66. Fish Stark on How The AHA Is Building a Humanist Revival In America

"If science tells you what's real and compassion tells you what's right, you're a humanist" - Fish Stark

Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association (AHA), joins Humanism Now to unpack what a modern humanist revival could look like in the United States. From creator-led storytelling to legal strategy and mutual aid, Fish shares how the AHA is building power, community, and a clearer public-facing vision of humanism rooted in empathy, agency, and responsibility.

Connect with Fish Stark

• Personal Website – fishstark.com
• AHA Speakers Bureau
• LinkedIn

Topics we cover

• Why Fish believes the moment is right for a “humanist revival” in America
• Humanism as identity, not just ideas: agency, responsibility, and moral confidence
• What the AHA actually does: community-building, lobbying, legal action, and public narrative
• Why the real arena is online, and how the AHA is backing creators to meet people where they are
• Church-state separation under pressure, and how coercion shows up in schools and public life
• Humanist chaplaincy and “parallel place” legal recognition as a strategic advantage
• The American Empathy Project and why mutual aid is humanism in practice
• What comedy teaches about organising: pacing, attention, clarity, and joy

Resources & further reading

• Humanist Manifesto I – American Humanist Association (1933) – https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto1/
• Peace First – https://peacefirst.org/
• Born This Way Foundation  – https://bornthisway.foundation/
• The Good Place – https://www.nbc.com/the-good-place
• Person-centered therapy (Carl Rogers) overview – NCBI Bookshelf / StatPearls (2023) – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK589708/

Transcript

Meet Fish Stark - Origins, Teaching and Humanist Identity

James Hogson 0:01

Welcome to the Humanism Now Podcast, a show about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassionate change. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our guest today is Fish Stark, the Executive Director of the American Humanist Association. Fish is an organizer, educator, and lifelong humanist whose work focuses on turning big ideas into real-world action in service of belonging, human flourishing, and social justice. Before joining AHA, Fish led educational technology startups supporting children's mental health, confidence and critical thinking. And he served as director of programs at Peace First, where he worked with international organizing teams and partners including the Red Cross and Lady Gargar's Born This Way Foundation. He's managed political campaigns, built youth mentorship and anti-bullying programs, taught students from preschool to high school, and holds a master's in education from Harvard and a bachelor's from Yale University. And he somehow still finds time to moonlight as an award-winning stand-up comedian. Fishdark, thank you for joining us on Humanism Now.

Fish Stark 1:04

James, thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here.

James Hogson 1:07

I barely got through everything in your background. There's probably plenty more I could say in terms of the experience that you're bringing to this role. You've worked in education, youth organizing, startups, political campaigning. So, and you're still a very young man. Why was humanism the right cause for you at this time?

Fish Stark 1:26

It's a good question. I grew up raised humanist and in the progressive movement, right? My dad, many people know, is the first person to come out openly as an atheist and a humanist in the United States Congress. And when our family, the code of values was very simple, right? You always work to help others and never be complacent, right? There was this sense of he was an entrepreneur before he was a public servant. And there was this sense of you have to combine a duty to other people with a duty to question your assumptions and challenge what doesn't push through to whatever can be. And he was an engineer by trade, right? And he cared about people, but he was fascinated with systems. He was always the person who was thinking about if we tweak this policy or we tweak this tax credit in this way, we can help this many million more people get healthcare. And that was where he loved to live. I care a lot about systems, but I've always been fascinated by people. And especially the fact that systems really are made up of people making choices. At the end of the day, if we can influence how people are thinking about their responsibilities, their obligations, their commitments to other people, what gives them joy and fulfillment as they're making public choices, that is a large part of how we change the world. And that's what humanists like John Dewey, one of the original signers of the Humanist Manifesto, have always believed, right? He reshaped the modern public education system in America because he believed that education actually was about citizenship and that the way you prepare young people to think about their role in public life influences the kind of democracy we have. So I went to college thinking I might go to law school and become a lawyer and go into the family business, as it were. And then I fell in love with teaching. And as I did that, I fell in love with the works of people like Dewey and realized actually, one of the ways that we can make a change in the world is by changing the way people are thinking and people are seeing themselves. And so that led to a journey of working at a small NGO that trained youth activists. And we worked with the Red Cross and with Lady Gaga to run programs that helped young people lead service projects in their community with the understanding that if we helped them build an identity as someone who was a servant leader, they would carry that through for their whole lives. And actually, one of the young people who was in our programs ended up becoming the youngest member of Scottish Parliament. A lot of our young people were involved in the uprising against the totalitarian regime in Nigeria. In 2020, a lot of our young people have been involved, you know, heavily involved in the work to rebuild civil society in Nepal. So we I got to see that play out, right? If you infuse an identity in someone that's pro-social, my gosh, what do they do with it? Went back to graduate school at Harvard, did a deep dive into developmental psychology and especially how we construct our moral selves, how we come to believe what we believe, what is good and right. And without even knowing it, that brought me through all the humanistic psychologists, right? Not just Dewey, but Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, these people who said the most powerful force in ourselves is identity-confirming behavior. We want to have a positive self-concept of ourselves and live up to that self-concept. And I took that to the tech startup world. Um, you know, was the head of program and curriculum at a mental health tech company. We were building apps for kids to build positive mental health because we know there's a mental health crisis for children, especially once they reach middle school. So we were building an app that teaches positive psychology techniques to parents and kids together when they're in elementary school. So they're prepared. And there again, what we saw was that giving kids a strong self-concept, a strong identity influenced how they behaved and how they felt about themselves. And so when that company got acquired in 2024, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, and especially wanting to do something in the pro-democracy space in the US, because we saw the sort of authoritarian threat rising on the horizon. It was like Trump may or may not win this election, but clearly there is a movement to retrench us into radical authoritarianism that is not going away. And when the job at the AHA came open, it was this amazing opportunity to blend two things I've believed in deeply my whole life, right? One is that we have to fight, right? Like we have to embrace trench warfare with the radical religious right if we want to win. That was the lesson my dad taught me, right? You have to, at the end of the day, you have to get in the arena, you have to work on policy, you have to work electorally. If you want to deliver things for people, you have to be willing to stand up to the people who are trying to hoard all the wealth and all the power for themselves. And the other thing that it offered the opportunity to do was say, wait a minute, humanism is this beautiful idea of what we could be if we embrace the values of reason and compassion. It is an in the same way the religious right has weaponized their kind of moral identity to get millions of Americans to support greed and intolerance and bigotry. There's an opportunity for the American center left to embrace moral identity, to promote generosity and open-mindedness and empathy. And yet we talk so little on the left about values and about morality and about what we owe to other people. And I think humanism has always been this incredible community that inspires people to live to be their best, not just for themselves, not just interpersonally, but for our global community. I think the time is right, basically, for a humanist revival in America. And we saw an opportunity to build it and super excited to be here.

