Why Americans are talking less and less about ‘love’ and ‘kindness’

It’s not often that Roy Speckhardt finds himself going to church to talk about how to make the world a better place.

Yet as a leader in the community of American atheists and humanists, he’s been part of a few interfaith councils, some of which meet in churches near Capitol Hill. He’s even served on boards for groups advocating religious freedom, offering a nontheistic perspective to wide-ranging interreligious dialogues. Still, it took a while, he says, for some of the denominational leaders to get used to his being around.

“When I first entered these circles, the thought was, ‘Oh, should we allow atheists in?’” says Mr. Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association in Washington. “Should we allow people who are nonreligious to be part of this essentially religious community? So there was this hesitation and even trepidation – and especially a gap in knowing each other’s language.”

Participants would refer to themselves as “people of faith,” for example. “But pretty quickly people started changing,” Speckhardt says. “They’d

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