A Word on Humanitarianism
Near the conclusion of his 2025 Touchstone conference talk, Matthew Crawford said that “the humanitarian focuses on suffering because the existence of suffering is thought to impugn God’s rule. This animus against God is the real source of the animus against hierarchy.”
While most readers today might regard this as a bit of a stretch, it would have been a case of stating the obvious to those who coined and promoted humanitarianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The following image comes from the 1929 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (an 1889 entry in The New Century Dictionary is essentially identical):
A parallel entry appears in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910–1911):
HUMANITARIANS, a term applied (1) to a school of theologians who repudiate the doctrine of the Trinity and hold an extreme view of the person of Christ as simply human. The adoption of this position by men like NathanielLardner, Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey in the middle of the 18th century led to the establishment of the first definitely organized Unitarian churches in England. (2) It is also applied to those who believe in the perfectibility of man apart fromsuperhuman aid, especially those who follow the teaching of Pierre Leroux (q.v.). The name is also sometimes given to the Positivists, and in a more general sense, to persons whose chief principle of action is the desire to preserve others from pain and discomfort.
John Dewey was the most prominent of the 34 academics, journalists, philosophers, and Unitarians who signed the Humanist Manifesto in 1933. This document asserted among its fifteen points that the universe and mankind were uncreated, that human values have no supernatural foundation, and that “the time has passed” for Christian beliefs and the values flowing from them. The signatories hoped to establish a new morality on secular terms, where “a good humanitarian man” could stand alone and supplant what they saw as the oxymoronic “good Christian man.”
By the time Webster’s published its Third New International Dictionary in 1961 (known as “W3” to dictionary enthusiasts), the transformation of the term “humanitarianism” was complete. A humanitarian was now defined simply as one devoted to promoting human welfare. A human who is for humans—it really is a ridiculous word when one stops and thinks about it.
The beliefs upon which the word was coined and which were reflected in the definition only three decades earlier—denial of Christ’s divinity and belief in the perfectibility of man apart from grace—were stricken from the newer lexicon:
Today we rarely hear anyone referred to as “a humanitarian.” Instead the word is usually used as an adjective to denote great human suffering, as in the expression “a great humanitarian crisis.” Yet even in this modern usage, the original animus—the focus on suffering as evidence against a just or sovereign God—still lingers just beneath the surface.
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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