How Humanists Push Back Against Populism And The Politics Of Division

Sign up for the Humanists International Newsletter

This week Gary and Leon zoom out from day-to-day advocacy to reflect on the wider global climate shaping freedom of thought. From rising populism and religious nationalism to legal battles and cultural shifts, the episode explores how political, legal, and social trends are reinforcing division, and what that means for humanists globally.

They revisit key Humanists International declarations, discuss pressures on courts and human rights systems, and examine how anti-rights actors coordinate across countries. We then turn to culture, including the “quiet revival” controversy, the rise of the manosphere, and what these trends reveal about meaning, identity, and the challenges facing young people today.

In this episode we cover:

• Growing Humanists International’s advocacy team 
• The enduring relevance of the Auckland Declaration against the politics of division 
• How anti-rights actors coordinate across law, lobbying, and international advocacy 
• The “quiet revival” controversy and why bad religion data matters 
• The manosphere, nihilism, and the search for meaning among young men

References

• Auckland Declaration against the Politics of Division - Humanists International
• London Declaration on Secularism - Humanists International
• Statement on upholding the independence of the ECtHR - Norwegian
  NGO Forum for Human Rights
• Bible Society retracts false Quiet Revival claims - Humanists UK
• Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization - Wikipedia
• Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere - Netflix
• Adolescence - IMDB
• Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband - Kings College London

Follow Humanist International

• Sign up for our free Newsletter
• Support Humanists International
• Follow our Campaigns
• About - Humanists International 
• Join us at the World Humanists Congress 2026

This podcast is produced by Humanise Live.

Start your podcast today, visit: humanise.live

🎶Music: Horizon by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Transcript

Welcome To Freedom Of Thought

Leon Langdon 0:05

Welcome to Freedom of Thought, a podcast by Humanists International. With me, Leon Langdon, and me, Gary McLelland. Each week we'll be discussing news, research, and policy developments and campaigns related to freedom of thought around the world. Of course, as an international NGO, it's always good to start with what we've been up to. So, Gary, want to tell our listeners or watchers what you've been up to for the week at least?

Gary McLelland 0:27

It's been a very busy week. We uh continue to do a lot of work preparing for the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa. I'm actually flying off to Montreal tomorrow to do a site visit and meet up with the team at Humanist Canada and also to meet up with the team of people who are at the AHQ, which is the Quebec Humanist Association. So I'm looking forward to that. And yeah, we've also had a very busy week or a very busy day in London, Leon, doing some interviews for recruitment of a new advocacy officer. So maybe you could just give us a bit of an update on what that position is and how the process was.

Ottawa Planning And Hiring Update

Leon Langdon 1:05

I don't think I've ever felt so fortunate to work for an organization that has had such incredible candidates and such a really high quantity of candidates, all of an incredibly high quality, um, sending in applications. Literally, hundreds of people have applied to work with us, and it really shows that we're at the vanguard of where we need to be and that we're doing a good job of selling ourselves to the world if so many incredible people want to come work for us. I think the biggest shame is that we're only going to be able to take on one person, unfortunately. That person's role will be to work with me and with our colleague Jonas in the advocacy team, um, working mostly across the United Nations, but also increasingly across regional institutions, with a particular focus there on capacity building, helping make sure our members' voices are raised up, helping to ensure our members have the prerequisite training, that they are supported if they're giving UN statements or that they know how to go and advocate at the African Commission on Human and People's Rights, or how to go work at the OAS, the Organization of American States, or the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. We're definitely asking a lot of people and we're looking for someone with a varied skill set. But like I said, it is just a real shame that we can only hire one. But I'm very excited to have someone new join the team to give me some support in this work and to, like you say, also hopefully be in place for Ottawa to come help us there, but also get to meet all of our members there. I think I was in in post almost a year before I got to go to Singapore and meet many of our members there. And I think it's such a great opportunity to see what this work that we do at the international level, what it really means for people on the ground, but also to hear about what it's like to be humanist or non-religious or generally a human rights activist in dozens and dozens of contexts around the world. And that is is invaluable in not just the way that it informs our sort of formal policy, our formal statements and things like that, but also the way that we do things and to be able to do this work holding all of that in mind, I think is a challenge. But I think it's also one of the greatest privileges of this job.

