Americans have very little faith in Obama’s faith. In fact, accepting that he’s “Christian” seems a leap of faith many citizens are unwilling to take, say polls. And Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin (shown) appears no exception.
Asked recently by two Washington Post reporters if Obama is a Christian, Walker replied, “I don’t know.” As the paper reports, when then told “that Obama has frequently spoken publicly about his Christian faith, Walker maintained that he was not aware of the president’s religion. ‘I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that,’ Walker said, his voice calm and firm. ‘I’ve never asked him that,’ he added.”
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Later, writes the paper, “Walker spokeswoman Jocelyn Webster telephoned the Washington Post to say the governor was trying to make a point of principle by not answering such kinds of questions, not trying to cast doubt on Obama’s faith.”
Obviously, this was an attempt at damage control necessary with hit-man reporters who continually put Republicans in callow and craven crosshairs. And what’s happening, in part, is that the media is trying to “Quayle” Walker. Referencing former Vice President Dan Quayle and the silly and misunderstood 1992 potato affair, this is when the media attempts to characterize an intelligent conservative candidate as a dolt, either through inordinate focus on a normal gaffe or via the use of gotcha questions. This is why Walker was recently asked about evolution in Europe, mind you (for my deeper take on evolution, click here).
Of course, the media is exercising situational stupidity framing. While it criticized Walker for “punting” on evolution, it took no issue when Obama answered a question in 2008 concerning when babies get human rights by flippantly saying the matter is “above my pay grade.” Nor did it much note his misspelling of “respect” or his claiming he’d been to “57 states.” But this article doesn’t concern Obama’s confusion about basic knowledge but people’s confusion about the faith of Obama.
And this confusion reigns. As Byron York wrote on Sunday:
In June, 2012, Gallup asked, “Do you happen to know the religious faith of Barack Obama?” Forty-four percent said they did not know, while 36 percent said he is a Christian, 11 percent said he is a Muslim, and eight percent said he has no religion. The “don’t know” group included 36 percent of Democrats. (A larger number of Republicans, 47 percent, said they didn’t know Obama’s religion, as did 46 percent of independents.)
In August, 2010, a Pew poll made news when it found that 18 percent of those surveyed believed Obama is a Muslim. But just as notably, 43 percent of respondents in that survey told Pew they didn’t know Obama’s religion. Among those who said they didn’t know were 41 percent of Democrats.
Just as notably, York points out that people only became more confused about Obama’s faith as time wore on.
Is this merely attributable to low-information voters’ ignorance? Ignorance is evident if people don’t know that Obama claims to be Christian — it’s also evident if people don’t know that politicians’ claims are sometimes, well, false witness.
We should start by understanding that, today especially, many are confused even about their own faith. G.K. Chesterton once said, “We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end,” precisely because most moderns haven’t thought to a definite end. We all know such people; one day they seem to believe in God, the next not so much. And some change their theology like clothes, with ever-vacillating values and personal priorities shifting their faith as oceans move sand.
Many public figures fall into this category, too. For example, people still argue over Thomas Jefferson’s religion, with many claiming he was a Deist, some asserting he was an atheist (even in his own time), others averring he was an extremely unorthodox Christian, and his saying, “I am of a sect by myself.” And many claim Adolf Hitler was Christian, largely in an effort to besmirch the faith via guilt by association; though good scholarship informs that the Nazis were often neo-pagans, and good psychology tells us that Hitler was a self-deifying narcissist.
This brings us to Barack Obama. Noting that actions speak louder than words, many would point out that the president’s ideology doesn’t exactly reflect Christian principles. But let’s focus on what will be seen as more directly relevant and less debatable: Obama’s choice of the notorious Trinity United as his Chicago church.
When Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright bellowed from the pulpit “God d*** America!” and “US of KKK A!” and said that our government might have purposely visited AIDS upon the black community, it wasn’t out of line in Trinity United; in fact, he’s still perhaps the church’s most respected figure. He had Obama’s “rspect” (and maybe even his respect), too, as he was once a spiritual adviser whom Obama affectionately called an “old uncle.” Just as damningly, Wright preached the Black Liberation Theology notion that Jesus was a black man fighting an oppressive white Roman establishment; interestingly, this mirrors the Nazi propagation of “Positive Christianity” (in addition to their pagan creed), which taught that Jesus was a Nordic character fighting an oppressive Jewish establishment. And is the Wright “faith” really any more Christian than the Nazis’ “faith”?
Of course, Wright has said that church was not Barack and Michelle Obama’s “thing,” and it’s believable that they were irregular congregants. What’s not believable is that Obama was oblivious to the preaching and teaching of a man for whom he expressed great affection, who married him and his wife and baptized his daughters, and whose pews he did at times occupy. Also note that Oprah Winfrey, who also was once a sporadic Trinity congregant, left the church in the mid-1990s — partially because she knew Wright’s incendiary rhetoric could tarnish her image.
Nonetheless, that going to church wasn’t really Obama’s “thing” — and that when he did attend it was at a hate-filled, race-oriented, black-power institution — doesn’t serve to convince that the president is “Christian.”
Then we have the Americans who consider Obama Muslim. Many view this as tin-foil-hat, two-brain-cell silliness, but there’s at least as much evidence for it as there is he’s Christian. There is the 2009 ABC News interview in which Obama said, in what some call a Freudian slip, that John McCain “has not talked about my Muslim faith.” After being corrected by interviewer George Stephanopoulos, he indicated he meant that McCain had not accused him of having such faith. Perhaps. But it was odd that he didn’t actually just say it that way in the first place.
More recently, American Thinker makes the case that a gesture Obama made at last August’s U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit was a “Muslim gang sign” called the shahada; I cannot say definitively if he intentionally made a sign or if he was merely raising his finger in the air while making a point, but American Thinker’s thesis warrants consideration. There’s also the fact that Obama praised the Muslim call to prayer as “the most beautiful sound in the world.” Note in addition that Obama was born to a Muslim father, spent many formative years in a Muslim country (Indonesia), and has a Muslim name. But does any of this actually mean he’s “Muslim”? Perhaps he’s something a bit different.
I believe that just as we hear about people culturally Jewish but not religiously so, Obama tends toward the Islamic culturally but doesn’t actually have “Muslim faith.” But then, what is Obama religiously? A 2004 interview conducted by Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter Cathleen Falsani provides some insight. As I wrote in 2010:
Obama … told Falsani that he had “deep faith.” … And this brings us to the part of the interview in which he was asked “What is sin?” Here was his answer:
“Being out of alignment with my values.”
… [But] this is not the definition of sin.… Sin is when you violate God’s laws, or, to put it in more modernistic terms, it’s being out of alignment with God’s values (which are the Truth). …Some might conclude that if you define sin as being out of alignment with your values, you believe you are God.
An even stranger answer came earlier in the interview. In response to Falsani’s query about whether he prayed often, Obama said, “Uh, yeah, I guess I do. It’s not formal, me getting on my knees. I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. I think throughout the day, I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why am I doing it.” [Emphasis added.]
Note that where “God” should have been in the last sentence, Obama inserted “myself.”
This is just one reason why I believe Obama is a self-deifying atheist (common) with quasi-Islamic tastes. Whatever the case, this whole exposition is a good reason not to be surprised that people are confused about his “faith.” For, as some of his profoundly arrogant statements have also illustrated, the only faith he really seems to have is faith in himself. Increasingly, though, he’s the only one who does.
