It would seem to go without saying that atheists are not comfortable in the Republican Party, what with its heavy dependence upon the Religious Right for volunteers and campaign dollars. Elizabeth Dole has made it very clear that she not only considers atheists not worth acknowledging, she sees political advantage in demonizing them.
But now it seems that atheists are not (openly) welcome in the Democratic party, either. The Democrats held a forum on faith or somesuch nonsense, and an agnostic who protested was asked to leave. The operatives who put the whole thing together basically chose the tactic of ignoring the openly non-theistic people in their midst. The political incentive here is to make inroads into religious voters by demonstrating that Democrats are believers and good Christians and therefore good Christians should vote (and register) Democratic. Acknowleding that atheists are good people too would at minimum be off-message and at worst could offend the target audience.
Regardless of political incentives, of course, this is just plain wrong and a meaningful apology is in order.
But query about political incentives. According to the WaPo‘s journalist, openly non-religious people make up between 10 to 12% of all Americans. This may not be synonymous with “atheists” or even “agnostics” but may include people who simply don’t think about religion at all and instead go on about their lives. I would submit that such non-religious people can probably be legitimately called “atheists” since they do not believe in God enough to avoid thinking about the issue at all. If you do not believe in Thor, then there is a decent chance that you aren’t going to spend a lot of time thinking about Thor or explaining away Thor’s non-existence or justifying your failure to attend Thor-worshipping ceremonies. A pro-Thor evangelist may come along and change their minds, but that would be a different issue.
Democrats are all about inclusion. They bend over backwards to be inclusive of a variety of groups — racial groups, gender identification and sexual preference groups, native speakers of non-English languages, and now, they are trying to reach out to religious groups. Good for them; religious Americans should be represented in politics. But so should non-religious Americans. I also note that a Republican party that really stood for small government, low taxes, personal freedom, and a strong military would attract a large number of people without making an overt appeal to religiosity. Those parts of a Republican policy platform are still attractive to me despite the sometimes overt religiosity of Republican politics.
But that’s the thing. Like a lot of non-religious Americans, I have to either look past or outright ignore the appeals to religion that are becoming integrated into both parties’ appeals for political support. The Democrats can offer a conversion story — a Republican military man who grew alarmed at the overreaching of executive power under George W. Bush, offended at the spread of pro-torture rhetoric within the Republican party, the leadership’s embrace of budget deficits and expanding social welfare programs, and reflexive reliance on military force — and that has some compelling power for a person like me. But if they do that on the same day they tell me I have to be religious to be a Democrat, they lose me more than they gain me. (There are some other things they may suggest on a policy level that would lose me more, too, but let’s not get into that right now.)
I’m not asking for an appeal to non-religious Americans by either party. I’m asking for the parties to appeal to me with good public policy. Whether I believe in magic, and if so what kind of magic I believe in, has nothing to do with reality. The choice of bronze age idols I worship, and the manner in which I choose to worship them, has zero effect on my patriotism, zero effect on homelessness, zero effect on my wealth (unless I tithe), zero effect on my security from our enemies, zero effect on how I think Social Security should be reformed, zero effect on the kinds of weapons our nation buys or how many soldiers we hire to use those weapons or where we choose to deploy them, zero effect on whether Medicare can keep a tuberculosis epidemic from breaking out in our inner cities, zero effect on pretty much anything the government does and therefore, zero effect on decisions I make as a voter. I want the parties to dispense with religion as an additive to politics altogether. Both of them.
But I guess that’s really too much to ask, isn’t it.
