Ron Guhname, who blogs as “Inductivist,” and knows his way round all the GSS and polling data, has dug up an interesting result from the World Values Survey.
The pollsters asked respondents in 60-odd countries if they agreed that an atheist is unfit for high public office. With “most strongly agree” at number one (it’s Pakistan), the U.S.A. ranked 19th.
That 17% of Americans think that an atheist is not suited for public office is not bad at all. I think 17% is a rather low number.
17.6 is a lot better (lower) than I’ve seen in past surveys, depending on how the question is asked. In the past I’ve seen either 50% or a majority saying they would never vote for an athiest for public office, but that’s a slightly different question than the one being asked by this survey.
The reason you’re only seeing 17.6% is because the answer is “strongly agree.” There other categories, like “agree” and “somewhat agree” that probably push the number above 50%.
Perhaps people believe that an atheist politician is more likely to be a crook than a religious one. However, we have certainly had our share of corrupt politicians over the decades and, as far as I know, all of them have professed to be “Christian”.
That’s funny. Romania is above the U.S. in the list and yet Romanians elected Ion Iliescu, a self-described freethinker, for president twice (non-consecutive terms). This may somewhat vindicate Christopher Hitchens’ objection to these surveys (if in the 70s people would have been asked on whether they’d vote for a former actor who has been divorced, most would have probably said no).
“Ron Guhname” is also a pseudonym. “Ron Guhname” == “Wrong Name”, see? Your post seems to imply that it is his real name.
Pity that Australia is not on the list. One of our most successful Prime Ministers of the last quarter century (Bob Hawke, 4 elections, 1983-91
) was an unbeliever – an agnostic.
I also found their Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map fascinating. Wow, Look at the Confucians.
What would be interesting to know is how many U.S. presidents or politicians were/are secretly atheistic, agnostic, or just not much interested in religion. I suspect the number is quite high. But atheism or agnosticism aren’t things you can admit to publicly and still expect to get elected or re-elected.
Of the presidents since Eisenhower (no particular reason for the cut-off line there), I’d be willing to bet that most, including Kennedy, were secret skeptics or atheists or simply didn’t give a damn one way or the other. They paid lip service to religious belief because of expedience.
Jimmy Carter is the exception. I think he truly believes in God. I truly believe he was one of the worst presidents of all time, so devoutness doesn’t equate with competence.
Be careful with that standard, since I Johnson’s in that list.
Are you saying Johnson was a worse President than Carter? Having lived through both of them, I disagree. One point to consider is that at least Johnson knew he had failed and Carter hasn’t figured out yet that he did.
Way too many people call themselves Christians when they really haven’t any idea what it means.
Are you saying Johnson was a worse President than Carter? Having lived through both of them, I disagree.
There are a lot of guys who didn’t live through Johnson, quite literally. Say what you will about Carter, he didn’t get us into Vietnam, nor did he push through anything quite as disastrous as the Great Society.
In fact, from a conservative POV the Carter presidency wasn’t a total write-off. He pushed through a great deal of deregulation and undid some of the damage inflicted on the economy by Nixon.
Carter was far better than Johnson and was actually not a bad president. Johnson carried through with all of Kennedy’s social programs and got us into Vietnam as well. It was with him that the conditions for the stagflation of the 70’s were created. He also presided over a huge expansion of the Federal government (but not as much as Bush II).
Carter came in as a flaming liberal in ’77 and got the message that free markets work by mid ’78. The deregulation of trucking, railroads, and airlines took place during his term. He also deregulated the natural gas industry (Reagan deregulated oil). He also appointed Paul Volcker as FED chairman, knowing full well that he was going to jack interest rates to the moon to kill inflation. The 70’s stagflation was largely a result of Johnson and Nixon economic policies.
Also, Carter became quite the cold-warrior starting in ’79. The defense buildup associated with Reagan actually started under Carter in ’79. Also, Carter was the least corrupt president to sit in the White house in living memory.
Carter was a far better president than Johnson. In fact, I like Carter better than any president except for Reagan (who is my favorite).
I think history will be kinder to Carter.
It’s quite possible I wrong about Carter, but I’m not yet convinced. This is in part because I think Carter is still doing harm.
Carter was not necessarily a good president. He just was not as bad as he’s been made out to be by popular conception. Reagan is the only decent president that we have had in the past 80 years and even he was not that great, just better than the rest.
FDR, Johnson, and Nixon are my least favorite presidents. They were by far the most statist presidents we ever had and both Johnson and Nixon were among the most corrupt presidents of the 20th century.
Hey, JM:
Well, I thought it was. You sure it isn’t? Blogging as "Inductivist" and then adding another layer of pseudonym under that, seems almost a daft as it would be to blog under a pseudonym when everybody knows who you are anyway …
@Bradlaugh
LOL… thanks for the chuckle. ◄Dave►
Well, I didn’t intend to kick off a discussion of who was the worst president of the past fifty years. What interests me is the idea that Americans seem to require that their leaders believe in God and be religious. And I’m sure that many more of these professed believers are actually agnostics or atheists than we know.
Susan,
The thing is with a president, you want him to be competent, naturally, but who he is is also important. People want to identify with him, and they largely don’t identify with atheists and their worldview. I say this as an atheist myself. I don’t approve of the view, but it is there. For most religious people, if they were to elect a non-believer, they’d feel it a diminution of their own group.
Look at the last election. Obama is a “transformative” president. No matter that he hasn’t even taken office, he is already transformative. That’s solely because of who he is and what he represents. He clearly sends a signal that white dominance in this country is on its way out. Whether you think that good or bad is irrelevant. All that matters here is that it does represent a diminution of white influence.
The same thing will probably happen when a non-believer wins the White House. It probably won’t be as celebrated or even noticed, but it will be a diminution of religious power, and the religious know it.
Bradlaugh:
He has made some comments about teaching his students and his being some sort of faculty member. As far as I know, he keeps his non-PC viewpoints in the blogosphere and he does not bring it up with his students and colleagues. I am pretty sure it is a pseudonym, though I don’t have any means of confirming it. As for “Inductivist,” I believe that is a descriptive term and not a name.
@Bradlaugh FWIW, ‘Guhname’ does not appear to be an actual surname: googling (guhname -ron) gets just 23 hits, most clearly referring to Ron. There’s a ‘Lamya Guhname’ on Facebook, but no other references to him/her – and no references to any other ‘guhnames’ at all.
@kurt9
I realize I’m posting a bit late in regard to this post, but suggesting that people would think atheists are more crooked than religious people belies that fact that the majority of prisoners behind bars are either Christian or Muslim. I think you’d find a very, very small percentage of the prison population is atheist. (Now if you’d like to suggest that perhaps atheists are smarter and just happened to get away with a crime…….but that’s another story!)