The Toy Vatican State at the UN

The Vatican is by far the smallest State in the world, being just over a hundred acres in size. It plays at being a real State by issuing its own stamps, but it has no proper citizens (just transient employees of the Catholic Church), few public services (Italy provides it with police and water) and no real economy (though it does have a novelty ATM machine that issues instructions in Latin).

But that does not matter, because the toy Vatican State does not generally interact with other real States. Instead, an entity called the Holy See, which is the central government of the worldwide Catholic Church, masquerades as a State and deals with actual States from its base in the Vatican.

This distinction is very important. It is the openly religious Holy See, and not the theoretically civic Vatican State, that swaps diplomats with actual States, and that has Permanent Observer status at the United Nations and other bodies. But the Holy See does not have any citizens, or any defined territory, and all that it governs is the religious affairs of some citizens of actual civic States.

Preaching to Diplomats about God

In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI gave a ‘state of the world’ address to all foreign diplomats to the Holy See. He told them that ‘law can be an effective force for peace only if its foundations remain solidly anchored in natural law, given by the Creator,’ and that ‘God can never be excluded from the horizon of man or of history.’

In a particularly patronizing passage, he added that ‘my thoughts today go especially to the nations that have yet to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See: they too have a place in the Pope’s heart.’ But he could be forgiven for sounding smug: compared to the 176 States that have diplomatic relations with the Holy See, there are only seventeen that have not (nine of which are Muslim, and four communist).

Vatican Issues its own Stamps

How did this happen? How did the worldwide leadership of one religion come to be accepted as not only a civic State, but an influential one, while it is preaching to diplomats about God?

Well, in 1929, when Mussolini’s Italy recognised it as a State, the Vatican started issuing its own stamps. Because of this, in 1951, it got to attend UN meetings through its membership of the Universal Postal Union.

In 1957, the Vatican delegates persuaded the UN to refer to them as ‘the Holy See’. There was no vote on this, just an exchange of letters with the Secretary General. With this political sleight-of-hand, the Catholic Church could now officially act as a State.

Vatican Gets Status at United Nations

In 1964, the UN gave the Holy See permanent observer status, allowing the Catholic Church to attend and vote at UN conferences.

Pope Paul VI quickly set the tone when he colourfully told the next General Assembly that the UN must ‘not favour an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.’

Since then, because the UN takes most decisions by consensus, the Holy See has been able to frustrate negotiations on population, contraception, reproductive health care and women’s rights.

Vatican Status Upgraded at United Nations

In 1999, a campaign called ‘See Change’ tried to get the UN to treat the Catholic Church in the same way as it treats other religions – by allowing it to make submissions as an ordinary nongovernmental organisation. A reasonable suggestion, you would think.

Instead, in 2004, the UN upgraded the Holy See to having all of the rights of a full member State except voting at the General Assembly, which they didn’t want to do.

And so today, because the toy Vatican State can issue stamps, the Catholic Church is the only religion in the world that can attend and vote at UN conferences and co-sponsor drafts of UN resolutions and decisions.

I am of course exaggerating for effect here. The Vatican did not get to attend UN meetings solely because they could issue their own stamps. It was also because they ran their own radio station.

Photo: Vatican Postbox by Dear Barbie (cc)

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The Unelectable Atheist President

An atheist running for President of the United States today faces roughly the same level of prejudice from voters as a female candidate would have faced in the 1940s while women workers were being sacked to make way for returning soldiers.

Or as a black candidate would have faced in the 1960s while Martin Luther King was delivering his ‘I have a Dream’ speech. Or as a gay candidate would have faced in the 1980s while many of the straight community were blaming gay men for an AIDS epidemic.

In 2007, a Gallup poll revealed that most Americans would not vote for a well-qualified atheist as President. Incredibly, half of all American moderates, and three in ten liberals, said they would not vote for a well-qualified atheist who was nominated by their own party. If you look at similar polls since the 1930s, you will see that black and female politicians are gradually escaping from this prejudice – or, at least, voters are less willing to openly admit such prejudice to pollsters – but atheist politicians, like gay politicians, still have decades of catching up ahead of them.

The question that Gallup asked, for USA Today, in Feb 2007, was: If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [atheist etc], would you vote for that person?

