Edwin Kagin

Edwin Frederick Kagin (November 26, 1940 – March 28, 2014) was an attorney at law in Union, Kentucky, and a founder of Camp Quest, the first secular summer camp in the United States for the children of secularists, atheists, agnostics, brights, skeptics, naturalists and freethinkers. He served as the National Legal Director of American Atheists from 2006 until his death in 2014.

Personal life

Edwin Kagin was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to a Presbyterian minister father who had been born in Kentucky and a Daughters of the American Revolution mother who had been born in South Carolina. His ancestry was German Calvinist on his father's side and Scottish Calvinist Presbyterian on his mother's—both sides boasting numerous clerics.

In youth Kagin became an Eagle Scout. In early adulthood he served in the United States Air Force as a medic in London, England, and received an Honorable Discharge in 1962. He then attended The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio; Park College in Parkville, Missouri; and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. At the University of Louisville School of Law in Louisville, Kentucky, he earned his Juris Doctor.

He was married to Helen McGregor Kagin, a Canadian of Scottish descent from Regina, Saskatchewan, who was a retired anesthesiologist. Helen died on February 17, 2010, following complications from cancer surgery.

He died in 2014 at the age of 73 at his home in Union, Kentucky.

Career and activism

Kagin worked for a time as a college English instructor and served as editor of the American Association of Mental Deficiency and National Institute for Mental Health project that created the Adaptive Behavior Scale, an instrument for the assessment of intellectual disability. But the larger part of his career was as an attorney, sometimes focusing on civil liberties and constitutional issues.

After abandoning belief in Christianity, Kagin became a freethought activist. He was a founding member in 1991 of the Free Inquiry Group, Inc., (FIG) of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and served as its vice president.

Through his writings in Fig Leaves, the FIG newsletter, as well as those he published and circulated via the Internet, Kagin gradually became known in wider humanist and freethought circles. This led in 2003 to his authorship of a chapter in Kimberly Blaker's Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America and in 2005 to his own book, Baubles of Blasphemy, a collection of some of his often irreverent essays and poetry. In 2003 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.

Kagin is the originator and was, for its first decade, Director of Camp Quest, the nation's first residential secular summer camp for children of Atheists and other freethinkers, started in 1996 by FIG.