Humanists UK on the long history of godless Prime Ministers:

In the run-up to the general election, several newspapers published stories saying that Keir Starmer would be the UK’s ‘first atheist Prime Minister’ – but as Humanists UK pointed out at the time, that simply was not true! As a non-religious person with a belief in ‘irreducible human dignity’ (as he put it to a recent biographer), Sir Keir is only the latest in a long line of non-religious and humanist heads of government in the UK.

I’m envious. It’s decidedly not the case over here in The Colonies.

Prior to becoming the first ever Labour Prime Minister in 1929, Ramsay MacDonald was the Chair (sometimes ‘President’) of Humanists UK, in 1902 and 1904. Although [he is] sometimes remembered, even by biographers, for his early religiosity, MacDonald’s views changed significantly with age – starting off strict Calvinist, then Church of Scotland, before later giving sermons that were non-committal about the existence of god as a Unitarian, and then being drawn into the British Ethical Culture movement and the London Ethical Societies that together merged to become today’s Humanists UK.

…

Although a controversial figure for making political compromises and forced to implement austerity measures once in office, MacDonald is significant in history for being one of the earliest examples of an explicitly humanist Prime Minister. The fact that this is often left out of histories is a great example of a pattern in historical writing that the Humanist Heritage project was set up to challenge and redress.

Humans have a very conspicuous advantage over this putative “God” person: humans can be talked to, argued with, held to account. “God”? Not so much. Postulating a magic being undetectable to human senses who made and controls everything but can’t be personally confronted is a pretty reckless way to run a planet.

I’m surprised to see Churchill in the list. I don’t think I knew that.

Churchill was an agnostic atheist whose writings to friends evinced a deep personal dislike of Christianity. In one letter he said ‘I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief.’ In common with the German communist philosopher Karl Marx, he likened religion to a drug, calling it a ‘dangerous narcotic’. He was no secularist, saying of the state Anglican church that he ‘supported it from the outside’.

Keeps the plebs in line wot wot.

Clement Attlee was a politician whose socialist and humanist values underpinned a commitment to implementing sweeping reforms in social welfare. Described by historian R.C. Whiting as an ‘unobtrusive atheist,’ Attlee believed in ‘ethics’ without ‘mumbo-jumbo’, and earned a reputation as a principled, decisive, yet modest politician.

Despite being a heathen.