Humanist Manifesto

About the Author

The person regarded as the principal author and motive force behind the Humanist Manifesto is Raymond Bennett Bragg. Bragg was born on October 10, 1902, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Bates College in Maine from 1921 to 1924 and then transferred to Brown University, where he studied until 1925. His interest in theology grew, so he attended the Meadville Theological School, graduating in 1928. It was here that his humanist views developed. From 1927 to 1930 he served as the pastor of the Church of All Souls in Evanston, Illinois. After he was appointed secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference, he traveled up to fifty thousand miles a year to help keep Unitarian churches open during the Great Depression. As if that were not enough to occupy him, Bragg was the associate editor of The New Humanist from 1932 to 1935 and editor in 1935–1936.

Throughout the 1930s Bragg traveled across Europe, witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1935 he accepted a job as associate pastor of the First Unitarian Society under John Dietrich in Minneapolis. Three years later he succeeded Dietrich as the church’s senior minister. In this position he became an outspoken critic of Fascism. During World War II he served on the board of directors of the American Unitarian Association and chaired the Committee on Foreign Churches. After the war he served in various administrative positions for the Unitarian Church, but in 1952 he returned to pastoral work when he accepted a position at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was one of the founders of the Kansas City Civil Liberties Union. He retired from the ministry in 1973 and died on February 15, 1979.

Roy Wood Sellars was the author of the first draft of the Humanist Manifesto. Sellars was born in 1880 in Ontario, Canada. He enjoyed a distinguished academic career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan until he retired in 1950. He was the author of numerous influential books that dealt with humanist themes, including Critical Realism (1916), The Next Step in Religion (1918), Evolutionary Naturalism (1922), and Religion Coming of Age (1928). He died on September 5, 1973.