Secularist Schism Widens, Threatening a Movement's Finances -- and Future?

For decades, and long before the recent arrival of ballyhooed and bully "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Paul Kurtz and the secular humanist movement that he birthed in the 1970s represented the gravitational center of unbelief in America.

While atheist leaders like the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair ("Mad, Mad, Madalyn") grabbed headlines with her court battles against prayer in schools -- and almost any other fight she could pick -- Kurtz, a retired University of Buffalo philosophy professor with a scholar's bearing and 50 books to his name, was developing a far-flung network of skeptics, agnostics, secularists and other "non-theists."

He was also building an imposing infrastructure of secular humanism -- a "mini-empire," as The Buffalo News recently called it, that includes two magazines, a publishing house and affiliated institutions under the aegis of the Center for Inquiry, the internationally renowned hub of humanism, based in Amherst, outside Buffalo.

But now Paul Kurtz is gone from the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and its affiliated publications and organizations, resigning last month after losing a lengthy power struggle with CFI's board of directors, and the movement he leaves behind isn't looking too good either.

"It's been a shattering blow," Kurtz told me in a recent telephone interview. "I founded that organization."

The upheaval at CFI was largely the culmination of years of tensions between Kurtz, now 84, and his designated successor at CFI, Ronald A. Lindsay. On one level, the drama is one of those all-too-common stories of an organization working to make the transition from a charismatic founder to the next generation of leadership. Such changeovers can become nasty personality clashes, and the conflict between Kurtz and Lindsay was all that and more.

Yet to many the split also underscores a serious and widening schism in the broader community of non-believers, between those who want civil engagement with people of faith, and even cooperation where possible, and atheist "fundamentalists" (as Kurtz and the old guard call them) -- true believers in godlessness who belittle religion and religious people at every turn, and yet by doing so can wind up sounding like the very enemy they are trying to defeat.

"They're dogmatic," Kurtz said of those at CFI who he contends are narrowing the broader scope of secular humanism, which embraces a range of non-religious and irreligious people. "I don't think the Center for Inquiry, which has among the leading scholars and scientists in the world, that we should resort to that. We should provide important, informative, thoughtful criticism."

In the short term, the internecine battle with Kurtz appears to have come at a high cost for CFI and its related organizations, the Council for Secular Humanism and its research arm, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. All are based in Amherst, though CFI has offices and programs around the country, along with national and international chapters and affiliates.

On June 1, Lindsay published an urgent appeal on CFI's website, revealing that the organization was suddenly facing an $800,000 shortfall, equivalent to 25 percent of the annual budget. The gap was due to the failure of an anonymous funder to provide his or her expected annual donation.

For months, Lindsey said, he had tried to contact the donor but heard nothing, and so he began to fear the worst -- that the donation would not be forthcoming, and that if it was not due to the poor economy, it was because the donor did not like the way the CFI was dealing with Paul Kurtz.

By the end of May, Lindsey couldn't wait any longer, and in his June 1 post he asked for donations to forestall "immediate drastic reductions in expenditures."

On June 10, Lindsay told me the appeal had generated about $50,000 in donations, not nearly enough to stave off deep cuts, but a hopeful first step toward a goal of about $250,000. Additional money could be drawn from CFI's endowment, currently valued at about $7.5 million, Lindsay said, though the organization hopes to avoid that option.

Kurtz says he takes no satisfaction in the travails of the organizations he founded, but he also says the problems are not surprising. He says they are a function of what he sees as a shift in tone away from the seriousness of purpose and positive approach that marked CFI's original vision. That shift, he said, coincides with the rise of the "New Atheists," like Richard Dawkins, who Politics Daily profiled last year, and Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett -- sometimes jokingly referred to as the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse.

Those writers are best-selling authors and, in the case of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, in particular, sharp-tongued polemicists whose fierce and witty (to some) denunciations of religion earn them headlines and criticism, but also a devoted following among like-minded unbelievers who see them as gurus of godlessness.

Kurtz thinks CFI has taken that same low road with campaigns, like last fall's "Blasphemy Day" and a "Free Expression Cartoon Contest" that last March gave its top prize to a drawing of a mitered bishop ogling a rank of altar boys.

"What has happened is that there is increasingly an effort to focus on criticism of religion," Kurtz told me. "Although we" -- he was referring to secular humanists like himself, who hold varying opinions on the supernatural -- "are skeptical of religion, we nonetheless have a positive statement to make. We want to work with religious people solving our planetary problems. This represents a basic philosophical difference."

