moment’s thought, the utter irrelevancy of many humanist gatherings to minority concerns becomes staggering.

And when it comes to abstractions, whites like to talk about the European Enlightenment as if nothing bad could ever legitimately be said about it. But Enlightenment rationalism was experienced differently by those of African extraction. Knowledgeable people of color are acutely aware that, despite the universalized language of this tradition’s thinkers and activists, non-whites really weren’t included among the “all men” who were “created equal” in the estimation of America’s founders. It would take generations to include the unpropertied, women, and non-whites among those recognized as fully human and therefore entitled to full rights and citizenship.

Joseph Graves, in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, states: “Eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ scholars never doubted that God and science declared the existence of races and that there should be hierarchical relations between them.” For more than two centuries religion and science were in total agreement about racial difference, even when social opinion differed as to how best to respond to it. This is why both black slavery and programs to ship emancipated slaves “back to Africa” (as President James Monroe instituted) were not mere aberrations in an otherwise noble and universal Age of Reason philosophy. They were part and parcel of it.

After the abolition of slavery in the United States, blacks continued to be regarded as inferior, even by many progressive whites. Hutchinson draws attention to atheist women’s suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who took issue with the idea of giving black men the vote before it was conferred upon white women, declaring in an 1869 speech that if white women found it hard to live under the rule “of their own Saxon fathers, the best orders of manhood,” how unendurable might it become “when all the lower orders of foreigners crowding our shores legislate for them.” She called on her audience to think of “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic.” How unfit they were for the vote, she thought, especially ahead of American women of Anglo-Saxon descent.

Facing this type of opinion, American blacks rejected as exemplars the slave-owning freethinkers of the Enlightenment in favor of a biblical Jesus who spoke to the humanity of the most dispossessed elements of society, and of a loving God who would dole out just deserts with an even hand in the next life. Moreover, as Hutchinson notes, in terms of gaining social acceptance among whites, Christianity “gave African slaves purchase on being human, on being American, and on being moral.” Blacks adopting Christianity seemed to force whites to recognize them as fellow believers and hence equals. This was therefore “the price of the ticket” to eventual citizenship and acceptance. Which explains the embarrassing adoption of “the god of our kidnappers, murderers, slave masters, and oppressors,” as blogger Wrath James White put it.

It isn’t enough, then, for mainstream humanists to point out this contradiction. Hutchinson writes: “Many humanists and atheists of color… chafe at white atheists’ often paternalistic and ahistorical criticism of the role religion has played in African-American, Latino, and Native-American cultures.” Whites need especially to understand the importance religion has had for African-American identity throughout the struggle for civil rights, civil liberties, social justice, and equal recognition. And they need to become more aware of the positive social benefits churches have conferred upon minorities. “A balm for suffering, a source of atonement, and a nexus for kinship and community, organized religion serves multiple functions in African American communities,” Hutchinson contends.

That suffering experienced by oppressed groups is the initial impetus that creates a need for religion and religious institutions. Churches then become central to the degree that they provide necessary services, social and professional networking, and a base for socio-political activists and candidates. By this process, the communal dimension of faith becomes the glue that holds the community together.

Moreover, explains Hutchinson, “For communities of color, the lifeblood of organized religion is economic injustice.” Those unaware of their privilege don’t suffer economic injustice, so nontheism comes relatively easy. But in communities of color, only the churches redress some of the imbalance. This means that, in order to be relevant to the oppressed, humanist groups must take on economic injustice and offer a viable alternative to the services provided by churches.

Until they do, there will always be a high social cost for those who publicly abandon the faith. Such an act in the black community amounts to nothing less than race treason, especially given the significance of the black church during the Civil Rights era.

Nonetheless, something has changed. And therefore humanists of color are at long last starting to emerge. Hutchinson maintains that “the social justice compass” of the dominant black churches “has been broken by consumerism, institutional sexism, and faith-based witch hunts of gays and lesbians,” making their moral capital increasingly dubious. A blog post on January 17 of this year at the WTLC 106.7 FM (Indianapolis) website seemed to agree: “Many black churches preach abstinence over safety and refuse to endorse the use of contraceptives, while supporting conservatives on policies such as the disintegration of Planned Parenthood, which provides life-saving and preventative treatment for people of color.”

Beyond this, urban Christianity has abandoned its social justice leadership and begun more and more to prey on the communities it used to serve. Black megachurches have created lavish lifestyles for their charismatic leaders, complete with sex scandals. And these leaders are always male, benefiting from the traditional patriarchy that continues to dominate the black community, much to the detriment of struggles for the rights of women and gays. This adds up to these churches acting in clear betrayal of the interests of the black community.

So it is in this context, the context of social justice, that traditional faith needs to be critiqued in minority communities. And this need has generated a perceived urgency on the part of today’s black atheists and humanists. Absurdities of theological doctrine, revealing discoveries of biblical scholarship, and the fact of scriptural contradictions are considered irrelevant here. But the latter are what mainstream humanist groups tend to focus on when they discuss religion. Hutchinson complains, “There is little analysis of the relationship between economic disenfranchisement, race, gender, and religiosity in New Atheist or secular humanist critiques of organized religion.”

And this may answer the question as to why humanists in the United States and Canada are mostly white. Their humanism fails to notice white privilege, fails to see that the needs their philosophy addresses are particular, not universal. And operating from such an orientation, the dominant humanist organizations, national and local, go on to view the concerns specific to racial minorities as narrow or specialized—hence outside the broad philosophical generalities they prefer to address.

This marginalizing of minority concerns, Hutchinson argues, undermines “the possibility of any sustainable cross-racial alliances around humanist issues.” Meaning that, “in the absence of an explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, and anti-imperialist critical consciousness there will continue to be a major divide between white atheist discourse and the lived experiences of humanists of color.” One might take the defiant expression, “No justice, no peace” and rework it to say, “No justice, no African-American humanism.”

Clearly, Hutchinson’s call is a radical one, more likely to be met by humanists of color themselves. And this is exactly what is beginning to happen. Under her leadership and that of others, new minority atheist and humanist groups have emerged, such as Black Atheists of America and Black Freethinkers. And to bring the various groups and individuals together in this struggle, Donald Wright, author of The Only Prayer I’ll Ever Pray: Let My People Go, organized a Day of Solidarity for Black Non-believers on February 26, 2012. The goal, says Wright, is to make it an annual celebration on the fourth Sunday in February to “encourage community activism” as well as “promote fellowship, share experiences, meet new nonbelievers, and discuss the lives of black nonbelievers that our typical history books omit.”

