Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK – Details, episodes & analysis

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Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK

Humanise Live

History

Society & Culture

Education

Frequency: 1 episode/9d. Total Eps: 13

Join Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall—alongside a host of expert guests—as they uncover the hidden histories and untold stories of the people, places, movements, ideas, and events that helped shape British humanism, secularism and freethought.

From radical reformers to forgotten dissenters, Unholy Histories explores how reason, skepticism, science, and activism helped build modern Britain—and how these values still shape our society today.

Unholy Histories is a Humanists UK Podcast, showcasing the Humanist Heritage Project and produced by Humanise Live.

Find out more: https://heritage.humanists.uk/

Support us at: https://humanists.uk/support-us/
Start your podcast: https://humanise.live/

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Apple Podcasts

🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
01/08/2026
#97
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
30/07/2026
#85
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
29/07/2026
#64
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
28/07/2026
#55
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
27/07/2026
#45
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
26/07/2026
#36
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
25/07/2026
#60
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
24/06/2026
#89
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
23/06/2026
#71
🇬🇧 Great Britain - history
22/06/2026
#90

Spotify

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https://heritage.humanists.uk/
14 shares
https://www.humanise.live/
13 shares

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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 83%

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Introducing Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK

Season 1

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 • Duration 02:21

Unholy Histories is the new Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK and inspired by the research of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Join Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall as they uncover the rebels, reformers, and freethinkers who shaped a more open and compassionate Britain.

The first episodes go live very soon. Subscribe now via your preferred podcast app to be notified the moment new episodes are released.

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Discover more Humanist Heritage: heritage.humanists.uk

Send us your questions or feedback: Unholy@Humanise.Live

Unholy Histories is produced by Humanise Live a production agency creating values-led podcast content. Start podcasting today at humanise.live

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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Born of Mary: LGBT+ Rights & Humanism Shared Fight for Freedoms

Season 1 · Episode 4

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 • Duration 57:57

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Throughout modern British history, the movements for sexual freedom and freedom of belief have often converged, challenging moral orthodoxy and religious authority in the name of human dignity. This episode traces how humanism and LGBT activism have evolved side by side, and what that shared legacy means today.

Guests:

Lesley Hall, historian and retired archivist, specialising in sexuality and gender in 19th and 20th century Britain. Author of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880.
Peter Parker, cultural historian and biographer, author of Some Men in London: Queer Life, (Vol 1) 1945–1959 & (Vol 2) 1960-1967

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Good Without God: The Fight for Secular Education

Season 1 · Episode 3

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 • Duration 50:58

Education has always been central to humanist thought, from the founding of the Moral Instruction League in 1897 to Margaret Knight's scandalous 1955 BBC broadcasts on raising children without religion. This episode traces the long humanist tradition of moral and civic education in Britain, and asks how children form their identities and worldviews in an increasingly non-religious society.

Guests:

Dr Lois Lee, senior lecturer in secular studies at the University of Kent, whose research examines contemporary forms of non-religiosity and the formation of humanism in childhood. explainingatheism.org
Dr Susannah Wright, associate professor in the history of education at Oxford Brookes, whose work focuses on secularism, war and peace in the history of British education. brookes.ac.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Atheists Before the Enlightenment: Doubters Before the Age of Reason

Season 1 · Episode 2

Wednesday, May 6, 2026 • Duration 49:02

Many people assume humanism began with the Enlightenment. But sceptical, rational, human-centred ideas have a much longer history. This episode travels back to the centuries before the so-called Age of Reason to meet the freethinkers, doubters, and proto-humanists who challenged religious orthodoxy when doing so could mean prison, exile, or death, and asks what their courage tells us about the slow erosion of religious certainty.

Guests:

Professor Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience. https://www.bbk.ac.uk/about-us/fellows/michael-hunter
Dr Patrick McGhee, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University. https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/patrick-mcghee

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

The First Atheists: How Ancient Greece Questioned the Gods and Influenced Modern Thought

Season 1 · Episode 7

Wednesday, June 10, 2026 • Duration 49:18

Long before the Enlightenment, ancient thinkers were already questioning the gods. In the Greek world of the seventh to fifth centuries BCE, medicine, weather and the natural world began to be explained without divine intervention. Philosophers asked whether the gods existed at all, whether ethics could rest on human reason alone, and whether a meaningful life required belief in an afterlife. The answers they gave — Epicurus on the consolations of mortality, Protagoras on the limits of knowledge, Lucretius on a universe of atoms — would echo through European thought for the next two thousand years, surface again in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and shape the British humanist movement in ways that are often forgotten. This episode goes back to the ancient world to recover the first humanists, and traces how their ideas reached the radicals, ethical societies, and classical scholars who built modern British humanism.

