One of my local libraries has a free program for which I am unspeakably grateful. Twice a month, one of the children’s librarians hosts a Dungeons & Dragons game for middle school–age kids.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Dungeons & Dragons (or D&D) is a tabletop, pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing game, in which players invent a character for themselves (such as an elf warrior or human wizard), and a moderator known as the “dungeon master” devises, narrates, and mediates imaginary scenarios for the players. My daughter has now been a faithful member of her adventuring party for over two years, and I can tell you, based on the sheer exuberance of the kids’ declarations (“I’m going to hit the monster in the face with my frying pan!”) and the decibel level of their cacophonic belly laughs, these kids are having an absolute blast.
When I was my daughter’s age, I too wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, but at that the time there was (and still is to some degree) a social stigma attached to it; the stereotype of the D&D player was of a hopeless nerd in his parents’ basement, his unwashed clothes coated with cheese doodle crumbs. I was already about as low on the middle school social totem pole as one could possibly be, and to broadcast my enthusiasm for fantasy role-playing would have meant exponentially more bullying and mockery. It simply wasn’t safe.
In the late 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was also culturally stained by associations with satanism and the occult. There was no actual connection between the game and any demonic agenda, but nonetheless, D&D got tangled up in the era’s culture wars and satanic panic, such that I was even scolded by my Italian-Portuguese Catholic grandfather when he learned I was playing the game. “You shouldn’t be playing with that! That’s devil-worshiping crap!” he declared (and earned an eye roll from my more enlightened grandmother). He wanted me to feel ashamed of it.
In my mid-twenties, I and some of the members of my touring Shakespeare troupe began to catch wind that several of us were erstwhile D&D players, and yet we were still a little afraid to admit it. But the urge to battle kobolds and beholders was too great, and fully half of our troupe “came out of the closet” as D&D enthusiasts, which resulted in a joyous, year-long campaign played in hotel rooms across the country. You can imagine that when a bunch of Shakespearean actors get together to play orcs, elves, paladins, and thieves (I played a halfling wizard named Rusty Clackdish), things get pretty dramatic, highly creative, and magnificently ridiculous.
Rather than feel any shame for my weird pastime, I had a whole year’s worth of thoroughly fun, creative, nourishing, and meaningful experiences. It wasn’t perfect, we made mistakes, and sometimes we pissed each other off, but we were always safe to be exactly who we were. It’s one of my favorite memories.
Skip ahead to the 2020s, and my, how things have changed. While D&D still exists firmly within today’s geek culture, it is no longer exclusively the pastime of outcasts. D&D and other tabletop role-playing games are more popular than they’ve ever been. It still may not be “cool,” nor do I expect that all the manufactured associations with devil worship have totally dissipated, but at least today my daughter can play it without giving a thought as to whether she’ll be judged or mocked for it. It is safe to play. The library that hosts the game she plays is a safe space for her and the members of her adventuring party. As it should be. After all, what is a library if not a safe space for the full spectrum of humanity’s imagination; our wildest ideas, our biggest questions, our most brilliant discoveries?
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Let us dispense with whatever sense of exasperation you might have with the much-abused term safe space. I’m not talking about some caricature of hyper-liberal elite academia in which pampered youths are shielded from any ideas that cause them an iota of discomfort or challenge their “personal truths.” I’m talking about something much simpler and, frankly, crucial.
The kind of safe space I’m talking about is one in which it is safe to indulge one’s imagination, experiment with new identities, and explore strange scenarios. A space in which it is okay to admit you don’t know something, where asking “dumb questions” is welcome, and the consideration of new ideas is embraced with enthusiasm, not dismissed out of hand.
My local library’s D&D group is just one small instantiation of what I think a universal secular humanism can and should provide, in every community and at a global scale: an environment in which it is safe to be weird. It’s safe to be ignorant. It’s safe to be wrong. Because it’s also a space to learn what you don’t know and maybe even come up with better ideas that, once discussed, debated, and tested, may turn out to be right.