Meanwhile, groups of Hispanic atheists are also emerging. Jose Alvarado of Chicago Latino Atheists has set up his group to “discuss contemporary issues regarding Hispanics/Latinos and the predominance of religion in our culture” and “make atheists more visible in our local communities by promoting education, community service, secular religious education, and upholding the separation of church and state.”

Such changes in minority humanist advocacy have grown out of a recognition that one size doesn’t fit all. Since we don’t live in a post-racial society, since white privilege continues to exist, and since the predominant form of humanism doesn’t have the “unraced” status its proponents seem to imply for it, then organizations specifically focused on the needs of racial and ethnic minorities have become a necessity.

May they grow and thrive.

Fred Edwords, a past editor of the Humanist, serves as the historian for the American Humanist Association and is national director of the United Coalition of Reason.

Working methodically, Jefferson sliced out the parts of the Bible that he believed and pasted them onto a folio of blank pages. The rest—the parts he didn’t believe—he left behind in two maimed, mutilated Bibles.

Thomas Jefferson was editing the Bible, a book regarded by most of his fellow Americans as the word of God. The act was certainly presumptuous, perhaps blasphemous. But Jefferson found the task simple. The worthy parts of the Bible were easily distinguishable from the worthless—“as distinguishable,” he later wrote in a letter to John Adams, “as diamonds in a dunghill.”

Using the passages he sliced out of his Bibles, Jefferson created a new book, which he called, “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth.” He had it bound but he never published it, and he told only a handful of close friends about it. His copy—the only copy that ever existed—later disappeared and is now lost to history.

But sixteen years later, he created another. In 1820, retired from politics and living at Monticello, Jefferson sat down again, at the age of seventy-seven, to edit the Bible. He purchased six Bibles—two in English, two in French, and two containing both Latin and Greek—and cut them up, creating a second edited version of the New Testament, in four languages.

In this book, he kept the words of Jesus and some of his deeds, but left out the miracles and any suggestion that Jesus is God. The virgin birth is gone. So is Jesus walking on water, multiplying the loaves and fishes, and raising Lazarus from the dead. Jefferson’s version ends with Jesus’ burial on Good Friday. There is no resurrection, no Easter Sunday. Jefferson called this version “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”

That book has survived. It’s smaller than you might expect—roughly five by eight inches—with a faded red leather cover. Conservators at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in Washington, DC, painstakingly repaired rips and restored the book. It’s currently on display at the museum, along with two of the Bibles that Jefferson cut up to create it.

The exhibition is sure to generate questions: Why did one of America’s beloved Founding Fathers cut up Bibles? Was it an act of piety or of blasphemy? Was Jefferson a Christian or a heretic? And what does this book, commonly known as the “Jefferson Bible,” tell us about America’s religious heritage?

Those questions have no easy answers. Experts argue about all of them, as we shall see. But one thing seems certain: If Jefferson was running for president today, his Bible-slicing experiments would surely torpedo his candidacy.

“There is no way Jefferson could get elected president today,” says Steven Waldman, author of Founding Faith, a best-selling history of the role of religion in America’s creation. “You can practically see the attack ad that would be run about him: You see the Bible and you see a hand with a scissors cutting up the Bible. And that’s not going to play too well in the red states—or the blue states for that matter.”

“I am a sect by myself,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, commenting on his eccentric religious views. Born into the Church of England, Virginia’s official religion, Jefferson studied under Anglican clergymen from elementary school through college, and attended Anglican services all his life, although not always faithfully. He wasn’t the kind of man who accepts dogmas uncritically. Brilliant and intellectually curious, Jefferson preferred to make his own judgment in matters of religion, and advised others to do the same.

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God,” he urged his nephew, Peter Carr, in 1787, “because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

Influenced by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, Jefferson scoffed at biblical stories of miracles but believed that the study of nature proves the existence of God. He thought deeply about religion all his life, and although his views sometimes shifted, one opinion never changed: He believed that no government had the right to impose any religion on any individual. He wrote Virginia’s statute on religious freedom and famously coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state.”

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Today, that statement seems uncontroversial but in 1800, many people, particularly clergymen, considered it evidence of atheism. “They were of the opinion that not caring about that meant you were not a man of faith,” says Joseph J. Ellis, author of American Sphinx, a best-selling biography of Jefferson.

When Jefferson ran for president against John Adams in 1800, Adams’ Federalist allies distorted Jefferson’s defense of freedom of religion to portray him as an enemy of God. Alexander Hamilton called Jefferson “an Atheist in Religion and a Fanatic in politics.” William Linn, a New York minister, claimed that voting for him constituted “a rebellion against God.” Yale President Timothy Dwight warned Americans that if they elected Jefferson they would “see the Bible cast into a bonfire…and our children united in chanting mockeries against God.”

Despite all that, Jefferson won the election.

But the various lies about his religious beliefs angered him and hardened his antipathy to the clergy, who he described in Latin as “genus irritable vatum”—irritable tribe of priests—and in English as “soothsayers and necromancers.”

The nasty campaign of 1800 rendered Jefferson reticent about making public statements on religion. But he remained fascinated with the topic and continued to comment on religion in letters to trusted friends. Those comments are so voluminous and so varied that, for two centuries, both Christians and secularists have cherry-picked Jefferson quotes to “prove” that the sage of Monticello was a believer—or not.

Want to prove that Jefferson was a committed Christian? It’s easy.

Jefferson wrote, “I am a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” He called Christ’s teachings “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” He urged “getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ.” He suggested that the defeat of Napoleon “proves that we have a god in heaven.” In his first inaugural address, he invoked the blessings of “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe.” In his second inaugural address, he sought the blessings “of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

Want to prove that Jefferson was a militant secularist? That’s easy, too.

Jefferson wrote that “Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God.” He called the writers of the New Testament “ignorant, unlettered men” who produced “superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications.” He called the Apostle Paul the “first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” He dismissed the concept of the Trinity as “mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” He believed that the clergy used religion as a “mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves” and that “in every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.” And he wrote in a letter to John Adams that “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

So which Jefferson was the real Jefferson—the serious Christian or the angry heretic?

Both, says Waldman. Jefferson’s beliefs don’t conform to the “stereotypes created by modern culture warriors,” Waldman wrote. “He was anti-Christian and pro-Jesus. He was anti-religion and pro-God. He was against blind faith and in favor of reason-based belief. He resented being considered a heretic because he believed that his approach to God and Jesus was more faithful to both of them.”

On January 29, 1804, Jefferson wrote to his friend Joseph Priestley, the British scientist and dissident theologian, suggesting that Priestley compile a book of Jesus’ “moral doctrines,” extracted from the Bible.