What The AHA Does Today

James Hogson 7:07

That's wonderful. Yeah, and you're not the first guest to say there's something very timely at the moment that this is perhaps the time for a new humanist movement and so hopefully a you know more positive, inclusive, free thinking movement in the US by reflection globally, I think as well. So for listeners who are new to the American Humanist Association, what is the AHA and what does it exist to do at this time?

Fish Stark 7:31

That's a great question. So the AHA has been fighting to build positive identity and community for the 46 million Americans with humanist values and make America freer and fairer for nearly 90 years. So some of your listeners who have some history with humanism may have heard of the Humanist Manifesto, right? The seminal document written in 1933 that outlines what do we believe and why do we believe it. And the AHA grew out of that group that created the Humanist Manifesto, right? They had a conference to create it and then they created a magazine, and then they decided that around the magazine they were going to build an organization. And the organization was founded in the early 1940s by Curtis Reese and John Dietrich. They were two sort of radical Unitarian ministers who believed that you could create, you could harness the moral community and the all the sort of positive social technology of religion and direct it towards not worshiping some unseen authority, but actually reveling in the things that are great about humanity, exalting our neighbors, challenging us to be the best people we can, not again to fulfill some ancient commandment, but to fulfill our responsibilities to the people around us. So they believed in this idea that we could use this very powerful tool of moral identity and moral community to direct people towards what matters most. And for Dietrich, you know, it wasn't about believing in God or not. Dietrich famously thought God was irrelevant. Um he called it humanism agnosticism with a hyphen before he, some person who understood branding, told him probably that a hyphenated identity was a little unwieldy to manage. But his feeling was the humanist is only concerned with the God idea insofar as it distracts us from our obligations to our neighbors and here on earth. And so there's this idea that it could be almost like religion for the rest of us, right? Focusing us on the things that there wasn't enough energy focused on. And so the AHA has worked for decades to, again, create those communities for humanists, to help train the next leaders in the humanist movement, and to mobilize our community for social change, right? Service work, legal work, lobbying work, fighting, not just for the separation of church and state, not just for religious rights for all people, but for a more humanist world, right? We were the first organization to the first membership organization in the US to endorse a right to an abortion years before Roe versus Wade, right? And we spoke out against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and for trans rights and all of these causes that ultimately are about increasing freedom and flourishing for people. So today, the AHA does a few things. Number one, we are building communities across the country for the 30% of Americans for whom religion traditionally does not work, right? We are some of them meet on Sundays and they're singing and there's readings, but we don't talk about God. Some of them don't look like that at all and look more like discussion groups or social activism groups. So we do that. We build those communities. We work to help spread humanism as a positive ideal for people to believe in at a time where it doesn't feel like there's not a lot to believe in right now. A major concern of mine is that a lot of the young people who are listening to Sam Harris 15 years ago are now listening to Jordan Peterson. To me, that's a failure of humanism. I think we have to engage in the arena right now, and the arena is online, spreading our ideas of what humanism is and telling people this can be an identity that you can belong to, where you don't have to buy into a supremacist ideal to make yourself feel good and powerful. And so we have a creator fund, right, that works with digital YouTubers, podcasters, online creators, and helps grow their audiences and helps them talk about humanism, right? And we have a magazine that is about to start doing original reporting on church-state separation and religion in America. We just hired a couple student journalism fellows, a young woman from Towson University and a young woman from Harvard, um, who are going to be doing even more amazing commentary for us. And of course, we work to make sure that when religion, church-state separation are being discussed in the media, humanists are there offering a perspective. And the final thing we do, and the most important thing, right? Because humanism isn't about what we believe, it's about what we do with those beliefs. You mobilize our community to fight for a more humane world. That means we have advocates, we have professional lobbyists, and we've trained hundreds of citizen lobbyists to lobby in Congress and in the states on issues we care about. We have a legal team that is busy suing the hell out of the religious right and working to defend the rights, not just of our community, right? But every time we stand up for the rights of our community, we stand up for the rights of every religious minority. And we mobilize our chapters, we provide grants, we support them to do service and mutual aid work that eliminates the needs of our neighbors around the country or being terribly harmed by this current administration, which has no regard for basic humanity. So that's what the AHA does. And it's we do all of that, right? From the creator fund to the legal defense to the lobbying. We do all of it on the budget of less than one megachurch.

