January 20-26, 2005

slant

One Nation, Under [Blank]

Isn't it time we had an atheist president?

by Shaun Brady

By the time you read this, George W. Bush most likely will have already re-upped his oath of office, one hand no doubt resting on a copy of the Holy Bible proffered by the highest-ranking jurist in the land. How does the president reconcile the fact that he is swearing to uphold the tenets of a constitution that protects religious freedom upon the central tome of one particular ideology?

Easy. He doesn't.

The fact is, atheists are still seen in this country as bizarre eccentrics, like alien abductees or gay Republicans. God is a given; no need to explain. Last week, President Bush told the ultra-conservative Washington Times that he can't "see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord." (The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, owner of the Times, certainly has a relationship with the Lord: He was crowned "humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent" in March at a ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building attended by several members of Congress. Somehow this is more acceptable than wanting "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.)

But given that Bush is simultaneously among the most religious and most incompetent of presidents, he just might be wrong about that.

I say it's time for an atheist president.

The concept of faith is central to American religious conservatism, far more than the actual text of the Bible. Unquestioning belief is posited as the key to the gates of heaven, regardless of personal behavior or adherence to the actual teachings of Jesus. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson makes the argument that religion is in fact a mechanism of social evolution. It provides a set of beliefs around which a group can congregate and clearly defines an "outsider" who must be vanquished. But the prospect of eternal reward or punishment is a far stronger incentive than a mere social contract.

The Bush presidency is a dramatic illustration of this idea; facts are irrelevant as long as everyone agrees on what to believe. The administration quietly ended the search for WMDs in Iraq this week, empty-handed but declaring, "Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action, because this is about protecting the American people."

Exactly what the American people are being protected from is never explained.

"Faith," as practiced by the truly spiritual, is a belief in something higher than oneself, an ideal to strive toward. But the evangelical notion of faith is one of self-delusion in service of ideology. From its beginning, America has struck an at-times uncomfortable balance between these two notions. Essentially, the Constitution is just such an ideal, an idea that generations of Americans have attempted to live up to, even if they fall far short more often than not. But too often, the very act of falling short is ratified by faith or patriotism. For a country that endlessly trumpets its devotion to freedom and liberty, we always seem to be dragged kicking and screaming into any expansion of civil liberties. Our various moral trespasses during the current conflict are invariably blown off by restating that we're the "good guys." Apparently nothing we do can contradict that fact, so what good are value judgments, anyway? What won Bush his second term wasn't "values," it was blind faith.

Nothing else can explain why the red-state electorate so often votes against its own best interests. And by continually harping on faith, religious and political leaders codify a way of thinking that insures they'll remain in power. Right here in Pennsylvania, the Dover Area School District recently added "Intelligent Design," a supposed alternative to evolution with no scientific backing, to its curriculum, while a suburban district in Atlanta slapped stickers in biology textbooks declaring evolution a "theory, not a fact." These attempts not only equate religious belief with hard science, they manufacture a distrust in science and empirical evidence.

Call me cynical, but an atheist president would be more likely to pay attention to the facts in front of his or her own face.

And an administration making decisions based on the interpretation of evidence, rather than the echo chamber of its own often contradictory wishful thinking, would be far better equipped to address the issues before us.

Shaun Brady is going to hell. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Duane Swierczynski, City Paper, 123 Chestnut St., Third Floor, Phila., Pa., 19106 or e-mail Duane Swierczynski.