“It would be,” Jefferson said, “short and precious.”

Priestley died a week later, so Jefferson did the job himself, spending a couple nights at the White House, cutting and pasting. He titled it “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth” and identified it as “an abridgment of the New Testament for the use of the Indians.”

That last phrase has since kicked up a controversy. Some Christian historians note that Jefferson had earlier signed a law appropriating federal money to subsidize missionary work among the Native Americans, and they suggest that perhaps Jefferson’s first cut-and-paste Bible was designed to serve as a sort of Reader’s Digest Bible condensed for American Indians. Other historians disagree, noting that Jefferson never attempted to use his Bible to educate Indians, never mentioned that idea in his letters, and later wrote to John Adams, saying that he created the book “for my own use.”

Who’s right? Nobody really knows.

In 1816, seven years after he left the White House, Jefferson wrote to a friend, discussing his edited Bible, and adding this thought: “It was too hastily done, however, being the work of one or two evenings only while I lived at Washington, overwhelmed by other business, and it is my intention to go over it again at more leisure.”

Sometime in late 1819 or early 1820, Jefferson finally found the time to do exactly that. He purchased Bibles in Greek, Latin, French, and English and, working very meticulously, cut them up, extracting the passages he wanted and carefully pasting them in four vertical columns, two columns to a page. He added two maps of the Holy Land, and sent his eighty-six pages to Frederick Mayo, a Richmond bookbinder, who bound them in an elegant red leather cover.

When Jefferson finished the project, he wrote to his friend William Short, explaining that he had edited the Bible in order to separate the sublime from the ridiculous. “I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.” It wasn’t difficult to tell the “lovely benevolence” from the “absurdity,” he added: “I found the work obvious and easy.”

Pleased with both versions of his cut-and-paste Bible, Jefferson later wrote to a friend that he was “in the habit of reading nightly from them before going to bed.”

After Jefferson died in 1826, the first of his Bibles disappeared, but the second remained in his family. In 1895 Cyrus Adler, a librarian at the Smithsonian, purchased the book from Jefferson’s great-granddaughter for $400. When the Jefferson Bible was exhibited, it caught the eye of Rep. John F. Lacey, an Iowa Republican. In 1902 Lacey proposed that Congress appropriate $3,227 to print 9,000 copies—3,000 copies for the Senate and 6,000 for the House. The bill passed, despite opposition from ministers angry that the government would print a “Bible” with the miracles removed, along with any suggestion that Jesus might be God.

“The preachers generally oppose the publication,” reported the Richmond Dispatch, “and so do the publishers, the latter wanting the job for themselves.”

House members quickly gave their copies of the book to constituents, but the Senate saved enough of them to provide a volume to each incoming freshman senator for the next fifty years. In 1957 Frank Church, a newly elected senator from Idaho, took the oath of office and was presented with a copy of Jefferson’s Bible. Two years later, he gave it to his son, Forrest Church, who eventually became a prominent Unitarian Universalist minister and the editor of an edition of the Jefferson Bible.

Over the last century, countless editions of the book were published, many containing introductions that attempt to prove that Jefferson held the same religious views as whoever was writing the introduction—Jefferson as Unitarian, as evangelical, as agnostic.

In 1996 Judd W. Patton, a professor of economics at Bellevue University in Nebraska—aided by the Nebraska Christian Coalition—published an edition that he distributes to every incoming member of Congress. If those politicians take the time to study Jefferson’s book, Patton wrote in his introduction, they might “begin the process of restoring and reclaiming our moral bearings and moral heritage.”

In 2009 Cari Haus, an accountant and Christian author, published The Reverse Jefferson Bible, which contains the parts left out of Jefferson’s version. “Unfortunately, Jefferson missed the point that the morals of Jesus were linked to the Way, the Truth and the Life,” she wrote in her introduction. She also issued a “warning” to Jefferson in the form of a quotation from the Book of Revelation: “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophesy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” Haus did not quote Jefferson’s 1825 description of the Book of Revelation: “merely the ravings of a maniac.”

Meanwhile, the vast army of Jefferson biographers, as well as religious scholars of various views, continue to debate the meaning of Jefferson’s Bible and our third president’s spiritual musings and proclivities.

“Doctrinally, he’s a heretic,” says Waldman. “He doesn’t believe in Jesus’ divinity or the miracles or many of the central tenets of orthodox Christianity. And yet, when you read Jefferson’s Bible you come away with the sense that he is quite religious in his own way, quite spiritual in his own way.”

“In Jefferson, there’s a lack—I really think it’s a learning disability—a lack of understanding about spirituality,” says Garrett Ward Sheldon, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia and author of The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. “He was a brilliant man but he was very practical, very scientific. He just didn’t get spirituality.”

“Jefferson was a deist,” says Ellis. “He believed God created the world but doesn’t have much to do with it any more.”

“Jefferson was not a true deist,” says Waldman. “Jefferson believed in a God who intervened in the course of history.”

Sheldon, who is a Baptist minister as well as a political scientist, is amused that Jefferson cut up the Bible. “Madison wrote commentary on the Bible. Jefferson edited it,” he says, laughing. “As a God-fearing Christian, I find it presumptuous to edit the Bible. But to him, it wasn’t.”

Actually, almost everybody edits the Bible, says Lori Anne Ferrell, author of The Bible and the People and a professor of history and literature at Claremont Graduate University. “Even people who read the Bible regularly only read parts of it. People read selectively. They read the parts they believe or the parts that give them comfort. For most people, the Bible is a cut-and-paste job. It’s just that Jefferson actually takes a scissors or a knife and actually excises the parts he doesn’t think should be in there.”

“Jefferson did this in a somewhat audacious way, but I think it’s also respectful,” says Harry Rubenstein, the Smithsonian curator who worked on the Bible. “He’s not trashing Jesus. He’s writing to his colleagues saying this is the greatest moral teacher of all time, and these moral principles can be the basis for the new republic.”

Arguments over Jefferson’s religious views have been going on since the presidential campaign of 1800, and they are unlikely to end any time soon for one simple reason: Americans care deeply about religion, and about Jefferson.

“The battle over Jefferson’s religious legacy is kind of crazy,” says Ellis. “But Thomas Jefferson is a powerful trophy. Having Jefferson on your side is a big thing. And having him on the other side is bad news.”

Waldman agrees, but he doesn’t believe Jefferson truly belongs on either side of current cultural debates.