Gallup has asked similar questions in Jan-Feb 1937, Sep 1949, Sep 1958, Mar 1969, Jul 1978, Jul 1987, Aug 1987, and Feb 1999.

Photo: The White House by David Paul Ohmer (cc)

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America’s Top Elected Atheists

Americans elect a lot of public officials – over half a million, from the President down to school district level. If atheists and other nonbelievers were represented fairly, you would expect about 50 in the US Congress and another 50,000 at State and local level. In 2007, the Secular Coalition for America tried to find them. They found only five. Three were very local officials: a school board president, a school committee member and a town meeting member. And the two most senior were both in their seventies, much closer to the end than the start of their political careers.

Pete Stark, United States Congressman

The first, Pete Stark, was born in 1931 and served in the Air Force and founded a bank before being elected to Congress in 1973 to represent a liberal district in California. He grew up a Republican, but had switched sides when he opposed the Vietnam War. He is a Unitarian Universalist, a congregation in which members seek their own truth about theological issues. Stark does not believe in a supreme being, saying that he is more interested in people, though he adds that the Stark family does recognize a supreme being – his wife Deborah.

So what horrific future would this openly atheist Congressman inflict on Americans? His shocking priorities are universal health care, ending the war in Iraq and protecting Medicare. He wants higher taxes for the wealthy and on cigarettes. He wants incentives for teachers to work in low-income schools. He wants higher payroll taxes to better fund social security. He wants better job re-training, child care and housing assistance. He supports the UN, the Kyoto protocol, abortion, gay marriage and affirmative action. He opposes the death penalty, and wants to restrict sex and violence on television. May God protect us all from Pete Stark.

Stark is unruffled by religious fanaticism, saying that ‘the leading candidates all agree that they believe in a supreme being, but forget about it as soon as they are elected.’ He believes that religion affects the style, rather than the substance, of the main political debate in America, which he says is between the Democrat view that government makes our lives better and the Republican view that government is dangerous for us. On ‘coming out’, he looked forward to ‘working with the Secular Coalition to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social service.’

Ernie Chambers, Nebraska State Senator

Next comes Ernie Chambers, the only openly atheist lawmaker at State level. He was born in 1937 and worked as a barber before he became a local civil rights leader in the 1960s. He was first elected as an independent candidate to the Nebraska Senate in 1971, and is the State’s only black Senator, its longest serving Senator and the only one to wear blue tee-shirts and jeans instead of a suit. His crimes against God include ending corporal punishment in state schools, getting equal state pensions for women, and blocking the legalization of concealed weapons. He strongly opposes the death penalty, and starts every legislative session by proposing its abolition.

Chambers got world attention in 2007 when he took a legal case against God. In a different case, a Nebraska judge had barred a woman from using the words ‘rape’ or ‘victim’ while alleging that she was a rape victim. He insisted that she describe what happened as ‘sex’, which is a bit like calling a mugging a ‘financial transaction’. The woman took a lawsuit against the judge, but her case was dismissed as being frivolous. Chambers took her side, arguing that the Nebraska constitution allows anyone to sue anyone. To make this point in a satirical way, he sued God in the district court of Douglas County, Nebraska.

Chambers wanted an injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities including the making of terroristic threats as well as ‘fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like.’ He argued that the court had jurisdiction because God, being omnipresent, was personally in Douglas County, and that he should not have to serve legal papers because God, being omniscient, already knew about the case.

Three Local Elected Officials

The three local officials who responded to the Secular Coalition were Terry Doran, president of the School Board in Berkeley, California.; Nancy Glista on the School Committee in Franklin, Maine; and Michael Cerone, a Town Meeting Member from Arlington, Massachusetts. And that, in the early twenty-first century, was the extent of openly atheist elected officials in America: Pete Stark married to his supreme being in California, Ernie Chambers suing God in Nebraska, and three local officials scattered across three million square miles of land.

Clearly there are many, many more elected atheists in the American closet. If one in every ten citizens rejects belief in gods, then about fifty members of Congress should do so. The Secular Coalition says there are 21 others who are not yet willing to go public. Even if this is true, it would still be less than half the amount that would be proportional to the overall population. It is time for elected American atheists to stand up for their rational beliefs.

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