In my last post, I wondered out loud if Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa would make him America’s second preacher-president.

In the interest of fairness, I am asking today if America will ever have an atheist president.

I think the answer is perhaps –- but not anytime soon. According to a recent poll, just over half of all Americans say that they would not vote to elect an otherwise-qualified atheist to the highest office in the land. At the present time, the highest-ranking public official in America to admit to having no religion is Peter Stark, a democratic congressman from the San Francisco area.

Still, as the Economist magazine reported last month, almost 30 million Americans professed “no religion” in 2001 –- twice as many as a decade earlier. So it may be that atheists will have to be taken seriously as a voting bloc before too long.

I wonder how the politicians will straddle that one.