Should We Vote For Religious Politicians?

In recent years, the personal life and opinions of leading politicians has become increasingly important to many voters. I’ve never liked this trend. Many seem to think that unless a politician is married, they can’t possibly understand what it’s like and so can’t possibly meet the needs of married couples. In response to this, most potential prime ministers and presidents get married. The same goes for having children, which is why all future leaders proceed to have kids.

As I say I don’t like this trend, as it has a logical fallacy sitting at its core. The prime minister couldn’t possibly be representative of everyone in this way, because it would require being both married and single, gay and straight, like cheese and not like cheese, and so on, all at once, which is of course impossible, and indeed nonsense.

Of course it usually doesn’t work so exhaustively. I’ve never heard of anyone voting for a leader because they are single, and they think that only an unmarried person could meet the needs of the many millions of single people around the country.

There is one personal opinion of politicians however, that seems to attract more scrutiny than the rest. What are that politician’s religious beliefs? This is a problem more in the US than the UK, but its effects still propagate through politics. Many voters will only support politicians of a certain religion, and even more will not support and atheist politician. It’s a well-known statistic that atheists are the least trusted minority in the US.

Now for atheists is the question the other way around. If I knew that a certain politician were religious, I would incline not to vote for them, because to me, a religious person has a flaw in their ability to logically analyse a problem or question, and so I would not think they were suitable to run the country.

The effect of religious politicians propagates into law-making. Many religious people will use their religion to help them make decisions, on everything. I can foresee the hindrance to society that this could cause, such as marriage being restricted to heterosexual couples and so forth.

On the other hand, if one decides not to vote for a politician on the grounds that they are not atheist, then isn’t that perpetuating the trend of personal life being important in politics? (The answer is no, because the ability to think logically is different from the ability to understand what a person who is different from you wants. But I’m going to ignore this avenue of logic because I don’t think it’s the solution to the initial problem.)

Religious beliefs, as much as they’re wrong, remain a personal attribute, and could be influence by any number of personal situations. It’s obvious that religion and politics should not mix. It’s also important that the personal lives of politicians stays out of politics. Politicians should be judged on the pragmatism of it all: does what they do coincide with what they say and was it a good idea? On those grounds, I would be more content to vote for a religious politician … unless they’re completely crazy.