What co-chairing Humanist Society Scotland taught me about humanism in Scotland

By John Paul Fitzpatrick — Humanist Society Scotland celebrant & board co-chair

Most people who book me only meet one side of what I do. I sit with a couple while they work out how to describe, in their own words, what they mean to each other. I sit with a family in the days after a death, trying to find language for a life that doesn't flatten it into cliché. I stand at the back of a room with new parents and watch them decide, out loud, what kind of people they want to be for their child. That's the job, and most days it's the whole of my world. But I've also served on the board of trustees of Humanist Society Scotland, currently as one of two co-chairs alongside my fellow trustee Jennifer Buchan, and that seat has shown me a much bigger picture than the one I see from the front of a ceremony. I'd like to explain what that bigger picture is — not to overstate my own part in it, but because I think it changes how you should understand the word "humanist" on a celebrant's website.

The ceremony is real. It's just not the whole story.

A wedding, a funeral, a naming — these aren't lesser versions of some more serious humanism happening elsewhere. They're where humanist values get lived out at the most personal scale there is. But sitting on the HSS board taught me that the values underneath those ceremonies — dignity, autonomy, fairness, the belief that people are entitled to make their own meaning out of their own lives — don't stop mattering once the ceremony ends. HSS spends a great deal of its time arguing for exactly those values in rooms far less warm than a wedding marquee: committee rooms at Holyrood, consultation responses, coalitions with other campaigning groups, public statements when something needs said plainly. Being on the board showed me that the organisation whose logo sits at the bottom of my ceremony scripts is the same organisation doing that other work too. It's one organisation, not two.

Autonomy at the end of life, not just at the altar

Nowhere has that connection felt sharper than on assisted dying. HSS has campaigned for legal assisted dying in Scotland for three decades, alongside Dignity in Dying Scotland and Friends at the End, in support of the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, brought forward by MSP Liam McArthur. The Bill passed Stage One 70–56 on 13 May 2025. After more than eighty hours of debate and around 250 amendments, it was defeated at the final Stage Three vote, 69–57, on 17 March 2026. HSS's chief executive, Fraser Sutherland, put it plainly afterwards: "We are heartbroken by tonight's decision by MSPs. But this debate doesn't end here. We will keep fighting for end-of-life choice." He also said misinformation and fearmongering appeared to have influenced the vote. The value underneath that fight — that people should have some say over how their own life ends, in keeping with their own beliefs — is exactly the value I try to honour when I sit with a grieving family and help them describe a death honestly rather than euphemistically. The campaign didn't win this round. It hasn't stopped either.

Children's rights, not just parents' preferences

The same argument shows up in Scottish schools. Religious Observance has been compulsory in state schools since 1872, despite more than 60% of school-age children now identifying as non-religious. On 31 August 2025, HSS launched a report, Preaching is not Teaching, which found that inclusive Religious Observance isn't consistently delivered, that parents often lack clear information about their right to withdraw their children, and that pupils who ask to be withdrawn can face real resistance — one parent was told by a headteacher, "I won't apologise, this is a Christian country." HSS recommended an inclusive "Time for Reflection" model, better provision for opted-out pupils, clearer opt-out communication, an inspectorate review, and extending the opt-out right to pupils directly. On 28 October 2025, HSS criticised the Education Secretary for what it called "bowing to church pressure" over the school worship bill, arguing that "children are not stakeholders to be appeased." A Stage Two amendment for a genuine pupil opt-out right was rejected in December 2025. I don't conduct many ceremonies for school-age children directly, but I write a great many naming ceremonies for parents making a first public statement about the upbringing they want for their child — built on their own convictions, not an assumed default. Seeing HSS argue that children themselves are stakeholders in their own beliefs, not passengers in their parents' or their school's, made that connection obvious to me.

A rights-based approach, and solidarity beyond "our own"

HSS is also working, through the "Let's Change the Act" coalition, to move Scotland's abortion law from its current exception-based decriminalisation model to a comprehensive, rights-based one, building on the success of the buffer-zone legislation — the same premise as everything else here: that decisions about a person's own body and life belong, in the end, to that person. And a striking amount of HSS's work isn't really about non-religious people at all, in the narrow sense. On 6 July 2026, HSS co-authored a Scottish Government Faith and Belief Representatives' Group Statement of Solidarity with racially minoritised communities, responding to racist knife attacks in Edinburgh's Leith area and racially aggravated marches elsewhere in Scotland, through HSS's seat on that Group — a forum bringing together religious and non-religious belief communities. The statement put it simply: "An attack on one community can feel like an attack on all of us." It's a reminder that humanism, properly understood, isn't a team lined up against people of faith — it's one voice among several willing to stand alongside people, whatever they believe, when they're targeted for who they are. The same underlying commitment sits behind HSS's ongoing campaign to end conversion practices targeting LGBTQ+ people, a 2026 priority for the organisation — and behind every LGBTQ+ ceremony I write, each one resting on a legal and social settlement that took real campaigning to win and takes ongoing campaigning to hold.

Two thousand and five, and everything since

It's worth remembering how recent all of this legal footing is. Scotland's first legal humanist wedding took place on 18 June 2005, when Karen Watts and Martin Reijns married at Edinburgh Zoo, conducted by celebrant Ivan Middleton, grounded ultimately in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the right to equal treatment for non-religious belief. Since then, more than 50,000 couples, over 100,000 people, have had a humanist ceremony in Scotland. By 2019, humanist marriages had overtaken Christian denominational weddings here for the first time. In 2022, there were 9,140 humanist weddings, more than all other faith-based ceremonies put together. HSS now has more than 130 accredited celebrants. None of that happened by drift. It happened because people fought, in the same kind of rooms described above, for the right of couples like the ones I marry to have their beliefs treated as equal in the eyes of the law.

What the board seat actually gave me

I want to be honest about the limits of what I'm claiming. Serving on the board doesn't make me an authority on Scottish politics, and I'd rather under-claim than over-claim what any one trustee contributes to an organisation like HSS. What the seat showed me, plainly, is that "humanist" was always a bigger word than "the person who marries you." It's a set of convictions about dignity, autonomy and fairness that HSS lives out on two fronts at once — one deeply personal, conducted at wedding venues and crematoria and in living rooms with new parents; the other slower and often invisible unless you go looking for it, conducted in committee rooms, consultation responses and coalition statements. Since joining the board, I've come to see my own ceremony work less as a stand-alone service and more as one visible expression of something an entire organisation is arguing for on a much wider stage.

Why that matters on your wedding day

None of this needs to weigh down your ceremony — nobody wants a lecture on education policy between their vows and their first dance, and that's not what I bring to a wedding. But it's worth knowing what stands behind the person writing your script. Choosing a Humanist Society Scotland celebrant means choosing someone accredited by an organisation that has spent three decades arguing for end-of-life dignity, that published serious research on children's rights in schools last year, that stood publicly against racism this summer, and that keeps campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights and a fairer abortion law even when success isn't guaranteed. The assisted dying Bill fell in March. The school opt-out amendment was rejected in December. Neither defeat stopped the campaigning, and neither should stop us feeling hopeful about what humanism in Scotland is doing. The same organisation that keeps showing up in those rooms is the one that will show up for your wedding, ready to help you say, honestly and in your own words, what you actually believe.

If you'd like to read more about how HSS's standards connect to the ceremony you'll actually get on the day, have a look at my post on what HSS accreditation means for your celebrant. And if you've got questions about how any of this fits together for your own wedding or naming day, my FAQ page and the stories other couples have shared are both good places to start.