Ted Turner, Humanist

Heaven Is Here

May 13, 2026

A remembrance for Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III, November 19, 1938 – May 6, 2026

Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026, and I found myself thinking back to 1990, the year the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him Humanist of the Year. I was struck then, as I am now, by what that recognition meant.

Here was one of the most powerful figures in American media publicly embracing a tradition that too often goes unnamed — one I share — and doing so without apology. Turner spoke openly about his humanism at a time when doing so carried real risk. The AHA honored him for his global humanitarian commitments, his environmental activism, and his willingness to state plainly what many in his position preferred to leave implicit: that human beings are responsible for this world, and that responsibility begins here, not in the hereafter.

Turner was introduced by Lloyd Morain at the AHA’s “Humanist of the Year” ceremony in April 1990. Morain was a former president of the American Humanist Association and a prominent figure in the organization. Listen to Turner’s acceptance speech after receiving the “Humanist of the Year” award here:

AHA honored him for refusing to outsource that responsibility to institutional religion, preferring instead to act directly — as when he donated a billion dollars to the United Nations Foundation, betting that human cooperation was a more reliable instrument of good than prayer. It was a wager entirely in keeping with the man.

He Thought His Way to Unbelief

Turner did not arrive at a secular outlook through philosophy seminars or the prose of academic journals. He came to it through grief. His sister Mary Jean contracted a rare form of lupus at age twelve, and over time the illness left her with severe neurological damage and chronic pain until her death years later. “She was sick for five years before she passed away,” Turner said. “What had she done wrong? Christianity couldn’t give me any answers to that. So my faith got shaken somewhat.”

That is not the story of a man arriving at disbelief through reflexive contrarianism or the fashionable posture of sophistication. It is the story of a man in genuine anguish confronting one of the oldest and most persistent questions in human thought: why do the innocent suffer? Turner prayed for his sister for years, yet she died all the same. By his early twenties, he had become agnostic— a conclusion reached not through philosophical system-building but because the religious explanations available to him no longer rang true against the evidence of lived experience.

What is striking about Turner’s journey is that it exemplifies the humanist tradition at its most honest: a willingness to submit even cherished beliefs to evidence and moral scrutiny, to measure inherited claims against observable reality and find them insufficiently persuasive. He did not perform doubt; he arrived at it the hard way, and he owned it.

Humanists like Ted Turner do not generally regard religious belief as evidence of intellectual deficiency. But what science has done is something narrow and profoundly consequential: it has shown that the universe operates according to consistent and discoverable laws, without any observable suspension of those laws in response to human hope, grief, prayer, or suffering. Those same indifferent processes that govern stellar formation and planetary motion also govern disease, decay, and death. They killed Mary Jean Turner no less surely than gravity holds galaxies together.

And yet, within that same indifference, something extraordinary happened. Carl Sagan famously wrote that “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Properly understood, this is not a reduction of human significance but an elevation of it. Out of the blind material violence of stars and time emerged creatures capable of love, art, moral reflection, and wonder — matter becoming conscious enough to contemplate its own existence. For many secular humanists, that reality inspires a deeper awe than the notion that the universe was arranged with humanity as its central concern.

Initiatives, Not Commandments

In 2015 Turner addressed a convention of newspaper executives, arguing that the Ten Commandments of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures had become outdated. He emphasized the historical gap between ancient moral codes and modern technological realities, stating:

“We are living with outdated rules. The rules we are living under are The Ten Commandments, and I bet nobody here even pays much attention to them because they are too old. When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, and there was no poverty. Today, The Ten Commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded. Commandments are out!”

This provoked the predictable outrage — the Washington Post rather gleefully noted he had descended not from a mountaintop but from “a very high horse.” Turner was never what you would call a man of understatement. But underneath the bravado, the critique had substance. A moral code forged in the ancient Near East, for a nomadic people navigating questions of tribal loyalty and agricultural community, was not automatically equipped for a species now capable of planetary self-destruction. Wisdom needs updating, as all living things do.

In place of the Ten Commandments, Turner proposed what he called “Ten Voluntary Initiatives” — updated aspirations geared to the problems of our time, with the expressed purpose of helping foster “the idea that our purpose while alive is to make a heaven here.” They are worth presenting in full, because they have not aged badly:

1. I promise to care for planet Earth and all living things thereon, especially my fellow human beings.
2. I promise to treat all persons everywhere with dignity, respect, and friendliness.
3. I promise to have no more than one or two children.
4. I promise to use my best efforts to help save what is left of our natural world in its undisturbed state and to restore degraded areas.
5. I promise to use as little of our nonrenewable resources as possible.
6. I promise to minimize my use of toxic chemicals, pesticides, and other poisons.
7. I promise to contribute to those less fortunate, to help them become self-sufficient and enjoy the benefits of a decent life.
8. I promise to reject the use of force, and military force in particular.
9. I promise to support the total elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
10. I promise to support the United Nations and its efforts to improve the welfare of all people on Earth.

