Generative Humanist Communities: Shared Moral Exploration as a Guiding Principle

In April 2026, I wrote an article for The Harvard Crimson in which I addressed the lack of community spaces for atheists at Harvard College. Though Harvard prides itself on intellectual vitality and a robust academic community that stems from its diversity, I observed that nonreligious people, while making up nearly half of the undergraduate population, rarely received much attention in any campus discourse about identity, politics, or moral frameworks. I grounded this discussion in the background of an increasingly authoritarian country which pushes nonreligious people to the margins, and a society that considers atheism a rather rude and untrustworthy thing, leading to a sort of defensive self-silencing which contributes to the unique gap in campus discussion on the nonreligious experience. 

After my article’s publication, I was contacted by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard & MIT, and subsequently was made president of the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics, an undergraduate student organization which had been largely dormant. Rebuilding this community has become my mission and forced me to ask myself these questions: What is a humanist gathering? What is its function? How can it best serve a nonreligious community? 

What exactly binds nonreligious people together? How does one build an existentially supportive community based not on a belief but a lack of one? 

In my article I posture—admittedly vaguely—about atheists having a “unique opportunity to see the diversity of ways one can conceptualize the universe.” But since September, I’ve been iterating on a guiding principle for fruitful, secular meaning-making. In short, I believe that a humanist gathering should be, above all, generative. 

Speaking Openly and Honestly

A humanist gathering doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and I find it important to analyze its relationship with the religious society around it. Each meeting is likely to be someone’s first time being surrounded by nonreligious people, so it will probably be the first time they can speak openly about discrimination they have faced—religious acquaintances who habitually doubt moral character; the stereotyping of atheism as annoying or juvenile; the learned instinct to be defensive when discussing nonreligion, or to caveat that you hold no ill will when that should never be an assumption to begin with. It is tempting and perhaps politically advantageous to view humanism as completely unrelated to religion. But for an affinity group, not holding space to discuss and validate experiences of discrimination is as nonsensical as a feminist space that makes no room for discussions of patriarchy and its effect on participants’ lives. Building awareness of how societal violence affects humanists is a necessary prerequisite to having good discussions about big questions; there is no meaningful moral exploration if everyone is silencing their most honest thoughts in an effort to be polite, and it takes time and constant reassurance to break down the habit of self-amelioration. 

Indeed, the undergraduate community’s immediate response to my article showed both a desire for community among nonreligious students, as well as a habit of self-silencing only broken in the company of a louder voice. Fellow students reached out to me expressing annoyance about when their class discussions devolved into people asserting their religious beliefs, or how alone they felt when 2:00 a.m. discussions about the universe got derailed by someone suddenly trying to convert them. I got emails from strangers about the pushback they got from classmates when they tried to levy some pretty mild criticism toward common religions; people in the dining hall would tell me about the undeserved respect they felt obligated to give religious belief systems that refused to give them the same special treatment. The frustration was there—atheists across Harvard, sitting in their resentment, pretending like everything was fine, because there’s no place to process that discrimination, or even to understand that it is wrong. Beating that habitual self-silencing takes time, and I’m sure not everyone that reached out to me gave it a second thought. But for those who sought space, over the course of our affinity group’s first meeting, a tension and defensive anxiety slowly lifted from the room. 

Once people feel free to speak their minds, the real joy of a humanist community is free to flow forth, that of exploring and defining how to make sense of the world ourselves. A humanist community must not only be opposed to discrimination against the nonreligious; to be spiritually meaningful, it must be morally and existentially generative. 

Toward Shared Moral Exploration

What does a generative humanist community look like? Broadly speaking, it creates opportunities for its participants to develop, clarify, discuss, and strengthen their own sources of moral and ethical meaning. This can take many forms: for a group like mine, this means a facilitated weekly philosophical discussion about rotating topics like friendship, rituals, beauty, and grief, where we try to cross-apply our personal beliefs and pursue questions of personal and societal relevance. The goal is to make a ritual of existential exploration, to make space for it in everyday life through a constant community gathering. 

Generative humanist communities uniquely provide existential care to nonbelievers because they provide a safe arena for people to build stronger, more cohesive beliefs that can withstand questioning. No atheist requires a community discussion to have moral principles, but postulating principles in a community setting gives people the opportunity to articulate, clarify, and consider well-meaning pushback on their beliefs without the fear of discriminatory scrutiny. Moreover, stepping beyond one individual’s contribution, a humanist community that asks big questions about principles has the ability to create collective meaning, to define moral laws that are irreducibly the product of the group. Generative humanist communities are a ground on which participants’ sources of meaning can grow and learn to stand, and they do this by making space for people to lean on each other and push each other gently to build up their moral framework. 

Once a baseline is set and people have carved this habit into their schedule, we can go further and develop rituals. Our religious counterparts saturate their lives with ceremonies, holidays, and celebrations that cause all kinds of reflection; a humanist community can not only do these types of ceremonies too, we can do them better. A generative humanist community can host coming-of-age ceremonies for young members who vote for the first time, prompting them to apply their existential exploration to politics; a group like mine at the university can host graduation ceremonies that facilitate deeper exploration of what it means to move into the next step of your life. Others still host distinctly humanist weddings, funerals, holiday events in the winter, and the like. As a facilitator I aim to develop a ritual with my community. Each is an opportunity to reflect and understand oneself in the company of friends. Having a group to explore morals and one’s place in the universe allows people to build out these deeply human sources of meaning. And when a ritual stems from a community that is genuinely generative, we never lose sight of why it matters; it grounds us, and we ground it. 

It can be difficult to restrain oneself as a facilitator and equally welcome the diversity of perspectives needed to have generative ethical and existential exploration. The humanists most passionate about building community spaces often feel very strongly about the philosophical implications of nonreligion, the epistemic vacuousness of faith, or the social harm of religion writ large. Especially if you have been personally wronged by religion, it can be tempting to use a humanist gathering to spread your manifesto. 

But the fact is that nonreligion is a spectrum. Put one hundred nonreligious people in a room, and maybe twenty will share that militant atheism—an equal number are unsure of their affiliation, and might go back to their pastor, rabbi, or imam by the end of the week. Nevertheless, these and all in between have unique and valuable conceptions of what it means to live well and do good without gods. All of them would benefit from being able to discuss those values and clarify what truly matters to them. 

One of the most common responses I get when I tell people I run a humanist gathering is something along the lines of, “So you do church but for atheists?” I find it important to remind myself of what sets my work apart from that of a religious leader—that is, why I am not just swapping one problematic set of moral heuristics for another. I believe what sets humanists apart is a dogged lack of dogmatism. No humanist has any business believing that their sense of morality is inherently more valuable than someone else’s; a principle triumphs over another by way of reason, not the authority of the speaker or the weight of the dogma. A generative community is not just “church for atheists,” it’s something greater, something more active, where every participant in some way teaches the moral lessons everyone learns. 

My humanism is one that values existential care for everyone on the spectrum of nonreligion, and I have no choice but to prioritize this over the stringency of my own atheism. Only a generative model can create a community of existential support that serves anyone and everyone who seeks answers about the universe and morality outside of religion. I want to build humanist communities to give nonreligious people existential care and community, and to prove to the world that humanism is a powerful source of moral grounding. To do this, I know I cannot simply push my humanism as truth—I need to do something harder, something better, that respects the capacity in everyone to develop moral truth alone, and then build on it together.