stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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 Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 11:55 am Post subject: Atheists, Presidents, and rights |
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Michael Medved wrote an article entitled "Americans Are Right To Resist An Atheist As President". Normally, I expect a column to make some attempt to justify its thesis. Medved doesn't bother.
After a little preamble about polling data, he takes it upon himself to tell his readers what atheists think:
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| Of course, some non-believers respond to this state of affairs by decrying the American people as backward and benighted, while dismissing our politicians as hypocritical, falsely religious blowhards. These skeptics and humanists point to the huge popularity of anti-religious books (by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others) as evidence that the public resistance to atheist ideas and candidates may be overstated. Now that we�ve broken barriers with history�s first viable female and African-American candidates, opponents of organized religion hope for a new campaign in which a brave politician makes a credible run for the highest office even while proclaiming his non-belief. |
The first sentence is ironic, because the people dismissing the religious convictions of politicians are, almost without exception, religious themselves. Very often they are of the same religion, just a different political persuasion. Just this year, there was an abortive right-wing attempt to characterize Obama as a closet atheist (or perhaps a closet Moslem), before the Jeremiah Wright controversy presented a more tempting opportunity. I always appreciate being told what I think, but in fact Medved is quite wrong. (If I thought a politician were "falsely religious", that would hardly be a problem in and of itself.)
Now that the strawman is out of the way, Medved is supposed to proceed with his argument; the trouble is, he doesn't have one.
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Actually, there�s little chance that atheists will succeed in placing one of their own in the White House at any time in the foreseeable future, and it continues to make powerful sense for voters to shun potential presidents who deny the existence of God. An atheist may be a good person, a good politician, a good family man (or woman), and even a good patriot, but a publicly proclaimed non-believer as president would, for three reasons, be bad for the country.
Hollowness and Hypocrisy at State Occasions. As Constitutional scholars all point out, the Presidency uniquely combines the two functions of head of government (like the British Prime Minister) and head of state (like the Queen of England). POTUS not only appoints cabinet members and shapes foreign policy and delivers addresses to Congress, but also presides over solemn and ceremonial occasions. Just as the Queen plays a formal role as head of the Church of England, the President functions as head of the �Church of America� � that informal, tolerant but profoundly important civic religion that dominates all our national holidays and historic milestones. For instance, try to imagine an atheist president issuing the annual Thanksgiving proclamation. To whom would he extend thanks in the name of his grateful nation �-the Indians in Massachusetts?
Then there�s the significant matter of the Pledge of Allegiance. Would President Atheist pronounce the controversial words �under God�? If he did, he�d stand accused (rightly) of rank hypocrisy. And if he didn�t, he�d pointedly excuse himself from a daily ritual that overwhelming majorities of his fellow citizens consider meaningful. Moreover, what patriotic songs would our non-believer chief executive authorize for major celebrations and observances? �God Bless America� is out, obviously, as is �America the Beautiful� (with its chorus, �America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.�) �My Country �tis of Thee� features an altogether unacceptable last verse (�Our father�s God to thee/Author of Liberty/To Thee we sing��) and �The Star Spangled Banner� national anthem also concludes with a verse that could cause hives to the ACLU (�Then conquer we must when our cause it is just/And this be our motto: In God is Our Trust.�) A non-Christian (like Joe Lieberman) could easily preside over state occasions because even though his faith differs significantly from that of the Christian majority, his obvious attachment to faith in God and Old Testament principles shows sympathy, not hostility, to the generalized value of faith.
Skeptics may suggest that an atheist president would give the nation the long-overdue chance to purge itself of these inappropriate religious trappings in our governmental and public processes, but truly overwhelming majorities cherish such traditions. The notion of dropping or altering all references to God and faith on public occasions to avoid discomfort for a single individual amounts to a formula for a disastrously unpopular presidency. |
"That informal, tolerant, but profoundly important civic religion" nonetheless apparently requires a God. (Who is the God of America, exactly?) Medved may not be aware of this, but there are all kinds of provisions for atheists who decline to say "under God" in the Pledge or swear on a Bible. No official of the United States government is required to serve in a priestly capacity; the dropping or alteration of references to God to "avoid discomfort for a single individual" is a routine occurrence, and it seems hard to believe that Americans who cheerfully accept the legitimacy of weddings performed by judges would have trouble with a President who thanks Americans rather than God in his Thanksgiving address. Even if they would, Medved's proper argument here is not that they would, but that they should, a much dicier proposition that he does not bother to address. It's a recurring theme.