In an editorial, I wrote about my experiences as neurodivergent, having been diagnosed as autistic in my late thirties. Reflecting on the feeling of alienation, I wrote:
The realization that the world is not made for you or for a group with which you identify is not a declaration of victimhood. Or at least it needn’t be. Truly, I see it as a kind of epiphany, one that both confronts the harsh realities of the world outside oneself and offers a kind of liberation, the knowledge that there is no one to blame for one’s differences or incompatibilities—not you or anyone else. With one’s illusions shattered and guilt absolved, one can start anew, armed with the quantifiable facts of the world in which one lives and with one’s own firsthand, preciously unique experiences. You are now free to effect change should you seek it.
To be free to effect change, one must feel safe enough to do so. We can’t possibly be our best selves and have our best ideas when we are under threat, constantly editing ourselves so that we fit in with unwritten yet strictly enforced social expectations. We need places, groups, and fora in which we can safely and in good faith express ourselves, our worries, our wishes, our questions, and our ideas without fear of being humiliated or cast out for being odd, ignorant, or making a mistake.
I got the idea of secular humanism as a safe space from Sarah An Myers. In a piece for the October/November 2023 issue of Free Inquiry, she wrote about the importance of creating a safe place for people of all kinds and backgrounds to inquire and learn. “Secular humanism can provide that space,” she wrote, “fostering a culture in which everyone can freely question, explore, and exchange ideas without fear.”
But why does this even need to be said? Isn’t secular humanism already an oasis from harmful dogmas and superstitions? It is right-wing politicians who are pushing libraries and schools to ban books and any discussion of ideas that conflict with their rigid, backward, and patriarchal view of how a human life must be lived. They are the ones attempting to tighten the boundaries of what ideas can be expressed, what questions can be asked, and what possibilities can be explored. It’s because of them that places that should be safe become fraught with fear and peril.
Humanism does indeed provide badly needed safety from dogma and authoritarianism. Almost by definition, humanists are a peaceful bunch, so even if the most deluded religious fundamentalist or conspiracy theorist were to stumble into some humanist meetup, the most hostility they could expect would be in the form of a torrent of logical arguments, assuming they were not just politely ignored. In this sense, no one is “unsafe” from secular humanism.
So, we’re obviously not talking about anyone’s physical safety. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m more interested in a person’s feelings of security and belonging within a secular humanist community. In another essay from that same issue of Free Inquiry, political scientist Juhem Navarro-Rivera expressed a concern for what he perceives to be a kind of counterproductive gatekeeping by secular activists. An avowed atheist himself, Navarro-Rivera confessed to holding on to some silly superstitions concerning his favorite baseball teams. He knows very well, of course, that no rituals or behaviors on his part could in fact have any effect on a baseball game taking place nowhere near him, yet he feels compelled to engage in his superstitious behaviors all the same. So, he wonders, does this mean he’s out of the atheist club?
“How often do we make people feel unwelcome in our meetings or events because we spend a significant chunk of time making fun of the religious or any kind of belief?” he asked. “How much ‘belief’ are we willing to tolerate?” If our tolerance for false or misguided beliefs is too high, we defeat the purpose of our movement. If our tolerance is too low, however, fence-sitters intrigued by humanism may wind up feeling unwanted or demeaned. In that case, aren’t we missing an opportunity to grow our community, share our messages and values, and learn from new perspectives?
At least a third of Millennials and Gen Z-ers are religiously unaffiliated, or Nones. Digging into survey responses, Navarro-Riverra says we can safely say that about three-quarters of those Nones are, for all intents and purposes, atheists—even if they don’t use that term to identify themselves. Most of those younger Nones likely share many of the values of secular humanism: they accept and embrace science, they support free expression and free inquiry, and they want to make the world a better place for everyone in the here and now, not in some imagined afterlife. But a high percentage of those Nones might also think that astrology is fun and interesting, have an inkling that there might be something to psychic powers, or sense there could be some kind of unknowable “force” at work in the universe. Just from a practical point of view, can our movement afford to make these millions of potential allies feel like fools?