He added: "I don't believe we should ridicule religion. To focus on that is degrading."

But Lindsay rejected Kurtz's charges.

"It is a total mischaracterization to say we've changed the mission," Lindsay said in a telephone interview. "We're doing the same things we did when Paul was in charge."

Lindsay did say that since CFI represents a "broad-based group" that includes the "New Atheists" as well as "moderate" secular humanists. He said that CFI's approach was viewed "more as a question of what's appropriate at different times and places" and that some of CFI's initiatives, like the blasphemy prize, reflected the tenor of the times.

Lindsay's efforts have drawn some sharp criticism from secular humanists and others who support Kurtz's approach, like R. Joseph Hoffman, a well-known secular humanist who in a blistering blog post in May called for Lindsay's resignation.

Other commentators, however, accused Kurtz of being disingenuous at best with his criticisms, saying he is the one who has changed and has lost his edge. (The outré' atheist and biology professor P.Z. Myers said Kurtz's complaints caused him to wonder "who chopped Kurtz's balls off.")

Comments on CFI's blogs also offer a sense of the heated debate -- and underscore the fractious nature of the non-theist community and their laudable penchant for openly debating everything . But Lindsay dismisses any broader meaning to the dispute with Kurtz.

"I think there is definitely some disagreement within the non-religious community about the approach to take toward religion," Lindsay said. "There is that going on. I just don't think that's what's happening here."

For example, Lindsay blames Kurtz for failing to help secure the large annual donation that has gone missing, a task Lindsay says had been part of Kurtz's job description. He said that he even told Kurtz at one point that he -- Lindsay -- would resign by the end of the year if Kurtz could secure the money from the major funder.

"I know he sees me as the villain and he's very unhappy that I am here," Lindsay said. "It's very unfortunate. But we have to carry on."

The dispute between Lindsay and Kurtz has been festering for two years, almost since the board of directors named Lindsay as chief executive in June 2008 at the request of Kurtz himself, who has known Lindsay for 25 years. Until 2008 Kurtz had been both chief executive and chairman of the board of CFI, with complete control over operations, and the board wanted to diversify the authority structure, Lindsay said. But, he added, "Paul simply did not want to give up any significant authority. And it spiraled from that. ... Nothing apparently could be done to satisfy him."

Lindsay accused Kurtz of repeatedly plotting against him, and of increasingly speaking out in CFI's publications and on its blog against the direction of the organization. But in a showdown in June 2009 the board backed Lindsay and Kurtz was removed as board chair and given an emeritus title, though he still had a say in the editorial content of the center's magazines, Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer. (Kurtz's son, Jonathan, also left the board, though he still runs the publishing company, Prometheus Books.)

Tensions came to a head last month when Kurtz wrote a lead editorial for the June/July issue of Free Inquiry, titling the piece "Toward a Kinder and Gentler Humanism" and declaring that "buffoonery" should have no place at CFI. Lindsay shot back with a testy blog post in which he called Kurtz "intellectually dishonest" and said his "constant carping and false claims" were discouraging donors and leading to cutbacks.

A short time later the split was final, and on May 18 Kurtz sent an email to friends announcing his resignation.

"I have already been shorn of all effective authority in these organizations and magazines and 'shoved on an ice flow' so to speak, so it is merely a formality to divest myself of any pretensions that I have anything any longer to say within the organizations or magazines that I founded," he wrote.

CFI issued a brief statement thanking Kurtz but also noting concerns about his "day-to-day management of the organization."

The fate of CFI remains up in the air, though Lindsay and others seem confident that they can rebound without losing too much in the way of their influence or their endowment.

The wider debate among secularists over whether to engage religious believers, or whether snark and sneer are the best ways to defeat faith and rally unbelievers to atheism, seems destined to continue. That does not bode well for a community that is growing faster than any U.S. religion -- Americans claiming no religion went from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008 -- but one which is also characterized by myriad shades of unbelief and often united only by a desire to debate everything and a disinclination to join anything that resembles a church. And among that 15 percent, true atheists like Dawkins and company comprise just a small fraction.

For his part, Kurtz says he feels as youthful as ever, having just completed two books, and he is launching a new organization, the Institute for Science and Human Values, to advance a "kinder, gentler" humanism and to continue his life project of enunciating a "planetary ethics" that could join believers and nonbelievers alike in projects to help society and save the environment.

"All through my life I've worked with religious people," Kurtz said, adding with a laugh: "I find my relationship with religious people far more friendly now than with many humanists."