The President Should Be An Atheist

With all this talk about whether President Obama is a Muslim or a Christian, as he claims, with Glenn Feckless making an issue of it despite his own Christian ambiguity, with 18% of the electorate believing he’s a Muslim, and with 60% of seemingly lobotomized Republicans using it as a political issue to retake Congress, it seems to me that the Founding Fathers didn’t go far enough defining the required qualifications for the job of President.

Ours is a secular government, created to perform secular functions for the citizens of the United States. Religion is to play no part in the governance of the country, and the personal superstitions beliefs of those citizens are inviolate, not to be infringed upon by the government in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, no religious test can be required of any officer of the United States, including, but especially, the President. Religion is supposed to be a subject non grata in the White House, and indeed, on Capitol Hill.

We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy worrying about, discussing, analyzing, questioning and debating the President’s religion, both during the campaign, and now even after he’s elected, as if it was singularly important, the most important aspect of his qualifications to do his job, when in fact it’s relatively meaningless. Given the fact that his religion is to not only play a small part, but is supposed to play no part at all, in the functions of his job, doesn’t it make more sense that as a qualification for the presidency, he should be religiously neutral?

In order to be religiously neutral, he could not be a member of any cult religion, lest he be accused of favoring the dogma and theology of that religion, to the exclusion of all others, in the execution of his duties.  Wouldn’t it make more sense that he be able to exclude the dogma and theology of all religions? So the only rational religious stance he could possibly take, and still remain neutral, would be an atheistic one. He should be able to profess, honestly, allegiance to no god(s). Only then could he be trusted to fairly and equitably enforce the First Amendment.

One of the advantages of an atheist President is that we wouldn’t, as a nation, have to be confronted with this national distraction concerning  exactly what religion he belongs to. There would be no doubt. He’d be neither Muslim, Christian, Wiccan, Satanist, or Gideonist, nor the member of any other weird, offbeat cult he failed to tell us about, but that he joined in a moment of weakness during a fraternity hazing while in college. There would be no question that he favored the building of the mosque in New York on strict First Amendment grounds, and not because his imam told him to do so.

Nathan Diament, Director of Public Policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, recently said:

A president’s religion matters insofar as it informs his policy choices.

To me, that is a significant cause for concern. A president’s religion should never have any effect whatsoever on his policy choices, so if we had a President who was an atheist, that would be one layer of oversight the nation would not have to spend time on. Is he smart? Is he receiving accurate intelligence? Are his advisers competent? Did he get any nookie last night? These are all perfectly sound questions to ask when analyzing the day-to-day presidential policy decision making. Getting rid of the religious question makes the second-guessing that much less complicated.

Logically, then, it makes sense that in a secular country like the United States, one qualification for President that should be mandated should be that he have no religion whatsoever, no belief in god(s), no theology, and no one other than “We the People” to answer to.