The First Humanist Manifesto: a foundation in conversation

The media spectacle of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes in the summer of 1925 underlined for many religious liberals that Charles Darwin’s natural selection would be the wedge that permanently split Western religious thinking into two broad camps.

The question became what position the most protesting of Protestants would look like, and . . . there was no general consensus on that theological point. Many thought the logical candidate for the far left was Humanism.