Chuck Bryant

You were all about separation of church and state.

You had compassion for all people, not just men.

people that looked like you and had the same amount of money as you.

You cared about actually doing stuff to get the government to take care of poverty and things like that.

Like Quakers, the conception of Quakers at this time is a really good view of what it meant to be a humanist at the time because you still believed in God, but you really cared about other people.

And this was fairly new for Europe at the time.

Yeah, for sure.

And free thought essentially as a concept is, it's just questioning everything.

Yeah.

Especially received wisdom.

You stop and ask like, well, wait a minute, why do I think that?

How do I know that?

You just challenge all of your own assumptions.

And by doing that, you can kind of free yourself from being indoctrinated by the man, essentially.

So this is when it seems to me the progressive movement in the United States really started to come about.

Right.

This is the mid to late 19th century.

One of the next big things that happened was the establishment of the New York Society for Ethical Culture by a guy named Felix Adler.

And this became essentially the ethical movement.

E and capital E, capital M. And they were basically like the very first.