I did enjoy the reference to Joe Lieberman's "attachment to [...] Old Testament principles". It's a stunningly accurate characterization, but I wonder if Mr. Medved has ever actually read the Old Testament?
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| Disconnecting from the People. The United States remains a profoundly, uniquely religious society: �a nation with the soul of a church� in Tocqueville�s durable phrase. A president need not embrace one of the nation�s leading faiths: the public accepted two Quaker presidents (Hoover and Nixon) despite the tiny number of our citizens who identify with the Society of Friends, and polling on candidates like Romney and Lieberman indicated that the their devout membership in minority religions hardly disqualified them. There�s a difference between an atheist, however, and a Mormon or a Jew � despite the fact that the same U.S. population (about five million) claims membership in each of the three groups. For Mitt and Joe, their religious affiliation reflected their heritage and demonstrated their preference for a faith tradition differing from larger Christian denominations. But embrace of Jewish or Mormon practices doesn�t show contempt for the Protestant or Catholic faith of the majority, but affirmation of atheism does. The most successful presidents sustain an almost mystical connection with the people they serve � as did Ike, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton (for all his faults), and Bush (before his recent troubles). A chief executive who publicly discards the core belief in God that drives the life and work of most of his countrymen can never achieve that sort of connection. A president with a mandate doesn�t have to be a regular church-goer, or even a convinced believer; but he can�t openly reject the religious sensibility of nearly all his predecessors and nearly all his fellow citizens. A leader who touts his non-belief will, even with the best of intentions, give the impression that he looks down on the people who elected him. |
I said it would be a recurring theme. Why address the reasons why Americans feel unable to "connect" with atheists, when you can simply assert that being a misunderstood minority automatically makes atheists ineligible for the Presidency? Note that Medved doesn't say that an atheist would look down on the people who elected him, merely that he would "give the impression" of looking down on them. Depending on the atheist, not even this weak formulation is necessarily true. I realize that we don't always have the best spokespeople, but most atheists are not contemptuous of most religious believers. Quite a few of us are married to religious believers! And quite a few Protestants really are contemptuous of Catholics, quite a few Jews are contemptuous of Moslems, quite a few Christians are contemptuous of atheists, etc. Medved seems to regard religious intolerance as a bug and secular intolerance as a feature, a pathetic and insupportable dual standard.
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| Winning the War on Islamo-Nazism. On one level, at least, the ongoing war on terror represents a furious battle of ideas and we face devastating handicaps if we attempt to beat something with nothing. Modern secularism rejects the notion that human beings feel a deep-seated, unquenchable craving for making connections with Godliness, in its various definitions and manifestations. For Osama bin Laden and other jihadist preachers, Islam understands that yearning but �infidel� America does not. Our enemies insist that God plays the central role in the current war and that they affirm and defend him, while we reject and ignore him. The proper response to such assertions involves the citation of our religious traditions and commitments, and the credible argument that embrace of modernity, tolerance and democracy need not lead to godless materialism. In this context, an atheist president conforms to the most hostile anti-America stereotypes of Islamic fanatics and makes it that much harder to appeal to Muslim moderates whose cooperation (or at least neutrality) we very much need. The charge that our battle amounts to a �war against Islam� seems more persuasive when an openly identified non-believer leads our side�after all, President Atheist says he believes in nothing, so it�s easy to assume that he leads a war against belief itself. A conventional adherent of Judeo-Christian faith can, on the other hand, make the case that our fight constitutes of an effort to defend our own way of life, not a war to suppress some alternative � and that way of life includes a specific sort of free-wheeling, open-minded religiosity that has blessed this nation and could also bless the nations of the Middle East. |
The "free-wheeling, open-minded religiosity" that Medved rightly admires usually goes by a simpler name: tolerance. The problem is that tolerance is anathema to Medved's explicitly intolerant thesis, so he's obliged to circumlocute. He sneaks in some sly allusions to atheists' supposed problems: we aren't spiritual (this will be news to a lot of Buddhists), we are "materialist" (a common double entendre used to signify "greedy" or "uncaring"), we "believe in nothing" (I trust this idiocy requires no refutation). Medved is resting his argument entirely on common misconceptions believers have about atheists, and then using those misconceptions to justify themselves. (That would be strike three, Mr. Medved. An argument has to begin somewhere other than where it ends up.) If the Islamists are wrong to believe that American tolerance has negative outcomes -- and of course they are wrong to believe this -- what better way to prove them wrong than by being tolerant, and successful? Living well is the best revenge, and the best propaganda too. Attempting to fit our way of life into the conceptual frames of our sworn enemies is a bizarre and cowardly approach.