“Looking at the Jefferson Bible should teach people on all sides of the debate to be very skeptical when someone of their tribe quotes a Founding Father to prove that he was an ally in their cause,” Waldman says. “It’s easy to cherry-pick the Founding Fathers’ quotes to ‘prove’ that they were either orthodox Christians or they were secular. They were neither. Their religious views were complex and fascinating and they don’t lend themselves to being pigeonholed or used in the modern culture wars. When you do that, you distort reality.”

SIDEBAR: Resurrecting Jefferson’s Bible

Peter Carlson is a former reporter for the Washington Post and the author of two books on American history, K Blows Top and Roughneck. He is now writing a book on the adventures of two reporters who covered the Civil War until they were captured by the Confederates, imprisoned, and then made a dramatic escape.

Article and sidebar reprinted with permission, American History, October 2011, copyright Weider History Group.

In 1810, he listed his daily schedule in a letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, the engineer from Poland responsible for the Colonies’ fortifications, “My mornings are devoted to correspondence, from breakfast to dinner I am in my shops, my garden, or on horseback among my farms. From dinner to dark I give to society and recreation with my neighbors and friends, and from candlelight to early bedtime, I read.” He got a bit closer to confiding more personal information to Dr. Vine Utley, of Lyme, Connecticut. In 1819 he wrote: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an ailment but as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” But despite this sharing of his personal life, he never wrote of the two women who were closest to him during his life—his wife and his slave mistress.

What manner of a man was the undisclosed Thomas Jefferson? Of course we know he was born just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the frontier in those days. His parents were aristocrats; his mother, Jane, was a Randolph, and his father, Peter, was a planter and surveyor whose map of Virginia was universally used in the colonial era. The elder Jefferson had an extensive library that included William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift among others. Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen. During his formative years Thomas was tutored by the extremely conservative Reverend James Maury, an Anglican clergyman. Jefferson’s ideas about morality and religion would later jell in a way his tutor would not have applauded.

At seventeen, inklings of Jefferson the man began to emerge. It’s no surprise that Jefferson excelled in his studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, or that his interest in the opposite sex was piqued there. We can only speculate, of course, but historians have pointed to certain events and trends. When not at school, he and his best friend, John Page, exchanged chatty letters. During the school term, when not studying, they patronized the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. There, Jefferson met the vivacious Rebecca Burwell and was smitten. He couldn’t help noticing her as she danced the quadrille or flirted with the men at the tavern. She was extremely attractive, and, at sixteen, of a marriageable age. Jefferson became infatuated, despite the fact that as the months passed he seldom saw her. Shy with young women, he wrote to his friend Page asking for advice. Page advised him to hurry and tell her his feelings.

Jefferson spent time planning how to do this and, in a letter to Page, recounted his disastrous attempt to follow through: “I had dressed up in my own mind such thoughts as occurred to me in a moving language…and expected to perform them in a tolerably credible manner. But, good God! …a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length were the visible marks of my strange confusion.” Rebecca had in the meantime turned seventeen and married another suitor not long after what Jefferson considered his debacle. That he could laugh at himself showed he was hardly devastated but viewed the matter as a learning experience.

The next woman’s name that appears on Jefferson’s historical record in a serious way is Betsey Walker. Undoubtedly other women caught Jefferson’s eye between his seventeenth and twenty-fifth years, but Walker is important because his relationship with her sheds insight into his sexual mores. Along with most men of the era, he believed intercourse was medically necessary for good health. When it came to medical subjects, Jefferson was a traditionalist and followed the medical advice of the day. He probably would not have consorted with women of “easy virtue” who could have left him with a sexual disease. Married women, it appears, could have been acceptable. Betsey Walker presented a golden opportunity.

John Walker, Betsey’s husband, had attended William and Mary with Jefferson. They were close enough that Jefferson was a member of their wedding party. Shortly afterward, John Walker was posted to Fort Stanwix, near present-day Rome, New York, and he asked Jefferson to look out for Betsey who stayed behind in Virginia. During the four months he was away, Walker asked Jefferson to visit her often.

Gossip maintained that Jefferson was, in fact, too attentive to Betsey. Years later, in a note to the secretary of the navy, Jefferson wrote, “I plead guilty…when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness.” When rumors about his relationships with other women arose later on, he ignored or denied the allegations.

Unfortunately, no painting or detailed written portrait remains of the woman Jefferson courted seriously a few years later. Although people uniformly called her beautiful, we don’t know her height or the color of her hair or eyes, but we do know she was vivacious and talented. She had all the qualities Jefferson admired in a woman, indeed expected—that is, an ability to converse in a light but literate way, talent in one of the arts, and the ability to sew well and oversee a houseful of slaves.

That woman was Martha Wayles Skelton, widowed at the age of nineteen and left with an infant son when her husband, Bathurst Skelton, died in 1768. Martha’s father was John Wayles, a wealthy planter, slave dealer, and lawyer, who had been married four times by the time Martha was thirteen. She hadn’t liked any of her three stepmothers. Wayles, perhaps as a consequence, gave up on marriage but took to his bed a slave named Betty Hemings. She was half white, her father having been a white ship captain, her mother a full-blooded African. Betty’s ongoing affair with Wayles produced six children, all one-quarter black, all half-siblings of Martha. Betty Hemings could very well have been like a surrogate mother to her; Martha had known her longer than any of her three stepmothers.

Jefferson was enthralled with Martha, who was twenty-two or twenty-three when he began courting her. Her beauty and accomplishments fit his desires perfectly. Not only did she love music, as did he, she was proficient on the harpsichord. They often played duets, with Jefferson playing the violin. They also sang, talked, and flirted. One of Jefferson’s favorite novels was Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, whose satirical skits, essays, and sketches were filled with sexual innuendo, sometimes including witty obscenity. Whether Martha shared Jefferson’s appreciation of the book at the time is unknown, but her familiarity with it is expressed in later writings. Although it’s true she had many other suitors, it seems clear that Martha and Jefferson were a love match.

Snow covered the Virginia countryside January 1, 1772, when Jefferson, twenty-nine, and Martha, twenty-four, took their oaths at The Forest, the Wayles’ plantation, and honeymooned in the South Pavilion at Monticello. (The rest of the grand house was not yet finished.)

With marriage, Jefferson’s wealth increased exponentially. In addition to land and other slaves, Martha brought all the Hemings family to Monticello, including the children that predated Betty’s liaison with Wayles. Undoubtedly the bonds between the young heiress and the Hemings family were strong. Probably because of the blood relationship, no Hemings ever worked in the fields at Monticello. Until they were fourteen years old, the children had few chores and mainly ran errands. After that the boys were taught a trade while the girls did light sewing and baking at the great house.

