Parting words from the only openly atheist Republican senator in the country

Idaho State Sen. Geoff Schroeder felt there was room in the GOP for someone like him. Then he lost his primary.

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Update (June 4): I was reminded that Brandon Phinney, an atheist Republican who left his party, lost a re-election bid, then re-entered politics as a Republican, is still serving in New Hampshire! My apologies. I’ve updated the headline to reflect that.

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Last Tuesday night, Idaho State Sen. Geoff Schroeder lost his primary, putting an end to his time in office after a single term.

The Republican lost to Christy Zito, a former GOP member of the state legislature who served two terms in the House (2016-2020) and one term in the Senate (2020-2022). She left office after that to take over a pro-gun organization but decided to run again this time around. (Due to redistricting, the boundaries had shifted, putting her head-to-head with Schroeder.)

Why does that result matter? After all, a Republican replacing another Republican usually isn’t news, especially in a deeply red state.

But I think it’s worth exploring because Schroeder is an open atheist. As far as I can tell, he’s the only elected Republican atheist (at the state level or higher) in the country. After the new legislature is sworn in, the GOP will have no openly non-religious representation as it heads into its Christian Nationalist future.

That’s why Schroeder’s election in 2022 was so fascinating to me.

He’s not just an atheist either. He’s the type of atheist who owns the “ATHEIST” license plate in his state—and got it signed by Richard Dawkins.

Image provided by Geoff Schroeder

How the hell did a guy like that get elected, as a Republican, in freaking Idaho, in the first place?

How did Schroeder get elected in 2022?

Schroeder was also no stranger to public service. He served for years as city prosecutor, was elected to two terms on the Mountain Home City Council (in 2007 and 2013), and spent more than two decades before that with the Idaho Army National Guard.

His entry into legislative politics began in 2010, when he became precinct committeeman for the Elmore County Republican Party. He later became vice-chair, then chair.

After redistricting moved his incumbent state senator to a neighboring district, there was an opening where he lived. So Schroeder decided to hop into the District 8 State Senate race against three other GOP challengers. He won that primary with a plurality of the votes (32%) and was unopposed in the general election.

State Sen. Geoff Schroeder (screenshot via YouTube)

To my surprise, despite his openness about his atheism, it never came up in the campaign. His opponents didn’t bring it up. Schroeder never talked about it. He didn’t have to, largely because, in local races, the “culture war” issues usually aren’t front and center. When asked at the time about his top three priorities, he talked about giving local leaders more control to solve problems (rather than issuing inflexible mandates from the state), protecting the education system against the barrage of attacks (from people who come from a “position of ignorance”), and making sure his district had access to good clean water (“I fully support aquifer recharge efforts”).

So it wasn’t that Schroeder was hiding his atheism; it’s that it was a non-issue during the campaign.

If they tried to bring it up, though, Schroeder had a response ready to go. He told me during his campaign he planned to tell people that the U.S. Constitution forbids a religious test for public office and embraces religious freedom, including freedom from religion. He also pointed out that his wife is Christian. He had a history, in other words, of respecting people of faith and wasn’t some anti-theist purposely picking fights about religion.

“I understand where the basis of their faith comes from, so I’m not antithetical to people of faith,” he said, adding that being an atheist in a community with a few different (and conflicting) religious beliefs could arguably made him a better arbiter of policies that affect everyone because he had no dog in the fight.

But none of that ever came up in the race. In fact, the Idaho 97 Project, which fights extremism and disinformation, endorsed Schroeder. For most primary voters, it was really a question of whether they preferred a seemingly moderate newcomer to the state legislature, one of his two far-right opponents, or a long-time politician who was also entering the race. They went with the new guy who talked about issues that everyone could get on board with.

Why was Geoff Schroeder a Republican?

So why was he a Republican?

The simple answer, in my opinion, was that if you wanted to be involved in politics in his part of the state, you had to be a Republican. Having a “D” after your name was a political death-wish. And Schroeder happened to be the kind of old-school Republican who felt the MAGA extremists represented the fringe of his party.

Yes, he knew they were growing, and yes, he knew they were vocal, but he had always been focused on local and state-level politics. He typically didn’t encounter the sort of MAGA cultism that we tend to hear about in the national news. He wasn’t oblivious to it, but in his circles, most Republicans were the kind he’d consider moderate, and they wanted politicians to take care of the roads and schools, not engage in “culture war” battles.

When I asked him in 2022 about those extremists, he pegged them as representing about “30%” of the Party. (I felt that was an underestimate; they’re hardly a fringe group.) He argued that moderates needed to fight back. It wouldn’t be easy, he acknowledged, but his goal was to conduct the business of state and local government and not get distracted by high-profile controversial issues.

To put it another way, Schroeder was a conservative who lived in reality. He intended to govern that way. He was the sort of person who believed extremist Republicans were hijacking the GOP; he didn’t accept my view that the Party had always been this bad but just kept it under wraps before Donald Trump gave them permission to unleash their inner awfulness.

