An Atheist President

One of the fun parts about dealing with atheists is that they believe that there will never be an atheist president, at least not any time soon. The belief is that Americans in general find atheists not having the same morals as they do, and that they are amoral, whereas at least those with a Christian background have morals. The problem obviously is that atheists do have morals, and that they do feel the need to serve just as much as their religious counterparts. However, an atheist would need to overcome a different set of problems in order to become president: negative campaigning, proving their reputation, and organization.

Something that social media types are all too aware of is that atheists tend to spread the message of atheism way too much. If you have atheist friends, and they are proud of it, it seems that they post a lot of atheist propaganda. Ricky Gervais gets posted a lot, as do Dawkins and Carlin. There are also numerous posts that attack religious in general and Christianity specifically. A lot of it is easily slapped down, but there does seem to be a lot of it. It’s also gotten worse with the pope’s retirement; a major item was that Pope Benedict was retiring after a discussion about immunity. Although the item was proven false almost every time it popped it, that it kept popping up says all the wrong things about atheism.

The issue here is that almost everyone is tired of negative campaigning, and religious people are tired of dealing with attacks on the social media. That’s why this is the first problem; if atheists want to keep up the onslaught of negativity they can, but it’s not going to help build positive publicity for their case. It’s fine to say whatever you want, to start a discussion using a negative statement, but there is a problem when it borders on libel; there needs to be some form of fact-checking on the posts. It’s hardly a great plan to build a campaign for president when it doesn’t take much to see that you’ve been libeling most of your potential constituency.

Obviously the person must establish a reputation of religious tolerance, but doing so may alienate his own atheist base. Rather than being seen as someone who likes to bridge the gap between atheist and believer, but it is most likely that he will alienate one or the other side. By doing so, he may lose both sides in the election, so he needs to play a very tight game.

The other issue will be proving his or her reputation. This is going to be even harder for an atheist than someone who is a known by his church. One of the reasons that politicians maintain close ties to their church is that those close ties can establish a record of that person’s personality, especially the good deeds that the person has done. There are other ways to establish a person’s character, obviously, but few of them have as much duration as a person’s church; it is a group of people that knew the person for a long period of time, some of them even since the person was a kid. Having a military record helps, of course, as does a long volunteer record, but few things work as well as a church. Being part of a church establishes the person as salt of the earth, even if the person is rich, in a way that doing volunteer doesn’t. A military record will also help, especially if the person is a hero or by default in the combat arms.

Last but not least is the lack of a support organization. A Christian has the advantage of a church for support; nothing gets out the vote like a large organization, and that organization supports its own even if they’ve heard of the person before. An atheist candidate is going to have to build that organization almost from scratch; although atheist organizations do exist, they simply lack the organization that a church has.

In short, an atheist may need to overcome his own record, must establish that he has a positive reputation, and has to build an organization to back him during the campaign. If he can do all of that, he should be able to at least do a decent run at a campaign. So good luck and you have my prayers ;-)!