Notice what is absent. There is nothing about worship, nothing about dietary restrictions, nothing about the proper observance of the Sabbath, nothing about sacrificial rites. There is no punishment stipulated for transgression — hence “voluntary.” These are not commandments handed down from above but pledges made horizontally, person to person and person to planet. The accountability is not to a deity but to one another and to the biosphere that sustains us all.

What is striking, looked at alongside our present moment, is how urgently prescient the list is. Climate science — which is not a belief system but a measured, replicable, peer-reviewed description of physical reality — tells us that the global temperature has been rising due to the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Turner understood this decades before it became headline news. He was not alone. Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring awakened the public to the devastating consequences of pesticides and environmental carelessness, sounded an early alarm that industry and indifference could unravel the natural world. David Attenborough has spent decades translating that alarm into vivid, unavoidable witness, bringing the fragility of ecosystems into living rooms across the globe. And Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel laureate who planted millions of trees across Africa, understood that environmental destruction and human suffering are not separate crises but one.

When “Secular” Becomes a Target

It is no accident that remembering Turner as a secular humanist feels, in May 2026, like an act of mild defiance.

Recently, Sebastian Gorka, discussing a new White House counterterrorism strategy, said the administration would focus on “identifying and neutralizing … violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically transgender or anarchist.” Critics immediately focused on the inclusion of the word “secular,” because secularism is not an extremist movement or criminal ideology — it is simply the principle that government and public life are not governed by religion, and millions of Americans identify as secular, nonreligious, or politically secular. When a government places a broad constitutional identity inside the language of counterterrorism, it risks transforming lawful belief and political dissent into categories of suspicion rather than protected freedoms.

The danger in language like this is not merely rhetorical, but constitutional and profoundly political. When a White House counterterrorism framework singles out “secular political groups” alongside ideological enemies to be “identified and neutralized,” it erodes the distinction between violent criminal conduct and lawful belief itself.

In the United States, “secular” is not an extremist category — it is a constitutionally protected position under the First Amendment, just as protected as religious belief. Framing secularism as inherently suspect opens the door to state power being used not against crimes, but against disfavored worldviews, dissenting politics, minority identities, or nonreligious citizens.

History shows that governments rarely begin repression by openly criminalizing all opposition at once; they begin by linguistically redefining ideological opponents as threats to the nation. Reuters reported that Gorka described the administration’s focus in terms that critics argue dangerously blur the line between violence and protected political identity itself.

Into this atmosphere steps the ghost of Ted Turner — a man who was proudly, publicly, and unapologetically secular his entire adult life. Who gave a billion dollars to the United Nations. Who proposed Voluntary Initiatives rather than commandments. Who said, plainly, that praying to an unknown being “who hasn’t shown up in thousands of years” was not a substitute for rolling up your sleeves. By the logic now percolating in certain corners of Washington, Turner’s worldview — secular, humanist, internationalist — would be a category of suspicion. That tells you something disturbing about where we are.

Contrast Turner with the figures now shaping American public life. Speaker Mike Johnson, a committed creationist, has described himself as a “biblical worldview” legislator — someone whose policy positions flow explicitly from religious doctrine rather than science, or constitutional pluralism. Johnson has argued that the separation of church and state is a “misunderstanding,” and has been forthright that his faith, not the empirical record, governs his thinking on everything from climate to governance. Turner would have recognized this immediately. He had, after all, argued for decades that the problem with commandments — divine or legislative — is that they place authority above scrutiny. When the person issuing the commandment is accountable only to God, the rest of us have nowhere to appeal.

The United States was not founded on religious sanction, but on the explicit principle that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and that no religious test shall be required as a qualification for public office. The Founders were, many of them, products of the Enlightenment — men who believed that reason, evidence, and democratic deliberation were surer guides than revelation. Turner stood squarely in that tradition. It is not a fringe tradition. It is the tradition of Thomas Paine, who argued in Common Sense and The Age of Reason that free conscience — whether it leads to faith or doubt — must never be subordinated to the authority of church or state. To be free from religious compulsion is not to be against religion; it is to be for liberty. The attempt to render that tradition suspect — to place the word "secular" inside a counterterrorism brief alongside "anti-American" — is a distortion of American history as much as a threat to American liberty.

The Jane Fonda Question

No discussion of Turner’s humanism is complete without acknowledging the collision that occurred when the most secular man in American media married one of the most spiritually restless women in American public life.

Turner and Fonda married in 1991 and spent a decade together. The marriage unraveled around the turn of the millennium, and at its center was the oldest philosophical fault line in human experience: is there something more?

Fonda became a Christian near the end of their marriage, describing a sense of being led toward wholeness, of “a presence, a reverence humming within” her. Turner, in his memoir, said he was hurt — but clarified that it “wasn’t because she had become Christian.” What he mourned was not her faith but her silence; the wound was one of intimacy, not ideology.

What stands out here is what Turner did not do. He did not convert. He did not soften his secularism to accommodate the woman he loved. He held his ground, continued to hold it, and the marriage ended not in bitterness but in genuine mutual affection. Fonda called him her “favorite ex-husband,” and upon his death said she loved him with all her heart and pictured him in heaven with the wildlife he had saved.