So, in fairness to him, he had no other option if he wanted to create change other than calling himself a Republican. District 8 was so red that a Democrat hadn’t even run for State Senate since 2012. (This year, at least, David Hoag will be a token challenger.) Furthermore, the Republican on the ballot had won every election with over 70% of the votes since that time. If you could get past the GOP primary, the seat was yours.

Schroeder had every intention to do in state office what he had done at lower levels of government, which is to do the work he was elected to do and, importantly, push back when necessary. For example, in 2012, shortly after he won a second term as a Republican precinct committeeman, Schroeder switched his party affiliation to “Unaffiliated” as a rebuke against the state’s closed primaries.

The GOP is “leering over … a list of who is and who isn’t declared as a Republican, a creepy aspect of government that is done by people like Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler,” Schroeder said. “I’m not going to be a part of it.”

And in 2011, he apparently told a story at a local atheist gathering about how he had to give an invocation at a Mountain Home City Council meeting… but didn’t go through with it. As one attendee put it:

One story Geoff told was about when he was asked to lead the invocation for a council meeting. He agreed, folded his arms, and stared at the clock for about a minute. Eventually the person next to him nudged him and asked him when he was going to start and he just said that the invocation was done and they could move on. If he had some warning he would have put together some grand invocation to the FSM, which would have just been awesome, but a minute of awkward silence….that’s a pretty damn good way of handling it with no notice.

If anyone needed more proof he wasn’t a right-wing extremist, he even got criticized by a right-wing troll for acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

I asked him in 2022 how he reconciled his atheism with the Republican Party’s overtly Christian Nationalist agenda. He didn’t see those as a contradiction largely because the role he had never required him to choose between rational thinking and religious extremism. It’s not like there was an “atheist” position on fixing potholes or a “conservative Christian” stance against water safety. Which was a fair point.

Whenever there had been a conflict, though, he came at the issue from a smaller government perspective. In a questionnaire for the Idaho Statesman, for example, he condemned a resolution that gave “working groups” the ability to censor books in public libraries:

… The legislature should not have passed a resolution creating a “working group” regarding materials in public libraries. There are already over 100 such “working groups”: the library boards that govern each library in Idaho. There are already statutory provisions for library patrons to address materials they are concerned with and adding yet another level of state-mandated interference is wasteful and harmful.

He also said the state should work on offering “better access to mental health resources,” which isn’t exactly the sort of FOX News bait you expect from a Republican politician. (One of his opponents at the time responded to the same questions by saying his priority in office would be fixing the “failure to teach basic Christian values” to kids.)

What about the more hot button issues, though?

What about LGBTQ rights? What about abortion rights? I pointed out that he could avoid those issues on a local level, but he would eventually have to vote on bills concerning those topics. Was he going to do the right thing or throw marginalized people under the bus?

Without giving specifics at the time, he told me the questions guiding his votes would be “What’s the proper role of government?” and “Does this bill accomplish that?” He also mentioned that careful analysis of the language of the bills would likely put him at odds with folks on either side.

That’s all well and good… but come on. I wanted a straight answer. How was he going to vote on abortion rights? It wasn’t a tough question.

He told me that medical decisions were not the role of government, and he opposed politicians making decisions for women. He was also adamant that Republicans focusing on issues like that were costing the state its infrastructure. He didn’t want to get elected to make noise. He wanted to get elected to make a positive difference.

It wasn’t just a sound bite. Schroeder had long criticized Christian Nationalist Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (who had lost her gubernatorial primary). He even called for the removal of Trump from office after the January 6 insurrection attempt.

And when Schroeder was accused of being a Republican In Name Only (RINO), he had a very succinct response:

I asked Schroeder in 2022 if there were any Republicans he admired, thinking he might throw out the name of Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney or any number of Republicans who were conservative on just about every issue but occasionally did the right thing (and got fawning coverage for it).

Instead, he mentioned former Idaho Gov. Phil Batt, who ran the state from 1995-1999 and was the state’s first Republican governor in 24 years. In his 90s today, Batt criticized the extremist shift in the GOP and advocated for civil rights, including for LGBTQ people. Schroeder also brought up Barry Goldwater (for putting country over party) and former Idaho attorney general and Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Jones, who, in retirement, has lashed out against right-wing extremism.

It’s one thing to say he respected those moderate Republicans. But what did he do when there weren’t guys like that on the ballot?

I asked him bluntly: Did he vote for Donald Trump in 2020?

After a brief pause, he responded with, “… Can we not?”

It was the only question I asked he didn’t want to answer. He justified the silence by saying he never paid much attention to national politics because Idaho’s electoral votes were always a foregone conclusion, making his vote for president effectively meaningless. For someone whose passion had always been local and state politics, that wasn’t necessarily a bad point... but still.

It made me wonder what he would do when he got into office. Would he stick to his “moderate” ways or would he lean in to the right-wing extremism that defines his party, especially in a state like Idaho?

What Schroeder did in office

We now have answers to that.

Over the past two years, Schroeder built up enough of a record for people to judge him beyond the sound bites. We can look at his votes and positions on issues that never came up at the local level.

The bottom line? He pretty much stuck to his game plan.