Advantages of a Nationwide Humanists Movement

James Hogson 12:54

I mean, there's so many directions we could go there. There's so many things that would be great to draw out on. But maybe on that last point, I think on the campaigning, the lobbying, actively trying to create positive change in the country. Where do you think humanist groups can achieve things that political parties or single-issue campaign groups may struggle? What is the unique benefits when working with a humanist organization or a nationwide group like AHA in terms of what you can achieve?

Fish Stark 13:23

Yeah, it's a good question. I grew up in the Obama era, right? I was 12. No, I was 13, but he got elected for the first time. And so I saw, I was talking about this with a friend of mine. I saw a lot of people in my generation who took all of their kind of faith instinct and they put it in the Democratic Party as an institution. And that's a bad move, I think, to try and yoke all of your deepest ideals and your sort of most hopeful self to a political party because the political party is a coalition of interests, right? We have two political parties in America, and that means none of them are really going to adequately represent the views of most people, right? That's not a knock on outside of my work at the AHA. I'm very involved in my local Democratic Party because ultimately it's one of the best tools we have, an opposition party, to combat the rising tide of fascism on the other side. But it's not something that I trust with a religious fervor, right? It's okay, this is the place I go to get some things done. But I I'm not always, I'm not expecting it to fulfill the deepest moral, my deepest moral self. And I think that a lot of of us, including me, made that mistake and then were terribly disappointed and disillusioned when repeatedly the party failed to live up to that. I think the beauty of the humanist community is it's not for everyone, right? I'm not saying I'm standing here at the door with a litmus test turning people away. Like we are, we're happy to have anyone who wants to be considered a humanist in the tent, but we're very clear about what we believe. We have a set of beliefs about truth and morality and power, where it comes from, what matters, what we support and why. And if you believe those things, you're one of us. And if not, that's okay. And so there's value in being a cohesive community with a cohesive set of beliefs, right? You are helping people when you're asking them to do work on behalf of humanism, you're helping them feel connected to this community of people they care about and connected to this set of beliefs. So it becomes this great self-reinforcing cycle. We can mobilize humanists, we can help them deepen their humanist identity, we can mobilize them even stronger. But also, one of the great things about humanism as a belief system is we can sit at the table alongside other religious belief systems for faith advocacy work, which has proven to be really effective. So for instance, when the radical religious right brought a bill to Ohio to put chaplains in public K to 12 schools, we brought our chaplains, chaplains that we have trained and certified as humanist chaplains, to the Ohio State legislature to say, hey, we're chaplains. We believe chaplaincy is important, but it does not belong in public schools because children can't consent to religious proselytization. And so that's an advantage that we have. And legally, we have the advantage of being recognized as a religion by the Supreme Court. Now, obviously, humanism doesn't operate like basically any traditional religion, right? If you define religion as worshipping a supernatural supreme being, that's not what we are. But the Supreme Court has recognized it's called parallel place doctrine, right? The idea that any cohesive worldview that people, you know, that people live out and gather to discuss and is, you know, that adopts some of the set of practices and takes the place in someone's life of a religious belief, that legally is to be treated as a religion. Otherwise, it's discrimination against people who don't believe in God. And so we can leverage this to say, hey, as humanists, we have religious rights in the same way Christians and Jews do. And you're about to see some very creative litigation coming out of the AHA on that front, saying, hey, if you get to tell, you know, Christians that they don't have to obey non-discrimination laws, there are certain things you don't get to tell us that we have to do. And I'm really excited to test out some of those theories. Not because I'm certain that they'll work, but because the religious right got where it is by testing novel legal theories for 30 years and getting laughed out of court for 25 of them. But guess what? Now it's the law of the land. The other great thing about this is that again, because we have that sort of sense of moral fire, moral commitment, but also because humanism, we've always been as a community really committed to saying, you know what? The way things were always done, all right, that's fine. But what if we thought about them differently? That's our brand, right? Even outside of politics, you've got people like Steve Wozniak and Albert Einstein who made amazing scientific discoveries because that was the way they thought. And so we're in this space where we can be really creative with the tactics that we're using to challenge the religious right. And that was the strategy that they used to such great effect.

