A secular sermon for the 2024 solstice season

We’re living through a time of darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

This is the season of the winter solstice, when the nights are longest, the earth is dead and frozen, and cold winds howl at the door. Our distant ancestors built up rituals around this season, lighting fires and decorating their homes with evergreens. It was both a reminder and a petition to the gods, ensuring that light and warmth would return and crops would grow again.

Thanks to astronomy, we know that this is a natural cycle. Prayers and sacrifices aren’t necessary to bring the sun back. However, those ancient rhythms still echo in us, and many people find their mood sinking into depression when the world is darkest.

Of course, there’s another reason to feel melancholy. As a new year dawns, America is right back where we were in the waning days of 2016. Once again, we’re dreading the next four years and the chaos and disaster they’re sure to bring. Once again, we’re facing the prospect of a long darkness ahead.

It’s hard to believe we’re back here. We’ve enjoyed four years of generally competent and decent government. The Biden administration was far from perfect, but it could boast a long list of genuinely meaningful accomplishments. It was respectful of science, concerned for protecting democracy, willing to treat all Americans equally.

Most of all, I’d say, there was the intangible sense of peace of mind that came from having adults in charge. The world was still turbulent, but you could open social media or check the headlines without fearing what you might see. There wasn’t that constant, low-grade anxiety at the back of your mind about the next nightmare about to fall upon us.

But it didn’t last. Given the chance to have four more such years, or to return to the previous era of blundering incompetence, gleeful cruelty, and anti-democratic authoritarianism… we know what Americans picked. A foolish nation has returned to its folly, just as a dog returns to its vomit.

Where does this leave those of us who look for the light?

It’s no challenge to be a secular humanist when times are good. Ours is an ideology of optimism. We want to believe that humanity is flawed but has the capacity to improve, that we’re leaving the follies of the past behind and growing wiser. Admittedly, it’s easier to believe this when the world plays along.

But that can’t be the only guidance that our philosophy offers. If secular humanism is a fair-weather ideology – if it only works when people are good and the world is peaceful – then there’s no value in it.

People have never been all good. The world has never been peaceful. We’ve always suffered from poverty, war, oppression, unfairness, toxic superstition, corrupt institutions and bad rulers. Humanity has been afflicted by selfishness, short-sightedness, stupidity, bigotry and violence throughout the span of our existence on earth. The times and places when peace reigned, democracy flourished and justice was upheld are the exception and not the rule.

Our morality has to be built on an unflinching recognition of that fact, like solid bedrock beneath a house. If it isn’t, then it’s a thing of straw – flimsy, insubstantial, incapable of offering advice for the world we live in. It’s no better than Christian morality, which proclaims that people are evil to the core and the world’s problems are unfixable, so the only thing we can do is wait for death.

To our credit, we have examples who prove that this is possible. The roll call of history lists countless freethinkers who lived in darker, more violent, more ignorant times than ours. If you look only at the facts of their eras, they had even less reason for optimism than we do. Nevertheless, they persisted.

There were philosophers like Voltaire, who lived in the dark ages of theocracy and monarchy; orators like Robert Ingersoll, who grew up with slavery and saw the U.S. torn apart in civil war over it; scientists like Carl Sagan, who lived in the shadow of nuclear war; feminist pioneers like Frances Wright or Mary Wollstonecraft, who refused to bow to patriarchy; civil-rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston or A. Philip Randolph, who dreamed of a world free from both religious and racist oppression; and many, many more I could name.

These past ambassadors of enlightenment didn’t give up or give in, however dark or hopeless the world seemed. They didn’t compromise their principles to fit in. They spoke out boldly, regardless of whether they found a receptive audience. They persisted in preaching that humans could do better. They carried the torch onward, keeping the flame of those ideals burning, preserving them until the next generation could take them up and improve on them.

That’s our task as well.

The principles of secular humanism are the right ones: reason, empathy, justice, equality. They’re better for the people who follow them and better for humanity and the world as a whole. I truly believe that, and that belief doesn’t depend on the outcome of elections or the results of opinion polls. I won’t give it up no matter how many people say otherwise.

In fact, our secular ideals are more vital and more powerful when the world is against us. When the majority of humanity chooses cruelty, a humanist morality that’s based on compassion and decency burns brighter and clearer by contrast. In times of darkness, it stands out like a lantern lighting the way.

However long this dark season lasts, we should carry that light proudly. We should preserve it for the future, just as our ancestors preserved it for us. The time will come when the world is ready for it again.