Sir Keir Starmer is the first British prime minister to identify publicly as an atheist.
There has been some media comment on this, some of which you’ve probably seen.
Humanists UK say that it’s no big deal. They point out that there have been unbelieving PMs before. Yet most prime ministers have continued to identify with the religion of their upbringing, whatever their private theological views.
Starmer is genuinely quite unusual.
Lack of belief is a red herring. Religion is not the same as belief. Declaring that someone is not truly a member of a religion because they don’t believe the right things is a characteristically Christian or Islamic move. Other religious systems tend to emphasise practice over belief (although some scholars exaggerate this, as if belief in itself was somehow exclusive to Christianity and Islam).
A major problem with defining religion as belief is that an individual’s beliefs can wax, wane and evolve - over years, months, days or hours. When Boris Johnson said that his faith flickered like the reception for Heart FM in the Chilterns, he probably spoke for several other PMs, as well as many millions of ordinary plebs.
My approach, from an academic perspective, is to define religion not primarily as a matter of belief, or even of practice, but as an identity. You’re a Christian (or a Zoroastrian, or a Wiccan) if you can say ‘yes, that’s me, I’m one of them’.
On this view, a nominal or cultural Christian has as good a claim to be a Christian as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Liz Truss said, ‘I share the values of the Christian faith and the Church of England, but I’m not a regular practising religious person.’ That is perhaps borderline - but it’s arguably enough.
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Prime ministers tend to lag behind general social trends in religion.
Until the twentieth century, every prime minister was a member of one of the two state churches: the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. But these churches had long since lost their monopoly on the British religious market.
An awful lot of Christians in nineteenth-century Britain were Nonconformist Protestants (and a smaller number were Roman Catholics). Nonconformism was particularly strong in the Liberal Party. But there was no Nonconformist prime minister until Herbert Asquith (entered office 1908). His predecessor, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905), was brought up in the Church of Scotland and never formally left it, although he had amicable relations with Nonconformists and was open to the idea of disestablishing the state churches.
By Asquith and Campbell-Bannerman’s time, Christianity itself was passing its peak as a British cultural institution. Open rejection of Christianity, or religion in general, had been a broadly respectable part of the public scene since at least the 1870s. If prime ministers were representative of such social trends, we would perhaps expect to see at least one overtly non-Christian PM by the First World War.
One candidate for this title is Arthur Balfour (1902) - a philosopher who helpfully shared his thoughts on religion and belief in public and in print. In his writings, he supported theism, but not Christianity specifically. Yet he seems not to have rejected the Christian identity of his upbringing, and he was given a Church of Scotland funeral.
A stronger candidate for the first non-Christian PM is the first Labour premier, Ramsay MacDonald (1924). MacDonald seems to have drifted through the Unitarian Church - in which he served as a lay preacher - to what would today be called Humanism. There is an argument that Unitarianism is a non-Christian movement, although it has generally been seen as a radical form of Protestant Christianity. So MacDonald should probably still be counted as a Christian for the period in which he affiliated with the Unitarians.
At the parliamentary oath table, MacDonald was still swearing by God in 1906, but he had switched to making a secular affirmation by 1910. In later years, when he was Prime Minister, this attracted adverse comment:
In view of this, MacDonald may be the closest rival to Keir Starmer for the title of first atheist PM. At any rate, he is probably a slightly better candidate than Neville Chamberlain - Chambo was an agnostic Unitarian who perhaps retained slightly more of a Unitarian identity than MacDonald. Anglican clerics during his premiership resented him being in charge of appointing their bishops.
Winston Spencer-Churchill was open about his playful and ironic attitude to religion before he became PM. He claimed in My Early Life (1930) that he decided early on to believe whatever he wanted to believe. He went through a militant atheist phase in his youth, but in later life he seems to have accepted the existence of a vague higher power. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a rationalist. And we must remember, again, that religion does not equate to belief. Churchill identified with what he called ‘Christian civilisation’, and he never publicly defected from the Church of England. His alleged comment that he supported the church from the outside, like a buttress, appears to be apocryphal.
It seems to be agreed all round that Clement Attlee had no religious beliefs. He is famously said to have described his attitude to Christianity as ‘accept the ethic, can’t stand the mumbo-jumbo’. This is essentially a laconic, Attlean version of Liz Truss’s remark (although the evidence that he said it is not rock solid). In any event, Clem didn’t publicly make an issue of his theological troubles. Unlike MacDonald, he seems to have quietly gone along with taking the parliamentary oath.
Jim Callaghan is sometimes seen in the same vein as Attlee. He had a fundamentalist Baptist upbringing, from which he seems to have moved on in adult life. But he was ambiguous about how far he rejected a Christian cultural identity. In his memoirs, Time and Chance, he wrote: ‘I never forget the immense debt I owe to a Christian upbringing, nor have I ever escaped its influence’.
Every PM from 1979 to at least 2022 was publicly religious in some sense, even at a time when the nation’s churches were emptying and Christianity was fading even as a cultural identity (self-described Christians had declined in the national census to 46% by 2021, the first minority figure ever recorded).
Margaret Thatcher was brought up a Methodist by her Liberal father, who was a lay preacher (and a sexual harasser). Somewhat predictably, she became Church of England when she joined the Tory ruling class, but in her old age she still liked listening to old Methodist hymns on Songs of Praise. She was quite impressed when she attended a Russian Orthodox liturgy in the USSR:
Tony Blair was so into religion that he converted to Catholicism after his time as PM. When challenged about gay rights after his conversion, he made it clear that he didn’t share the orthodox papal line on the issue. He may have been right about this, but becoming a Catholic and then declaring five minutes later that the pope had got it wrong about an important subject was very ‘Tony Blair’.
With Boris Johnson, the Christian identity was more than usually difficult to take seriously. Some people thought that he privately shared the pagan worldview of the Greeks and Romans whom he had studied at Oxford. Nevertheless, he insisted that he was a ‘very, very bad Christian’.
In 2022 came Liz Truss, a PM who was prepared to doubt publicly that she had a religious affiliation. But - to reiterate - she was careful to identify with Anglican values, whatever those are.
Rishi Sunak was, famously, a practising Hindu. One of the few bright spots of his premiership was the sight of Diwali lights in Downing Street.
Which brings us to Keir Starmer. It should be clear by now that his public irreligiosity is genuinely unusual in the ranks of British prime ministers. With perhaps the exception of Ramsay MacDonald, he is our first head of government who is prepared to out himself publicly as a nontheist. Given the general collapse of religious identification in British society, this development has been a long time coming.
Incidentally, Keir Starmer also takes the prize for being the first PM to enter Number 10 with a Jewish wife. Lord Rosebery, the Liberal successor of Gladstone, had married Hannah de Rothschild - but Hannah had died by the time that Rosebery ascended to the premiership in 1894.