James Hogson 18:06

And that principle of separation of church and state or religion and government, it's always seemed to be quite robust. And you talk about as well, you know, not having chaplains in schools. I mean, that's very unusual growing up in the UK where religion is still very much embedded in the educational system here. But that's held uh firmly in the US. And now, as you you touched on, it's probably under the most threat that it's been under. How uh confident are you that or uh that principle is going to hold? And how are you defending against the threat?

Fish Stark 18:37

It's a good question. And it's interesting to think about the separation of church and state in the US. You have like a sort of a floor of 80% support in public polling for the idea of separation of church and state and which is high for any idea currently. It's actually one of the issues where there's the most bipartisan agreement, right? And that is one of the things that makes me a lot of people ask me why, out of all the things that's going on, why advocate around church-state separation? You want to know why, because it's the issue where this administration is most over its skis and where it is losing the most legitimacy. If you think about what the Trump administration or the Trump campaign did to undermine the Biden administration in 2024, right? It was the steady drip drip of stories that was like, hey, here's a thing he's focusing on that's not getting prices down, not reducing the rate of inflation. Something here, here's him focusing on something that most Americans don't really care about very much or don't want him to touch. And by the way, you still can't afford a home. You still can't afford groceries. We have the opportunity to do the exact same thing, to shine a spotlight on one of the most radical pieces of overreach of the Trump administration while Americans' grocery bills continue to rise, while housing prices continue to rise, while American life becomes more and more unaffordable because billionaires are taking a larger and larger share of the wealth produced by our productivity and then jacking up the prices on everything we need to survive. So you've got a majority of Christians in this country that oppose Trump's anti-Christian bias commission based on the most recent polling I've seen. That tells me something. That tells me that Trump is trying to satisfy a campaign promise that he made to some of the forces that elected him, the really conservative evangelicals. And people are not really interested in this. And so it's our opportunity to say, hey, look at this, look at this crazy out-of-step administration. They're doing this, they're doing the ice. Is any of this what you asked for? And I think the answer will largely be no. Now, that'll help us shore up people's understanding of what separation of church and state is. Because when you get down to things like prayer in schools, you actually have a majority of Americans that support prayer in schools. Now, how do you have a majority of Americans support the separation of church and state and support school prayer? That seems pretty contradictory. But I think for a lot of people, there's this idea that it is good for religion to be present in public life, but it's not good for there to be coercion, right? There's this sense of religion is maybe a positive good, or at least it's something that people should be allowed to live publicly, but it should be your choice. And the thing that we've been trying to push on is like, you know, kids do not have a choice about whether to pray in school. That is not something that a teacher can reasonably impart in a way that gives a child who is expected to obey an adult in a school context an opportunity to opt out, right? Like kids have always been allowed to pray in school if they want to pray. And as the joke goes, there's always plenty of prayer before every math test. But government-led prayer is inherently coercive if the government holds coercive authority. And so there's a lot of work that we still have to do to get Americans believing in the set of behaviors or non-behaviors that support church state separation. Because for a lot of people, it boils down to this feeling that like the government should say religion is good, but it shouldn't force you to be religious. But ultimately, No one thinks that Trump should be spending money restoring these biblical portraits and holding giant prayer meetings rather than trying to get the cost of groceries down. And that's what we're going to stay focused on.

James Hogson 22:19

You've spoken about the advantages of messaging rooted in agency, responsibility, and high expectations. What do those principles mean in practice for the modern humanist movement?

