President Obama: Christian or Muslim or something else?
The poll getting all the attention this morning is on what Americans believe about President Barack Obama’s religious faith. From the AFP:
Nearly two years after Barack Obama’s election as US president, a growing number of Americans misidentify his faith as Muslim, according to a new poll released Thursday.
Despite Obama’s attendance in church and his repeated public statements about his Christian faith, nearly one in five respondents on the survey said they believed he is a practitioner of Islam, while only 34 percent of Americans correctly identified him as a Christian, down sharply from a year earlier.
The poll was conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Meanwhile, the percentage of people who say they are unsure what religion Obama practices has risen to 43 percent, from 34 percent a year ago.
The bolding on misidentify and correctly was added by myself. I think these characterizations which brook no debate illustrate how the AFP, and others analyzing these poll results, are rather missing the point. The point is that there are a whole lot of Americans who, to one degree or another, doubt that President Barack Obama believes what he is purported to believe. The AFP apparently thinks Christianity is simply a matter of calling oneself a Christian in campaign materials, or attending Jeremiah Wright’s United Church of Christ in Chicago for twenty years. To a lot of Americans, of Christian faith themselves, Christianity is fundamentally a matter of what is in your heart, as well as how you attempt to lead your life. The poll suggests many Americans feel dubious about what is in Barack Obama’s heart on this subject, and perhaps this doubt has been increased by how they’ve gotten to know him over the past twenty months that he’s been in office.
I don’t personally think that Obama is secretly praying towards Mecca five times a day. I don’t think he is hiding a devout Muslim faith. But certainly I think it’s allowable to question to what degree he is a believing Christian in the sense that believing Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Eastern Orthodox and faithful “mainline” Protestants are. The United Church of Christ, which he attended for twenty years, does not profess a strict creed, and even the notion of the divinity of Christ is something which that church leaves to one’s own conscience. This is unconventional to say the least. Great power is therefore given to individual pastors to run their churches and preach to their congregants based solely on their own perspective. Barack Obama’s pastor was Jeremiah Wright, who preaches Black Liberation Theology. To the degree they researched it, many Americans would not recognize this theology as authentically Christian.
What Americans have seen from President Barack Obama in office is a great deal in the way of outreach to Islam, with little in the way of outreach to Christians, and this may be inclining more of them to believe that in his heart he really is a Muslim. I don’t think so myself; I get the impression he has no firm beliefs regarding God and the worship of God, but inclines positively towards Islam for the same reason many misguided leftists do: they see Islam as the religion of disenfranchised and oppressed peoples, and orthodox Christianity as the religion of the privileged. This is utterly bogus, of-course — millions of the world’s poorest people, as in Africa, profess Christianity, and many of the world’s most rich and decadent, as in the oil sheiks of the Middle East, profess Islam — but as a perspective of the irreligious left it’s surprisingly resilient, and this despite the horrifying record Islamic societies and communities have on issues supposedly dear to liberals, such as women’s rights, homosexuals’ rights, and human freedoms generally.
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The AFP and other media outlets may be convinced they know what resides in President Obama’s heart, but, regardless of what they print, many Americans are not going to regard the nature of his faith as settled fact in the absence of firmer evidence.
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As Jesus says in Matthew 12:34: “For the mouth speaks from what fills the heart.”
When Obama told Rick Warren that the question of when life begins was above his pay grade, it showed how weak are his beliefs in anything beyond his own interests.
A counter-argument from some of the pastors who have counseled Obama over the years:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100819/pl_mcclatchy/3601787
Obviously, they left one out.
Franklin Graham: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim,the seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother,he was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name,
Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”
:)
There’s a collection of Obama’s quotes on faith here –
http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/08/19/his-own-words-obama-religion – which focuses on Christian references. On the other hand theres things left out like his recitation of the Muslim call-to-prayer to Kristof in the NY Times with a “first rate” Arabic accent. http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1
That call to prayer is a compressed version of the whole Islamic creed and Muslims are supposed to recite it each time they hear it. So you can get different conclusions by just looking at what Obama has said and written over the years on this stuff. It shouldn’t surprise that people aren’t sure what the truth is.
Yes Barack Obama has gone to church but that does not make him a Christian. His actions show hes not a Christian even from his ordering the cross covered so it didnt show at Georgetown His reusal to celebrate or pray on the national day of Prayer and his playing golf and hawaii on Christmas. He’s eithera Muslim or a satanist but hes not a Christian A) he Loves abortions
B) he Lies and C)everything hes done has harmed not helped one person. He’s almost never told the truth and has lied about everything important such as the economy. For example theeconomy is actually in a Depression not a recession and it’s only gonna get worse.
[...] President Obama: Christian or Muslim or something else? [...]
Of course he’s a muslim.
IMO obama does’nt like the uk and he does’nt like the usa either. You have elected this dishonest man and given him access to all the sensitive information on the west.
Very foolish and very very dangerous.