Guests:

Professor Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689–1939 and Aristotle's Way. /edithhall.co.uk

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and author of Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. classics.cam.ac.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Discover more Humanist Heritage: heritage.humanists.uk

Send us your questions or feedback: Unholy@Humanise.Live
Unholy Histories is produced by Humanise Live a production agency creating values-led podcast content. Start podcasting today at

Britain's Most Secular Parliament and the Battle That Built It

Season 1 · Episode 6

Wednesday, June 3, 2026 • Duration 42:20

In 1880 a newly elected MP walked into the House of Commons and refused to swear an oath to God. Parliament refused to let him take his seat. He was re-elected four times. The standoff lasted six years. Charles Bradlaugh's fight ended with the Oaths Act of 1888, a turning point in the recognition of non-religious conscience in British public life. This episode traces that struggle from Bradlaugh's Northampton victory to the 2024 General Election, the most secular Westminster has ever returned, and asks how much religious privilege still shapes power in Britain today.

Guests:

Professor David Nash, historian of secularism and freethought and co-author of The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists (Bloomsbury, 2023). jesus.ox.ac.uk

Lizzi Collinge, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. lizzicollinge.com

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Who Really Wrote Human Rights? The Humanist Roots of the UDHR

Season 1 · Episode 5

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 51:06

In the aftermath of two world wars, a new vision for humanity began to take shape, one grounded in shared dignity, freedom, and cooperation across borders. At the heart of that vision were humanist thinkers, from H.G. Wells, whose Rights of Man helped inspire the movement, to Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO. This episode traces the ideas that shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asks why it still matters, and considers what challenges lie ahead for the universal ideals it enshrines.

Guests:

Bill Cooke, historian, senior editor of Free Inquiry, and author of A Wealth of Insights: Humanist Thought Since the Enlightenment and H.G. Wells and the Twenty-First Century. secularhumanism.org/authors/cooke-bill/
Francesca Klug, human rights scholar and writer, visiting professor at the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and author of Values for a Godless Age and A Magna Carta for All Humanity. lse.ac.uk/people/francesca-klug

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Radical Empathy: Civil Rights and The Humanist Ideas That Changed Two Nations

Season 1 · Episode 8

Wednesday, June 17, 2026 • Duration 58:45

In February 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. faced each other across a packed Cambridge Union, debating whether "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro." Baldwin won the vote by a landslide. But that famous moment was one flashpoint in a much wider struggle. Across the United States and here in Britain, activists, writers and thinkers were challenging injustice, confronting systems of power, and asking fundamental questions about equality, dignity and how we ought to live. Many looked to humanist ideas of reason, shared humanity, and a vision of ethics grounded in human experience.

This episode traces the humanist threads that ran through the civil rights movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the United States to the Windrush generation, the 1965 Race Relations Act, and the Black British radical tradition of C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones and Darcus Howe.

Guests:

Dr Nicholas Buccola, Dr Jules K. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College, and author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton, 2019). nicholasbuccola.com

Dr Angelina Osborne, British historian, researcher and heritage consultant, and co-author with Patrick Vernon of 100 Great Black Britons (Robinson, 2020). 100greatblackbritons.co.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

The "open conspiracy": how 94 humanists rewrote Britain’s moral laws

Season 1 · Episode 12

Wednesday, July 15, 2026 • Duration 50:03

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

When we think of the progressive reforms of the 1960s, we often picture youth in revolt, the sexual revolution, and a sudden explosion of freedom. But what if the real blueprint for change arose from something quite different? What if it was meticulously plotted across decades by a remarkable network of intellectuals, activists, and friends — co-conspirators in a plot to change the world?

In this episode of Unholy Histories, we dive into what H.G. Wells called "the open conspiracy" — a decades-long campaign by 94 leading humanists who set out to rewrite Britain's moral laws, overturning moral theocracy in favour of individual autonomy, humanitarianism, and internationalism. From the decriminalisation of homosexuality and attempted suicide to divorce law reform, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament, and the abolition of capital punishment, we trace the hidden humanist network behind the most sweeping ethical transformation in modern British history.

Guest:

Professor Callum Brown, social and cultural historian and author of Ninety Humanists and the Ethical Transition of Britain (2026), The Death of Christian Britain (2001), Becoming Atheist (2017), and The Battle for Christian Britain (2019). wiki/Callum_Brown

Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK – Details, episodes & analysis

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Unholy Histories: The Humanist Heritage Podcast from Humanists UK – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other25

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

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Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

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