AHA Creators Initiative

Fish Stark 22:30

Aaron Powell Yeah, I was talking to Jordan Klepper, one of the hosts of The Daily Show at Harvard a couple months ago. We gave him a humanist of the year award. Greg Epstein, who is an amazing author, scholar of humanism, and leads the humanist center at Harvard, gave him this award. And I was talking to Jordan in the green room beforehand, and we were talking about, especially young people and especially young men, right? What is drawing them into this world of the alt-right? And what are people like Hassan Piker on the left who have successfully won some of them back doing? And Jordan shared with me something I've thought for a long time. He's like, it's about agency. It's about having a sense of power and control in your life, right? In a dispossessed world where our paychecks go less far, where my generation can't afford the homes we grew up in, even if we do the same jobs our parents did, right? We are the first generation in American history on track to be less wealthy than our parents' generation. And it's not because we're working fewer hours, and it's not because we're getting dumber. There is really this sense of my dollar goes less far, my vote goes less far because of unlimited billionaire money and politics and racist gerrymandering. And there's this sense of I don't really have a lot of control over my life in this world. And we know as humans, we want to seek that sense of autonomy. Again, that's a lesson from the humanistic psychologist. We move towards opportunities and environments where we can exercise our agency. And so one of the things I think humanism can say to differentiate itself and be really powerful is to talk about the idea that we believe in human agency. We believe you should have control over your life. That's sort of our thing. We think that ultimately you should be empowered to live your life on your terms. You know, in the first manifesto, we said the realization of man's personality is one of life's chief joys and chief ends, right? Something to that effect. Life is not just meant to be lived with a sense of dower obligation, but you are meant to feel in control and moving your life in a positive direction. And humanism has produced some of the people who have made an agency most possible in American life, right? Carl Rogers, who created client-centered psychology that was about empowering you to make changes in your own life rather than be, you know, have a bell rung at you like the behaviorists or be told that you wanted to f your mother like Freud, right? Like, or Steve Wozniak, who created Apple and put the power of the mainframe in people's pockets, the people who created Plan Parenthood and made it possible for women to have choice in their lives. All of those people were humanists. And it's because at our core, humanists believe you should be able to live your life on your terms without submission to an outside authority, period. And I think people are really crying out for a system that tells them that. And I think that's the trick of a lot of the trick of a light that a lot of the Jordan Petersons of the world play. They say, Oh, you feel out of control. What you need in your life is more order, and order requires hierarchy. And that means you need to decide who you're superior to and make them submit to you, which is we understand it to be. I think people inherently understand it to be because they try it and it doesn't actually make them feel more powerful or more fulfilled. And that's why these young men are so angry and ginned up and grabbing for the guns right now. So I think there's an opportunity to talk about agency. I think there's also an opportunity to talk about responsibility, right? Humanism was not meant to be this thing that you just easily skip around in. Humanism has always imparted a sense of obligation to us, right? Nobody's coming to save us. That means we have to be the ones to save ourselves. And I trained to be a teacher, right? I spent several years working in classrooms on and off. And the best teachers are not the ones who tell you you're already good at everything and you don't need to try very hard, right? They're also not the ones who tell you you're stupid and you're not capable and they put you down. They're the ones who say, I know you're capable of great things and I expect a lot of you, and I'm gonna hold you to that. Right. I don't think people are looking for belief systems that expect nothing of them. I don't think that's satisfying to people. I think that makes them feel babied. I think people want to feel challenged. They want to feel treated like adults. And I think one of the great things about humanism is we see people as inherently capable and we don't talk down to them. We don't tell them they need a babysitter to know right from wrong, but we expect them to do the right thing. Again, not because we wrote a set of rules down in a book, but because we all have to do the work of listening to our neighbors, paying attention to the needs around us, thinking about how we can most responsibly serve ourselves, serve our families, and serve our communities. And I think that when you couple together this agency and this responsibility and you root it in this sense of reason and compassion, rather than these made-up sets of rules about how you can cook your darn meat and like what, you know, that men and women have these inherent gender roles that are ineffable and can't be broken out of. I think that has the ability to resonate with a lot of people. But we got to get out of the philosophizing, like everything at a 30,000 foot level, not talking about people's material needs. And we've got to get out of the like really thin tumbler that's just like about clapping at whatever latest good left meme is and really root ourselves in the philosophy of humanism and how it can help you live a good life for yourselves and others.

James Hogson 27:41

And I think that brings us back nicely to the creators initiative that you have at the AHA as well. I know you mentioned people like Jordan Peterson and yeah, the message is cutting through, but also it's the platform if they've been very effective at using new media podcasts, as we know, YouTube and others. So why back creators? And what do you feel that creators can get across that perhaps, as you say, wasn't cutting through in the other ways in which humanism was discussed previously, as you say, either in the very academic settings or in the sort of just online forum debates?

