The New York Times ran an article at the end of August under the headline, “Harvard’s Chief Chaplain Is an Atheist,” which generated the head-snapping attention it was designed to produce. The university’s diverse body of chaplains had recently voted to make the humanist leader Greg Epstein the administrative head of its group, but it certainly sounded like Harvard as a whole had perpetrated the kind of outrage that only an elitist, out-of-touch institution of higher learning would dare to commit: It had turned the religious leadership of its students over to an openly godless advisor. As the political website, The Hill, repackaged the Times piece for its readership, “Harvard Elects Atheist as New Chief Chaplain, Defying School’s Origins.” It was clickbait, but it was also a narrative framework certain to create more heat than light—a leap from faithful Puritans of the 1630s, absorbed with gospel truths, to contemporary “nones,” untethered from religious authorities. Christians were set up to bewail their diminished standing, and secularists to celebrate their elevated status.
The arc of the story—a remote religious past, an emergent secular future—has an obvious appeal and familiarity: a Puritan-to-Yankee tale adapted to the latest social circumstances. But, what if the coverage had resisted that tempting hook—the old clergyman John Harvard displaced by the new atheist Greg Epstein? What if it had refused to bait culture-war rivals into conjuring images of victory and defeat—one Roman Catholic churchman, writing in the New York Post, called Epstein’s election a sign of “abject surrender” on the part of the faithful to the faithless? What alternative scripts, what shifts of interpretive perspective and historical framing, might help us see the significance of Greg Epstein’s new role at Harvard differently, as something besides another iteration of one of modernity’s (and anti-modernity’s) favorite myths in which secularization advances at religion’s expense? Two possibilities come to mind.
First, a story about humanism is a distinct story from one about atheism. Leading with the atheist moniker as the Times did in both its print and online versions of the article obviously had more pizazz than leading with the humanist tag, but the lower voltage of the latter term is one of the main reasons it is preferred by those who have adopted it, including Epstein himself. In the confusing welter of names that American nonbelievers have used to identify themselves—freethinker, secularist, agnostic, liberal, atheist, positivist, skeptic, rationalist, and nontheist, to make a partial list—humanist has been advanced, since the early decades of the twentieth century, as a mediating term designed to break through the sharp dichotomies between theism and atheism, religion and irreligion. To those who wanted to keep the lines of communication open between believers and nonbelievers, the atheist label had been freighted for so long with so much moral and political menace as to be an inevitable conversation-stopper. As one nineteenth-century Protestant aphorized, “A nation of Atheists is a nation of fiends.” Humanism too could be turned into a scare word (as it would be with the sustained attacks on secular humanism in the 1970s and 1980s), but it certainly had less baggage than atheism. As a descriptor, it was designed to lead with the positive—the ethical values, scientific principles, and societal hopes that freethinking, secular-minded people affirmed, what they imagined the good life to be.