Gary McLelland 3:06

It was absolutely incredible to get to meet the candidates, as you say, out of the three or four hundred that were shortlisted, the handful that we got to meet were just incredible people. And obviously it's a very difficult decision to have to make, but like you say, it's an incredible reflection to be able to meet so many amazing, talented advocates that want to come and spend their efforts working with us. And yeah, I guess we put out that call again to any wealthy donors that happen to stumble upon this podcast to get in touch with us because we have no shortage of ambition and important work to be done. What we do lack is the resources to fully realize our vision. So very happy to hear from anybody that can support us. But yeah, nonetheless, I think we we're in a really good position to be growing the advocacy team and expanding our efforts there. Which actually is probably quite a good point, maybe for us to spend a bit more time than we've been able to in this podcast in recent weeks,

Populism And The Politics Of Division

Gary McLelland 4:04

just kind of zooming out a little bit and thinking about the world that we find ourselves in, the kind of the advocacy challenges, but also just the general picture of the world that we find ourselves in. You know, when we were preparing for this podcast, one of the things that was in my mind was the 2018 Auckland Declaration against the politics of division. And it's funny because I guess 2018 is not that long ago, but also in terms of global developments and political developments, it feels like it could have been a lifetime ago in terms of the world that we find ourselves in. Now it's pre-COVID. That also feels like a different era. But I think it was quite useful. I found it quite useful just to kind of review that document and we'll include it in the show notes and people can read it themselves. But I guess what the General Assembly was doing back then was highlighting this increasing tendency towards populism, politics of division. It's interesting. I remember the debate as well. We had quite a lot of discussion about some of the terminology, which doesn't track across every different culture and language. But I think when discussing this situation in English, we all generally know what we're talking about in terms of populism. But it gave antidotes against this tendency towards populism, which I thought it might be helpful just to read out again. So this is a summary of the full document, but against this tendency towards populism, the General Assembly affirmed the best ethical foundation from which to approach the problems of today's world and the future of all of us is to try and see humanity as one global community. Democracy is much more than a periodic opportunity to vote. Democracies can thrive only in a culture of open debate. Today's problems are more complex than ever before, and across the world, the speed of human progress is accelerating, but the fruits of human progress are not being enjoyed evenly. And I actually thought that was just like a really incredible document to be able to reflect on because I think it is quite timeless in its assessment and its diagnosis and its recommendations. But maybe a bit sad also to know that the situation is probably only worsened in those eight years since that document was ratified. I'll go two ways with this.

Leon Langdon 6:20

I think the first is just it is sad, but it's also a privilege to have all of these great documents written by the General Assemblies of Humanists International past and present to some extent on these pressing issues, like reading back policies about nuclear disarmament from the 50s through 70s and 80s. I read one recently on the US leaving UNESCO, I think it was in the 90s, and I was like, oh, that's exactly what's just happening again. Yeah, withdrawal from multilateral institutions. And so seeing that through line is really helpful, and I think is a real testament to the work this organization's done for almost 75 years now, as of next year. But I think specifically on populism, I think the division is just, it feels like it's just getting worse. And I feel like to some extent it's it used to be something that we'd see purely around elections, or at least would be in focus around elections. And that's not to say that this isn't a year with lots of elections. I I know Denmark and Hungary off the top of my head will be having elections. I know obviously the US will be having national elections, but not presidential election, which could be very decisive in the next couple of years. And with the sort of outsize footprint of the US on the world, that is particularly the case. But I just feel like it's seeping into every part of life. I think the ability of one person to have a conversation with another at something that basic is really in decline.

