Humanists UK celebrates 130th anniversary

Today marks a significant milestone for the humanist movement in the UK, celebrating the 130th anniversary of the founding of Humanists UK on 30 April 1896. The date also marks a milestone year for the groundbreaking Humanist Heritage project, which turns five years old.

A brief history of Humanists UK

Humanists UK was founded in 1896 as the Union of Ethical Societies. The organisation was a product of a non-religious ‘ethical culture’ movement which focused on living well and acting morally set apart from notions of supernatural punishment or reward. The earliest ethical societies trace their roots back to the 1870s, and the movement reached its peak in the early 1900s when there were over 70 such groups in the UK hosting vibrant meetings about politics, philosophy, science, and ethics, and providing a means for non-religious people – especially women – to participate in charitable work and campaigns for social reform.

In 1920, the Union of Ethical Societies was renamed the Ethical Union and a diverse movement of freethinkers, rationalists, atheists, agnostics, and other non-religious people increasingly came together under the shared banner of ‘humanism’. The term, which had come into English via the German term humanismus in the 19th century, expressed the values, ideas, and concerns non-religious people held in common, rather than define them by an absence of belief in gods. In 1965, the organisation unveiled the Happy Human logo, which went on to become an internationally recognised symbol of humanism, and in 1967, the Ethical Union changed its name to the British Humanist Association (BHA).

In 2017, the organisation further evolved into Humanists UK. In 2025, Humanists UK merged with longtime allies the Rationalist Association and became the publisher of the long-running and critically celebrated magazine, New Humanist. Today Humanists UK has around 150,000 members and supporters – more than ever before in its long history.

Think for yourself, act for everyone

From the very beginning, the concerns of the humanist movement were outward-looking. Humanist Ceremonies, the organisation’s oldest public service, emerged in the 1890s to pioneer the idea of non-religious funerals, weddings, and baby-naming ceremonies. Today non-religious wedding ceremonies are the most popular of all, and humanist celebrants are recognised across the UK as providing an exceptional, person-led service, focusing on the unique stories at the heart of major life events. The earliest form of the Humanist Counselling Service in the 1960s directly inspired the creation of many secular counselling services in the UK. Its successor, the Non-Religious Pastoral Support Network, continues to provide a vital lifeline to non-religious people in hospitals, prisons, universities, and the armed forces. In educational settings, Humanists UK developed a strong reputation with teachers for providing high-quality educational resources about humanism to schools. Today today continues under the banner of Understanding Humanism. Other educational programmes include the charity’s work encouraging good community relations through dialogue with religious groups.

Other services in the movement’s history or founded by some of its members included the Humanist Housing Association, which emerged in 1955 to address inequalities in housing provision for non-religious people and poorer families, and which today exists as a separate organisation, Origin Housing. The Agnostics Adoption Society emerged in 1963 to support non-religious people who faced discrimination when attempting to adopt children. Uniquely among adoption agencies in the period, it also strove to support unmarried mothers to keep their children rather than put them up for adoption, with records suggesting the organisation deliberately sought to avoid the tactics used by religious adoption agencies, in an era replete with cases of ‘forced adoptions’. Humanists UK’s newest service, Faith to Faithless, was founded in the 21st century to support a growing number of people in the UK who found themselves cut off from families, friends, and support networks, or at risk of harm, after leaving a high-control religion.

While the new services have come and gone with the changing needs of society, the principles underpinning the organisation’s work have remained remarkably consistent over 130 years. Leading figures in the movement consistently describe its work as a cultural and social project to bring about a better, fairer world for everyone, regardless of religion of belief. Notable events in Humanists UK’s history included the first ever global anti-racism gathering, the Universal Races Congress, which was held in 1911 and featured W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as three past or future UK Prime Ministers. Another was the 1955 BBC broadcast ‘Morals without Religion’ by Margaret Knight, psychologist and later member of the Humanist Broadcasting Council, which broke new ground as the first-ever broadcast of its type, and led to an avalanche of complaints.

