Conor Robinson is a humanist speaker and activist from Los Angeles, California. He and I first met my freshman year at Yale, when he founded the Yale Humanist Society. Since graduating, he spent time in Los Angeles doing Teach for America, before pioneering the Pathfinders Project, a yearlong global humanist service trip.

Conor was the recipient of Foundation Beyond Belief’s 2014 Humanist Visionary award, and he is now working with the Foundation to launch the Humanist Service Corps. I spoke with Conor over the phone about his service work and the implication for nonreligious communities. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You led a group of Humanists on a year abroad doing service work for the Pathfinders Project. Since you’ve been back, you’ve been planning to institute a Humanist Service Corps. What were you trying to do abroad and how are you hoping to carry that forward to your new project?

The Pathfinders Project was many things, but among those many things it was an exploratory study for the Humanist Service Corps. The idea was that we set up ten different month or month-and-a-half long projects that allowed us to research locations and partner organizations for the launch of this future program that we were hoping to get off the ground. So we did clean water, human rights, environmental conservation, and education projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

It gave us exactly what we needed in terms of information about location safety and the feasibility of taking volunteers there long-term, as well as the strength of the partner organizations. It also just taught us a lot about how shared service can help provide a foundation for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and how we can best support organizations as international humanist volunteers.

Since you finished up The Pathfinders Project, you’ve sort of been doing the Humanist speaking circuit, going around and giving talks to nonreligious groups and conferences. Have you gotten the sense that this project and your ideas are welcome in the Humanist community?

The broader community has been very receptive to these ideas, but on an individual level there’s definitely a sort of mixed response based on how someone identifies, whether it’s skeptic, atheist, or humanist. Humanists are most strongly in favor of this sort of work, but importantly, they are also in the best position to be adequately critical of the work. The question of how, when, and even if to engage in international service is a question that I think should be taken seriously, and it’s not a question I take lightly.

I’d say in general, though, people are very excited about the idea of additional avenues for the nonreligious to not just demonstrate the values they hold but explore them, deepen them, and maybe just figure out precisely what those values are.

What are you looking for in applicants for the Humanist Service Corps?

One of the reasons we selected the location where we’re going, Northern Ghana, is that the work is so multifaceted. So what that means is that we don’t have to select for a particular set of professional skills in our volunteers because no matter what skills a volunteer brings, we can probably plug them into a project on the ground. But what we do need to assess for are personality traits that are going to allow volunteers to handle the stress, to support the other members of the team, and to function highly and navigate easily the intercultural exchange that is really the center of our work. So what we are looking for in our volunteers is grit, first and foremost, strong emotional intelligence, strong interpersonal skills, a history of resilience, of overcoming, of perseverance. That’s the core of what we’re looking at.

And you guys still are accepting applicants?

Yeah we are, up through December 31st.

So readers might not know, but Conor, you and I go way back. You started the Yale Humanist Society back in 2008, the first nonreligious group at Yale, right when I was a freshman. Now, you’re pioneering an international Humanist service group. Have you thought about why you’re always sort of weirdly at the forefront of so many Humanist communities?

Believe me, it’s a question that I have pondered myself and I’m not sure if I have a good answer to it to be perfectly honest, but I do feel an attachment and investment in this community. And I don’t think it’s rational, honestly. Not that I need to defend it on the grounds of reason, but yeah, the idea of drawing more nonreligious people into service and making the service of nonreligious people more effective wherever they are, whether they choose to volunteer internationally or whether they choose to volunteer at home—we need to be having a stronger more involved conversation as a movement of disparately labeled nonreligious people about how we can make ourselves better rather than about trying to convince other people to join us necessarily. In fact, I think those end up being the same conversation. If we have a conversation about making ourselves better, then we’re going to become more attractive.

When you were abroad engaging in this interreligious work and dialogue with the people native to the communities you were in, did you run up against any friction being an atheist group that’s doing that?

I anticipated much more resistance than we ever received, and to be honest, we only ever received resistance from other volunteering groups.

Really?

Yeah, these volunteering groups we were bumping into were often religious groups, and so they had a hard time wrapping their minds around us. The people we were helping had no issue at all, though. I think some of that has to do with the fact that it was never our goal to go in, blow a trumpet, and raise a banner that says “Hey, we’re the Humanists and we’re here to help.” It was always just to let the work speak for itself. We would do the work, and if they asked us about what we believed then of course we would tell them. But we were never going there with the expressed intention of having that conversation. The goal was that if the conversation came up, we could have it successfully.

So did any of you try to play the part of the more aggressive atheist and challenge any of their beliefs?

The funny thing was that many of these people we visited had grown so accustomed to the sort of missionary pattern that after we would work with them, they would sit down and then look at us expectantly and say “so what was it that you wanted to share with us or tell us or give us,” and we’d say “actually, we just want to hang out, do you want to go grab a beer or something?”

Even though they were almost always religious, they seemed to really appreciate that from us, that there wasn’t anything additional we wanted from them aside from the interaction we were there to have with them.

Do you think the atheist community puts too much of a premium on challenging false belief?

I do. Just from a political or human psychology perspective, we have to know that our antagonism doesn’t help us. Let’s assume for a minute that we have the goal of winning people over to our side, of making people feel like our camp is a safe and viable option for them where they can find what they need in life. If we really do have that goal, our antagonism doesn’t serve it. That’s one side of things, and the other side of things is that I don’t think that’s a good practice for us. On the individual level, I don’t think focusing on that is productive emotionally or psychologically, and that’s not to say that I necessarily disagree with the criticism.

I think the work we’re doing in Northern Ghana provides a really good illustration of this. We are going in there because there are women being accused of witchcraft and whose lives are being ruined as a result of this superstition. And there are many in the atheist community who would say, “Great, so we need to go in and we need to stamp out this superstition.” And, you know, not only is that not really possible, but I don’t think that would even be effective or a good use of time.

You know, 90% of Ghanaians believe in witchcraft, but it’s only in one out of the 10 regions in Ghana where that belief translates into harm against women, and that’s the one region of Ghana with the lowest rating in every single category for social welfare and development. It’s the region that has an illiteracy rate of above 70% when the rest of the country has an illiteracy rate of around 40%. It has three times more poverty than any other region.

So is it really a superstition issue when almost all of Ghana believes in witchcraft, or is it actually just the fact that in this one particular area there’s so much room for this superstition to operate? And I think that’s a powerful argument that I think many people in the movement need to pay attention to. This is a development issue. It’s not really even a superstition issue.

Atheists often seem to have a sort of reductive view of religious beliefs, where there’s a straight line between beliefs and actions without taking into account the relevant context.

I think that this is an example that is connected to the Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Reza Aslan argument from the past couple months. Is it all belief? Is none of it belief? How are human behaviors influenced by beliefs? Yeah, I think this provides more food for thought on that issue, I would think.

And I hope that if people in the atheist community really do want to take believers away from the harmful things they see in their beliefs, and assuming that’s even a worthwhile goal, then the best way to do that is not to shout at them but to improve their circumstances. Period. Whether you’re Bill Maher and Sam Harris or Reza Aslan, whichever side of that argument you fall into, I feel like we should also be able to agree that the solution is to make everybody’s lives better. Period.