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Believe in Man? Potter quit his Unitarian pulpit the same year. All his life, he decided, had been a "conflict between the preacher and me . . . the Fundamentalist boy-preacher they had made of me at 17," and the Potter he knew had "always been a layman at heart." He tried a year as executive secretary of Antioch College, then another as lecturer for the National Association of Book Publishers. But in 1927, the preacher in him won a round, and he became pastor of the Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity on Manhattan's upper West Side. The Potter brand of religious radicalism, however, was too much for the Universalists. In 1929, he resigned and formed the First Humanist Society of New York.
Humanism is, in effect, a stab at having a religion without a God. "The universe is self-existing, not created. Man is part of nature, product of his social heritage, culture and environment . . . and religion is deemed to consist of 'those actions, purposes and experiences which are humanly significant.' "
Today, with a few sidelines such as extrasensory perception and campaigns against capital punishment and in favor of euthanasia, Humanist Potter is as strong for his new creed as ever. Humanism now has some 40,000 adherents, he claims. There have been a few setbacks, he admits, such as "much publicized 'conversions' " to the Roman Catholic Church and the neo-orthodox movement in Protestantism. But he is sure the long-term trend is going his way.
"The great question in religion has been, during my lifetime and back of that for several thousand years—do you believe in God? The great question of future religion will be—do you believe in man?"