If these hypothetical woo-curious Nones were also curious about secular humanism and began to interact with our community, what is the better outcome: that they are made to feel silly for their irrational beliefs or that they discover a welcoming group of compassionate, reasonable folks who are eager to learn from those with different viewpoints and experiences? If someone feels safe enough to investigate and ask questions, and in the process reevaluates their false beliefs and discovers new ideas, wouldn’t we all have benefited from that?
I hope that Free Inquiry was, under my former editorship, one such safe space. (I left the magazine in March 2024.) We published several pieces in which the authors courageously discuss their intellectual and emotional struggles with weighty personal subjects such as the fear of mortality, grief over lost loved ones and shattered illusions, eagerness to explore the limits of consciousness, yearnings for meaning and mystery, a simultaneous dread and fascination with rapidly advancing technologies, and curiosity about what various and disparate schools of thought and belief might have to offer, all of which can be evaluated and questioned in good faith. These writers are not rigidly claiming categorical certainty. Rather, they openly discuss what they don’t know, what worries them, and what they want to better understand. For all to see, they engage in sincere questioning and exploration, opening themselves up to scrutiny and criticism. It’s very brave, and we all benefit from their vulnerability.
All ideas can and should be backed up by evidence and subject to critical inquiry, not so we can point out who’s wrong and reject them for it, but to improve our own thinking, evaluate our own ideas, and turn bad ideas into good ones. To take part in something like this, to foster this kind of environment, is an act of humanism. It’s an act of love.
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What could a space like this look like? Is it like a church, with secular sermons and a humanist choir? It could be. That’s what Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr., who recently acknowledged his status as a None, says he’s pining for:
Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional post-church brunch.4
Does it take the form of a theater, where a community gathers to share an experience of storytelling presented by real live human beings right in front of them? Kate Cohen, also at the Washington Post, called theaters “meaning-full spaces” and says that what makes them similar to churches is that “they are both places where people can feel what the Rev. Molly Baskette calls ‘the participatory transcendence that you get when humans are in the flesh together.’” In our feature article for this issue, you’ll see how Cohen attributes that kind of participatory transcendence to the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, a theater founded by her father and where I performed Shakespeare for several years. “Its beauty confers value on everything that happens there,” she writes, “so when you are in the audience, it confers value on you.” Oh, I so very much love the sound of that.
Perhaps, though, the best example of a secular humanist safe space is where this essay began, at the local public library. Our libraries are not just warehouses for books, though that is part of why they are so well suited to this role. Even the smallest library is an incredible resource for knowledge, diligently organized for easy access; it is a museum and gallery of human culture, specially curated by a staff that knows the community it serves; it is a place where individuals and groups of all ages can have enriching experiences through activities such as book clubs, job training programs, arts and crafts, lectures and presentations, and, of course, storytelling.
And, if you’re lucky, Dungeons & Dragons.
This inhospitable world needs more spaces in which we are safe to inquire, safe to explore, and safe to be weird. My daughter’s library, where she delights in her imagination, is one such place. There are precious few others.
At a time when each new generation is less religious than the last and Americans are growing ever more disillusioned with organized religion and indeed institutions in general, our challenge as secular humanists is to cultivate these kinds of spaces; environments in which people feel free to put forth their big, silly ideas. Maybe their ideas will be wrong! So, let’s give them the chance and the security to be wrong, and then let’s have good-faith discussions, debates, and investigations of those big, silly, maybe-wrong ideas. When someone new to a secular humanist community harbors a false belief, let’s not kick them out or make them feel ashamed. Let’s be grateful for the chance to go on a journey of inquiry with a fellow explorer and invite them to join our adventuring party. This is how discovery happens. It’s how we experience the spark of new ideas we never would have thought of if we hadn’t had the space to be weird.
This article was originally published in the February/March 2024 issue of Free Inquiry. Photo by Sam McNamara from Unsplash.
Near-Earth Object 