Austin Dacey

Austin Dacey (born April 19, 1972) is an American philosopher, writer, and human rights activist whose work concerns secularism, religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience.

As a young teenager, Dacey became an evangelical Protestant, playing in the Christian alternative rock band, The Swoon, which in 1990 released an EP produced by Charlie Peacock.

While studying music and philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Dacey lost his religion, explaining later that "God stopped returning my calls."

Beginning in 1999, Dacey worked for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a think tank that seeks "to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values."

He opened the New York City branch office of CFI and later served as the organization's representative to the United Nations.

He studied applied ethics and social philosophy at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and was awarded a doctorate in 2002.

In 2005, he debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig over the existence of God.

He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict.

He is a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the creator and director of The Impossible Music Sessions.

Dacey was raised in the rural Midwest by liberal Catholics.

His father Philip Dacey is a poet.

Dacey was a lead organizer of the Secular Islam Summit in March 2007, described by the Wall Street Journal as "a landmark."

The conference issued the St. Petersburg Declaration, a statement of principles endorsed by Mithal al-Alusi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Shahriar Kabir among others.

Reviewing The Secular Conscience for Asharq Al-Awsat, Amir Taheri wrote, "[m]aking this book available in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Muslim nations would be an immense service."

As a representative of civil society organizations at the United Nations, Dacey has participated in lobbying at Human Rights Council in Geneva.

to oppose efforts by some member states to diminish international standards of freedom of expression out of "respect for religions and beliefs."

"The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims," Dacey has commented, "but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."

In defending a universal human right to blaspheme, Dacey has emphasized that it is a matter of freedom of conscience as much as just freedom of speech.

In 2009, Dacey left CFI and published a critique of the secular movement.

In 2010, he created The Impossible Music Sessions, a forum in New York City for censored and persecuted musicians.

He has taught ethics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Dacey has defended a form of secularism emphasizing the values of "individual autonomy, equal rights and freedom of conscience."

Religion News Service dubbed him a member of Atheism 3.0, a designation he contests.

He claims that secularism is not atheistic, but instead that it comes "before God."

Aspects of Dacey's position have been embraced by religious thinkers such as Richard John Neuhaus, Andrew Sullivan, and Rabbi Marc Gellman as well as secular figures such as Sam Harris, Susan Jacoby, Ibn Warraq, and Peter Singer.

In The Secular Conscience, Dacey argues that contemporary secular liberalism has "lost its soul" due to misconceptions he labels the Privacy Fallacy and the Liberty Fallacy.

The Privacy Fallacy lies in thinking that "because matters of conscience are private in the sense of nongovernmental, they are private in the sense of personal preference."

The Liberty Fallacy lies in thinking that "because conscience must be free from coercion, its moral conclusions must also be free from public criticism."

This confused thinking, according to Dacey, leads to "the conclusion that controversial religious and moral claims are beyond evaluation by reason, truth and objective standards of right and wrong, and should therefore be precluded from public conversation."

In place of the "privacy of conscience," Dacey defends a model of the "openness of conscience," comparing conscience to a free press.

It is to be protected from coercion so that it can be free to play an important role in the public sphere and free to follow its own objective standards.

Reasons of conscience are by their nature shareable, not subjective.

Dacey uses the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate the thesis that "any act of faith depends on a prior act of conscience."

By precluding conscience from public debate, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics.

Instead, the "gag order" has prevented secular liberals from subjecting religious claims to "due public scrutiny" and from advancing their own views in robustly moral terms, granting a "monopoly on the language of ethics and values" to the religious on the Right and the Left.

Dacey argues that claims of conscience—including religious claims—cannot be barred from public debate, but that they can and must be held to the same critical conversational standards as all serious contributions to public debate.

While advocating the separation of religion and state, Dacey has suggested that political institutions should be designed to protect the exercise of conscience, not religion as such.

In "Against Religious Freedom", a 2010 article in Dissent co-authored with Colin Koproske, he argues that religious freedom should be regarded as "one manifestation of more fundamental rights held by all people, religious and secular alike: private property, personal autonomy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and perhaps most important, freedom of conscience."

Criticizing the failure of some on the Left in the West to support secular liberal forces in the Arab and Muslim world, Dacey has stressed the importance of religious rationales for secularism.

He has analogized religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries to dissident Protestant sects such as the Anabaptists who constructed theological arguments for toleration and church-state separation in early modern Europe.