Nonbelievers just as qualified for politics as the religious

Though the U.S. is a secular nation, if you want to be a politician in America, you have to believe in something.

A full 51 percent of Americans say they would be less likely to support an openly atheist candidate for president, and 45 percent say that belief in God is necessary to have good values, according to Pew Research Center surveys taken in 2014 and 2015 respectively. At his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general Jeff Sessions said he wasn’t sure when asked if a secular person could claim to know the truth just as well as someone who practices religion.

The prevalence of these views has ultimately discouraged the irreligious from engaging in our political system.

“I do feel as though the secular population is more cynical than extremists on either side, liberal or conservative. They are more likely to feel that their vote and their voice doesn’t matter. They’re just more skeptical of the system, just as they are skeptical of things in everyday life,” said Quinn Wolter, former president of the Pitt Secular Alliance, a nonreligious student association on campus. Irreligious representation is impeded further by the fact that the irreligious tend to be young, and that youth have a notoriously low turnout rate in elections.

So it should come as no surprise that the recently elected 115th Congress has only one religiously unaffiliated member: Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona. Moreover, the dominant religion in America, Christianity, is overrepresented, with 93 percent of our representatives in Congress identifying as Christian, though only 70 percent of the population does.

What is surprising is that the religiously unaffiliated are no small minority. Just under 23 percent of Americans do not identify with any religion, making them the second-largest religious group in the country and counting, increasing from 16.1 percent of the population in 2007.

The minimal representation of these over 70 million people in American politics is heightened by the fact that the Christian-dominated legislatures in America often pursue policies rooted in religious doctrine. The most blatant of these policies require legislators to believe in a higher power. According to Wolter, “some states still have a requirement of faith to join office.”

Seven states in America — Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — still have language in their constitutions prohibiting atheists from holding public office.

Religion also sneaks into policy debate in more subtle, insidious ways. A full 34 percent of our representatives in Congress are climate change deniers. While there are other reasons representatives choose to deny the existence of climate change, like lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, some object due to their belief that God controls the climate.

The most prominent of these is Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, who was the chair of the Senate Environment Committee for the past two years — the same man who brought a snowball to the floor of the Senate as evidence that climate change wasn’t real. In his book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” Inhofe wrote, “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”

But what’s outrageous to me is the chair of the Senate Environment Committee standing in the way of solutions to the largest environmental crisis of our time because “God’s still up there.”

Religion was never meant to have this much influence over politics. Patrick Hughes, a professor of history at Pitt, said the government shouldn’t take a stance on religious issues or make laws specifically dealing with religion.

“The U.S. government is not atheistic, it’s not supposed to be Christian — it’s supposed to be completely neutral,” he said. These ideals are enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which, according to Thomas Jefferson, built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

The overwhelming religiosity of America’s legislating bodies erodes that wall of separation, while the wall of public opinion blocks all but the best few of America’s irreligious from public office and leaves the rest feeling voiceless.

This religious barrier must be brought down, not just for the sake of irreligious representation but as a part of the progressive movement. Studies show that the religiously unaffiliated tend to lean politically liberal, with strong majorities supporting same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to choose. The irreligious are also more likely to look to science for guidance, which is imperative for meaningful legislative that can slow climate change.

Bringing down that wall of public opinion is the key to accessing the political power of America’s irreligious, but it won’t be brought down from the top. Part of the solution for Hughes involves secularists playing an active role in combating stereotypes and misconceptions about atheism, agnosticism and unbelief in order to change them and sway public opinion.

Another part of the solution is engaging more nonbelievers in the system. The only way to do this, however, is for the irreligious to come together as a larger and more impactful force. The nonreligious are a diverse group on many levels, meaning they lack specific ideology to unite them like many denominations of Christianity. If nonbelievers can put aside the differences between their many subgroups, they can gain access to the power that comes with being a group of over 70 million.

As the unaffiliated population in America continues to grow, so does hope for more irreligious representation in the future. But low political engagement and a dismal view in the public eye threatens to relegate America’s second-largest religious group to the sidelines while our legislative bodies argue over whether God controls the weather.

God — if he’s up there — hasn’t sent us quality leaders. Let’s send our own.

Nick primarily writes on politics and American culture for The Pitt News.

Write to Nick at npe3@pitt.edu.