Let's talk about something political that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Okay, maybe a little bit to do with Donald Trump.
The current Congress
-- everyone in the House and Senate --
doesn't have a single open atheist.
Only one Congress member,
Representative Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, is "unaffiliated."
And even her staff has said she feels the label of "atheist" is
"not befitting of her life's work".
A common reaction to this news, when it was first reported in January,
was that atheists are merely underrepresented in Congress.
I mean, strictly looking at the numbers,
this is true.
Americans without organized religion make up about 23% of the country,
according to the Pew Research Center,
but we have only 0.2% representation on Capitol Hill.
That's more than a hundred-fold difference.
This ignores the ten politicians who chose not to answer the religion question.
Christians, on the other hand, are 71% of the country,
but 90.7% of Congress.
So, why does this continue to happen?
Why aren't there more
-- or should I say any -- open atheists in Congress?
Let me offer a few theories.
1) We don't vote.
According to The Atlantic,
the "Nones" were approximately a quarter of the population over the past several years,
but we made up only 12% of the electorate in both 2012 and 2014.
We're not electing people like us,
because we're not electing people, period.
I should mention, we don't have numbers specifically on atheists.
Just the Nones, which is a much larger group, that includes anyone and everyone who doesn't belong to an organized religion.
Despite our percentage gains as a group over the past decade,
our voter turnout has remained frustratingly steady.
And while the Religious Right is growing smaller,
they remain as engaged as ever.
It's that sort of apathy on our side that gives them so much power.
2) We don't vote as a bloc.
Last July, 78% of white evangelical Protestants
said they planned to support Donald Trump.
Only 67% of non-religious Americans said they'd be voting for Hillary Clinton.
And that was before Trump's tax return problems escalated and the
tape of him bragging about sexual assault came to light.
When Republicans have a candidate,
the Christian Right gets in line
and does the strategically smart thing,
no matter how much they might dislike their candidate.
And make no mistake, they're not exactly bragging about Trump.
This past election put that theory to the ultimate test.
Trump is about as far from being a model religious candidate, as a Republican could be,
and yet, they supported him in overwhelming fashion.
When Democrats have a candidate,
secular Americans debate how progressive that person truly is.
We vote for third-party candidates, who have no chance of winning a national election,
because they're further to the left on our pet issues.
We stay at home because the Democrat isn't perfect.
We're too damn stupid to see the bigger picture.
I should note though,
that there's an obvious reason we don't vote as a bloc:
there's no "we".
While different denominations of Christianity are still bound together in their beliefs about Jesus,
the Nones are a weird mixture of atheists, agnostics,
and religious people who don't belong to an organized group.
While the Nones are a quarter of the population,
the percentage of atheists is in the single digits.
That means, as a group,
the Nones include a lot of people who believe in God, heaven, hell, miracles,
ghosts, and other forms of nonsense.
I suspect if you separated the atheist from everyone else, you'd see very different results.
3) We would never listen to someone telling us how to vote.
You know, if Richard Dawkins told atheists to vote for Hillary Clinton,
and he undoubtedly supported her in 2016 -- even though he's British --
the reaction from atheists would be obvious:
"You don't tell me what to do."
"What are you? The Atheist Pope?"
"Go to non-existent hell!"
We don't like authority.
Many of us left religion because we were sick and tired of being told to respect people who didn't always deserve it.
We're not about to start now.
The idea that atheists should vote a certain way
also reeks of the dogmatic thinking we abhor.
We'll think for ourselves. Thank you very much.
And if that means voting for Jill Stein, too bad for the rest of you, Democrats.
Even if that sort of independent thinking means the Religious Right we'll get everything at once.
4) We don't have atheist candidates to choose from.
I could count on one hand the number of openly atheist candidates who ran for national office this year.
They all lost.
Hell! They probably only came out as atheists because they knew they had virtually no chance of winning.
Even at the state level, the number of openly atheist candidates was relatively small.
We can't elect atheist candidates who aren't there.
And why aren't they there? Because being an open atheist is still political poison.
Only 58% of Americans say they would vote for an otherwise preferable candidate from their party,
if that person didn't believe in God.
And that's an improvement from the past.
Given how hard it is to win an election,
it's no wonder candidates might choose to keep their atheism under wraps.
I mean, why give people a reason not to vote for you?
So, even if we could be motivated to support one of our own,
the cost of a candidate coming out as an atheist
before getting elected, continues to be high.
5) Atheist candidates wouldn't necessarily have a pro atheism platform.
I mean, what would an open atheist do in Congress?
Demand that we put "In God we don't trust" on the money?
Remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance?
Change the law to give atheist groups special tax breaks?
No, of course not.
The battles most atheist groups have fought over the past several years
have been about maintaining neutrality, not calling for unique privilege.
We're not asking for any special treatment from the government.
For the most part, we just want to maintain a separation between church and state.
And that means that an atheist candidate
would likely be running on a typical progressive platform
which a lot of religious Democrats and independents do already.
We don't necessarily have to have an atheist in office
when others can fight our battles for us.
Meanwhile, there are countless politicians
who act like their devout religious faith is precisely why you should elect them.
They campaign on a platform of promoting Christianity and Christian principles, through the government,
turning our nation into as close to a theocracy as it can be within the law.
Donald Trump is already heading in that direction.
You know, promising to eliminate the Johnson amendment,
funneling taxpayer money to religious schools through Betsy DeVos,
discriminating on the basis of religion,
rolling back the clock on LGBT rights and abortion rights,
and appointing a conservative Christian to the Supreme Court.
I mean, these are issues that Christian right leaders would say are direct extensions of their religious beliefs.
When it comes down to it,
we don't necessarily need atheists in Congress,
but we're not doing ourselves any favors by not voting for candidates who support our issues in general.
I've said this many times over the past year:
atheists had all sorts of reasons to vote in 2016, and to vote for Hillary Clinton specifically,
even if she did some things you didn't love.
Given the small margins in a few swing states,
if we had been more politically active and smart about it,
we could have swayed the election.
So could a lot of groups whose members, I hope, are currently kicking themselves.
The one thing to be optimistic about
is that the demographic trends in America continue to be in our favor,
but having a higher percentage of non-religious Americans means nothing
if it doesn't translate into a more non-religious voters supporting church-state separation.
It's something we have to get better at if we want more political clout.
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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