In our present uncomfortable climate of quarrels between religionists and secularists it would be a great advantage to everyone to have atheists in leading government positions. Here are the reasons why.
Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush came perilously close to doing when later talking about the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from national laws, and having unelected seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism, satire and challenge.
Atheist leaders are going to be more sceptical about inculcating sectarian beliefs into small children separated into publicly funded ‘faith-based’ schools, risking social divisiveness and possible future conflict. They will be readier to learn Northern Ireland’s bleak lesson in this regard.
Atheist leaders will by definition be neutral between the different religious pressure groups in society, and will have no temptation not to be even-handed because of an allegiance to the outlook of just one of those groups.
Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation. This is not a trivial point: for most of history those lower down the social ladder have been promised a perch at the top when dead, and kept quiet thereby; and the claim that in an imperfect world one’s hopes are better fixed on the afterlife than on hopes of earthly paradise is official church doctrine.
Atheist leaders will not be tempted to think they are the messenger of any kind of Good News from above, or the agent of any Higher Purpose on earth. Or at very least, they will not think this literally.
If an atheist became prime minister in the UK, the prospect of disestablishment of the Church of England would come closer. This is a matter of importance, for two chief reasons. The first is that the Church of England’s privileged position gives other religious groups too much incentive to try elbowing their way into getting similar privileges, such as the ear of ministers, tax exemptions, public funding for their own sect’s faith schools, and the big prize of seats in the legislature.
Second, the C of E has far too big a footprint in the public domain, out of all proportion to the actual numbers it represents: just 2 per cent of the population go weekly to its churches. Yet it controls the primary school system – 80 per cent of C of E schools are primary – and a substantial proportion of the secondary school system, including academy schools. It is entitled to have twenty-six of its bishops sitting in the House of Lords, plus a number more who have been made life peers on retiring; and it has the automatic ear of government – do not suppose that if an Archbishop of Canterbury phones Number 10 he is told no one is at home.
Having a publicly atheist British prime minister would make it more likely that the functional secularity of British life and politics, the foregoing exceptions noted, would become actual secularity. ‘Secularism’ means that matters of public policy and government are not under the influence, still less control, of sectarian religious interests. The phrase ‘separation of church and state’ does not quite capture the sense in which a genuinely secular arrangement keeps religious voices on a par with all other non-governmental voices in the public square, and all the non-governmental players in the public square separate from the government itself. It means that churches and religious movements have to see themselves as civil society organisations exactly like trades unions, political parties, the Boy Scouts, and so on: with every right to exist, and to have their say, but as self-constituted interest groups no more entitled to a bigger share of the public pie of influence, privilege, tax handouts and legal exemptions than any other self-appointed interest group.
As things stand, religious groups get a slice of the pie vastly larger than their numbers or merits truly justify. The big advantage of an atheist prime minister or head of state would be that he or she would see that fact, and act accordingly. An atheist is not going to have the lingering sense that because someone has chosen to believe one or another ancient dogma, and put on funny clothes, he is to be respected and honoured, listened to, given the public’s money to bring up other people’s children in the same beliefs, and exempted from some of the laws of the land.
Religion is a matter of choice in that, unlike your race, age, gender or disability if you have one, you can change it or not have it at all. True, most people believe because they were made to believe as small children, and belief can be hard to shake off if your community threatens to reject you or in some cases even kill you for your apostasy. But it is still fundamentally voluntary. As such it should pay its own way and take its place in the queue along with all other voluntary things. That is something that an atheist political leader might say aloud, and we might all breathe a great deal more easily as a result.
Despite appearances, the world is not seeing a resurgence of religion, only a big turning-up of the volume of religious voices, which is happening in response to increasing secularism tired of the disruptions, obstructions and conflicts religion so often causes. Public acknowledgement of atheism by a senior politician would be just one more indicator of the fact that the tide is actually running in the opposite direction: and that would be a welcome and hopeful sign.