Humanism and Politics

Unbelief and the Vote

Tom Shipka

Tom Shipka is a professor of philosophy and chair emeritus of the Department of Philosophy and Reli­gious Studies at Youngstown State University. This essay is adapted from a commentary first aired on Youngstown, Ohio’s public-radio station, WYSU-FM.

A pressing issue for many people in the United States today is whether Americans will vote for a Caucasian woman or an African-Ameri­can man for president. The answer is “Yes.” Ninety percent of adult Ameri­cans say that, in principle, they are willing to vote for such candidates. When it comes to another category—unbelievers—the results are drastically different. Fifty-four percent of Americans say that they “would be unlikely” to vote for an atheist or agnostic. The percentage rises even higher among those respondents who profess a religion.

These revelations, disappointing if not surprising, come from a study by three researchers at the University of Minnesota that reports the attitudes of religious people in the United States toward nonreligious people. Based on a telephone survey of more than two thousand households and in-depth interviews with a sample from this group, the study shows that most believers:

• won’t consider a presidential candidate who is an atheist or agnostic,
• hold that religion is central to being a good American and a good person,
• do not trust unbelievers,
• view unbelievers as selfish and uncaring, and
• oppose their children marrying unbelievers.

Nevertheless, the Minnesota study, which was published in the April 2006 American Sociological Review, shows a modest improvement in toleration of unbelievers in recent decades. On March 31, Newsweek released a poll that shows a trend of softening attitudes by believers toward unbelievers, alongside a residual refusal to seriously consider religious skeptics as candidates for elective office. The Princeton Survey Research Associates Inter­national, which conducted the poll for News­week, contacted 1,004 adults aged eighteen or older. The poll finds that 68 percent of the respondents believe that a person can be moral and an atheist compared to 26 percent who said it is not possible. Furthermore, it reports that 49 percent of Americans report personally knowing an atheist and 47 percent believe that the nation is more accepting of atheists than it used to be. Nevertheless, it also found that most Americans—62 percent—wouldn’t vote for an atheist.

Despite this modest progress, mainstream views in the United States about the importance of belief in God are, to put it mildly, worrisome. In the first place, they fly in the face of these facts:

• Article VI of the Constitution says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
• Our political system is built upon the separation of church and state.
• The word God does not appear in the Constitution even once.
• Many of our Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, repudiated traditional religion.
• Some twenty to thirty million Americans profess no religion.

In the second place, these views denigrate the many atheists and agnostics who compare favorably on the virtue scale with believers and who have made important contributions to our civilization.

On this point, let me drop the names of a few infidels. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, arguably the two richest people in the world, are also arguably its two greatest living philanthropists. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, gave a billion dollars to the United Nations. Actor Angelina Jolie, a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, has invested her time and wealth in refugees and children in Africa and Asia. Many other respected actors, past and present, are also unbelievers. They include Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Jodie Foster, Jack Nicholson, Margot Kidder, John Malkovich, Christopher Reeve, George C. Scott, Charles Laughton, and Katherine Hepburn. Composer Irving Berlin was an unbeliever. Musicians Barry Manilow, Billy Joel, Frank Zappa, and James Taylor are unbelievers, as are Las Vegas headliners Penn and Teller, comedians Julia Sweeney and George Carlin, humor columnist Dave Barry, 60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney, and golfer Annika Sorenstam. Unbelievers also include American inventor Thomas Edison; Nobel laureates Francis Crick and James Watson, codiscoverers of DNA; economist Milton Friedman; and chemist Linus Pauling. Poet Robert Frost; playwright George Bernard Shaw; Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek; and Ernest Heming­way, one of America’s greatest writers, were all unbelievers. A. Philip Randolph, African-American civil-rights leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black labor union in the United States, was an unbeliever. Cyclist extraordinaire and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong and former Ohio State and Minnesota Vikings running back Robert Smith are unbelievers. Hall-of-Fame baseball player Ted Williams, who gave up nearly five full years of baseball during his prime to serve his country as a flight instructor and a fighter pilot in two wars, was an unbeliever. (So much for the no-atheists-in-foxholes canard.) Hundreds of more names could be added to these.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that all atheists and agnostics are pillars of virtue. For instance, shock-jock Howard Stern, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, and Karl Rove, the president’s alter ego, are not on my Super Bowl party invitation list. (That’s right, friends, Karl Rove is an agnostic.) I am saying that whether a person does or does not profess religion tells us nothing about his or her character or whether he or she enhances the lives of others. It’s high time for people on both sides of the religious divide to recognize this.

Finally, while the Minnesota study and the Newsweek poll show that believers are quick to caricature or even demonize unbelievers, one wonders if they also show that believers are impervious to the dark side of religion. Be­lievers continue to feel confident that religion furnishes an accurate and reliable moral compass—despite religion’s role in (to name a few):

• anti-Semitism
• the Crusades
• the Inquisition
• witch hunts
• slavery
• clergy sex abuse
• the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, and others
• the subordination of women
• the genital mutilation of girls
• honor killings
• violence against workers at women’s clinics
• ‑fakery by faith-healers
• the exploitation of believers by money-grubbing televangelists who (as the country-music lyric says) tell you to send your money to God but give you their own addresses
• exacerbating conflict around the world, including sectarian violence
• the flimsy moral agenda of the religious Right, limited as it is to subversion of the principle of the separation of church and state and opposition to homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, the teaching of evolution, and stem-cell research.

In a letter on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “May it (America’s new form of government) be to the world, what I believe it will be: the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”

On that day, when America’s intoxication with religion subsides and Amer­icans judge candidates for public office on the basis of their character, intelligence, and commitment to public service, instead of whether they profess religion, the Constitution will triumph, the nation will benefit, and Jefferson’s hope will be realized.

Further Reading
Braiker, Brian. “God’s Numbers.” Newsweek Web-exclusive content. Available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17879317/newsweek/.
Edgell, Penny, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. “Atheists as Other: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” American
Socio­logical Review 71, Number 2, April 2006.
FitzGerald, Francis. “The Evangelical Sur­prise.” The New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007.

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