Gary McLelland 7:38

It's a really worrying picture. And I think we can see that in the United States very clearly, the complete division and breakdown across the two political tendencies. And it's true in in many European countries and the types of Hindu nationalism that we see in India. And I suppose one where I think humanist international and humanist voices generally have quite an interesting perspective is on the fact that a lot of this populism that we see permeating now does have a religious flavour. It's the tendency towards Americans must see themselves as part of a Christian nation, Indians must see themselves as part of a Hindu nation, and this kind of sublimation of religion into political discourse, which again, I think thinking now back to the General Assembly in 2017, which passed a declaration on the London Declaration on Secularism. So it's worrying to see these tendencies and in part of the bigger picture. In fact, only to this week, actually, the Norwegian NGO Forum for Human Rights has released a statement condemning a letter which was sent on behalf of a number of European countries to the Council of Europe about how the European Convention on Human Rights is being implemented, trying essentially to make the case that it should be implemented in a way which is more in line with these countries' views of immigration and refugees, and trying to manipulate or influence the way in which judges in the European court rule on these cases. And the Norwegian committee has condemned this, obviously, and condemned the political interference with the judicial process. But I guess it's just as further signs of this politics of division, this populist rhetoric. It's very good to see the Norwegian Humanist Association signing on and promoting that letter. But it's yeah, it's worrying developments even in the Council of Europe.

Leon Langdon 9:35

I know. I think, and I don't want to be too sort of Western-centric in talking about all these problems, but I feel like that is where so many of them are being seen now as much as anything. I have a legal background, so I follow the US Supreme Court probably more closely than most people would. And this sort of links the European Court of Human Rights idea, which is uh and maybe ties out everything we're saying together, is this idea of in the US what they call constitutional originalism or textualism. And it's a way of reading law in line with what the founders thought, which 1700s, the writing of these laws, or I'd say more recently in terms of the Council of Europe or their national constitutions. And it's sort of an ahistorical look at things, like the idea that anyone who wrote these documents, or most people who wrote these documents, thought that they would be stagnant is often not the case, that most of these documents, constitutions, international law were seen to be living instruments, seen to be read in line with current trends and current understandings of things, be it science, be it politics. And so this sort of entrenchment of we must figure out what was meant at the time of writing is being seen in so many spaces. And I think within that reading, you get exactly what you're talking about is you can have a more conservative and ultimately divisive view of things in line with, for example, religious tendencies that just aren't necessarily true at the moment. My NoHemanist UK have been working quite a lot lately in response to a study in the UK, which was called the Quiet Revival, which purported to discuss a rise, I think it was last year, in religiosity in the UK. And basically they had pointed out these huge flaws with how it was the research was conducted. And just I think it was this week that survey had to be, or the reporting on that survey had to be retracted because Humanists UK and others who campaigned on this were ultimately correct. And so when you don't have laws that are that are being read in the time that that they're existing in, in line with the views of sort of modern human rights law and modern conceptions of human rights and human dignity, I think that is a problem. And that is also where you get space for more divisive rhetoric generally.

Originalism And Rights Rollbacks

Gary McLelland 11:47

Yeah, it's interesting as though, because when you talk about the US originalism, textualism, I think that's a really interesting one to just pause on for a moment because some people may have been familiar with one of the kind of leading proponents of that conservative opinion, which was Justice Antonin Scalia, who died, I don't know, some years ago, maybe 10 years ago. He was probably one of the biggest voices, or he was certainly one of the leading voices for this originalist interpretation. But one of the interesting things I was thinking about recently when someone was discussing with me the Roe versus Wade case, was that even that Justice Scalia, who was a strong conservative advocate for originalism, was asked multiple times what he thought about Roe versus Wade. And he even said that he follows this legal principle called stare decisis, i.e., the idea that when a legal decision is made by a judge, unless of some outstanding issue, it should be followed because the law has to be predictable and expected and has to be known. He even, one of the leading proponents of this, said that Roe vs. Wade was such old law that it basically shouldn't be revised. But of course, we now find ourselves in a situation where it was overturned by a conservative majority on the court. So it's funny to think that, yeah, even the legal principles which guided one of the most famous conservative justices is now being brushed aside with this kind of radical lawfare.