He co-sponsored two bills, with massive GOP support, criminalizing the trafficking of fentanyl and dealing with taxes. Both were signed into law. Neither was very controversial.

But I found this interesting: On an anti-trans bill that redefined “sex” and “gender” to accommodate conservative beliefs, Schroeder was the lone “absent” vote. He was also absent for another anti-trans bill that prohibited government employees from having to use someone else’s pronouns. And he was the lone “absent” vote on a bill to “prohibit ballot harvesting”—essentially a voter suppression law.

When I asked him about those votes during a lengthy conversation Monday night, I thought he would tell me he took a passive aggressive, but politically acceptable, approach to those bills. That he couldn’t vote against them, but his conscience wouldn’t let him vote for them.

Instead, his response was far more pragmtic: He still works as an attorney and those bills all came up for a vote on a day when he needed to be in the courtroom. He really was just absent.

"I’ve never intentionally missed a vote,” he told me, though he added that he probably would have joined Democrats and voted against all three of them.

On Wednesday, one conservative celebrated Schroeder’s loss while referring to him as a “pro-LGBT liberal,” a description that completely exaggerates his voting record on those issues. In fact, he did support one piece of anti-trans legislation: a bill that banned the use of public funds for gender affirming procedures.

When I asked Schroeder why a right-wing group would call him “pro-LGBT,” he brought up a 2023 bill that would have criminalized doctors who provide gender affirming care to minors. He voted against it largely because he wasn’t a medical authority and he believes that doctors, not politicians, know what’s best for their patients. On that vote, Schroeder was joined by a handful of Republican colleagues even though the bill eventually passed.

He was also one of only two Republicans to vote against a bill that gave immunity to volunteer security teams of religious organizations.

To put all this another way, when MAGA Republicans pushed bills to enact a right-wing agenda, Schroeder was usually not on board. And he was away from the Capitol on days when he likely would have voted against his party—in ways that would have been both courageous as well as a massive political risk.

That doesn’t mean he was a progressive ally.

For example, Schroeder voted with his party on a bill that gave 18-year-old students the ability to exempt themselves from mandatory vaccinations.

He also supported a bill banning certain materials “from being promoted, given, or made available to a minor by a school or public library.” (Every Democrat voted against it.) And he supported a bill banning non-citizens from voting… even though that’s already the law. All of that is what you’d expect from a Republican these days.

When I asked about those votes, he told me he always asked himself how much harm a given bill would do. If its passage was a foregone conclusion, he did what he could to blunt the damage (through amendments or by encouraging the bill’s sponsor to modify the language). If a bill was merely symbolic—a “signaling” bill—he was willing to vote with the party.

Consider the book banning bill. Schroeder explained his vote by saying it didn’t apply to any books that had “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors” and that an out-of-context passage wasn’t enough to get a book banned. In other words, the bill had no teeth. In fact, and to his credit, he actually co-sponsored a different bill that would’ve made it slightly more difficult to sue a library… but that bill failed. Still, his input altered the bill that did pass to make it less corrosive.

That seemed to be the hallmark of his time in office. By gaining the trust of his Republican colleagues and getting to know them on a personal level, he was able to make some changes to bad bills while helping sponsors avoid potentially disastrous consequences in initial drafts by making “surgical” changes. He couldn’t single-handedly stop the bad bills entirely, but he was respected as a good-faith participant in those discussions.

That may not have happened with a Democrat in his place.

In general, Schroeder didn’t usually vote the way I would’ve wanted my representative to vote, but his replacement will be much, much worse. As far as Republicans in red states go, he may have been the best a progressive could hope for, especially when you look at how the cultists attacked him:

Schroeder’s future plans

Now, soon, he’ll be out of office. It’s another sign that there really is no place in the Republican Party for an atheist who values civil liberties and small government and who did what little he could to rein in the extremist tendencies of his GOP colleagues.

“I’m concerned about this march toward theocracy,” he told me.

Schroeder doesn’t believe he lost his race because of anything personal he did. (I couldn’t find any evidence suggesting otherwise.) The demographics of his district are just shifting in a more conservative direction. In addition to Schroeder, the two State House members who represent his district also lost their primaries to right-wing challengers.

The move away from “thinking candidates" to those who merely "report for duty" (his words, not mine) is something Schroeder finds very disappointing. But he hoped general election voters would at least prevent those candidates from running away with the wins this November, sending a message that they don’t want to see extremism in the legislature. “I worry about the quality of future legislation," he said, given the people who will be in office very soon. It also didn’t help that the longtime Senate leader Chuck Winder lost his primary; Schroeder said Winder provided “stability and leadership” that would now be lacking.

As for himself, Schroeder will go back to being an attorney full-time. "I've been smiling a lot over the past five days," he said. “There's only so much campaigning I can do while maintaining my job.”

I asked Schroeder if he still had that ATHEIST license plate. He had told me a while back that he was working on transferring it to someone else in the state whose focus is on combatting religious extremism.

It still hasn’t happened yet. The process is ongoing, he told me me while laughing. For now, he said, “I’m still renewing the plate.”

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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