J. B. Coates (1891–1973)

J. B. Coates was a writer and thinker who, from the 1930s to the 1960s, was one of the most persistent voices calling for the rationalist and ethical movements to move beyond attacking religion and build a positive humanism that would help remake society. The author of five books on modern thought and belief, he championed ‘personalism’, the idea that the fulfilment of each individual person should be the measure of social progress, and played a part in the discussions that brought the Ethical Union and the Rationalist Press Association together as the British Humanist Association. His proposals often provoked fierce argument within the movement, but even his critics admired his integrity and his insistence that humanism should be open-minded, constructive and engaged with the problems of its time.

John Bourne Coates was born on 24 June 1891 in Burslem, Staffordshire, the son of an insurance agent. He trained to teach in Birmingham and in 1920 married Ellen Luckins, also a teacher. He first came to notice in August 1931 with an article in the Rationalist Press Association’s Literary Guide, ‘Scientific Humanism and the R.P.A.’. The Association, he argued, should stop concentrating on refuting Christian evidences and become the intellectual centre of a ‘scientific humanist’ movement for the reconstruction of society, inspired by thinkers such as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley, because ‘the higher moral possibilities of mankind cannot be realized without the scientific control of the political and economic mechanism of the world’.

The article set off months of correspondence. Its most formidable critic was the veteran freethinker and former Liberal minister J. M. Robertson, who insisted that criticising religion was itself the Association’s proper constructive work and that it should not take up political programmes. The editor closed the debate at the end of 1931, seeing no reason for radical change, but Coates returned to the charge at the Association’s annual meeting in 1932, urging a policy in which ‘the reconstruction of society was a primary factor’.

Through the 1930s and 1940s Coates lectured to ethical societies, including the Hampstead Ethical Society, and set out his ideas in a series of books. A Common Faith or Synthesis (1942) called for a movement to unite progressive thought behind a shared programme. Ten Modern Prophets (1944) and Leaders of Modern Thought (1947) introduced general readers to the thinkers he believed were shaping the age, and did not spare his own side: ‘The older Rationalism is too negative a creed to meet the demands of our generation’. In ‘The Fundamental Issue’, written for the Ethical Union’s journal Plain View in 1945, he identified ‘how to combine planning with freedom’ as ‘the major problem of our age’.

His answer was personalism, which he explored through the work of Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Lewis Mumford in The Crisis of the Human Person (1949). H. J. Blackham, reviewing it in Plain View, doubted that personalism could provide an adequate philosophy, but praised the author’s ‘unusual modesty, temperateness, and integrity’. Coates was the secretary of the Personalist Group, which met regularly at Conway Hall, became affiliated to the Ethical Union in 1956, and was still listed among the British Humanist Association’s affiliated groups in 1967.

In the 1950s he became a leading figure in the Ethical Union’s debates about the future of humanism. In ‘The Problem of Humanist Action’ (1950) he criticised the movement for defining itself by what it rejected:

In ‘An Alternative to Christianity’ for the Rationalist Annual of 1953 he argued that ‘Humanism must preserve at all costs a basic openness’, and that it should challenge the Churches’ monopoly of moral education and religious broadcasting. That September he addressed the Ethical Union’s conference at High Leigh on ‘The Revolution within Humanism’. In 1954 he was elected to the Ethical Union’s Executive Committee, and in 1955 he was one of the Union’s three members on the joint committee with the Rationalist Press Association, chaired by Blackham, that prepared the way for the two bodies to work together. He also took part in organised dialogues between humanists and Christians in 1955 and 1956.

Coates led the Ethical Union’s work on a humanist policy for schools. Moral education, he argued, should teach method rather than doctrine, bring co-operation and self-government into the classroom, and never indoctrinate: ‘The philosophy of each person should be his own authentic creation.’ In essays on ethics he drew on the philosopher R. M. Hare to argue that moral rules are human prescriptions that can be revised by reason, not divine commands, and that moral agreement could be reached by patient, practical means. He contributed to the Rationalist Press Association’s collection Reason in Action (1956), and Antony Flew counted him among the leaders of a new, constructive rationalism. In ‘A Rational Approach to Sex’ (1957) he called for the repeal of the laws against homosexuality and the reform of divorce, setting out what he saw as the heart of the humanist position:

His last book, A Challenge to Christianity (1958), was hailed by Ronald Fletcher in The Humanist as a ‘Humanist Manifesto’, though Fletcher found it hasty and remarked that ‘Mr Coates is a man of crisis’. In the same year Coates accused the movement of failing to take any independent initiative on public issues, argued that humanism should be ‘more Left than the Left’, and debated the case for political action with Blackham. He kept pressing into the 1960s for a ‘constructive and social humanism’ to replace the individualistic, purely critical rationalism of the 19th century, insisting that ‘it is prudent to aim low, but it is better to miss a high ideal than to hit a low one’.

With his wife he attended the first joint conference of the Rationalist Press Association and the Ethical Union at Nottingham in 1962, and he went on lecturing into the mid-1960s on subjects from existentialism to ‘Entering the Humanist Phase of History’. His name disappears from the movement’s publications after 1967, but he died in 1973 at Rose Bush Court, a Humanist Housing Association project.

Coates never held high office, but for more than 30 years he continued to press one question: what humanism was for. He argued that humanists must offer a positive philosophy and work to change society, not merely criticise religion, and that they should stay open to dialogue with Christians and Marxists alike. Many of the causes he championed, including inclusive moral education, law reform on sex and marriage, and a single humanist organisation, became central to the work of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK).

J. B. Coates, ‘Scientific Humanism and the R.P.A.’, The Literary Guide, August 1931

J. B. Coates, Ten Modern Prophets (1944)

J. B. Coates, The Crisis of the Human Person: Some Personalist Interpretations (1949)

J. B. Coates, ‘An Alternative to Christianity’, Rationalist Annual, 1953

J. B. Coates, ‘A Humanist Educational Policy’, News and Notes, June 1955

J. B. Coates, A Challenge to Christianity (1958)

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