Jefferson characterized his years with Martha as “unchequered happiness.” Although he and the other founders often traveled to Philadelphia during that time, he invariably stated his desire to be home. At Monticello, he entertained visitors in his erudite fashion and Martha, adding her genteel, charming ways to his table, expanded her own horizons entertaining foreign visitors. In charge of the house slaves, she oversaw the making of beer, soap, candles, and the sewing of household goods. She also supervised the baking, and at times read recipes aloud from cookbooks. An ardent spouse, she bore Jefferson six children, two of whom lived to adulthood. But each pregnancy dragged her down physically, and after ten years of marriage, on September 6, 1782, she died at age thirty-four, having begged Jefferson not to force a stepmother upon her children.

This request could have been taken to mean that if he did remarry, he should be the final arbiter regarding the children. Instead he took the words to mean he should not remarry and, indeed, he never did.

Years later, a note written by Martha Jefferson was found that read: “Time wastes too fast. Every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return more—everything passes on…” This quote was finished by Thomas Jefferson: “and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!” The words, so filled with meaning, were taken from Tristram Shandy.

The depth of Jefferson’s love for his beloved wife can be seen in the paucity of his writing about her. She meant too much for him to eulogize her. He merely wrote in his journal that she had died. Consistent with his beliefs, he did not look to religion for consolation in grief. But he did turn to his daughter, Patsy, and the two became very close.

Five years after Martha died, Jefferson represented his new country in Paris. The French were a revelation. Although he undoubtedly knew they were against slavery, he found France different in other ways, too. The women of the continent surprised him with their sophistication, pleased him with their wit and charm, and confounded him with their political knowledge. In his opinion, women were to stay out of politics. During his last year in Paris, he wrote to Ann Bingham, a Philadelphia beauty, “The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of politics. Men, women, children talk nothing else. But our good American ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. They are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate. They have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other.”

Still, the Parisian women, more relaxed in affairs of the heart than American women, intrigued Jefferson. Erotica permeated Europe, especially in the French culture where, for example, women wore gowns cut exceedingly low in front. Also, his dear friend Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution who was happily married, had a mistress. Jefferson couldn’t help but be interested and confused at the same time.

At first Jefferson socialized primarily with John and Abigail Adams, who were also in Paris. Matching wits with Abigail, whose mind was unmatched by most women Jefferson knew, gave him intellectual stimulation, and Abigail’s rather prudish ways (she was shocked at what dancers wore in the ballet) insulated him from French society. But when the Adamses went to London, Jefferson plunged into Parisian social life. “Here we have singing, dancing, laughter and merriment. No assassinations, rebellions, nor other dark deeds,” he wrote to Abigail. “When our king goes out they go down and kiss the earth where he has trodden, and then they go to kissing one another. And this is the truest wisdom.” He soon met and became infatuated with Maria Cosway, wife of the famous British painter, Richard Cosway. By this time Jefferson was forty-four; it had been five years since he’d lost Martha, and he was ready for a romantic interlude.

Jefferson liked teasing and flirting with Maria Cosway. She had an Italian background, laughed easily, and flirted enthusiastically. Jefferson was enchanted. They spent many hours together while her husband attended to his art. (In addition to serious canvases, Richard Cosway painted snuff-boxes that bore pornographic images.)

Maria seemed like the perfect woman for Jefferson; he could stay true to his deathbed promise to Martha and still indulge his erotic self. With Maria he rode through the parks and down the boulevards, danced at balls, played cards, and romanced her in notes. Once while out strolling, whether to prove his physical prowess or virility, Jefferson tried to leap over a fence. Catching his foot, he came down on his hand, injuring it. The event coincided with Maria’s husband leaving Paris, so we don’t know how sympathetic the lady could have been. Although her husband was remarkably tolerant, when he left for home, he wanted her with him.

Jefferson’s letters to Maria became more passionate as well as literary. In a treatise that verged on a polemic, he spoke of his head and his heart, using them to illustrate his physiological and psychological distress. To which should he listen, he asked. He worked on this now-famous letter for a full week. She answered without once referring to his head and heart assertions. And while Jefferson had been struggling over the wording of his important letter, Maria had been spending time with the American painter John Trumbull. Upon learning of this, Jefferson, in a pique, didn’t write to her but addressed attention to her in a letter to Trumbull, saying something akin to “give Mrs. Cosway my regards.”

In a quandary about the lady, he set out on an extended tour of the continent and was gone two and a half months. Not once during that time did he write to her, although he kept copious notes of the flora and fauna he saw along the way. Back in Paris, he again wrote to Maria. He alluded to Tristram Shandy, using references to noses in place of a more erotic appendage. Maria seemed rather bored with the letter and upset with him. Why hadn’t he written to her while he was away? And what was this about noses? It seemed she had not fully understood the wordplay, or chose not to. Either way, their romance slowly faded.

Jefferson’s daughter, Patsy, had already been in Paris with him, and he now sent for his daughter Polly, asking that she be accompanied by a woman servant. Instead, one of the Hemings children, fourteen-year-old Sally, was sent. We don’t know when Jefferson and Sally became intimate, but we do know that she was pregnant when they returned to Monticello.

Before a 1998 DNA analysis showed a match between the Jefferson male line and a Hemings descendant, scholars, historians, and the public denied that a romantic relationship between Jefferson and his slave could have happened. As Joseph Ellis notes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1998), Jefferson had become not only an icon but a myth, larger than life. This thinking temporarily blinded people to reality. Today, however, we can look to other events and speculate how his relationship with Sally Hemings may have played a role. His beloved daughter, Patsy, for example, married just two months after returning home from Paris. There is no indication that she and her husband-to-be, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., had been eager correspondents while she was away, and there is no indication that they had been anything more than friendly cousins before she went to France. Could she have been afraid of losing her number-one spot with her father? Or can we attribute her actions to shock and anger upon learning of her father’s affair with a slave she’d known her entire life?

Such a reaction certainly would have echoed the hypocritical and confusing feelings the majority of Americans held about slavery during those colonial and post-revolutionary years. Abigail Adams, for example, was a devout abolitionist but, after seeing Othello, wrote that she was quite undone seeing a play about a marriage between a black man and a white woman. She felt horror and disgust every time she saw the Moor touch the gentle Desdemona. Abigail was no different than most of her peers. When she referred to Hemings as “the girl” rather than using her name, it was hardly seen as strange.

At Monticello, Sally Hemings was known as “dashing Sally” and was said to have a pleasing disposition. Beautiful and extremely light-skinned, she bore a probable resemblance to her late half-sister, Martha, Jefferson’s beloved wife. Hemings could also read and write and had learned to speak French while in Paris.

