Greetings. I’m very happy to be a contributor to a blog called “Civil Religion,” which Tim Townsend has defined with help from Rousseau. As a religious humanist, however, I’m not sure what Rousseau would have made of me, as I don’t happen to affirm “the existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Deity” or “the life to come”–but I am passionately concerned with justice, happiness, ethics, and the environment, and what religions can do to promote all these things.

And judging from the recent Pew poll on religious affiliation, I’m not alone. The biggest change in American religious demographics is not that people are switching religions or denominations, but that people are leaving religious organizations altogether. Yet the humanists, agnostics, atheists, and “nothing in particular”ers that I talk to every day are also passionately interested in justice, happiness, ethics, and the environment. (NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” covered religious and secular humanism recently, and their website gives some good resources.)

If any of you are like those in the Pew poll and have given up on religious organizations altogether, or if you never had a religious community in the first place, I’d like to hear your story. Do you consider yourself non-religious? Or are you a religion of one? Where do you find inspiration, ethical values, comfort, community? Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.