Fish Stark was appointed the Executive Director of the American Humanist Association in September 2024.
This article is excerpted from his Welcome remarks at the American Humanist Association’s 2024 Conference in September.
LET’S GET THIS out of the way early: Fish is not my given name.
My father, Fortney Hillman Stark Jr., rarely used his given name either. Most folks in the humanist and secular movements know him as Pete Stark—the first open atheist in Congress. That was how his family and friends knew him, too. He occasionally went by Fortney when he was younger, giving rise to a hilarious incident where a tongue-tied news anchor introduced him as “local banker, Fartney Stork.”
But when I was born, it was decided that I would be named Fortney Hillman Stark III. For understandable reasons, I was not consulted at the time.
I developed an opinion on the matter several years later, when it became clear that the name “Fortney” was a very challenging name to have as a boy in the first grade.
And not just any boy. I was a feminine little boy who was bad at sports, wore tortoise-shell glasses, and was always sneaking a copy of a Baby-Sitters’ Club book under my desk.
“Fortney”—two letters off from the girl’s name, “Courtney”—just added fuel to the fire. It was an excellent target, proof positive I was a sissy and worse.
As I judged it, I had two options: change my name, or learn to fight.
And in the Stark family, you could be anything you wanted to be—even religious, though this was not encouraged—as long as you were a pacifist.
So I set about looking for a new name for myself. I flipped over a dot-to-dot I was working on, and wrote down my initials: F, H, S.
To me, that looked a lot like “Fish”—which sounded hip, cool, and edgy. I was quite certain (mistakenly) that a boy named Fish would not get bullied.
My parents, teachers, and friends weren’t quite sure why I wanted to be called Fish, or how long it would last. Nevertheless, I persisted. To me, it fit perfectly, like a pair of brand-new sneakers, and Fortney fit like when I would try on my dad’s neckties—loose and droopy and silly. I felt more like myself; more confident and proud. Since then, everyone—from bosses to grandparents—has called me Fish.
I’ve done a lot of work with youth over the course of my career, and I like to tell this story to them not because I think more people should change their names—but to remind them that there are a lot of things in the world that we don’t get to choose, but we always get to choose what we believe and how we define ourselves.
We’re the people who get to write our own stories. We can’t control a lot of things, but we can control who we are and how we show up.
To me, the fundamental ethic of humanism is about freedom and self-determination for all people. Yes, we live in a world shaped by forces beyond us, but also we have the fundamental right to decide what we believe, how we live our lives, with ethics, reason, and compassion as our guide.
Humanists want to increase that freedom—equal access to that freedom—for all people.
When I was in college, I read and was inspired by the luminary humanist John Dewey, who popularized not just the idea of secular public schools, but of a kind of a public education that was about helping people build the skills to live and participate in a free and democratic society. To prepare young people not just to be good workers in industry, but to think critically about the issues of the day, to challenge one another, to construct knowledge rather than consume it.
His belief was that, through learning through dialogue and exchange with others, children would not just learn more effectively—but be able to make better use of that knowledge; that through the process of reasoning and talking things out rather than memorization, we’d learn how to generate new ideas and apply them to solve problems in a free society.
The idea that rationalism is the source of empirical truth, empathy is the source of moral truth, and we learn these things from engaging deeply with one another and with the world – not turning to an authority or looking at something written thousands of years ago – is what brings us together.
And it’s allowed us to do some pretty incredible things. For decades, humanism has moved America forward. If we look at the ideas, the movements, the innovations that have increased human dignity and flourishing – from reproductive freedom to personal computing, from popular science to the March on Washington, from women’s liberation to the COVID vaccine – humanism has been the spark that lit the flame.
That’s because we’ve always been unafraid to push the boundaries of the possible. Rather than constantly reaching back into the past for answers, we look towards what could be, and rather than trying to shrink the circle of who counts and who matters, we always look to grow it.
I’ve spent much of my career working in what I’d call “applied humanism.” After studying child development at Yale, where I was a member of the student humanist group led by humanist chaplain Chris Stedman, and trained to be a preschool teacher, I worked in programs that helped low-income high school students apply to college, then was Director of Programs for a global nonprofit that trained and funded youth peace and democracy activists—young people from Nepal to Nigeria working to make their communities safer, fairer, and more inclusive.
I went back to graduate school at Harvard for a deeper dive into child development, looking further into how we develop our moral and political beliefs. And I spent several years helping build a successful tech startup, creating apps that helped children develop positive mental health.
In everything I do, I try to ask the question: How can we help people feel capable, purposeful, and confident? And once that’s done, how can we help guide them to repair the world?
I’m proud to be joining the AHA in this particular moment in our country, because we need humanism more than ever.
As we drift apart in profound ways, and people become more isolated and alone, we need something that can bring people together.
My generation is growing up less religious than ever before, but more starved for meaning, purpose, and community. And humanism can provide that community, common identity, and sense of purpose.
And we’re also in a moment where we need to provide an important counterweight to the people who say that we don’t need more freedom, that the problem is that people have too much freedom to decide what they believe and how to live their lives, that we need to reach deeper and more fervently into the past. That rather than giving people the tools to write a better future, we need to put things back the way they were. We need to stand up for the freedom of conscience in the face of those who would like to undermine it.
I think that this job, when done well, is much less about being an oracle with all the answers and more like being a symphony conductor who’s able to synthesize the contributions of an ensemble into something beautiful. One thing I’ve enjoyed about my first few weeks is going on the road, meeting and listening to many of you.
One thing I’ve heard very clearly from many of you is that we want to talk much more about what we do believe than what we don’t believe. Certainly, as humanists, the supernatural is not something that is on our minds or driving our values. But humanism isn’t just about being not religious. It’s about our shared core principles that give us common cause, and that we work to make real in the world.
And these young people who are coming up less religious than ever are deeply aligned with our values—freedom and self-determination for all, respecting people’s equal worth and dignity, taking care of each other.
We’ve got a lot of people who are humanist and don’t know it yet, and one thing I’ve heard from you really clearly is that we need to find these people, communicate with them directly and on their terms, and make sure they know humanism is for them, and that it’s fun here.
Because at the end of the day, we believe in people. Whether they’re moms of five or childless cat ladies, tenth generation Americans or Haitian immigrants, football coaches or couch potatoes. We believe people are valuable, they’re capable, they don’t need saving but are worth serving.
When we say “The Future Is Humanist,” it’s a declaration of hope, a belief that we can shape a future that reflects our principles. But it only happens if we’re working together to shape it, raising our voices to protect the things that make it possible, contributing part of the tapestry of ideas and service and good works and community building that makes it possible to bring more people in. It only happens if we’re shouting our humanism as loud as we can, and living it fully.
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