Fish Stark 28:17

Yeah, I think it's 40% of Americans who are looking for content about meaning and purpose online, at least on a monthly basis. Yeah. Right. In fact, we did this massive, we spent about between an in-kind contribution from a donor and money the AHA put in. We spent about a quarter million dollars last year doing market research on the 46 million Americans who either identify with humanist beliefs or very nearly do, but don't yet call themselves humanist. And we asked them, we didn't just test slogans on them, we asked them about their values and we asked them about their needs. And the biggest unmet need, the biggest unmet need for those people was a sense of meaning and purpose. And we know increasingly from other data that people are going online to find the answers to this question of how do I find meaning in my life? What is my purpose? What am I called to do? And what is it valuable for me to pursue at this time? And the religious right has made an incredible killing on being in the arena online and pipelining all these messages, especially to young people, saying, here is how you find meaning in your life, be a trad wife, or even like more neutrally, right? I think about like Ryan Holliday and Stoicism. I've got friends of mine who wake up every morning and they read Marcus Aurelius, the ancient Roman emperor. Why do they do that? Or was he Greek? I don't know, you would think he was Greek. You know, they do that because we've got this guy and an ecosystem around him that's really great at creating content that says if you want to find meaning and purpose in your life, Stoic philosophy has done it for really incredible people for thousands of years, and it's simple precepts that you can follow to live a good life. And so here it is, you should try it. There's no reason humanism can't or shouldn't be out there making the same argument. And in fact, we're about to, not just through the creator fun, we're about to drop a podcast soon. We're releasing a series of short-form videos we call humanism 101 for a long time when people were like, What is humanism? We used to direct them to an online course that was all just a giant wall of text written in the 1980s with like quiz questions, which is not how anyone, I don't think that's how anyone ever has wanted to consume information on the internet, but it's especially not how young people consume information today. So we are going in the arena because if there's anything I learned working on political campaigns, it's you can't plant a flag where you are and demand people meet you at the flag. You have to meet people where they are and take them where you want them to go. And so that means we're working with these creators who are already reaching people. Some of them are talking about secularism, some of them are talking about humanist values more broadly, like Matt Bernstein, who we just partnered with, who's an incredible creator, just talking about human dignity through a progressive lens. And we work with them and we help fund their content. So they can, for some of our smaller creators, they can hire a video editor, they can buy new camera equipment, they can build themselves up. And then they plug the American Humanist Association in their show and encourage people to come join. And we've got a vibrant, growing Discord community. We've probably seen in the first few months of the creator program, our online uh memberships and and registrations grew by about 30% because this is how you do it, right? You find someone who already has built trust with an audience, you have them endorse you, that's borrowed trust, and you have them say, Hey, if you want to act out these values in real life, this is the community that you go to. And we're proud now to be that community for a growing number of young people. I don't come with a bunch of new ideas, right? My job is to synthesize things that have worked in our movement, have worked for the opposition, and then new sources of ideas that other people bring to me. And the truth is, like, you know, Charlie Kirk got started with a $10,000 grant from a guy named Foster Frice, who is a right-wing radical religious billionaire. We're investing $10,000 a month to find the Charlie Kirk of humanism. That's what we're doing. That's the plan.

Celebrity Humanists and Acceptance of Non-Belief

James Hogson 32:22

And representation really is everything, I think. Just people seeing, and as you say, they build trust and a sense of familiarity with someone, and then to learn, oh, they are a humanist. I still think that's the most powerful way in which you normalize, humanize, if we can use that word, this view and become accepted. And I was interested as well, when you met with Jordan to give the Humanist of the Year award, um, I don't know whether you had a chance to discuss this, whether it's something that's come up elsewhere. Do you feel it's becoming easier for celebrities in the States to openly come out as either humanist or openly be agnostic, let's say?

Fish Stark 32:58

Yeah, I think that's always been pretty easy for sort of entertainment celebrities, right? I think for a lot of people we talk to, it's almost okay, yeah, like we're all kind of atheists in Hollywood, right? Like it's more of an aberration to be deeply religious in Hollywood's such a big deal when Chris Pratt did it. And so I think there's all like, what's the point? Why does it matter? And I'm really excited about who our humanist of the year this year, I think, is likely to be. And obviously I can't share any names, but I think it's a name a lot of people will recognize. And it's after doing a bunch of journalists and scientists and politicians, I really just want to do a celebrity that people like. And the challenge, right, broadly, is that you know, we need to do a better job talking about what humanism is, why it matters, why it's interesting, why it's fun, right? I'll give you an example. When I came to the AHA, you could click on a tab on our website that says what is humanism, and you would get eight different definitions of what is humanism, right? At a certain point, we became really, you know, we let our sort of democratic instincts overwhelm our sort of drive for results. And we were like, okay, well, you know, we don't want to offend anyone. So we're gonna list eight different definitions of humanism. We're gonna let people figure it out. Ultimately, what people want out of their belief system is a sense of coherence. It's not people want to be told what to think. It's that people want a clear set of do I belong in this community or not? Who is it for? Who believes this and what is it that we collectively believe? They want a clarity around what they're opting into. One of the things that we're doing with all of that research we did is we're working with a brand firm called Wide Eye Creative. They did the brand work for March for Our Lives and Both Harris campaigns and the Southern Poverty Law Center and Emily's List and the LGBTQ victory fund and common cause and moveon.org. Like they know how to harness people's values and bring them into causes that they care about. And so we're aiming for really clear and direct communication about what humanism is that anyone can understand. It's not just going to facilitate adoption on a person-person level, but it's going to make it easier for public figures to say, okay, you guys know what you're about. You don't believe eight different things. This is the thing you believe. And I agree with that, so I support that. We don't want to have to direct people to a whole manifesto that they have to read. What I tell people is if science tells you what's real and compassion tells you what's right, you're a humanist. And at that, you get a lot of people nodding along and saying, Oh, yeah, that is what I am. So at a certain point, we got to spend more time talking to people who are not already in our circle, and we have to get out of our own way and communicate simply and clearly.

Lessons from Stand-Up Comedy

James Hogson 35:33

And going back to Jordan as a comedian who you gave the Humanist of the Year award to, and by the way, very intrigued to find out who this year's recipient will be. I mentioned in the intro, you are also an award-winning stand-up comedian. What have you learned from the art of stand-up comedy that you've been able to transfer into campaigning and community organizing?