Today we might ask, why didn’t Hemings remain in France where she could have been a free woman? For one thing, France had become chaotic. The storming of the Bastille had taken place while she was in Paris. Considering her age and that most of her life had been spent at Monticello, returning was not a hard choice. At the plantation Hemings had status, a status that would undoubtedly grow when she returned as Jefferson’s lover. Hadn’t that been her mother’s position at the Wayles plantation? Also, Jefferson agreed any children born of their union would be freed when they turned twenty-one.

So while there was without question a power imbalance between the elder statesman and his young slave, coercion seems to have played a very small part. It’s also not inconceivable that Sally Hemings was in love with Jefferson. He had a good physique, rode horseback well, and could be charming as well as didactic. While in Paris, he had seen that Sally received a wage, had better clothing than she’d worn in Virginia, and was inoculated against smallpox. It’s also well documented that Jefferson liked playing the patriarchal figure at Monticello. Hemings, whose father, John Wayles, died shortly after she went to Monticello at the age of two, very likely looked upon Jefferson as a father figure and could have been flattered that this great man, honored not only in his own country but also in France, had an interest in her.

Jefferson’s devotion to Sally Hemings lasted all his life. That he never wrote about her is not surprising. She was at once too important to him and not important enough; despite her role as a sympathetic ear and loving bedmate, she was still a slave. If his beliefs about her status changed at all during the years, there is no evidence of it.

In his 1781 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote that he did not believe blacks were equal to whites. But because they were human beings, he insisted slaves should be respected and treated well. He argued all his life that slavery should be abolished, but that emancipation should be gradual and that former slaves should live separately from whites. His belief that the two races could not live together harmoniously was shared by his friend, James Madison. Madison never freed his slaves, and he illustrated his stance by adding that they couldn’t be freed “unless they are permanently moved beyond the region occupied or allotted to a white population.”

Although the inherent racism in their beliefs is clear to us today,  Jefferson and Madison were considered very progressive at the time. But their liberalism had limits. Even George Washington, the only founder to eventually free all his slaves, made sure that when slaves accompanied him to northern cities they returned with him to Mt. Vernon before they could become free. He and his wife, Martha, owned slaves separately. In his will, George freed his slaves but stipulated they would not be free until after Martha’s death. Convinced that some of these slaves wished her dead, Martha freed her late husband’s 123 slaves during her lifetime (but she never believed slavery was wrong). Moreover, all of the men who met in Philadelphia to write the Constitution agreed to stipulate that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a person. As president, James Monroe, whose beliefs echoed Jefferson’s and Madison’s, saw an initial group of American slaves settled in Liberia in 1820. (Thousands followed later, and Liberia became independent in 1847.) But most of the South believed, like Martha Washington, that slavery was biblically inspired, and the gulf between the South and their fellow Americans in the North grew larger.

Today, when African-American representatives of the government are spit upon and verbally assaulted, or when more subtle or more blatant acts erupt, the legacy of the past cannot be dismissed, and our most revered historical figures must bear some blame. We could say that Jefferson and the others reflected the social and economic mores of the times, and in a way that’s true. But their thinking had serious limitations and lasting implications. We see this thinking now, not in blatant violence like the lynching of black people or the violent reactions of some whites during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but in less easily discernible ways, like the slow pace we took in eliminating “separate but equal,” in getting rid of poll taxes, or integrating neighborhoods. Today blacks are still paid less than whites in many instances. Discrimination in housing, schooling, and voting still takes place. As a society, we routinely deplore racial violence and say we are not prejudiced, but racism still exists. For instance, U.S. presidential candidates routinely speak at universities, schools, and public venues that discriminate against African Americans. Also, too often religion and bigotry go hand in hand. And when the main objective of a political party is to “make Barack Obama a one-term president,” few people protest, even those who support him. So if we’re being honest, we must contend that otherwise admirable historical figures like Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Monroe, and Abigail Adams contributed to the legacy of racism.

It is now accepted as fact by most historians that Sally Hemings bore six of Jefferson’s children, four of whom survived to adulthood—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, all named by Jefferson after his best friends. (Was James Madison amused, annoyed, or was it a habit friends indulged in even as they indulged their libidos?) Jefferson’s belief in racial superiority is evident in his theory about the offspring of mixed-race couples, including his own. He felt that an infusion of white blood could make a person half black, and another infusion would make their offspring one-fourth black. Sally Hemings was one-fourth black. Offspring of a so-called quadroon and a white man would, in Jefferson’s thinking, make them equal to whites. And yet his children by Sally were never treated as completely equal. The contradictions were rife.

For example, although they were not part of the social life at Monticello, Jefferson’s slave children lived there and were seen by visitors. At a time when not all Americans could read or write, Jefferson saw that all the Hemings could. He also arranged for the boys to learn a useful trade. As for the Hemings women, none married other slaves at Monticello but they did have liaisons with white men who visited frequently, or who worked on the plantation. One Hemings woman married a house slave from another plantation.

Keeping his promise, Jefferson gave all of Sally Hemings’ children their freedom. Madison, whose full name was James Madison Hemings, reported that his father was not demonstrative, but was kind. Displays of affection were reserved for his white children. Two of Jefferson’s children from Sally “passed” and lived as white. Beverly, Jefferson’s eldest slave child, went to Washington as a white man and married a white woman. The beautiful Harriet, who, according to her brother Madison, was as white as anyone, was given stage fare to Philadelphia and fifty dollars, a very handsome sum at the time. She eventually married a white man of good standing from Washington, DC. Madison and Eston were freed when Jefferson died at the age of eighty-three on July 4, 1826.

Sally Hemings was not freed in Jefferson’s will. Undoubtedly he feared adding to the speculation about his relationship with her, which he and most people had ignored or denied. It’s believed that he arranged with Patsy to give Sally her freedom. Eight years after he died, she did so. In the interim, Sally lived in Virginia with her two sons, Madison and Eston. No one ever contested her right to live and act as a free person, undoubtedly a mark of respect for Jefferson. She stayed with her sons until her death in 1836. At times Harriet and Beverly visited, but these visits grew fewer and then stopped as slavery and states’ rights became a volatile issue in the more ambiguous colonial states.

So what kind of a man was Jefferson? Was he conflicted ideologically? An enlightened lover stifled by his very public place? Despite any desire for privacy concerning his private life, a public figure as complex and respected as Thomas Jefferson could never achieve it, even almost two centuries after his death. Nor should we wish he ever did or would, because the more we know about our heroes, for all their complexities and contradictions, the better we know ourselves, and the better positioned we are to honestly assess where we’d like to be as a society.

