Eslanda Goode Robeson at the San Francisco Conference, 1945. Credit: UN Photo/McLain Humanists helped build the United Nations, argued over its direction for decades, and still speak up at it today. On UN Day, we look back through our archive at the part humanists have played. On 24 October 1945, the Charter of the United Nations came into force. Its opening words, ‘We the peoples of the United Nations’, set out an organisation meant to serve people everywhere, not just the governments that signed it. Humanists were among those who helped shape it and its agencies. For United Nations Day, we’ve gone back over 80 years of humanist magazines and newsletters, now held in the New Humanist archive, to find out how humanists helped build the UN, how they pushed it to do better, and how Humanists UK carries that work on today. 1942: ‘Not a word about Christianity’ The name ‘United Nations’ was first used during the Second World War, for the Allies fighting the Axis powers. In 1942, Britain’s ambassadors to the United States and Spain, Lord Halifax and Sir Samuel Hoare, framed the Allies’ cause in terms of ‘Christian civilisation’ and ‘Christian brotherhood’. When MPs challenged this in the House of Commons that October, the Foreign Office defended it. The President of the Rationalist Press Association, Surgeon Rear-Admiral Charles Beadnell, wrote to the minister, Richard Law, to object. The ideals of the United Nations, he argued, were shared by people of every religion and none. Calling them
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