Leon Langdon 13:18

I think that's also a really relevant point to bring up. The case that overturned Roe vs. White in the US was the Dobbs case. And so many of the actors involved in the Dobbs case are also the ones that we see at the European Court of Human Rights. They're also the ones, for example, going back to the judges' point and the Norwegian Human Rights Forum, their letter, and it talks about judges and their sort of independence as well. There are documents and reports by many of the same organizations that work to overturn Roe v. Wade that are also critical of so-called NGO judges at the European Court of Human Rights. So judges that have offered pro-bono legal advice to NGOs around the world or around Europe, I guess, have come under stark criticism by some of these anti-rights actors. And then again, many of these groups are the same ones that are on the ground in Nigeria, they're on the ground in India. They're, you know, well-funded groups that are trying to take legal cases. And it's particularly interesting because obviously, as an organization with really strong history and a strong tradition of protecting freedom of expression, there are definitely times when our sort of interests would align with many of these anti-rights groups who call for the protection of free speech and call out over broad hate speech laws. But the reality is that's really where the similarities or the sort of alliance would end. And we then have to ask ourselves what else these groups are doing. And it is doing things like overturning Roe vs. Wade, recently working at the UN with the Hungarian government, another sort of right-wing populist government, which is facing an election this year itself. Outcome of that remains to be seen. And seeing all of these sort of phenomena, but also actors as interconnected, I think is really important for our work, but also important for the average person on the street, our listeners, to be aware that the intentions of these anti-rights actors are aligned with some really terrible causes, generally, even if it might briefly seem that that they're sort of reasonable in their viewpoints.

Tracking Anti Rights Networks Carefully

Gary McLelland 15:22

It's very frustrating, I guess. It can be frustrating for an organization like ours to be sat within that nexus and for us to be able to see these links and this influence. But obviously, many of these organizations that we're talking about are far better funded than we are, 10, 100 times better. And I think we've mentioned it on the podcast before. But one of the things that your team does, Leon, is what we call opposition monitoring. And of course, we're going to be careful in what we say on this podcast without naming certain organizations. But many of our members and listeners will know the type of organizations that we're talking about. And one of the jobs that your team does is kind of actively monitor legal cases or briefings or lobby work that's happening at different institutions around the world to make sure that we at least know what some of these actors are up to and that we can provide counterexamples, counter speech, or what we think are a more legitimate interpretation of what the human rights instruments and so on mention. And one of the things I guess that may be worth mentioning is that you and your team are sort of working on a proposal for a report that we might do this year into some of that. Maybe you want to say a little bit about that.

Leon Langdon 16:34

Yeah, so this came out of a conversation at the end of towards the end of last year between you and I, I think mostly Gary, which was to do with we lobby, for lack of a better word. We work to defend and protect the right to freedom of religion or belief. And international human rights law is very clear about what that law includes the right to do and doesn't include the right to do. It includes the right to be religious, to manifest that religion or belief. It includes the right to be non-religious. There are legitimate limits that can be put on that manifestation, and there are no legitimate limits on what you can sort of think in your head. The freedom of thought, your freedom of conscience is unlimited. But in terms of how you manifest that, there are legitimate limits to that. It's also very clear that there is no right to sort of impose your belief on other people. We see that most contested around LGBTQ plus rights, around reproductive rights. And it's really troubling that these groups are using the language of freedom of religion or belief or often religious freedom in this way. And so much of our work is about defending not just the rights of non-religious, but of sexual and gender minorities, of women and other religious or belief minorities in that space. You know, I see it very much as in line with, for example, our work on the Anti-Blasphemy Laws campaign about looking at the sort of the extreme limits or the extremes and what should be limited rather on the rights to freedom revolutionary belief. Within that as well, we've seen, like you mentioned, these groups being funded 10 or 100 times what we are. And I think bringing all of this together is something that that is quite important and showing where these links are, showing how all of these groups are connected, and but also just showing the general playbook of using that right, because I think it's very easy for people to get, like I say, caught up in brief alignments on the right to freedom of religion or belief, particularly groups that maybe aren't well funded, and to sort of there's something romantic about being approached about by a large Western organization with seemingly endlessly deep pockets. And I think making sure that first and foremost our members are aware of how all these things are connected, but also that we work with wider civil society colleagues on this. And so we have been really engaged with uh other civil society colleagues across a range of issues. But as I've been floating this idea to many NGOs, there's been a lot of interest. We have to see exactly what the sort of outlines of the report will look like going forward. But there's hopefully something exciting in the pipeline there. But I think it is also worth stressing that it's a really delicate line when we're talking in this sector, because there are so many great civil society organizations around the world, independent civil society organizations doing incredible work and looking for funding, for example, from governments, looking for funding from foundations, from the United Nations. And we have to be really careful that when we're criticizing these groups, that it also doesn't legitimize governments necessarily overreaching into civil society to put too many restrictions. Organizations that receive donor funds already are subject to so many restrictions, and we want to make sure that we're not advocating for increasing that. So we really need to find the balance when it comes to calling out these groups, calling out what they're doing, calling out his funding them, that we don't work against our own interests or the interests of really legitimate, good, independent civil society at the same time.