Growing the Humanist Revival

Fish Stark 35:55

Number one, as we were talking about before at the top of the call, um, stand-up comedy is incredible cross-training for public speaking. I'd encourage anyone to do it, right? It is people are going to be incredibly supportive of you the first time and the second, and always they're going to be supportive of you, honestly, is my experience. But the difference between a joke told poorly and a joke told well is less in the writing of the joke and more in the pitch and the tone and the pacing. And if you tell a joke a hundred times and you notice the laughs it gets, eventually you train yourself to be delivering the joke in a way that really captures the attention of people, brings them along with you, and boom, hits them at the end, right with the pathos or the subversiveness or whatever. I think comedy is important to humanism. I think that if you look through the tradition of American humanist people like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, right? These blisteringly funny writers. I mean, Mark Twain changed the genre of American literature forever. I would argue Kurt Vonnegut did too, because they were willing to pick apart tropes and be subversive and poke fun at structures in society that they saw that didn't make sense. You have George Carlin, you have Ricky Gervais, Stephen Fry, Your Guys Across the Pond, hilarious. We have Kristen Bell and Michael Schur creating The Good Place, which is the best show about moral philosophy and how to be a good person, coming from a deeply humanist perspective, even though it is ostensibly about heaven and hell. And you have Quinta Brunson, who writes my favorite show, Abbott Elementary, on TV. We've talked openly about being an agnostic and what her values are. I would call her a humanist. So there is this great tradition of humanists doing what Voltaire said to do, right? Voltaire said ridicule is the best defense against unintelligible propositions. So we mock the absurdity in our world and we do it in a way that uplifts humanity. I think that's cool. And I think if your job I got hired by the board of the American Humanist Association to grow the humanist movement. That's my job. I think if you want to grow a movement, you have to have a theory about what it needs to do differently than it's done before in order to grow. Number one theory I have is that the humanist movement is sometimes too serious and dour, right? It can be too focused on internecine warfare, fighting the small war, right? Combatitiveness, calling each other out. So what did Vonnegut say? We're here on Earth to fart around. Like ultimately, the humanist manifesto, the original one, which I think in my opinion is the best one, talks repeatedly about joy, right? That our goal is the pursuit of joy in living. Humanism is not about being a constant debunker, constant combative skepticism, right? It's not about picking out all the things you think that are wrong in the world and trying to disprove them. It's about trying to harness the best of humanity, which means you have to believe in people to an extent, not be a freaking cynic all the time. And harnessing and leveraging those things to bring about a world that has more freedom and flourishing and joy in it for more people, which at the end of the day is like not a world where we sit around talking like lawyers all the time, but where we're raising families and making art and telling jokes and watching sports and having a good time. And we've got to talk more about that part of humanism, the kind of lives we want to live and the kind of joy we want to have in those lives, and not make everything about, I don't know, Dawkins and Kant.

James Hogson 39:16

So, with that in mind, what are your top priorities for the American Humanist Association in the coming months and years?

