After 14 disastrous years of Conservative rule, the United Kingdom has just elected the Labour Party; in the British system, the leader of the Party is appointed Prime Minister — on this occasion, Sir Keir Starmer, who is an atheist and refused to take a religious oath when being sworn in:
I do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors according to law.
This is not the first time that the UK has had an atheist Prime Minister; before Starmer, there were at least six openly non-religious Prime Ministers. All of their elections were relatively recent (20th century) for up until 1886, British Members of Parliament (MP) could only be sworn into office by taking religious oaths; and it took MP Charles Bradlaugh three elections, five years and several arrests (!) to finally be able to be sworn in without religious oaths, setting a precedent for someone like Starmer today to do so without having to swear allegiance to supernatural entities in which he does not believe.
Several issues always arise with this topic, and today is as good a day as any to address them:
The first one is that being sworn into any public office is, by definition, a public act in which the candidate accepts to represent the electorate or parts of it. Out of the most basic respect for equality among his constituents, no candidate should invoke his imaginary friend(s) or swear on the book of potions of his affections. The swear-in is not theirs but the citizenship’s, a commitment to the citizenry, thus the private beliefs of the person taking office have nothing to do here. That’s why there should be no religious oath in any swear-in. Maybe one day…
It isn’t too much to ask for a public servant to keep her private convictions private, and acknowledge that she was elected to office to represent the citizenry at large, and not her co-religionists exclusively — that seems to have been the understanding of Christian American Presidents John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt at the time of their respective swear-ins, without religious books. Why would it be too hard for others to follow suit? For instance, Joe Biden‘s 2021 inauguration was an embarrassing religious display, in which evangelical Christians, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and other religious minorities would have had no reason to feel represented.
The second issue is that I don’t prefer public servants to be atheists for representational reasons; I don’t care about that, because I identify as human, and seeing another human being being elected already gives me enough aspirational certainty that I could do the job too. Moreover, even if the job was held by a three-headed monkey or a blue-skinned alien, all that would be irrelevant: what matters is how well they do the job. This is the heuristic of why it is preferable to have atheist public servants over religious believers because any public servant will do a better job the more accurate their model of reality is. Someone who is going to dictate the destiny of budgetary items and make decisions that will greatly impact the lives of their fellow citizens should have a vision of the world as close as possible to how it really is. The annals of history are overflowing with leaders who ruined billions of lives or dramatically hastened their journey to the grave because they held irrational beliefs, from fighting AIDS with vitamins to the Great Leap Forward — I don’t want public servants who believe in homeopathy, leprechauns, fairies, that the Earth is flat, or who reject the microbial theory of disease. And since there is no evidence for god, it is also preferable to have public servants who are atheists rather than religious believers.
Of course, it would not be unthinkable to find an atheist public servant who flouts secularism, squander taxpayers’ money on religious promotion, and resorts to organized superstition while carrying out his duties — and among openly atheist politicians there is no shortage of those who prostrate themselves before religion, and even show it more deference than theocrats themselves. This is where we come back to Starmer, who during the campaign promised that his Party would not tinker with how faith ‘schools’ are run in the country, and he even went as far as saying he would be “more supportive of faith schools” than the Conservatives.
Yes, unfortunately, the UK has faith ‘schools’ that are paid for with taxpayers’ money, which is a double infamy: on the one hand, public money is being wasted on the promotion of private beliefs. Even worse is that this is done in violation of children’s human rights to education and religious freedom — exploiting the fact that their minds are not fully formed and have not finished developing their critical thinking skills to smuggle in submission to religious authority, the existence of imaginary beings, and magical explanations of the world over and above the actual, real explanations, is a failure of any education institution.
There is no epistemological difference between explaining the existence of hurricanes as products of Poseidon’s fury and explaining the existence of the human species as descendants of Adam and the rib-woman who would have been tempted by the talking snake. And anyone who objects to teaching the former —in school or at home— but not the latter, is necessarily advocating the brainwashing of children and child recruitment (and giving privileged treatment to those who profess Christian superstition over those who profess Hellenic superstition). This is what Starmer promised during the campaign: to keep in place a huge roadblock to the intellectual emancipation of British children who have the misfortune to be born into deeply devout families.
Starmer’s in-laws are Jewish, and it turns out that Starmer’s own children are being recruited into Judaism, deprived of a reality-based worldview. And the shiny new Prime Minister tries to get off work on Fridays no later than 6:00 p.m. to observe Sabbath dinner with his family. It is not wrong for a politician to spend time with their family; although no one can deny that this is a case where religion is directly influencing the behavior of the incumbent in office. At this point Starmer’s secular swearing-in, without a religious oath, seems more almost the product of a miracle than a statement of a political stance.
The National Secular Society called for Labor to rethink its position on supporting faith ‘schools’ — although I am not holding my breath, hopefully, the Party will heed that call, and hopefully the Starmer we see in office will be more like the one who was sworn-in than the candidate one.