Gary McLelland 19:52

That's a very crucial point, I think, as well, because one of the things that we know from authoritarian regimes, like one standard playbook that they will use to squash civil society space is so-called like foreign donor bans and foreign donor bills and things like that. I'm thinking of like Russia, I think India has won. There's been some European countries looking to introduce similar ones. And this can be problematic because what you get into here is this idea that Western NGOs, which they often suggest are maybe state-funded, are trying to interfere on our traditional culture by advancing their own agenda. And so in actual fact, what's happening is in more closed societies, NGOs are coming in to try and open it up, to offer criticisms to the government, to report on human rights violations. But that's kind of morphed and skewed into foreign interference, foreign meddling in our internal affairs. And of course, we want to be careful here in that I think we're not saying these organizations should not function or they shouldn't be allowed to promote their activities and so on. I think what we're trying to do is something a bit higher level, which is simply to connect the dots between, okay, this organization which has a website that looks like a human rights organization, and they use all these fancy human rights terms and treaties and things like that. In our view, in many cases, they are misapplying what the human rights situation actually is, perhaps deliberately. And we were to try and just connect the dots there a little bit and try and help people have more context and understanding about the types of organizations and their funders and so on and so forth.

Leon Langdon 21:38

I think the flip side of that as well is that you also want to make sure that you're not applying an overly Western lens to what civil society is. When many people think about NGOs or civil society organizations, they think about having an office, they think about being a registered company, they think about very organized structures and, like you say, having a website that uses international human rights law. Ultimately, so many civil society organizations in particular contexts lack those resources and they're volunteer run and they're maybe not as formalized and things like that. So the other line to tow is making sure that the civil society you're talking about that we want to see funded, that we work with is not overly sanitized through a Western lens, that they're still connected to their own cultural context, that they're still able to work in that, that they're not sort of diluted by donor funding or donor priorities. For example, that's something that's been written non-extensively, is the sort of delicate role for international NGOs to play. And it's why I think, for example, in my job, so much of my job isn't making statements about countries that I've never been to, but actually reaching out to our members in those countries and saying, what would you like to say on the statement? Or if it's a delicate context and maybe it's not necessarily safe for them to give a statement saying, What do you want humans international or me to go to the UN and say, I think that's another sort of lens. It's there's so many overlapping kind of issues and it's so much to hold at once, but it is delicate and it is important that we and others sort of hold that balance.

The Manosphere And Modern Nihilism

Gary McLelland 23:07

I guess one other aspect that I wanted to talk to you about as well was that this political and kind of geopolitical diplomatic situation that we've been discussing is obviously connected to culture, and one of the issues that's been discussed, well, in the Anglo Sphere, shall we say, is the most recent Louis Thoreau documentary on the Manosphere. And I watched it myself, and I'm sure many of our supporters and our listeners have watched it, and I just thought it might be quite interesting to just talk about that a little bit because for us in the UK, we had this drama, I forget the name of it now. We had a drama about a schoolboy who kind of went into this manosphere Adolescence. Adolescence, that's right. And so the Louis Through documentary felt to me like a bit of a continuation of that conversation that we were having in the UK, and it was shocking, I guess, to me. Sadly, a lot of it wasn't so shocking, which is also what was quite upsetting. It's a very sad thing to see. I mean, to me, what I saw in that movie was a lot of really quite immature little boys that have a very twisted sense of, or in some cases, completely no sense of morality and responsibility, and just a kind of a very vacuous concept of their own culture and personality and morals. But I guess it's difficult to see that in its own bubble, but it's obviously kind of connected, I think, to this wider cultural shift that we've been talking about in the podcast. But yeah, any thoughts from you, Leon?

