Ignoring the Non-Religious

In his article, “Don’t Count Us Out”, Ronald Aronson points out that while both candidates in the recent presidential campaign openly vied for swing votes among evangelicals and Catholics, they treated what he asserts is the often overlooked but growing group of unreligious Americans as though they were “invisible”. He argues that both Barack Obama and John McCain responded to survey after survey, like the 2008 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that concluded that 95% of Americans were “believers”, and have reshaped their images, campaigns, and parties to attract religious voters into the fold. He contends however, that those surveys are actually based on “Fuzzy Math” and skewed questions that “lump together such profoundly different conceptions as a Judeo-Christian personal God, a distant God, a cosmic force and a universal spirit — which results in a conglomeration of "believers" with nothing in common and many of whom are in fact secularists”. As such, he believes that not only are political candidates ignoring the secularists of America, but indeed such unreligious citizens are made to feel like strangers in their own country. He writes, “This is what life is often like for secularists outside a few major urban or university centers. In the vast heartland of suburban and semirural America, they grow accustomed to new acquaintances greeting them by asking what church they go to. At work, they get used to God-talk as an unstated norm, having to decide again and again whether to ‘out’ themselves or to just remain silent,” comparing secularists today to homosexuals in the 1970’s and 80’s.
Aronson encourages secularists to demand recognition in the political process. “In an America where other minorities have mobilized themselves to demand their rights, when will our largest, most invisible minority ‘out’ itself in daily life,” he asks, “When will they demand that the spirit of multiculturalism be extended to those who do not pray, instead of the widespread assumption that religious values, norms and practices apply to everyone”?
I agree with Aronson that the unreligious are virtually ignored in the modern political process and are in turn asked to ignore the unashamed pandering of candidates to the extremely religious. The religious argue that they want a president who shares their religion and therefore their moral values but it is equally reasonable for unreligious voters to want a president to share their morals—which are not necessarily guided by Christianity or any major religion. In an article in Christian Today a survey found that 61% of Americans would be less willing to vote for a candidate that didn’t believe in God and 45% said they would be reluctant to vote for a Muslim. I think it’s time that Americans open their minds to the point where being a Christian is not a requirement for the Presidency. According to CIA World Fact Book, 24.9% of Americans are neither Protestant nor Catholic Christians and while Presidential candidates should obviously pay attention to our Christian majority, nearly a fourth of the country is ignored while the presidential candidates criss-cross the country catering to a mostly Protestant politically active voter block. Robert Bellah describes a “civil religion” in his article, “Civil religion in America” in which vague religious vocabulary is applied to America to convey a sense of higher purpose in a way that is not offensive to any religion—or those who are not particularly religious, but tt is when that ambiguous religion is somehow transformed into an unashamed campaign to cater to the Protestant majority that politicians risk alienating the rest of us.