Dog Save The King
This morning, as I watched new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer deliver his first speech in front of 10 Downing Street, I was struck as an American by what he said and didn’t say.
The Labour leader began by praising the public service and noting the history-making ethnicity of his Conservative Party predecessor, Rishi Sunak. Then he directly addressed the voters who had not supported his party in yesterday’s vote — assuring them that “my government will serve you” and adding a few sentences later, “Country first, party second.” Toward the end of his brief address, Starmer promised an administration “unburdened by doctrine” and pledged his commitment to “restore service and respect to government.”
I could easily write an entire blog post contrasting Starmer’s tone with that certain to characterize Donald Trump’s victory speech should the latter win America’s presidential election this fall. Can you imagine the bellicose and always petty Trump having anything nice to say about his predecessor, Joe Biden? Can you fathom even a hint of a national-unity theme from our ultimate Divider — a man for whom there is no such thing as the American People, but rather a dichotomy of those who support him and the scum who don’t? For Trump, doctrine — aka his crazy-quilt of grievances — is everything, and compromise is nothing. Not only does he lack any respect for public service and good-government practices, but he constantly derides the dedicated federal workforce as “the Swamp” — promising to complete the job he started in his first term as president, which is replacing them with sycophants whose loyalty is to him alone.
But all of that isn’t what I want to write about today. Rather, I’d like to focus on one thing Keir Starmer didn’t say.
Nowhere in his first speech as the most powerful man in the British government did he invoke a deity.
Even though he’d arrived at Downing Street right after his monarch, by quaint British custom, had asked him as leader of the election’s winning party to form a new government, Starmer didn’t rousingly shout that most British of phrases, “God save the King!”
Why is that significant? Because Starmer is Britain’s first avowed atheist.
That’s common knowledge among British voters, yet Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide victory. The British public understandably voted primarily on “pocketbook issues” and health care. Opinion poll after opinion poll tell us that those same issues are top-of-mind for American voters — even more than the evils of Trump or Biden’s cognitive state. Still, can you imagine the American electorate voting into office any presidential candidate who doesn’t so much as pay lip service to belief in God?
I can’t.
Not at a time when evangelicals in the United States have accrued so much power, as Trump’s most fervent and arguably most influential supporters, that even a messianic narcissist like Trump feels compelled to invoke God constantly. He’s already packed the U.S. Supreme Court with justices who’ve overturned Roe v Wade and seek to obliterate our nation’s founding principle of the separation of church and state.
Ours is a country, after all, in which Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry last month signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, prompting opportunistic “man of God” Donald Trump to exclaim (in typically all-caps bluster that I’ll not reproduce here) “I love the Ten Commandments in public schools, private schools, and many other places, for that matter. How can we as a nation go wrong???”
A week later, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools in that state.
As New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul noted recently, “In their drive to foist their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans are leaning harder into exclusionary territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the tenets of the Christian nationalist movement.” Per Wikipedia, Christian nationalism “primarily focuses on the internal politics of society, such as legislating civil and criminal laws that reflect their view of Christianity and the role of religion in political and social life.” In other words, “Christian nationalism seeks to establish a particular exclusivist version of Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural order.”
Which isn’t to say, by any means, that all Christians in this country are Christian nationalists. In fact, for all of the MAGA GOP’s efforts to paint Democratic voters as Godless beasts whose goal in life is to destroy everything that is good and decent, most surely believe in God, even those who don’t adhere to organized religion. Regardless, though, outing oneself as an atheist or agnostic — I count myself in the latter camp — can be perilous for those in the public eye, and remains suicide for politicians.
One of the first things I found when I Googled search terms such as “atheism in America” was this blurb, which I’d rather hadn’t been labeled an “AI overview” but which nevertheless rings true:
“According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 4% of US adults identify as atheists, up from 3% in 2014 and 2% in 2007. However, some scholars believe these numbers are underestimates. For example, a 2022 Gallup poll found that 17% of Americans don’t believe in God, and a study by University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle suggests that as many as 26% of Americans may be atheists. The study was designed to address the stigma associated with atheism and the possibility that some people may not identify as atheists, even anonymously, due to this stigma.”
