Everyone knew that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee were running a Nixonian dirty tricks campaign against Bernie Sanders — and thanks to WikiLeaks, we have proof — but did they have to turn atheism into a slur?
The treasure trove of resignation-worthy emails revealed a juicy May 5 exchange among several DNC officials hoping to smear Sanders in Kentucky and West Virginia by highlighting his apparent lack of belief that a supernatural deity created the Earth and all its creatures in six busy days.
“For KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall asked staffers in an email with the subject line “No s–t.”
“Does he believe in a God,” Marshall’s email continued. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. … My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
The inference, of course, is that Americans are far more accepting of anyone of faith — even “a Jew”! — than someone who professes to have no faith. Marshall knew what he was doing: the holy truth of American politics is that you can’t swear to uphold the Constitution unless you believe in God.
Jesus, what a crock. Yet this article of faith has more believers than the so-called Son of God.
Google the term “ran for congress as an atheist” and you get one result. Yes, a single result. But google “xylophone-playing kangaroo” and you get thousands more (406,999 more links, in fact).
It’s 2016 — roughly 225 years after the nation ratified the Bill of Rights’ mandate against state-sponsored religion — and no one in public office will admit he or she is an atheist.
As a result, identifying the godless is a bit of a parlor game in the non-believing community. Every time a politician alludes to being a “humanist” or a “democratic secularist,” our hearts beat a little faster.
Of course, our hopes are almost immediately dashed because the pols typically backtrack faster than a lobster (which, by the way, moves faster backwards than forwards thanks to millions of years of evolution).
Longtime California Rep. Pete Stark was the only open atheist in Congress, after coming out in 2007 after 34 years in the House. He issued a statement that he “does not believe in a Supreme Being” and hoped Congress would “stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social service.” Beyond that, he has said little (and, indeed, did not respond to my attempt to reach him).
Rep. Barney Frank didn’t reveal that he was an atheist until he left office in 2013, though he came out as gay years earlier — which is pretty ironic if you think about it.
Arizona Rep. Krysten Sinema is currently the closest thing we have to an open atheist in Congress, but when she was asked point blank about her apparent faithlessness, her office put out a statement that said nothing except that Congresswoman Icarus had flown too close to the godless sun:
“(Rep. Sinema) believes the terms non-theist, atheist or non-believer are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character,” the statement said. (Sinema didn’t get back to me for this story, but I certainly would have asked about that apparent link between faith and “character.”)
We thought we had another fellow traveler after Maryland State Sen. Jamie Raskin talked openly about his humanism during his successful primary campaign for Congress this spring, but he quickly told the Washington Post that he was “emphatically Jewish.”
His statement went on:
“I’ve never called myself an atheist,” he told the ultimate Beltway Bugle. “I’ve never pronounced upon the existence of a divinity before, and nobody has ever asked me.”
Nobody, until me, I guess. I called up Raskin and asked him point blank: Are you now or have you ever been an atheist? He wouldn’t bite.
“Our Constitution in Article VI explicitly rejects any religious test on holding public office,” he said. “Our Founders were rationalists who wanted to exclude all religious litmus tests for public service and, as Democrats, we should uphold our Jeffersonian values by not imposing tests of our own.”
Raskin agreed that the Democratic National Committee should not have trotted out “atheist” as a slur, but he attributed it to laziness on the committee’s part.
“If you don’t have a fighting populist economic program to convince people in West Virginia or Kentucky, you might fall back on some obsolete and stereotyped notions about Southern Baptists being religiously prejudiced,” he said. “It just demonstrates a shallow and lazy approach. We should not be trafficking in questions of theology in political campaigns.”
Beyond prejudice, he offered another theory on why no one comes out as an atheist.
“Yes, there’s the vilification that you see in those emails, but another reason that atheists don’t talk about it is because is not a belief or a faith, it is a disavowal of a faith. And it doesn’t ultimately tell you anything about a person’s politics. There is no atheist party because there is no atheist political program. Karl Rove is an atheist, for example.”
Oh, Senator, you had to go and ruin it, didn’t you?
You may wonder why we atheists even care about all this stuff, but the DNC dirty tricks reveal anew why it all matters: atheists are bullied for their lack of faith.
And it’s particularly ironic, given that the Founders — all men of faith, by the way — specifically wanted to separate the very private matter of belief from the very public matter of governance.
Yet God is everywhere in our society: He’s on the money and in our courtrooms (“In God We Trust”) and in the mouths of all our candidates (“God bless America”).
So for pete’s sake, can we at least vow to keep him out of our campaigns?
