"President Obama is a committed Christian, and his faith is an important part of his daily life. . . The President's strong Christian faith is what guides him through these challenges but he doesn't wear it on his sleeve."
Do you care about your president's religious beliefs? Why do you think so many Americans believe (falsely) that Obama is Muslim? Why do you think that only one in three Americans know that President Obama is Christian?
Barack Obama says he's a Christian who came to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in his mid-20's. But does he consider himself "evangelical?" That question was posed to him recently by a religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here is Obama's reponse:
"Gosh, I'm not sure if labels are helpful here because the definition of an evangelical is so loose and subject to so many different interpretations. I came to Christianity through the black church tradition where the line between evangelical and non-evangelical is completely blurred. Nobody knows exactly what it means. "Does it mean that you feel you've got a personal relationship with Christ the savior? Then that's directly part of the black church experience. Does it mean you're born-again in a classic sense, with all the accoutrements that go along with that, as it's understood by some other tradition? I'm not sure." He continued his answer: "My faith is complicated by the fact that I didn't grow up in a particular religious tradition. And so what that means is when you come at it as an adult, your brain mediates a lot, and you ask a lot of questions. "There are aspects of Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not. There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go, 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that,'" he said, shrugging and stammering slightly.
Obama's response doesn't bother me at all, and probably won't bother most people. But some on the right have already made some repugnant insinuations about his religious beliefs and how they may affect his "loyalties," and I suspect his comments about not growing up in a particular religious tradition and not being comfortable with certain "aspects" of the Christian tradition will, unfortunately, only serve to keep those dark innuendos circulating.
Barack Obama's religious background is more diverse than that of most prominent politicians, but it may prove to be representative of future generations of Americans who grow up in an increasingly diverse America. His mother was raised by non-practicing Christians; his father was raised a Muslim but was an atheist by the time he had married Obama's mother. Obama's step-father was also Muslim, but of an eclectic kind who could make room for animist and Hindu beliefs. Neither Obama nor his mother were ever atheists, but she raised him in a relatively secular household where he learned about religion. Almost one in five Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, according to a new poll, despite his public statements about his Christian faith.
18% now say that the US president is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Forty three percent say they do not know Obama's religion.
Before Obama's recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Centre, which have landed him in political hot water. The president has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic centre there, but refrained from taking a position on whether or not it should actually be built two blocks from Ground Zero. The issue has become politically charged ahead of congressional races in mid-November, with Republicans accusing Obama of being out touch with mainstream America.
The belief that Obama is a Muslim has increased most sharply among Republicans, (up 14 points) since 2009, especially conservative Republicans (up 16 points). But the number of independents who say Obama is a Muslim has also increased significantly (up eight points). There has been little change in the number of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim, but fewer Democrats today say he is a Christian.
The White House is concerned that beliefs about Obama's religion are linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing. Those who are unsure about Obama's religion are about evenly divided in their views of his performance.
The White House blamed "misinformation campaigns" by the president's opponents.
"While the president has been diligent and personally committed to his own Christian faith, there's certainly folks who are intent on spreading falsehoods about the president and his values and beliefs," Obama's faith adviser, Joshua DuBois, told the Washington Post.
DuBois pointed to six speeches on faith that the president has given in which he talked about his beliefs, but said coverage of Obama's Christianity has been scant compared with news about the economic crisis, legislative battles and other issues.
Pew analysts attribute the findings to attacks by his opponents and Obama's limited attendance at religious services, particularly in contrast with presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Centre's director, said the confusion partly reflected "the intensification of negative views about Obama among his critics". Alan Cooperman, the Pew Forum's associate director for research, said that with the public hearing little about Obama's religion, "maybe there's more possibility for other people to make suggestions that the president is this or he's really that or he's really a Muslim".
Obama is the Christian son of a Kenyan, Barack Obama Sr. Obama Sr was raised Muslim.
Between the ages of six and 10, Obama lived in predominantly Muslim Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather.
During the election campaign, rightwing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh used his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, in an attempt to portray him as somehow un-American. Rightwingers also spread the false allegation that Obama had attended a madrassa in Indonesia.
