HUMANIST HOLIDAY CAMPAIGN SPEECH

Jan Meshon, President and Founder of FreeThoughtAction     

Good morning. I’m Jan Meshon, president and founder of FreeThoughtAction, an adjunct of the American Humanist Association (AHA). FreeThoughtAction (FTA) uses traditional marketing and modern communications to raise the visibility and acceptance of the large and growing freethought community throughout the United States. I am thrilled to be here today to help launch the American Humanist Association’s new advertising campaign on Washington D.C. buses.

Throughout this year, FreeThoughtAction has been running a grassroots billboard campaign in locations around the country under our name and under the names of various local and national coalitions. I’m proud to say that our campaign has helped inspire efforts by other groups, including the one by the AHA we’re here to unveil.

To give some background, after 9/11, I thought it important to do my small part to try to move America in a more rational direction, if for no other reason than, as a resident of downtown Manhattan, self-preservation. As I conducted research and sought out other likeminded people, I found a dirty little secret: at a time when ultra-religious groups were touting their increased numbers the opposite was actually happening. The number of nonreligious Americans was growing by leaps and bounds and was quickly rising as a percentage of Americans. With that in mind, the place to start seemed to be a message of support to those who already shared our point of view.

During January of this year we officially launched FTA with a billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike just outside of New York City near the Meadowlands Sports Complex. It was a simple billboard with a positive but provocative message. It had a beautiful blue sky, some white fluffy clouds and just a few words: “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

My colleague, Joseph Stewart, and I put the ad up with the help of the American Humanist Association and a few generous donors, hoping it would start some conversations and begin some ripples. Its success has exceeded our wildest dreams.

The first billboard generated a few news stories, including on the front page of the Bergen Record, the large suburban newspaper in that area. It was also the lead story on their web site. Dozens of blogs covered it. We received hundreds of e-mails from around the country, almost all of them in support of the ad. People told us how proud they were to see their point of view so publicly displayed. Contributions came in from around the country. At this point people from more than half the states have chipped in to support more billboards.

The second billboard had even more impact. Several established freethought groups in Philadelphia came together to form PhillyCoR, the Greater Philadelphia Coalition of Reason. Groups that existed under various nontheistic terms like “atheist,” “freethought,” “humanist” and “secular” pulled together to run the ad jointly under a common name. This time the billboard flew high above I-95 just north of Philly’s center city.

The Philly ad was covered in many of the local city and suburban papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was the lead story on the Philly.com web site where over 70% of 10,000 participants in an online poll said they don’t believe in God. It was also covered on local news and talk radio and a hilarious report on Fox News Channel wherein they gave it the old “fair and balanced” treatment. Watching the Fox story you would be led to believe that God-fearing Philadelphians had gathered with pitchforks and torches demanding that the billboard be taken down. Truth is, aside from a dozen or so e-mails and phone calls, of varying sincerity and friendliness, warning us of spending eternity in hell, there was much discussion but little negativity. On the other hand, it inspired hundreds of fellow freethinkers to call, write, donate, come to a meeting or join one of the local participating groups.

Since then, the billboard has appeared in Los Angeles and Kansas City and is about to go up on several boards in the Denver and Colorado Springs areas in association with COCORE, the Colorado Coalition of Reason. Meanwhile, plans are being put together to launch a united national coalition under which to do joint promotion in many more markets in 2009.

People are ready for these messages. For all the attention paid to those promoting God in this country, slowly but surely, year by year, generation by generation, religion is losing its grip. During the 1990’s, for instance, the number of Americans who are not religious doubled while the number of Americans who are religious stayed flat. As of 2001, nonreligious Americans outnumbered Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Jehovah’s Witnesses combined.

As you’ve seen, a lot of people have simultaneously begun speaking up more and more.
There are our billboards as well as billboards and print ads by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. There are popular books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. There is Bill Maher’s film Religulous. Whether it’s because of 9/11, overreaching by the religious right, or just plain because it’s 2008 and it’s just time already to move forward together, a lot of freethinkers are taking this moment to say “hey, we live here too.”

And now we have this important and highly visible ad campaign from the American Humanist Association, an organization which is focused on positive nontheism and community, making the important point that morality isn’t tied to religion. We don’t claim to be any better than our religious friends and neighbors, but we certainly are no worse. There is a wealth of evidence to back that up. While undoubtedly there will be some people who won’t like seeing their view of a God-centered world challenged in public, many of the tens of millions of good Americans who manage to “be good for goodness’ sake” without a belief in God will be overjoyed to see their point of view represented so well here in the nation’s capital.