Other notable people with a shared history include a young Gandhi, who published translations of American humanist writings and was close friends with Florence Winterbottom, Secretary of the Union of Ethical Societies; the former UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who was President of the Union in the 1900s; Jennie Lee, a humanist who founded the Open University; Aneurin Bevan, creator of the National Health Service; and the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who spoke at the 2014 World Humanist Congress and today is a patron of Humanists UK. Today, patrons of Humanists UK include over 150 of the UK’s most high-profile artists, entertainers, activists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and campaigners.

The organisation’s long and proud history of political campaigning dates back to its foundation. Women counted among its earliest Victorian leaders – including its first President and its first Chief Executive – and the organisation campaigned openly for LGBT+ rights, women’s suffrage, racial equality, access to regulated midwives, and more enlightened attitudes to animal suffering and animal welfare. Come the 1960s, Humanists UK was at the heart of campaigns to decriminalise homosexuality and abortion, abolish the death penalty, and make contraception readily available to all who needed it. By the late 20th century and into the early 21st century, Humanists UK was successfully arguing for the abolition of blasphemy laws in Great Britain, legal same-sex marriage, the Human Rights Act, and stronger anti-discrimination protections in the form of the Equality Act.

Today Humanists UK runs dedicated campaigns to advance freedom of thought, freedom of choice, and freedom of expression. The Humanists UK Policy Unit has expertise in a wide range of distinct policy areas relating to this specialism and works to advance humanist ideas about freedom and happiness with support from like-minded organisations and members of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. Like its services and educational work, all of Humanists UK’s campaigning efforts are funded by donations from the general public and in the form of memberships.

Celebrating 130 years with the Unholy Histories podcast

To mark this 130 year anniversary, Humanists UK is thrilled to announce the launch of Unholy Histories, a brand new Humanist Heritage podcast. This series dives deep into the archives to bring to life the stories of the rebels, reformers, and freethinkers who dared to imagine a better world.

For the season premiere, on Heroines of Freethought, Andrew and Madeleine are joined by historian Nan Sloane, author of Uncontrollable Women, and Annie Laurie Gaylor, activist and editor of Women Without Superstition. Together, they cover the extraordinary stories of the suffragists, rationalists, and reformers who built the modern humanist movement, and who faced prosecution and imprisonment for their humanist views, or were otherwise written out of history.

Every episode features two guest experts, including leading historians and authors, alongside Andrew and Madeleine. Upcoming episodes will cover a wide range of topics, including atheism in the ancient world, the origins of the animal rights movement, a history of LGBT+ activism, the humanists who fought for racial equality, and even the overlooked role of humanist writers in the development of sci-fi and fantasy ranging from H.G. Wells to Star Trek.

Follow Unholy Histories now to never miss an episode.

Five years of uncovering humanist history

Since the inception of Humanist Heritage, and later supported by a £160,000 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project has transformed our understanding of the movement’s influence on UK society. From the struggle for civil rights and secular education to the development of the welfare state, the project has mapped the profound impact of humanist thought and action.

Since 2021, the project has generated more than half a million page views across nearly 600 pages. This impact has been strengthened through direct engagement, with the Humanist Heritage Manager delivering 44 visits to local humanist groups, and through significant external support, including £160,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which enabled 25 guided humanist heritage walks, talks, workshops, webinars, an online interactive tour, a public exhibition, and a short animated film aimed at widening public engagement with the project.

A legacy of influence

Beyond public engagement, the project has supported academic research and a range of new publications – co-organising an interdisciplinary conference in 2022, and supporting works from The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain to Through High Windows, a reissue of poetry by suffragist Lilian Sauter. Articles have been published in New Humanist, History Workshop Online, and RE Today, and findings shared at conferences on women’s history, social history, and cremation and burial.

From the outset, the Humanist Heritage project has worked to make sure that the contributions of non-religious people to society are not written out of our national story.