A CNN article from this March dissects that stigma, citing a 2020 Gallup poll finding that fewer Americans would be willing to vote for a well-qualified atheist candidate than for a candidate who was gay or Muslim. (Full disclosure: Sixty percent of those polled said they’d nonetheless be amenable to voting for a well-qualified atheist. Count me as deeply skeptical.)
Why the reluctance? Skim down to CNN’s subhead reading “What Do People Get Wrong About Atheists?” It begins, “One of the most common misconceptions about atheists is that they lack morals that others typically attribute to religion. In a 2019 Pew survey, 44% of US residents said belief in God was necessary to be moral and have good values.” But in fact, the article notes, “Various studies suggest that atheists are no more immoral than religious people. They’re also just as likely to participate in civic life as those who are affiliated with a religion, and just as likely to engage in community service, according to Pew’s recent survey of religious ‘nones’.” (In 2023, according to a Pew Research Center poll, “About 28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religion.”)
Atheists also get stereotyped as angry people who vehemently oppose religion and its followers. Surely some do, but I imagine that the vast majority of them — and the wider demographic of agnostics and nones — recognize the personal and societal goods that can come from religious belief. What makes us angry is not anyone’s faith in God, but overreach by Christian soldiers who seek to rewrite the laws of the land in accordance with their beliefs — subverting the intent of the Founding Fathers.
My internet search also uncovered an interesting piece from Politico headlined “The Last Taboo.” It’s from December 2013, but its contents are as true now as they were then.
The piece starts with longtime Congressman Barney Frank’s admitting his atheism on Real Time With Bill Maher shortly after he’d ended his political career. The point was that while Frank had been willing to risk re-election by coming out as gay in his liberal district as early as 1987, he still didn’t feel he could share his atheism with voters when he last ran for Congress in 2012.
No candidate for president has ever, from what I’ve read, publicly professed atheism or even agnosticism. Per the Politico article, the closest might have been president and later U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who never used “atheist” to describe himself but attended Unitarian church services and once turned down the chance to serve as president of then-Congregationalist-affiliated Yale University, saying “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ.”
Ward Hill Lamon, one of the closest friends of Abraham Lincoln — historians’ consensus pick as the greatest American president — wrote in his biography, “Never [during Lincoln’s early years in Illinois or single term in Congress] “did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God and the Savior of men.” As president, Thomas Jefferson, who once urged his nephew in a letter to “question with boldness even the existence of a God,” fought fiercely for the separation of church and state. Post-presidency, he founded the University of Virginia as the nation’s first secular institution of higher learning.
From the Politico article and everything else I’ve read online, it seems that the only member of Congress to date who has come out as a nonbeliever is California Democrat Pete Stark, who served in the House of Representatives for 40 years starting in 1973. Per the Pew Research Center’s “Faith on the Hill” survey of the current Congress, which was seated in January 2023, just one member — Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, notably the first self-proclaimed bisexual member of Congress — so much as identifies as religiously independent. Although she is a suspected atheist, she has denied the label.
I’m in no way saying that the novelty of some future out-and-proud atheist candidate for the U.S. presidency would, by itself, make me any more or less prone to vote for that individual. As I’d hope any voter would, I’d weigh that person’s stances on the issues of deepest importance to me and the nation. I’d also consider that candidate’s personal values as best I could determine them, and whether they align in meaningful ways with my own.
Now, would I admire the forthrightness and transparency of a self-declared atheist candidate for president? No doubt. But that would be because of the (sadly necessary) bravery of such candor.
With religious faith, it’s not the thing itself that’s a problem. Rather, it’s when one’s religious beliefs stomp on the rights of others — those who believe differently and those who don’t believe at all. What I admire about what’s happening today in the U.K. is not the fact that Britons made an atheist their prime minister. It’s the fact that they rightly saw his lack of faith as threatening no one and saying nothing negative about his character. Simply put, Keir Starmer’s atheism didn’t matter.
The sooner it doesn’t matter in American politics, the sooner we can stop worrying about our schools being turned into pulpits, our laws and government policies being unduly influenced by the narrow dictates of the Religious Right, and our highest court enabling it all.