Cleo Fellers Kocol is a former board member of the American Humanist Association and former chair of the AHA’s Feminist Caucus. In 1988 she was named its Humanist Heroine. A poet and author, her latest novel, The Good Foreigner, takes place in China and the United States during the years 1947 to 1989.

But my disgust with the radical scheme to kill off the United States Postal Service has nothing to do with nostalgia or romanticism.

The Postal Service is not a mere delivery service, an outdated, inefficient alternative to FedEx or UPS. It’s a public service that every nation on earth, except for Somalia, maintains. In fact the United States joins Somalia as one of the only nations that doesn’t fund a postal system. We used to fund it, from the birth of our nation until Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It’s one of the only public services specifically addressed in the U.S. Constitution—right in Article One. Its genesis dates back to the Second Continental Congress, which appointed Benjamin Franklin as our first postmaster general.

The original purpose of the Postal Service was not to deliver Christmas gifts or iPads but to deliver democracy. It was the conduit for political discussion and debate, tying a geographically dispersed population into a single, somewhat informed electorate. That’s why magazines and newspapers historically enjoyed a low, government-subsidized rate. The Founding Fathers realized that a large nation must communicate through media, and that privately funded media would skew the national debate toward the interests of the rich. Hence, they established the Postal Service and gave it a mandate to subsidize independent media with deeply discounted media mail rates. That’s why its formation was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution—for the same reason the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and names journalism as the only profession that it specifically safeguards. A free press, including a means for disseminating that press, are paramount necessities for a democracy to function.

Today, one could argue that the Internet fills this function, rendering media mail obsolete—at least for the 60 percent of the population that have dedicated Internet connections. But there are a few major differences between the Postal Service and the Internet that undermine the latter’s ability to protect our democracy. First off, our Internet connection comes via a private portal. A handful of corporations monopolize ownership of this infrastructure and keep trying to exert control over what passes through it and at what speed, if at all. We must never forget this, and never take the Internet, or its temporal anarchy, for granted. We’ve already seen governments and compliant corporations around the world employ simple algorithms or outright filters to censor the Internet. The Postal Service’s media mail provides the redundancy that we need to guarantee a free press.

Also, unlike the cable and telephone monopolies that control our Internet connections, the Postal Service is legally required to provide uniform service, quality, and pricing to all Americans, regardless of where they live. By contrast, approximately 40 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t have dedicated Internet access, and about a quarter have no access at all to the so-called information superhighway. Those of us who do enjoy Internet access pay exorbitant rates, usually to maintain a subpar connection. One way to correct this would be to have the Postal Service run a government-subsidized Internet system, with the same guaranteed, universal access to affordable service that the postal system has historically provided. This would be in line with the founding fathers’ original charge to build mail highways, with the information superhighway being the modern equivalent of a road specifically constructed to facilitate communication. Also in line with the original intent, an affordable Internet with guaranteed net neutrality would protect future access to a free press. In a democracy, access to information should be a public service and a guaranteed right.

A postal Internet, however, would challenge entrenched corporate interests in the communication sector—entities that persistently rip us off and openly work to undermine our democracy. It’s no surprise that these communication corporations employ an army of lobbyists on the state and federal level, and are among the largest political contributors to pro-corporate politicians who carry their water in the halls of Congress. These are the same politicians who cut all subsidies to the U.S. Postal Service during the Reagan years, and now want to finally see it completely decimated.

Essentially, the war against the U.S. Postal Service is part of the same corporate-funded war against democracy that brands itself as a supposed libertarian battle against “big government.” The obvious contradiction in this rhetoric, however, is that you can’t have libertarianism while corporations are left standing. Remove the “we the people” checks on a plutocracy that government is supposed to provide, and we’re left at the mercy of unfettered corporatism, no matter how seductive the brand marketing is.

Here’s how the cards were stacked against the Postal Service. Congress passed a law mandating that the Postal Service, and only the Postal Service, pre-fund parts of its retirement system seventy-five years into the future. This mandate, which costs the Postal Service $5 billion per year, does not apply to any other government agency or private corporation. Take away this burden, and the Postal Service, amazingly, would be profitable. I say “amazingly,” because the Postal Service still provides media rates, as low as eleven cents, to deliver magazines and newspapers, and as low as seven cents to deliver nonprofit mail—all without the subsidy that similar agencies enjoy around the world, and that our Postal Service previously enjoyed for more than two centuries.

Even the regular first-class postage rate, which has gone up to forty-five cents, is remarkably cheap, considering that it includes pickup at your home and two-day delivery to almost the entire nation. Now think about UPS, FedEX, or DHL coming to your home to pick up anything for forty-five cents.

And it’s not just ordinary people who enjoy this service. As much as we hate junk mail, small businesses often survive by using bulk mailings to send parcels of up to 3.3 ounces for as little as fourteen cents. None of this is really lucrative business, which is why postal services around the world are subsidized. Ours is not. Add to this disadvantage the fact that corporate delivery entities like UPS and FedEx can cherry-pick services that are profitable to provide, much like charter schools cherry-pick problem-free students, and it becomes obvious how the deck is stacked against the survival of the Postal Service. It’s no coincidence that FedEx and UPS are two of the largest campaign contributors funding politicians working to kill the Postal Service altogether. Such a move would eliminate their primary barrier to unfettered profits, much like the absence of public service Internet has allowed communication companies to saddle us with the some of the most expensive and slowest internet connections in the developed world. I believe this is racketeering.

On December 5, 2011, the Postal Service, facing a predicable budget shortfall and the unwillingness of Congress to restore any funding to the agency, announced that it will close half of its mail processing centers and end next-day delivery of first-class mail. This would essentially initiate a downward spiral of service cuts followed by revenue drops, eventually leading to the total collapse of the Postal Service. This plan, temporarily on hold, is already being prematurely celebrated by the corporatist press. In a December 15 column in Forbes, Roger Kay looks forward to the day when the mail system is privatized. He writes, “I predict that the shift will be a net benefit to the overall system, despite the loss of jobs for more than a half-million postal workers. I hope they don’t go postal on me for saying so.”

The Postal Service has been able to hang on to life, thirty years after it lost all public funding while retaining all of its public service mandates, thanks only to its work force. These are, for the most part, highly educated workers who secured their jobs through a competitive process. They’ve kept this unfunded public service system running against all odds for decades. They not only handle mail but keep an eye on disabled shut-ins, senior citizens, and our homes, often being the first ones to notice if anything is amiss. Most chose this public service career because it offered secure employment with a guaranteed pension. The very precepts of this agreement are now in jeopardy because of a corrupt Congress beholden to corporate special interests that, in their unfettered greed, want to privatize and profitize all government services, no matter the cost to society, our democracy, or our freedoms.