Fish Stark 39:23

Yeah, I have one priority and it's growth, right? Ultimately, if we believe that our moral system leads people towards more moral and just behavior, we have an obligation to grow it, period. And this is what humanists like A. Philip Randolph taught us, right? He's like power is the product of organization. Organization is the product of alignment around a common belief. In other words, you have to get people to align around your beliefs because that's how you build power. The point of humanism is not growth for its own sake, right? The point of humanism is you build a movement so that you can fight for a more humanist world, so that you have people who are on the same page, who are working in their own lives, in their communities, in the halls of power to bring about more humanity, more free thought, right? More liberty. But we're not going to get there if we're standing at the door like a bouncer, checking people off and trying to build a club that we can exclude more people from. We will build power if we bring more people together around the common belief. So we're building the creator fund with the idea of bringing in young people from the internet. We're about to launch a massive mutual aid campaign. I think the largest mutual aid campaign in the history of the American humanist movement. By the time this podcast is released, it'll be launched. It's called the American Empathy Project. And we are reacting to the fact that there is so much cruelty coming from our government right now and that the radical religious right had decided to wage a war on empathy. They're calling it a sin, they're calling it suicidal. But 80% of Americans think we need more empathy in this country. And for us as humanists, we don't have someone in the sky telling us what is right and wrong. Empathy is our tool to understand what is right and wrong, right? We understand what is right and wrong by understanding the impacts it has on our human community. And so what we're doing is we're investing $100,000 in microgrants and we're giving out grants to people to lead a hundred different service projects around the country on May 2nd, which is the Saturday before the National Day of Prayer. We're going out and we are showing people what humanists believe by mobilizing a mass movement in America to respond to the cruelty that's going on with acts of service and compassion towards their neighbors, because that's what humanism is. And we plan to grow through all the people who say, I really want to do something, and this is an exciting opportunity for me to lead in my community. We're going to grow from the people who see these events going on and say, I want to be a part of this because at a time of such cruelty, doing something decent for other people feels right to me right now more than anything. There was an Atlantic article yesterday about the protests against ICE in Minneapolis. And there was an older couple in there in their 70s who said, we don't see what we're doing as political. We see it as humanist. And that's what we want more people to see, right? Think about any behavior that combats authoritarianism and uplifts the dignity of all people as a humanist behavior, and people who prize that principle over any, you know, belief in anything else, that they're humanists. And so, you know, we're going, we're continuing the creator fund. We are doing this work with the American Empathy Project, which we think will demonstrate what humanism is about. We're going to be continuing our work against the radical rights attempts to turn our schools into Sunday schools. We're going to be suing some of the most egregious radical right players. And I can't say too much more about that right now, but I'm excited to announce we're in active litigation efforts right now, and I'm excited to announce some of them soon. And we are going to continue. We added 40 new humanist communities across America in the last year. We're going to continue growing that list, helping people start and scale humanist communities. And this is, I say we because my job is really just to raise the money and pay the people who do the real work, right? I paint the picture of what could be. We get people excited, but ultimately we are doing this work and we're doing it so well because we have been able to bring in top talent from across the country who agree with the idea that we need humanist revival in America right now and are taking the amazing careers that they've built in politics or tech or the legal field or wherever, and saying the humanist movement is what we want to build right now. A final point. We are, you know, when we did that big piece of market research and we talked to, you know, the representatives of the 46 million kind of people with humanist beliefs or humanist adjacent beliefs in America, we asked them what their values were. Because in my experience, that's the number one thing you do. You want to talk, understand what people's values are and communicate with them on that basis. When I was in the tech startup world, we were trying to sell mental health apps to parents. No parent wants to buy a mental health app for their kid. There's still so much stigma. There's this idea that This isn't something my kid needs if it's there, unless they're in crisis. And if they're in crisis, like it's my job. And like I shouldn't need something else to help me with my kid's mental health. And so we were like, okay, like there's still that stigma. We got to work within that. And we did this massive national survey and we asked parents, what do you value for your child? What is the thing as a parent you feel most responsible to help them have? And out of all of the things we asked them to rank, more than good manners, more than hard work, more than a lot of things, the number one value they told us was confidence. We want our kids to be confident. And we rebuilt our marketing around the and the whole product, actually, around the idea of helping children build confidence. And that was when we started seeing tens of thousands of families get excited about the program. And eventually we got acquired. All to say humanism needs to start by communicating with people about our shared values. Top four values that outperformed everything by far for people with humanist beliefs: empathy, compassion, open-mindedness, and honesty. The whole kind of reason, free thinking, milieu that we've talked about for a long time, it didn't rate. Um, it was not top five. It was really this idea that morality, again, comes from understanding the needs of our neighbors. And the most important thing that we can do is to be positively skeptical, right? Open-minded to a lot of different things and direct and honest about our beliefs. And so we're going to be communicating a lot more in those terms, because again, humanism, especially at a time as lonely and isolated in America right now, needs to be something that welcomes more and more people in. And to do that, it's got to resonate with the values they have.

James Hogson 45:44

And if anyone is inspired to join, reach out, start a group, join a group, perhaps even make contribute to funding, where's the best place to start?

Fish Stark 45:55

Americanhumanist.org. That is where to go. I'm sorry about the condition of the website. In a few months, it'll be way better, but it still works to set up your membership and join. And if you want, if you're in the US and you want to get a grant for the American Empathy Project or find a local event, American Empathy Project.com. And I will say, even if you're not in the US, if you like the work we're doing, if you think it has the ability to build the humanist movement around the world, you can still give us money. We like it when you do that.

Changing Minds

James Hogson 46:22

Well, Bish, thank you so much for our time. We just have time for our standard closer question, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change? Yeah, you told me this was a standard question.

Fish Stark 46:33

I forgot you were going to ask it. Now I have to think for a minute. I used to be really skeptical of universalist class-focused politics. I thought Bernie was downplaying too much. I voted for Clinton in 2016 in the primary and instantly regretted the vote because I felt like while Bernie was talking about things I cared about, like universal health care and taxing the rich and these big things, that he wasn't focused enough on talking about the scourge of racism and sexism in America, which I really believe in. And now I've realized through what we've seen the Clintonian messaging strategy play out. And we've seen especially the rise of Zoran Mamdani. And look, I believe deeply that what we need in this country is a multiracial, multi-generational, cross-class coalition of people saying we demand equal rights and equal opportunity for everyone, and we demand a radical redistribution of power so that everyone is an equal shot and an equal voice in America. And I'm realizing that actually, so much of what we said about dividing people into different groups didn't unite people in the way we wanted them to. That the Zoran Mamdani strategy of saying we are going to build that movement. We're going to build that movement that is going to fight for racial justice and social justice and economic justice and climate justice, but we're going to build it by talking about people's material needs and talking about universalizable strategies to engage those needs. The proof is in the pudding, right? Like I was wrong about the strategies that were going to effectively mobilize a broad coalition to come together for all these forms of justice. And actually, part of the, you know, we're tacking a lot towards Humanist Manifesto one, in part because it talks about that universalization, right? Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world. That is my absolute favorite quote from the first humanist manifesto. This world belongs to all of us equally and we have to fight for it. And I think the simplicity of that message and the universality of that message is what is going to enable us to fight and win our hardest.

James Hogson 48:31

Fish dog, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you.

Humanise Live 48:36

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