I am always excited to see new secular efforts popping up, and the recently announced Global Secular Council looks to have great potential. They have quite a diversity of expertise on their team, and they are backed by the mysterious Bella and Stella Foundation, who appear to be a well-funded if mischievous pair of calico cats. Their council’s mission will be to serve as an “international policy research and resource center for atheists, humanists, and other secularists who speak out for science and reason instead of religion and faith” and to “publish and disseminate . . . research to lawmakers in the form of reports, videos, surveys, demographic studies, and more.”
Looking through their list of issues, though, one gets the sense that they are mostly focused on problems facing secularists here in the United States. The page on Constitutional Law, for example, focuses on how to get the world’s first secular republic to stay true to its Jeffersonian and Madisonian roots. The policy recommendations on same sex marriage, employment discrimination, discriminatory youth groups, school prayer, school vouchers, and tax policy are similarly written from a distinctly American perspective. There are at least two pages focused on international issues, one on International Human Rights and the other on Freedom of Religion, Belief, and Expression in International Law, but this does not seem to be a major policy focus.
They council are just starting out, however, and they are allies in the ongoing fight for liberty, equality, and secularism, so I’m not about to tear into them for being insufficiently globally-minded for my own personal tastes. Instead, I would ask that the council find ways to beef up their international resume by consulting with secularists around the world (activists like James Onen of Freethought Kampala or Ðavid Osorio of the Asociación de Ateos y Agnósticos de Bogotá) and asking them what unique challenges they are facing as freethinkers where they live and what kinds of support (if any) they would like to have from the global secular movement. With any luck, we can all help to spread religious freedom and the ideals of secularism well beyond the U.S. and the OECD.
