Paul Geisert
2021
Bright · Educator · Community Organizer
Following his career as a science teacher and university biology professor (as well as feminist activist and educators’ union organizer), the American freethinker Paul Geisert (1932-2020) shifted his focus to the burgeoning secular activism of a new century.
At that time, the U.S. response to 9/11 had driven a groundswell of public religiosity. In civil commemorations of the catastrophe, freethinker involvement had been spurned. The situation of being shunted to the sidelines had prompted a diverse array of secular citizens to organize to seek greater civil acknowledgment and political clout.
Dr. Geisert’s approach to “uniting for action” was quite unlike that of his peers. In his view, continually positioning negatively (as “nonbelievers’) was not the way to go. The 2002 “Godless Americans March on Washington” prodded Geisert’s eventual radical proposal to change the platform of activism.
Despite agreement with the rally’s civil rights/civic equality mission, he was horrified by the deleterious “godless” label chosen as means to unite atheists, freethinkers, agnostics and humanists. After the GAMOW event, he sought some better way of coalescing those sundry “godless folks” to press for stronger church-state separation and develop a greater voice in the national political process. To publicly organize more successfully, wasn’t there any way to identify positively? His hope was that they might affirm some all-encompassing worldview and present it in a more sanguine way.
Hearkening to a once promising time when it seemed as if science and reason would offer a key to the future, Dr. Geisert drew upon the vision of the “Age of Enlightenment.” Reframing as a modern thrust, he proposed “embrightenment” as an affirmative means for uniting his freethinking contemporaries to common civic activism. They could all “be brights” and identify without referring to religion in any way whatsoever. The definition of “a bright”, supplied by his wife, is “an individual whose worldview is naturalistic, free of supernatural and mystical elements.” Together they co-founded The Brights’ Network as an online constituency of individuals adopting the descriptor.
Several notable freethinkers of the day, like magicians James Randi and Penn and Teller, the atheist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, joined the network of registered Brights and drew attention in their own writings to the initiative’s existence. Geisert’s astonishing idea led to an ultimately ephemeral international social movement bearing the name, “the brights.” Although it ultimately proved ineffective at reaching his lofty goals, his unconventional proposals and related efforts stirred such disquiet among freethinking contemporaries that the resulting raucous discussions reached well beyond national boundaries.
For that reason, Geisert is credited internationally as the person who in 2003 originated the new noun identity term (“a bright”) while proposing that the freethinkers of the day revamp their negative identity (as “nonbelievers”) and assume improved civic positioning, “as brights.”
Geisert became uniquely positioned as a freethinker in relation to freethought’s own (religion-focused) establishment. He would likely take pleasure in that particular twist.
“An idea that strongly challenges the status quo may be the very one to lead to the best shift in direction for humankind.”