I’d rather see these middle-class postal workers keep their jobs and continue to provide an essential communication service while Forbes’s Roger Kay queues up in a bread line, or, better yet, tries to find some honest work. Perhaps he’ll move to Somalia and experience the bliss of a postal-free society.

As the Postal Service creed goes, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Let’s hope they can also survive a Republican Congress.

Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College. This article was originally published by ArtVoice on December 21, 2011. Previous columns are at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com, and available globally through syndication.

The history of the NMAAHC itself is worth mentioning, given that it took Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) fifteen years to get congressional authorization for its creation as the latest of nineteen Smithsonian institutions located in Washington, DC, and elsewhere around the United States.

Back in 1929, Calvin Coolidge authorized construction of a memorial building to serve as a national museum and tribute to the contributions of black Americans, however plans were halted by the Great Depression. The timeline of the African-American history museum then jumps forward to the 1980s, when Lewis began introducing legislation each year without success. What happened in the fifty years between? Well, a lot happened, of course. The Civil Rights movement was successful—albeit with tragic casualties—but resistance to equality never disappeared. And in terms of the museum, it seems one legislator, Jessie Helms (nickname: “Senator No”), was at times the only one standing in its way. (Helms was, after all, the Republican Senator from North Carolina who filibustered for sixteen days in an attempt to stop the Senate from approving the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday.)

Flash forward to February 2012, and ground is finally being broken on the National Mall site where the National Museum of African American History and Culture will reside. It currently occupies a gallery of the National Museum of American History, where it’s hosting a forceful new exhibit called “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty.”

Visitors entering the exhibit encounter a juxtaposition that sets the tone: On one side is a picture of Jefferson alongside the Declaration of Independence, drafted by his hand; on the other, a page reproduced from his farm book where the names of slaves are neatly recorded. The exhibit is very much about the lives of the individual slaves who lived at Monticello—their tools and personal belongings are on display and their efforts to pursue literacy and freedom are detailed. But the exhibit also asks us to consider what kind of man Jefferson was, which is precisely what Cleo Fellers Kocol tackles in her article, “Jefferson’s Women: Sexual Enlightenment and Racism in the Life of a Secular Hero.” Together with Peter Carlson’s examination of Jefferson’s Bible, the challenge offered herein is to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of a national icon and to look for the same within ourselves.

Humanists of all stripes and colors will be encouraged to learn about today’s growing number of African-American and Hispanic nonbelievers and their organizations, detailed in the article by former Humanist editor, Fred Edwords. And, again, readers will be challenged by him and by author Sikivu Hutchinson to consider how different the contemporary minority experience is generally, and how differently black and Hispanic humanists experience nonbelief.

Jefferson said in first inaugural address in 1801: “[T]hough the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”

Let’s be reasonable. Let’s be right.

Jennifer Bardi is the editor of the Humanist.

“What about hope?” she’d asked.

Undaunted by the aura of hopelessness in her tone, I answered brightly: “The humanist worldview is filled with hope. We may be made of matter, but we decide what matters. It is through meaningful human action that a blank computer screen can become a poem, that slavery can become freedom. We can help others, alleviate suffering, and experience beauty. Humanism is not just the rejection of an idea. Humanism is an affirmation. It is a positive, clear-eyed response to our one world. It is saying ‘yes’, not saying ‘no.’”

“I don’t see how that helps me have hope,” she said, monotone. I went into high gear, and tried a different answer.

“Humanism is about possibilities. Without some grand supernatural plan or destiny, the future is open. Possibility means the door for hope and change and goodness is open. Possibilities can lead to progress, in the world and in our individual lives. It is a positive psychological message. We have choices in how to shape our lives. We can live with caring and compassion. We can invest ourselves in worthy goals. We don’t need anything supernatural for that. The fact that we can try to change ourselves, other people, and the world—and make it a better place through reason and compassion—is a fundamental wonder of being human, and can be celebrated. It is a cause for hope, and wisdom.”

“Okay,” she said. She was polite but unconvinced.

I don’t know what personal trauma, life events, or innate characteristics made the questioner long for hope, but clearly she’s not alone in seeking to satisfy this deep human need. Religion, in part, peddles hope. Hope also wins elections and sells products. The question is—for someone who is currently without hope—are the kinds of secular answers I proffered going to be enough on a personal, emotional, and psychological level?

I realize now that philosophical concepts may be too abstract for some who feel despondent. She needed a personal answer. What about hope for her? Humanism has a solid foundation. We have secular dreams of a better tomorrow, and a track record of positive social change. But do we have answers on a personal level? Do we have a fulfilling substitute for “God loves you” or, for the bereaved, “don’t worry, you’ll meet again someday in heaven”?

So let’s admit straight out: humanism is not about hope. It’s about facing the world as it actually exists and making the best of it. It’s about looking this real world in the eye and, using imagination and initiative, building castles in the sand, not castles in the sky. It’s about finding goodness within the spectrum of what’s real and what’s possible. And in facing such truths, humanists don’t look outside nature for salvation; they don’t seek change through wish fulfillment. This perspective is not a limitation. It’s a motivator. It’s the ground for positive action and results.

There are other approaches as well. A naturalistic, scientific worldview has led to medical marvels such as surgical anesthesia and life-saving antibiotics. In the same manner, properly used psychoactive medications can be thought of in a positive light as one tool among many to help relieve mental suffering and stress, find inner calm and happiness, and help individuals and their families to enjoy better lives.

Reflecting about the woman who asked, “What about hope?” I realize now that what she needed most was not just ideas, but love, broadly understood. She needed to feel loved by a person, family, or community. Conversely, she might find meaning in providing unconditional love to a person, pet, or worthy goal.

Ideas are the groundwork of the humanist lifestance, and are valued. But I now feel that the best response would have been to ask the woman to meet me for coffee afterwards, and then listen to her. To care. To show by action that there is the possibility of finding a person or a community that listens, supports, and tries to help with appropriate suggestions. A community that strives to provide encouragement—not with fairy tales, but with a whole realm of positive, real-world, personal human responses. That is the humanist way.

Lawrence Rifkin is a physician and a writer whose work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Contemporary Pediatrics, Free Inquiry, and Medical Economics (in which he was the grand-prize winner of the Doctors’ Writing Contest).