What Is A Humanist Ceremony?

During the pandemic, a young woman reached out to me. Her grandmother had died, and she wanted to create a humanist funeral to honour her. I'd heard the word "humanist" before, but if I'm honest, I didn't really understand what it meant.

So I dove in. I connected with the BC Humanist Association and Humanist Canada, and started talking to people about what humanism actually meant to them — not the dictionary definition, but the lived version. Together with Christina Andreola of New Narrative Memorials, we built a humanist-inspired celebration of life for the grandmother, with rituals unique to her woven throughout the ceremony.

It was beautiful, and it got me thinking: if I didn't know much about humanism, I'd bet most people don't either.

I get asked all the time: what actually makes a ceremony "humanist"? People assume it means a ceremony without religion (the same structure, minus the god part). But that's not quite it. A humanist ceremony isn't religion with something missing; it's built from a completely different starting point.

The short answer

A humanist ceremony is built entirely around meaning and relationships, without mention of the supernatural. No deity is invoked, no script is required. Instead, the ceremony draws its authority from the people actually standing in the room: their values, their history, their stories.

That might sound simple, but it changes everything about how a ceremony gets built. There's no template handed down from an institution. Every element (the words, the symbols, the order of things) has to be chosen on purpose, because it means something to these people, in this moment. That's the work, and it's also the gift of a humanist ceremony.

Why "humanist" and not just "secular"

People often use "secular ceremony" and "humanist ceremony" interchangeably, but I'd push back on that a little. A secular ceremony just means non-religious — it tells you what's absent. Humanist tells you what's present.

• A secular wedding might simply remove references to God from a standard religious script.
• A humanist wedding is built from the ground up around the couple's actual values, chosen symbols, and the community's role in witnessing and supporting the relationship going forward.

The same distinction shows up when you compare humanism to other secular philosophies people sometimes reach for instead:

• Stoicism gives people a powerful framework for managing their inner life, but it's not really built for shared ritual; it's a discipline of the individual mind. It doesn't offer much guidance for how to gather a room of people around a loss or a milestone.
• Existentialism tends to locate meaning-making in the solitary self, which can actually work against ceremony, as it is often a communal act.
• Atheism answers a belief question, not a gathering question. It's not a framework for ceremony, it's focused on the absence of religious belief.

Humanism is the one of these that actually gives you something to build with: a belief that people are capable of creating real meaning together, on purpose, without a supernatural authority backing it up. That's what makes it ceremony-ready in a way the others aren't.

Why we need ceremony

Here's what I keep realizing ~ people know what they don't want. They come to me with a clear list of everything they're trying to avoid — usually baggage from religious or cultural traditions that didn't fit them. But when I ask them what they do want, most people draw a blank. Ritual has been so tightly bound up with religion for so long that a lot of us don't even know how to picture a version of it that's separate — secular, personal, and still meaningful. People leaving religion don't lose the need to mark their lives. They lose the container that used to do it for them, and nobody's handed them a new one.

That gap is widening. You don't need a survey to see it — just look around at how many people you know who'd call themselves "not religious". A lot of those people are left standing in what I call a ceremony-shaped hole. The wedding, the funeral, the baby naming, the divorce, the diagnosis, the retirement ~ the milestones are still happening, just without a script or sense of what to do.

What happens in your body during a ceremony

This isn't just poetic. Researchers have started measuring what ritual does in the body, humanist or otherwise. In a 2020 study in Mauritius, people who performed a familiar ritual after a stressful task showed bigger drops in both reported anxiety and physiological stress (measured through heart rate variability) than people who simply sat and relaxed. And it isn't only traditional or religious ritual that helps: in a 2017 study, people who practised a simple, made-up ritual for a week showed a dampened brain response to their own mistakes. Ritual seems to give us a felt sense of structure when life feels like it's come apart.

I've seen this play out in real time. I once convened a community ritual for over 700 people at Vancouver's Butterfly Run, held in honour of pregnancy loss and stillbirth. Up until a certain point, the gathering felt disjointed — a park full of strangers who all knew they were there for similar reasons, but who didn't yet feel like a community. Then I had everyone hold a beach stone, close their eyes, and think about what they were holding in connection to their loss. That single shared action, everyone doing the same small thing at the same moment, transformed the group. People started breathing in unison. They moved closer together. When they opened their eyes, they saw each other differently — there were tears, smiles, hugs, movement. In that one ritual moment, we became a community of care.

A humanist ceremony isn't just emotionally meaningful. It's doing real work on your nervous system — the same work ritual has always done for humans, just without requiring belief in something beyond us to get there.

Why I wrote Ritual Without Religion

I decided to write this book after attending several humanist community events and realizing how many humanists were living with that exact ceremony-shaped hole — and didn't know how to fill it. I wanted to give people a framework to begin, and stories to inspire them with ideas. Not prescriptive rituals to copy, but descriptive ones: examples that offer a place to start, so people could reimagine what ritual means to them through a secular lens.

That's the gap Ritual Without Religion: A Humanist Guide to Creating Secular Ceremonies is built to close. It's not a book of scripts to copy — it's a method for building your own: how to choose symbols that actually mean something, how to structure a ceremony so it holds emotional weight, how to invite a community to witness rather than just attend.

If you've ever needed to mark something real and didn't know where to start without borrowing language from a faith you don't hold, that's exactly what a humanist ceremony — and this book — is for.

My hope is that you'll read it, share it with someone who needs it, and then start small. Don't fret about getting it "right" or making it "work." Building our ritual muscles starts with trying — small, everyday acts of awareness and intention as we move through times of change. The book is just a place to start. What you do with it, in your own life and your own community, is up to you.

You can find Ritual Without Religion: A Humanist Guide to Creating Secular Ceremonies here. And if you'd like support creating a humanist ceremony of your own, we offer celebrant services and ceremony coaching, or you can start designing your own in the Be Ceremonial app.