Religion and Politics

Aren't those supposed to be the two things you never talk about with friends? I must be different (okay, I know), because I rarely talk about much else, unless it's sports. There was a post this morning by Jane Galt on her excellent blog Asymmetrical Information, talking about a question asked by a BBC reporter, to wit: can a candidate win high public office in the US without being a Christian?

Well, of course this ignores Joe Lieberman, who is currently Senator from Connecticut, was once candidate for Vice President, and is a Jew. Is he the exception that proves the rule, though? Personally, I don't think so. I posted the following:

I was the National Field Director for Ambassador Alan Keyes' run for the GOP nomination in 2000, and was heavily involved in the primary campaign in South Carolina (we finished third). I am also a white Mormon from Utah (who is not sold on Mitt Romney, just in the interest of full disclosure). The vast majority of the campaign staff in SC was evangelical Christian and white. Not one person in the month I spent there said anything about Keyes's skin color except Keyes himself. I did not, however, reveal my religion to anyone, as it was judged by the campaign itself to be much more likely to be a problem in the South that I was a Mormon than that Keyes was black. I found this (later) to be absolutely spot-on accurate.

Fundamentalist Christians do not make up nearly as large a part of the voting populace as is commonly represented on CNN. I think an open atheist could absolutely get elected (we elect open homosexuals to the state legislature here in Utah, and I can promise you after someone declares himself gay here nobody cares much what church he goes to) as long as that atheist had a political philosophy that endeared him - or her - to a majority of the population.

My experience tells me that a Presidential candidate that really went to church every Sunday and believed that the things he professed there had useful things to tell him about his politics would have a harder time getting elected than one that never went to church except for funerals. IMO it is being TOO religious that causes political problems, rather more than not being religious enough. Most people are looking for a candidate that seems like them, and most people are just not that religious. They want a President that prays to God, then does whatever his brain tells him to do, because that's what they do. One that received angelic visitations would not do well at the ballot box, folks.

And that's really the bottom line. Of course an atheist could get elected, assuming the competition were sufficiently unattractive. If Giuliani gets the nomination, and the alternative is Hillary Clinton, I guarantee an atheist - if Rudy really is one - has a decent shot. If the Democrats nominated an open atheist (and it absolutely could happen), and the alternative were, say, Bill Frist (also a possibility, though a longshot), the atheist would probably win in a walk.

Theron Harmon, a Friend of the Group, is a big supporter of Mitt Romney, but I'm not sold. It's nice, of course, for a religious faith that still suffers from an inferiority complex (as Mormonism does) to have a practicing member as such a prominent candidate, but my beef with Romney is political and philosophical, not religious. His religion (and ironically, Senate Minority Leader Democrat Harry Reid is also a Mormon) is almost totally unimportant to me. What I mostly care about is the man's political philosophy - if he has one - and he could be an atheist and that wouldn't matter to me any more than if he were black.

What about you?

P.S. Remember, there's more blogging over at Mortgage Blogger.