I don’t think anything quite so cleanly captures the new direction of the Church as the  photo above. The shift from ornate robes and traditional throne seat to Francis’s white papal robes and an unelevated, plain chair—the same chairs on the same level as given to his guests—is extraordinarily stark and compelling.

His shift to a more reserved and austere church—from denying Vatican employee their bonuses to insisting that Christians be for the poor, rather than politely discussing theology over tea ¹—honestly surpasses anything I could have hoped or expected.

It seems clear that Francis is shifting his focus to the secular world, specifically to alleviating poverty and doing good works here on Earth. This is almost the picturesque example of “common ground” ² that believers can find with atheists. I often hear atheists questioning whether they’re even welcome to work with believers, and I think it’s an issue seriously worth addressing.

Pope Francis, though, has fortunately made his acceptance and, if I might be slightly bold, esteem towards nonbelievers clear. At a recent Mass, Pope Francis said the following:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

I’ll happily agree. We may not actually be redeemed by the blood of Christ, but we’re all united around our shared commitment to making the world a better place.

I often find it distressingly narrow when atheists deny any wisdom just because it comes from a religious source. I’m happy to accept that I should focus more on moral action instead of abstract discussion, even if Francis framed this in discussing churches and theology. And I’m happy to recognize that everyone—believer or atheist—is united in doing good on this Earth, even if Francis believes this comes from our shared redemption in Jesus.

We will miss the forest for the trees if we let ourselves be distracted by such petty theological differences. If there’s one thing believers and nonbelievers can share, it’s an understanding that there’s action we need to take to help other people. Props to Pope Francis for pointing that out.

EDIT: Right after I published this, I saw that Kimberly Winston wrote for Religion News Service about atheists liking Pope Francis. Check it out. 

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

For nearly five years, I’ve worked at the Humanist Community at Harvard doing what many would call “atheist activism.” I’ve been behind the scenes supporting a lot of great leaders and thinkers and helping to spread their messages of reason, progress, and pluralism to people around the world. But I’ve learned that, at the end of the day, what I’ve helped create is a network of people who turn to each other not only for shared philosophy, but for comfort and connection.

In April of this year, the city of Boston was rattled by a terrible tragedy. Many were injured or killed at the marathon, including two women who are like family to me. A week or so later, I was in a major car crash that sent me to the hospital and my car to the junkyard.

I was overcome with gratitude for the outpouring of support from Humanists here in Cambridge and all over the country. I received calls, emails, donations, and more from so many people after the marathon, helping raise more than a million dollars for my loved ones’ medical bills. My friend Molly Fazio, who has been coming to HCH since 2010 and is an active volunteer, was one of the first people to reach out to me in the aftermath of the marathon, telling me she had already sent in a donation. Two leaders from Tufts University’s Freethought group came by my office with a handwritten card the next day.

And after my accident, I couldn’t believe how many people rallied around me a second time with more calls, more visits, and more support.  Emails poured in from friends and volunteers — Tony DeBono, Judah Axe, Llaen Coston-Clark, writer Mary Johnson, and so many more — and from other secular group leaders like Ellery Schempp and Todd Stiefel, not to mention my fantastic staff here at HCH.

It was amazing just how far a vase of flowers or a note in an email could go when I working so hard to mend. Mostly, I was reminded: I’m not alone.

HCH is an organization with a mission: to build a strong community of atheists, agnostics, Humanists, and the nonreligious at Harvard University and beyond, and to do so by addressing the philosophical and pastoral needs of those who come to our events and those who share our resources worldwide.

After many years, we’ve finally found a community center that will help us bring people together better than we ever have before. Our dream is to have a big event space to hold weekly Sunday meetings, classrooms for children and adults, conference rooms for podcasts that reach around the world, a meditation space, and offices for our staff and chaplains.

But that’s not all. This new space will be a home for more than HCH — we’re partnering with local Humanist/atheist groups so we can all come together under one roof and offer an even broader range of programs and resources.

 But we need your help to make it happen!

Our new space is 2,700 square feet and located right in Harvard Square. But it needs some major construction, paint, repairs, and furniture to best serve the needs of our diverse community and make our dream a reality.

If you feel how I do, if this community is your home, or if you support secular communities and want to share in the resources we create here, I urge you to make a financial contribution toward helping to realize our highest shared aspirations.

We are a 501(c)3 organization and all of our funding comes from donations from people like you who support our vision.

Sarah Chandonnet is the Outreach and Development Manager at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and has been a member of the HCH team since 2009. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School (’09), she holds an MTS in Religion, Literature, and Culture. While at Harvard, she served as the editor-in-chief of Culture: The Harvard Divinity Graduate Journal of Religion, and as the vice president of the Harvard Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists (HASH). She also holds a BA (English, ’07) from Boston University, where she studied under Elie Wiesel. Sarah’s academic interests include 19th and 20th century American literature, and Judeo-Christian textual influences. She has written for Boston University’s Daily Free Press and The Journal of the Core Curriculum, as well as Harvard Divinity School’s The Wick, and the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Network News.

