Peter Stark, a US congressman from Freemont, California since 1973 has done the unthinkable. He has publicly declared his non-belief in a Supreme Being. His "courageous" announcement has caused much rejoicing among atheists, secularists and other assorted godless groups. Until Stark "came out," the highest ranking public official to identify him/ herself as a "non-theist" was a spunky school board president in Berkeley, California!
The American Humanist Association applauded Rep. Pete Stark for publicly acknowledging he does not believe in a supreme being. The declaration, it said, makes him the highest-ranking elected official — and first congressman — to proclaim to be an atheist. The organization took out an ad in Tuesday’s Washington Post, congratulating the California Democrat for his stance.
”With Stark’s courageous public announcement of his nontheism, it is our hope that he will become an inspiration for others who have hidden their conclusions for far too long,” executive director Roy Speckhardt said in a statement.
Associate director Ron Millar told the Los Angeles Times that the group wanted to highlight the difficulty that politicians have declaring they don’t believe in God. A member of American Atheists California nominated Stark.
”We didn’t think we’d have any member of Congress come forward,” Millar said.
Stark, whose district is in the San Francisco Bay-area town of Fremont, confirmed his belief in a statement to The Associated Press late Monday. He said he was ”a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being.” ”I look forward to working with the Secular Coalition to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social services,” he wrote.
Ellen Goodman writes and I agree that it will take more than the declaration of "non-theism" by a 75 year old congressman from a secure and liberal voting district to change the entrenched "god" culture of American public life, made into a litmus test and a trial by ordeal in the last thirty years by right wing religious groups like the Moral Majority. Writes Goodman:
Some described Mr. Stark’s admission as "coming out of the closet." Others rued the fact that God was not on his side. A spokesman for the Concerned Women for America unabashedly bashed him, saying that "a Christian worldview is proper for a politician to have."
Not surprisingly, Mr. Stark has no ambitions for the presidency. In one of those endless polls surveying whether we are "ready for" a black, a woman, a Jew or others to be president, only 14 percent of Americans believe we’re ready for an atheist. What Mr. Stark has done, however, is open a fresh chapter in this year’s hefty book on presidential politics and religion. ……
…… Until the Stark moment, what captured media attention had been the subtle and not-so-subtle focus on Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith. Will his religion hurt his chances for the Republican nomination? How much? I’ve been especially struck by this because I was a young reporter in Detroit when Mr. Romney’s father, George, was governor of Michigan. I barely heard a peep about George Romney’s faith even though at the time his church still banned blacks from the priesthood. I didn’t even know George’s grandfather had five wives. In 1967, this Romney’s campaign to be the moderate, anti-war Republican president foundered after he admitted being "brainwashed" about the Vietnam War. It had nothing to do with faith.
What happened between 1967 and 2007? How did the matter of someone’s religion get back into the dead center of the public square, not to mention the cable shows and the blogosphere?
As a society we need to have conversations about right and wrong. But in this increasingly pluralistic country we also need to uphold the idea that morals are not the exclusive property of any one religion. More controversially, we need to welcome the idea that values are not the exclusive property of religion itself.
Pete Stark denies that it takes courage to become the first admitted non-theist in the House. "What is courageous," he adds, "is to stand up in Congress and say, ‘let’s tax the rich and give money to poor kids.’ "
There are many ways to be a true believer.
Accidental Blogger 
5 responses to “Atheism in the American Public Square: Slim Pickings”
I’m an atheist and I was thinking about the topic today:
I woke up this morning and proceeded to make coffee and eat breakfast. Then I realized that I had not consciously decided to be the person I had been prior to going to sleep. I just woke up and my personality was still there, waiting for me, defining me without my explicit consent. It made me realize the absurdity of the concept “free will”. Anyway.
It’s all just a consequence of my Proust readings. He asks, and I paraphrase, “Why are we the same person, upon waking, that we were before we fell asleep?” He compares selfhood to a memory, just this fleeting, tenuous recollection.
And I wonder, as an atheist: what does it say that I lost faith in god before I lost faith in my self?
It’s confusing.
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It is time to revisit Harold Bloom’s The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, despite the author’s characteristically idiosyncratic harping. Take this remark from a review reproduced at Amazon from Publishers Weekly:
“Every American, [Bloom] writes, assumes that God loves her or him in a personal, intimate way, and this trait is the bedrock of our national religion, a debased Gnosticism often tinged with selfishness.”
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Matt:
I wrote in my post about my student turned yogi which I hope you read, scientists speculate that the “tools” of belief for the primitive man were fashioned around agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind. While atheists are fully capable of possessing all three tools of socialization, for many of us who do not buy into the herd mentality of unquestioning faith, one or all of the three stop making sense at some point as a satisfactory explanation of the inexplicable. Doesn’t mean we are not curious, afraid or unsympathetic. Just that we are okay with that limitation. And as you point out, so are we at peace with the honest, unsexy and sometimes painful realization that we are what we are, whether or not we believe in a supernatural power. (Just don’t run for public office in the foreseeable future!)
Dean:
The element of selfishness is a major driving force in the religiosity of the majority of the faithful. The idea that one would be “blessed,” physically, emotionally and materially by just “believing.” The bribery angle of devotion is not often mentioned – why some people will pour money into well oiled religious machines and not for purely altruistic measures which lack the allure of a reward here or in the hereafter. Every Sunday morning, the Houston TV channels blare the “feel good” message of God’s personal love and the resultant rewards, slickly mouthed by the charlatans of the area mega-churches. Listening to their message is like having hot lead poured into my ears. But hundreds of thousands of the pious are ecstatic, returning home smug, flush and eager with the promise of ever fancier homes, fatter bank balances and swankier automobiles.
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I am an atheist and applaud Stark for coming out. I emailed him saying so and I emailed the organizations involved in prompting his public declaration thanking them too.
That said, I disagree with his statement about courage. I do think what he did took courage. It may have been minimized by the liberal slant of his district and other similar factors, but I do not think it takes courage to espouse a Robin Hood approach to the budget.
I think it takes more courage to tell people they need to be responsible for their own lives, that they deserve greater freedom and that we need to work to reduce the size of government.
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Brian,
I agree that it took some courage for an American politician (even one from a liberal district) to “come out” as an atheist.
What I was asking though is whether Stark’s action is going to embolden others to do the same. I am afraid not. In the current culture, that would spell political suicide.
Forget public honesty about atheism or agnosticism. Even if a man or woman running for office is personally religious, when asked about their faith on the campaign trail, I would like to hear the terse reply: “None of your damn business!” That would be refreshing. Instead we see politicians hypocritically trying to outdo each other in proving their devotion and hence their suitability for public office.
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