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In response to the current rejection of a potential atheist president, secular enthusiasts may insist that some of our past leaders actually fit in to the long tradition of free-thinking and unorthodox religiosity � making it likely that we�ve already had a (mostly quiet) atheist president. That assumption, however, flies in the face of the evidence: the status of several founding fathers as so-called �Deists,� for instance, might make them less than conventional Christians, but hardly identified them as non-believers. Even Jefferson, in many ways the most daring theological thinker ever to occupy the White House, made a point of convening Christian church services in the Capitol Building and attending them regularly. Whatever their disagreements about miracles, the trinity, and the inerrancy of Scripture, the Founders certainly agreed about the usefulness and blessings associated with a faithful and Biblically-literate populace. Thomas Paine and even Ben Franklin might question some elements of traditional Christianity, but all the Constitutional fathers expressed unwavering faith in the necessity of a religious population in order to sustain their republican experiment,
On the question of the utility and benefits of religious beliefs and institutions, big majority of Americans agree today � even the bulk of that 15% of the country that professes no religious affiliation, or describes itself as �atheist� or �agnostic.� Many such skeptics still recognize the value of churches and synagogues in housing the homeless, visiting the sick, helping single mothers, ministering to the poor, building community, offering educational alternatives, and encouraging functional values in our young. Those who believe that religious institutions actually damage the society constitute only tiny minority within the already small non-believing minority. |
These two paragraphs are perfectly true, which is unfortunate for Medved because they undermine his (expressed but so far unargued) thesis. If most atheists do not believe that most religious beliefs and institutions are socially damaging, as I do not, how would this disqualify such tolerant atheists from being President? Atheists don't want to tear down all the churches: to the extent that most of us have a problem with religion, it is a problem with intolerant religion, with fundamentalist religion, with authoritarian religion -- the bloody-minded and fatal certainty of a small minority of religious believers. Of course, most religious Americans (and pretty much all the Presidents, as far as I can tell) have always had a problem with these things too. This looks more like a patch of common ground than an unbridgeable divide.
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| But even if an atheist president agrees that the well-being of the nation benefits from the spread of vigorous, non-fanatical religious faith, his own status as an openly proclaimed non-believer presents formidable handicaps for the encouragement of those values and institutions. For instance, Dr. Billy Graham has brought tens of millions to Christian commitment, but how could an unabashed atheist honor this achievement? If he avers (like Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris) that belief in God makes no more sense than belief in the Tooth Fairy, then how could he honor a great American for a lifetime of work in promulgating a silly and destructive myth? |
Well, that's easy. We wouldn't honor Billy Graham for spreading Christianity, we'd honor him for the humanitarian work he has done. Does Medved expect a President Lieberman to honor Graham for spreading Christianity? Does he expect a Christian President to shun secular humanitarian people and organizations? No American government has any business honoring any religious leader for spreading his religion. That is simply not an ideological arena in which America empowers government to intervene.
On the Tooth Fairy thing: this is an unfortunate and often-misunderstood sentiment of atheists. Belief in God obviously is not the same as belief in the Tooth Fairy, and the nonexistence of the Tooth Fairy is not evidence for the nonexistence of God. A better example of this sentiment (which, again, is not an argument) is to say that atheists feel about God the way modern theists feel about Zeus. We recognize that large numbers of people once believed in Zeus, and that they had what seemed to them to be valid reasons to believe in Zeus; we ask that Christians (for example) understand our nonbelief in God the way they understand their own nonbelief in Zeus. In essence, it is a plea for tolerance. Of course, it is not surprising that Medved doesn't grasp this.
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| The truth is that atheism remains a vibrant intellectual tradition and a healthy competitor in the marketplace of ideas � far less popular than our mainstream religions, but still capable of challenging those faiths and adding a bracing element to our national conversation. In the fierce competition among religious outlooks (some 40% of Americans embrace a denomination other than the one in which they began) no one wants to silence or extirpate atheism but big majorities rightly resist the idea of giving that non-faith official status and a powerful platform by placing an openly-advertised atheist in the White House. |
A fitting end to a deeply stupid column. Don't silence atheists, but for the love of God, don't give them a platform. Everyone knows they would just use it to advertise their beliefs. Religious people would never do that. Heh. |
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