Leon Langdon 24:56

I think I have a couple of brief thoughts. I know we're slowly running out of time or quickly running out of time. I think one is it's a secular space, is this sort of manosphere? It's not really, it doesn't really seem to involve sort of an appeal to religion in that same way, but it does involve appeals to tradition. And so I think it's interesting in that way, but it it's also firmly anti-humanist, I guess, in that way. I also think it's very nihilist. It's very hedonistic and very much grounded in a we only have one life, so what's the point? As opposed to we only have one life, it is meaningless, and so it's up to us to make a positive meaning from it. But as much as you point out in the Anglosphere, it is also, I think it was an Ipsos poll I saw a couple of weeks ago, which had, I think 33% of men think that women should obey their husband. And that was across several contexts. I think it was it also included, I think it was about 23,000 respondents from across the world. And I think that shows that it's kind of happening all over, this sort of this idea. And it's something that maybe it's sort of gone out of fashion in in the Anglo Sphere and is very much coming back. And I think my sort of big takeaway is, you know, firstly, that there's a real lack of meaning or a real search for meaning and a lack of finding something among these people. Secondly, that's very sad for the men and the boys involved that this is where their search for meaning is bringing them. But thirdly, and actually most importantly, is this is future husbands, this is future family members and friends who are likely to be abusive or likely to be really quite horrible partners or really quite horrible to be around. And so for those who aren't sucked into this manosphere, I think it's a really awful time as well. And I really worry about that. And I think a lot of the work we do, but far beyond the remit of what we can do, is to kind of think about providing some sort of cultural antidote to this. I don't exactly know what that would look like. And I don't even know if it's possible at this moment. You know, I think it's also connected to rhetoric around war and looking at everything happening in the Middle East at the moment, I see a very clear true line to hyper masculinity in wartime as well. I'm worried, frankly, I don't necessarily have any positive answers to end that on.

Gary McLelland 27:05

I think you're spot on, and there's an interesting thing for us to tease out there about the fact that this nihilistic cultural element which we can identify and perhaps put a challenge on ourselves as humanists. What can we do? What haven't we done to help these young men in their quest for a positive meaning for themselves and their lives? I think it's quite a difficult question. I often quote this, but I come back to one of the speeches that Yap Van Prague, the founder of Humanists International, made about 70 odd years ago when he said that humanism has two problems. He said the first problem is the issue of equal treatment, human rights, the day-to-day struggles for a tolerant and equal society. He said that's the little problem. But he said the second and bigger problem is the problem of nihilism, it's the problem of ultimate meaning making. I mean, if we as humanists believe that more or less the individual person bears responsibility for finding the meaning and purpose in their own lives, then what has a culture done to so ill equip these young men with the tools to find some solid ground on which to base their personality, their values, and obviously what we see is the products of that failure, which is rank, disgusting misogyny, a sort of aversion of blatant homophobia, which I honestly didn't think we would see in youth culture in this day and age, which was generally quite shocking. I don't really have any positive takeaways from it, other than I suppose the reaction that we've seen to it and the audience that's been ready and willing to engage with it critically, I suppose is a positive step in and of itself. But yeah, it's certainly a concern.

Leon Langdon 29:00

On that note, I think we should leave it there. Thank you so much, Gary.

Gary McLelland 29:04

Thank you, Leon, and congratulations again for your recruitment. Look forward to meeting your new colleague.

Final Thoughts And How To Help

Leon Langdon 29:11

If you find this episode useful, please share with others, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave us a rating and five-star review. It makes a big difference in helping new listeners find the show. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover or someone you'd like to suggest as a guest, you can contact us via the links in the show notes. We're also planning a QA episode, so please get in touch if you've got any questions for us. Thank you to James and the team at Humanize Live and to the team at Humanist International. To find out more or join Humanist International, visit humanist. Thank you for listening to this episode of Freedom.