Barack Obama does not appear to believe in a strict separation of church an state, which is a shame because opposition to church/state separation is a keystone in the Christian Right's assault on modernity and the Enlightenment. Barack Obama does not come out to openly deny that church and state should be separated, of course, but he liberally uses Christian Right rhetoric, misinformation, and even lies in a way that would tend to undermine confidence in and support for separation.
In his "Call to Renewal" Keynote Address of June 28, 2006, Barack Obama said:
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters.
Of course context matters — context always matters in every church/state separation issue. Barack Obama is being disingenuous because no one argues that "every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation." On the other hand, this claim is often used by Christian Nationalists to caricature and then dismiss church/state separation and those active on behalf of separation.
Barack Obama only seems to imagine a narrow context when evaluating church/state issues. He should look at the larger context which includes Christians harassing, intimidating, threatening, and sometimes assaulting minorities who do don't fall in line or who challenge "voluntary" religious observances.
Context matters, and the fact is the overall "context" is an America where Christians have been privileged, have abused their power over others, and have been accustomed to the idea that they and their religion should be treated as superior to all others. In recent years we've had incidents like Jews who were chased out of their homes by Christians who thought they owned the community. In Oklahoma, a community tried to chase an atheist family out of the state — and then tried to get the father convicted under false charges of assault when he stood his ground.
Christians are reacting so violently to challenges to government-endorsed religious rituals because they don't like losing those privileges — it's precisely the same sorts of reactions America saw when whites started to be denied their special race-based privileges. When a group is privileged long enough, members end up seeing their privileges as their rights (or stop seeing the privileges at all) — and when minorities demand equal treatment, they are derided as demanding "special rights."
What if Barack Obama had said "Not every expression of white privilege in public is an infringement of civil rights — context matters." Would he be right? Perhaps — but he wouldn't say it because he recognizes that white privilege is wrong. He doesn't yet recognize that Christian privilege is equally wrong. Every official government mention of "God" is an endorsement and expression of support for a particular conception of a particular god and, therefore, endorsement and support for a particular religious position held by some but not all Americans.
People who happen to share that conception of this god generally don't recognize the fact they are being privileged because their god usually plays an important role in everything they do — it's an unconscious ideology that prevents them from seeing anything amiss with one more expression of their beliefs from a different source. Such privileging of one religion is a problem, though, because it sends the message that adherents are politically privileged. In the long run, this message of privilege becomes a message of superiority, creating a situation in which people are willing to employ violence in defense of their privileges. It's only to be expected because people construct most of their personal and communal identities around those privileges.
Whites have used violence to defend white privilege; heterosexuals have used violence to defend heterosexual privilege; men have used violence to defend male privilege; Christians have used violence to defend Christian privilege. The story is always the same, all that changes is which group is being unjustly privileged. It's the duty of liberal, democratic governments to not only tear down such privileges, but to protect the minorities who might suffer from retaliation.
Why is Barack Obama using the rhetoric of Christian Nationalists? There is no indication that he himself is a Christian Nationalist, but this wouldn't be the only time that he used such rhetoric to disparage secularists and secularism. In a 2007 speech to United Church of Christ's Iowa conference, Barack Obama said:
Doing the Lord's work is a thread that runs through our politics since the very beginning. And it puts the lie to the notion that separation of church and state in America means somehow that faith should have no role in public life.
Once again, no one has actually said that "faith should have no role in public life," but that's a lie which Christian Nationalists love to repeat in order to encourage conservative opposition to church/state separation. Barack Obama here is misleading people in the same way that Christian Nationalists do by playing on multiple definitions of the word "public." There is "public life" in the sense of what people can easily see in public (as opposed to kept hidden in private) and then there is "public life" in the sense of the government.
The separation of church and state does not prevent people from expressing or practicing their faith in public, but it does prevent the integration of their personal religious faith into the government. Presumably Barack Obama knows that people's faith can be expressed and practiced in public, so that only leaves a desire for "faith" to play a role in the government. If Barack Obama is trying to say that his personal religion should be integrated into the government of all citizens — including those who reject his religion — then he is in effect denying that church and state should be separated.
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