In late summer 2023, a TV bulletin appeared around Colorado’s Fremont Correctional Facility inviting people to “Starting Over,” a class about good decision-making and self-betterment. A flier for the class featured a pair of hands holding a young plant in fresh soil.
Feeling duty-bound to better myself, I decided to attend. The location of the class was listed as Multipurpose Room 1. When I entered, I thought I must have made a mistake. The room was filled with rows of pews. Bibles and Bible guides lined the shelves.
Multipurpose Room 1 was the chapel.
By the time I realized, the doors were being locked behind us. For the next 90 minutes, we were a captive audience, forced to listen to proselytizing about our inherent and incurable sinfulness.
The class-issued workbook bore biblical quotes and messaging, including “I know nothing good lives in me” (Romans 7:18) and “I admit that I am powerless.” I’m all for taking personal responsibility, but that seems hard to do if one embraces powerlessness in one’s actions.
The presiding teacher, or maybe he was a pastor, confessed to the class that he had once planned on blowing up a church after the members cast him out.
“Is this an effort at winning street cred?” I wondered. Luckily, he told us, God convinced him otherwise.
Upon leaving the class, I resolved to never return, but I knew others would. Fremont has a history of offering self-improvement programs with undisclosed religious undertones. Over time, I’ve become worried about the impact these programs have on people who are vulnerable to becoming even more guilt- and obedience-driven. So, shortly after attending “Starting Over,” I decided to advocate for an alternative.
I asked two organizations, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the American Humanist Association, a nonprofit educational organization focused on ethical fulfillment, what could be done to help incarcerated people seeking alternatives to religious dogma.
The FFRF sent (and still sends) free copies of its newspaper, Freethought Today, to any prisoner who writes a request. The AHA sent me college information and fliers for discounted membership.
I realized it might be possible to start my own AHA chapter from within the Fremont population. From the conversations I regularly struck up in lines and around common spaces, I already had a base of people to draw from: atheists, agnostics and others who valued the separation of church and state.
I began circulating information. Within a month, I had 10 people ready to sign up and, after a bit of back and forth, the American Humanist Association recognized the secular prisoners at Fremont Correctional as an official branch of the AHA in late 2024. As chapter member Joseph Spector put it, this recognition affirmed his and other incarcerated participants’ right to “practice our unbelief.”
We are now known as the Fremont Humanist Chapter. Since our inception, dozens of prisoners here have signed on, becoming members and receiving literature and educational support. At our peak, we met for over an hour every other day, sitting in couches in the incentive unit, where most of us lived, or at desks in the education department as classes permitted.
Some of that time we spent venting to sympathetic ears about what feels like an oppressive presence of religion in our lives. At other times, we discussed our ethical commitments and how we were overcoming the moral confusion that first brought us to prison. Topics range from toxic masculinity to how to handle post-traumatic stress disorder.
We also welcomed religious believers who wanted to share their opinions. This sometimes made our members tentative, but it was also a source of lively debate and challenging opinions.
The difficulty was, and is, expanding beyond that communal start. I wanted us to be more than a group of free-thinking friends. Before we even got recognition from the AHA, our meetings met all the requirements for receiving religious accommodations. We hold a coherent, sincerely held belief system, our practices pose no threat to facility security, and humanism is, indeed, already recognized by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a religion for accommodation purposes, following an AHA lawsuit in 2016.
Being recognized in this way would mean receiving equal weekly access to a multipurpose room and associated media equipment. It would also allow us to provide more structured programming on topics such as ethics, philosophy and science.
I tried to establish institutional recognition in the way I knew how: by sending kites, which at my facility means writing official notes to departments. I wrote to the religious coordinator but never heard back. Because sending kites involves passing papers via staff, I could never confirm if my inquiries were reaching the correct office.
I also reached out to the AHA, whose lawyers sent me paperwork outlining the principles of humanism and its federal recognition as a legitimate religious option. I shared the information around to Fremont chapter members and kept it on hand for a hypothetical meeting with staff that never came. Understandably, the AHA moved on to other issues.
I’ve come to accept that for an organization to expand, it needs more than one person pushing at the helm and some interested parties at the oars. The lack of institutional recognition eventually meant that other preoccupations, such as work or legal responsibilities, overrode efforts to more clearly establish our impassioned but informal discussion group. It’s difficult to keep the ire up over the drag of prison years while waiting months for a reply. That’s how we lost — the status quo of bureaucratic indifference.
I am not proud I failed. But our mere existence is cause for celebration. As chapter member Eric St. George wrote to me recently when I asked why the AHA chapter mattered to him: “Nearly every world faith contains a core concept that man is somehow damaged or deficient. … The American Humanist Association offers an alternative message. It tells a person they are already enough, and that they are good without God.”
Together, we’ve created a shared language, one that resists the shame and powerlessness imparted by Fremont’s faith-based self-improvement programming. I thank no God for that.
