Ignorance, lies and President Obama's religion

https://www.thesuntimes.com/opinions...bamas-religion

Rick Holmes: Ignorance, lies and President Obama's religion
By Rick Holmes
GateHouse News Service
Aug 30, 2010

It says nothing about Barack Obama that 18 percent of respondents in a recent Pew survey believe the president is a Muslim. Obama has been candid and consistent in discussing his religious, writing about it years before he became a national figure. Nothing he has said or done since taking office has cast doubt on his personal commitment to Christianity.

But it says plenty about the gullibility of a fifth of the American people, and the cynicism of some media players, that the number who believe this fiction has grown by 50 percent since Obama was inaugurated. It's also noteworthy that nearly a third of Republicans think Obama is Muslim. The number who say Obama is a Christian has dropped from 47 percent in 2008 to 34 percent today.

Why are people getting more ignorant about their president 18 months into his term? The most likely explanation is that facts don't matter to his political opponents.

The facts? Obama was raised by his mother and her parents, who were nominal Christians but not especially active in church. His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., gave him his name but little else. During the brief period before he abandoned his young wife and toddler son, Obama Sr. considered himself an atheist.

As a boy, Obama lived several years in a Muslim country - Indonesia - where he attended a Catholic school. That doesn't make him Muslim any more than it makes him a Catholic.

Some allege that under Islamic law, because Obama's paternal grandfather - a man Obama never met - was a Muslim, he is one, too. But that's a red herring. Americans don't assign religious, political or any other kind of identity based on long-dead relatives. Americans get to define themselves, and there's no doubt how Barack Obama defines himself.

As a young adult, his experience working with ministers in Chicago on community issues brought him to Christianity. He affirmed his faith and became a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination with historic roots in the Puritans who founded Massachusetts.

Whether someone is a Christian is not a matter for public debate. Unlike some other faiths, Christianity is not inherited. From the time of the first apostles, Christianity is something you declare by affirmation and by the acceptance of sacraments. That's what Obama has done and consistently declared.

He doesn't advertise his Christian credentials like, say, George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. But Obama has written about it in books and answered questions when asked. In a long interview with religion writer Kathleen Falsami in 2004 (available online at www.godgrrl.com/obama-on-faith), he goes into more detail. In a 2008 interview with Christianity Today in 2008, he was more succinct:

"I am a devout Christian," he said. "I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ."

What part of that is hard to understand? Christianity in America, especially in the Protestant tradition, is a smorgasbord of denominations, encompassing snake-handlers on one end and ministers who welcome gay marriages on the other. There is no test you must take to qualify as a Christian, and no one - not even the pope - is authorized to kick you out of the faith.

Those who wish to ignore Jesus' commandment to "judge not that ye be not judged" may opine on whether Obama is a good Christian or a bad Christian, I guess. But you'd think such a judgment would hinge on some terrible sin of word or deed that cast doubt on his worthiness. In debating people who question Obama's Christianity, I don't hear that evidence. Instead, I hear a surprising number of references to health care reform. Who knew Jesus felt so strongly about the individual mandate?

But there's not a shred of evidence showing him to be a Muslim, and no grounds to dismiss his claim that he's a Christian.

Yet they do, with straight faces. That includes two Republican candidates for Congress in the Massachusetts 3rd District. "I believe that he's a Muslim," Robert Chipman of Plainville told the Attleboro Sun-Chronicle. "There is no doubt about it," Robert Delle of Westborough agreed. "Obama is a Muslim."

No doubt?

Here's what there's no doubt about: Anyone who says Obama is a Muslim is either ignorant or unprincipled. Either they don't know the truth, or truth means nothing to them.

It shouldn't matter, of course. The Constitution explicitly says there can be no religious test for public office. We've never had a Muslim president, or a Jewish one, for that matter - though Franklin D. Roosevelt was described as Jewish by some of his nastiest critics, the same kind of people who today call Obama a Muslim.

And they do it because it does matter. They do it for the same reason they spread lies about Obama's birth in Hawaii: to make the president seem like an outsider, a foreigner, a strange, dangerous non-American who doesn't belong in the White House. Someone we should "take America back" from.

Something ugly is happening in America this summer. One of the nation's foundational principles - the right to worship where and how you want - is under assault, and not just in Lower Manhattan. In Florida, where a mosque was bombed last spring, a minister is planning to mark the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks by burning Qurans.

Facts pose no obstacle for the anti-Obama, anti-Muslim crusaders. There's no "mosque" proposed for Ground Zero. It's a cultural center, expressly modeled on the YMCA, with a gym, restaurant, offices and a day center. It's not at the World Trade Center site, but more than two long blocks away, and well out of site of the WTC.

Yes, it will have a prayer room Muslims may use. It's about the size of the Muslim prayer room at another site hallowed by the 9-11 attacks: the Pentagon. There, Muslims in uniform, who put their lives on the line in America's war against terrorists, recite their prayers daily.

Maybe I'm overreacting. As Jay Leno demonstrates regularly on his show, it's easy to find people ignorant about the most basic facts of American life. After all, a recent Fox News poll found that 8 percent of Americans think Elvis is still alive. Maybe it doesn't matter that 18 percent think Obama's a Muslim.

Ignorant people will always be with us. What worries me are the well-paid media stars and political operatives who are doing everything they can to make Americans more ignorant.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor of the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. He can be reached at [email protected].

Copyright 2010 The Sun-Times. Some rights reserved

Interesting article. The most important part to me was barely touched upon: the fact that the impossibility of a non-Christian being elected to the Presidency shows so clearly that bigotry is still an accepted part of everyday life. The targets of bigotry change with the times and places--now it's Jews, now blacks, now women, now white males, now gays, now non-Christians (and especially atheists), but bigotry remains as a major determinant of our lives. Some states still have laws on their books that forbid atheists to hold public office; I believe there's a court case going on in South Carolina about that right now.

Virtually everyone claims to be against bigotry. What that really means is that they're against the other guys' bigotry, not their own.