In terms of movement strategy and critical humanism, Hutchinson has exposed and explored several ways in which the contemporary face of secularism is shortsighted–particularly with regard to intersectionality and privilege. In a piece I wrote for HuffPo a few months back on class and the new atheist/humanist movement, I quoted Hutchinson from her essay “Prayer Warriors and Freethinkers”, expressing a truth still (perhaps especially) relevant today: “If mainstream freethought and humanism continue to reflect the narrow cultural interests of white elites who have disposable income to go to conferences then the secular movement is destined to remain marginal and insular.”

In the striking passage below from the introduction to her newest essay collection Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, published by Infidel Books, Hutchinson embarks on a critical exploration into how humanism can be applied to a world marred by structural racial inequality and colorism. You can purchase Godless Americana at Amazon.com.

Over the past several years, the Right has spun the fantasy of colorblind, post-racial, post-feminist American exceptionalism.  This Orwellian narrative anchors the most blistering conservative assault on secularism, civil rights, and public education in the post-Vietnam War era.  It is no accident that this assault has occurred in an era in which whites have over twenty times the wealth of African Americans.[i]  For many communities of color, victimized by a rabidly Religious Right, neo-liberal agenda, the American dream has never been more of a nightmare than it is now.  Godless Americana is a radical humanist analysis of this climate.  It provides a vision of secular social justice that challenges Eurocentric traditions of race, gender, and class-neutral secularism.  For a small but growing number of non-believers of color, humanism and secularism are inextricably linked to the broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, economic injustice, and global imperialism.  Godless Americana critiques these titanic rifts and the role white Christian nationalism plays in the demonization of urban communities of color…

In the post-Civil and Voting Rights Acts era of so-called equal opportunity under the law, residential segregation has only intensified.  Martin Luther King Jr.’s widely caricatured vision of little black and white kids holding hands is the stuff of Hallmark cards, PC liberal arts college brochures, and smarmy GOP propaganda.  American K-12 schools are distant galaxies separated by inner city (i.e., black, Latino and “deprived”) or suburban (i.e., white and privileged), and “diversity” has become quick and dirty shorthand for smacking down uppity Negroes who want to talk institutional racism. It’s for this reason that the social capital of black believers and non-believers is closely intertwined—why black people, the most staunchly Christian group in America, can live in a Christian Nation and still be reviled as the heathen other. And it is for this reason that religious and secular whites are bonded by economic privilege, by homes and neighborhoods that have higher property values than that of the average person of color, and by the security of a police state that is designed to protect them.  For example, discriminatory lending practices such as those employed by former mortgage giant Countrywide make residential mobility elusive for people of color. Despite the fantasy of unlimited post-racial access and mobility, a U.S. 2010 report entitled “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians” concluded that residential segregation is even more intractable now than two decades ago. Indeed “as black-white segregation has slowly declined since 1990, blacks have become less isolated from Hispanics and Asians, but their exposure to whites has hardly changed. Affluent blacks have only marginally higher contact with whites than do poor blacks.”[ii] Hence, blacks and Latinos of all income levels generally live in black and Latino neighborhoods. Most tellingly, “The average affluent black or Hispanic household lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average low-income white resident.”[iii]

If higher-income people of color are not able to buy homes in white enclaves and escape the “ghetto,” what does this say about the nature of black and Latino social capital? About the white conservative lie that Newt Gingrich’s mythical poor neighborhoods are cesspits for the lazy and shiftless? Because of the mobility gap, communities of color are more likely to be economically depressed and heavily transit-dependent. Transit-dependency means isolation. It means less access to living-wage jobs, quality schools, affordable housing, and park space—resources that have been deemed privileges, not rights, in the world’s greatest democracy. Small wonder then that some of our youth, like Women’s Leadership Project twelfth-grader Victory Yates, view their churches as a lifeline. Even though her faith in God has wavered due to the hardship she’s experienced as a former foster care youth, her church is one of the few safe spaces in a neighborhood where young girls are routinely accosted by would-be pimps on the street. In our conversations about faith, she expresses curiosity about agnosticism and frustration with the so-called therapeutic power of prayer. Naturally inquisitive, she’s begun to make the first tentative steps toward investigating the truth claims of religion.

In the absence of community-based institutions that offer cultural reinforcement, social welfare, and fellowship, what does humanism have to offer poor and working-class communities of color?

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. She is the founder of Black Skeptics in Los Angeles and a senior fellow at the Institute for Humanist Studies. Learn more on her website at sikivuhutchinson.com.

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Walker Bristol is a nontheist Quaker living in Somerville, Massachusetts. A rising senior at Tufts University reading religion and philosophy, he covers social activism and class inequality in the Tufts Daily and has worked in on-campus movements promoting religious diversity, sexual assault awareness and prevention, and worker’s rights. Formerly, he was the Communications Coordinator at Foundation Beyond Belief and  the president of the Tufts Freethought Society. He tweets at @WalkerBristol.