A secular humanist, eulogized in the language of a faith he did not share.

The irony was there — she gave him, in death, the afterlife he had declined in life. He could not, of course, object. Turner’s secularism was not a pose or a provocation. It was who he was, to the end.

The Bison and the Memo

The cruelest timing surrounds not just Turner’s death but what was being done, in the days around it, to the cause he spent his last decades fighting for.

At the time of his death, Turner was one of the largest private landowners in the United States, with approximately two million acres, and maintained a bison herd of forty-five thousand animals. He spent decades and a personal fortune on the restoration of species that human carelessness had nearly erased. He didn’t do it because God commanded it. He did it because he thought it was right, because the world was better with those creatures in it, and because — in the absence of any afterlife to retreat to — this world was all any of us have.

On the very day he died, the Trump administration was in the process of evicting bison from the public lands they evolved to inhabit — in favor of subsidized cattle. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, acting on a direct request from Montana’s Republican governor and congressional delegation, moved to cancel grazing permits held by American Prairie, a conservation nonprofit that has spent twenty years restoring wild bison to federal grasslands in north-central Montana. The permits cover roughly 63,500 acres of BLM land, where more than 950 bison graze behind electric fences on land they built. The BLM had approved those very permits in 2022 after a thorough environmental review, finding no scientific reason why native bison should not be permitted to graze public land.

The scientific case for bison on that land is not ambiguous. Bison break up crusted earth with their hooves and wallows, creating openings for native grasses. They thin sagebrush, improving habitat for grouse. They graze to ideal heights for prairie dogs. They increase grassland resilience to drought. They built this prairie over thousands of years.

Cattle, by contrast, undercut streambanks, foul water with manure, strip native grasses down to the root, and open the door for invasive weeds that become wildfire fuel. The BLM’s own grazing program loses tens of millions of dollars a year. Less than two percent of American beef comes from public lands. And yet the full weight of the federal government was mobilized to guarantee that this money-losing, land-degrading arrangement continues — while the native animal that heals the land gets served an eviction notice by the department that still carries a bison on its official seal.

The law being invoked to do this — the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 — was written at the height of the Dust Bowl, when topsoil stripped from overgrazed Great Plains prairies was literally raining down on Washington, D.C. Its purpose was to halt catastrophic land damage from overgrazing. It is now being used to evict the one animal that prevents it.

Turner would have recognized this pattern immediately. It is not really about cattle or bison. It is about who controls what, and for whom. The grazing fee on public land is $1.69 per animal unit month — against a market rate on private land of more than $23. Among the largest beneficiaries are billionaires and corporations. Among those harmed are more than fifty tribal nations, for whom bison restoration is not a conservation hobby but a matter of cultural and food sovereignty.

Turner spent his life arguing that the Earth is the address of paradise, and that human beings are responsible for keeping it habitable. That is not a religious claim but an empirical one, backed by ecology, conservation biology, and the observable fact that healthy landscapes sustain life better than degraded ones. You do not have to be a humanist or an atheist to find the eviction of a native species from its own ecosystem, in favor of a subsidized industry that degrades it, morally indefensible. You just have to be paying attention.

The Legacy, Without Illusion

Turner launched CNN on June 1, 1980, from a converted Jewish country club in Atlanta, creating the country’s first 24/7 all-news network. He thought that if people could see each other — really see each other, across borders and languages and cultures — they might find it harder to kill each other. That is a humanist’s wager on information as the instrument of moral progress.

He donated a billion dollars to the United Nations and co-created Captain Planet and the Planeteers, writing in an essay that mass communication’s highest purpose is “the gathering and dissemination of worthwhile information to all the peoples of the world” — “the most important tool we have for achieving the end of realizing that our planet is the address of paradise.”

The planet as the address of paradise. He didn’t mean we were already there. He meant that this — this spinning rock, these forests, these bison, these children — this is what we have, and it is enough, and it is worth everything.

He was imperfect — flamboyantly, sometimes spectacularly imperfect, in his personal life and his business dealings alike. He would have been the first to admit it. But he took seriously the idea that a human life is measured by what it adds to the world, not by the metaphysical allegiances of the one living it.

He wrote: “Don’t go to church on Sundays to pray to some unknown being who hasn’t shown up in thousands of years to come save you. You need to get off your knees and roll up your sleeves and save yourself.”

He rolled up his sleeves. He saved some things. And the day he died, the people who would undo what he built were already at their desks, signing the memos.

That is the condition of the world, described without illusion.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, another unapologetic voice for the humanist tradition, has argued that death is not disappearance: our matter and energy return to the earth, or radiate outward into space, rejoining the universe’s ongoing cycle. For Turner, who spent a lifetime insisting that this earth — its prairies, its rivers, its bison — was the only paradise on offer, there is a particular comfort in that.

The atoms that built him will feed the grasses. The grasses will feed the bison. Nothing is lost.

The work does not stop because the worker does; and the worker, in the end, becomes the world he fought so hard to save.

Rest, Ted — in the great continuity of things.

Olga Bourlin

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?