Austin Dacey

By precluding conscience from public debate, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. Instead, the "gag order" has prevented secular liberals from subjecting religious claims to "due public scrutiny" and from advancing their own views in robustly moral terms, granting a "monopoly on the language of ethics and values" to the religious on the Right and the Left. Dacey argues that claims of conscience—including religious claims—cannot be barred from public debate, but that they can and must be held to the same critical conversational standards as all serious contributions to public debate.

In an interview, Dacey commented, "Ironically, in the Internet age, the live performance has become even more important. The thing that's frustrating for these groups is that while they can record on their Macbook in their basement and share the music with their friends, the government and other powerful forces in society—they control the public spaces. . . . there's something magical about standing in front of people and playing."

While advocating the separation of religion and state, Dacey has suggested that political institutions should be designed to protect the exercise of conscience, not religion as such. In "Against Religious Freedom", a 2010 article in Dissent co-authored with Colin Koproske, he argues that religious freedom should be regarded as "one manifestation of more fundamental rights held by all people, religious and secular alike: private property, personal autonomy, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and perhaps most important, freedom of conscience."

In March 2010, Dacey launched The Impossible Music Sessions, a forum in Brooklyn that features "artists who cannot appear and the music they are not free to make." Featured artists join via Internet streaming or phone as a counterpart with whom they have collaborated in advance performs a live interpretation of their music. Mark Levine wrote in the Huffington Post that the first Impossible Music Session "will go down in the annals of rock history." The Sessions are produced in cooperation with Freemuse: The World Forum on Music and Censorship.

Since 2010, the Sessions have facilitated collaborations between musicians in North America and musicians in Iran, Guinea Bissau, Cameroon, and Cuba. Dacey told the Wall Street Journal that the purpose is to "crosspollinate musically" and "banish isolation."

In September 2008, Dacey co-authored the CFI report, Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations, which puts these efforts in the context of a campaign by the intergovernmental Organization of the Islamic Conference to promulgate culturally specific "Islamic human rights."

Dacey was a lead organizer of the Secular Islam Summit in March 2007, described by the Wall Street Journal as "a landmark." The conference issued the St. Petersburg Declaration, a statement of principles endorsed by Mithal al-Alusi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Shahriar Kabir among others. Reviewing The Secular Conscience for Asharq Al-Awsat, Amir Taheri wrote, "[m]aking this book available in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Muslim nations would be an immense service."

From his early work with the Center for Inquiry, Dacey has been interested in the cultural implications of science. In 2004 he argued in Skeptical Inquirer that "science is making us more ignorant" by unsettling received cultural understandings of the self, meaning, and morality without replacing them with coherent alternatives. In a column for Skeptical Inquirer, Dacey explores the significance of the "culture of science" in Islamic, Chinese, and Indian cultural contexts.

In a 2004 article for Free Inquiry magazine, "Atheism is Not a Civil Rights Issue," Dacey and co-author DJ Grothe criticized comparisons between the atheist cause in the United States and the causes of civil rights and LGBT rights, concluding that atheists "need a public awareness campaign, not a liberation movement." The article was attacked by humanists and the atheist blogger PZ Myers.

Beginning in 1999, Dacey worked for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a think tank that seeks "to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values." He opened the New York City branch office of CFI and later served as the organization's representative to the United Nations. In 2009, Dacey left CFI and published a critique of the secular movement. In 2010, he created The Impossible Music Sessions, a forum in New York City for censored and persecuted musicians. He has taught ethics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Dacey was raised in the rural Midwest by liberal Catholics. His father Philip Dacey is a poet. As a young teenager, Dacey became an evangelical Protestant, playing in the Christian alternative rock band, The Swoon, which in 1990 released an EP produced by Charlie Peacock. While studying music and philosophy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Dacey lost his religion, explaining later that "God stopped returning my calls." He studied applied ethics and social philosophy at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and was awarded a doctorate in 2002. In 2005, he debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig over the existence of God.

Austin Dacey (born April 19, 1972) is an American philosopher, writer, and human rights activist whose work concerns secularism, religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience. He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights, and a 2006 New York Times op-ed entitled "Believing in Doubt," which criticized the ethical views of Pope Benedict. He is a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the creator and director of The Impossible Music Sessions.