Across northern Europe, beginning in the 1850s and accelerating after the Second World War, secular and humanist families began holding ceremonies that paralleled religious confirmation — formal recognitions, around age fourteen or fifteen, that a young person was crossing into the early threshold of adulthood. Norway's borgerlig konfirmasjon, Iceland's borgaraleg ferming, Germany's Jugendweihe, and similar rites in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and parts of the US have collectively grown into one of the largest secular ritual movements in modern history. In Norway today, more young people pass through Human-Etisk Forbund's humanist confirmation than through the Lutheran Church's. This is significant not because secular ceremony has "won" — that frame misunderstands what is happening — but because it demonstrates that families without theological commitments still feel the developmental pull that confirmation rituals were designed to meet. The child is changing; the family needs to mark the change; the community needs to witness the marking. The supernatural premises turn out to be optional. The ritual function does not.
What is striking, across the humanist confirmation movement and the broader landscape of secular rite-building, is that the structure of the rites tends to converge despite no central authority designing them. There is typically a preparation period (weeks to months of meetings, discussion, sometimes outdoor expeditions or service projects), a public ceremony with parents and community present, the speaking of words by or to the young person about what kind of adult they intend to become, sometimes the giving of gifts or symbolic objects, and a feast afterward. This is the same structure underlying bar and bat mitzvah, Christian confirmation, Hindu samskaras like the upanayana, and many traditional rites of passage worldwide. The convergence suggests that the structure is not religious in origin; it is anthropological. It is what humans do when they need to escort a person across a developmental boundary.
The revision law is at the heart of this, because what humanist confirmation is doing is consciously revising inherited religious rites — keeping the function, discarding the metaphysics, rebuilding the content. This is genuinely creative work, not subtraction. Sherwin Wine, the founder of Humanistic Judaism, articulated this most clearly: it is not enough to say "we don't believe in God." A community has to construct what it does believe in, and ceremonies are where belief becomes embodied. Humanistic Judaism's bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies retain the speech, the public reading, the community gathering, the feast, while replacing the Torah reading with a chosen text the young person has studied — often a piece of Jewish history, literature, or ethics — and replacing the theological framing with a humanist one. The young person is welcomed into responsibility not as a covenant-keeper before God but as an inheritor of a moral tradition they will now carry forward.
The collective implications are larger than the ceremonies themselves. A secular family that holds humanist confirmation has implicitly committed to a community that can witness it — humanist groups, ethical culture societies, secular Jewish congregations, family networks. The ceremony forces the construction of community where casual secularity does not. Many secular families have discovered that they need community when their child is fourteen even though they thought they could do without it when the child was four. The rite of passage exposes what was always true: humans cannot raise children alone, and the project of formation requires witnesses other than parents. This has driven a surge in secular community-building in the past two generations, often led by parents who wanted humanist confirmation for their own children and discovered they had to build the institution that would deliver it.
The longer question is whether these rites become tradition — repeated across generations, refined over time, accumulating the kind of weight that makes them work — or whether they remain one-generation experiments. The Norwegian and German experience suggests they can become genuine traditions; humanist confirmation is now in its third and fourth generation in some families. The American experience is more fragmented, partly because American secular institutions are weaker and partly because the surrounding religious culture is louder. What seems clear is that families who do build rites — whether humanist confirmation or invented family practices like coming-of-age trips, shared writing projects, formal mentorship from non-parental adults — give their children something that families without rites do not. The transition into adulthood is recognised, blessed, and witnessed, rather than slipping past unmarked. This matters more than the secular rite-builders themselves usually articulate, because what is being installed is the sense that one's own life passages have weight and witnesses, which is a foundation of adult selfhood.