Is Obama a Christian?

A recent poll found that 18% of Americans now believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim. That was up from 11% who said so in March. The same poll also showed that the number who think he is a Christian fell from 48% to 34% during the same time frame. A total of 48% (the largest group) said they did not know what religion he is. So that means that 66% of Americans either think he is a Muslim or they are not sure what his religion is. This seems, on the face of it, to be pretty incredible. (The poll did not measure what percentage of his liberal base thinks that Obama is a god, although there clearly are a fair number of true believers among the mainstream media.)

However, George Neumeyer at the American Spectator, provides some background that may help to put these surprising results in perspective in an interesting piece entitled "A Relativist, Wrapped in a Muslim, Inside an Agnostic."

Why does a significant chunk of the American electorate think Obama is a Muslim? Let's count some of the reasons: he speaks of his "Muslim roots," says he hails from "generations of Muslims," was born to a line of Muslim males and given by them an Arabic name, went to a Muslim school in Islamic Indonesia, speaks glowingly of Islam whenever he gets the chance, holds a Ramadan dinner in the White House, tells his NASA head to turn the space agency into a Muslim outreach program, and last but not least insults doctrinal Christians routinely.

The voice of the people is the voice of God, the pander bears and demagogues of the left usually say. But not on this one. With great impatience they have appeared on cable shows this week to lecture the American people on Obama's "real" religion. Has the left-wing chattering class ever been more eager to pronounce a president Christian?

The American public hasn't seen this level of hyperactive defensiveness from them, or what they would call a "teachable moment," since that terribly insensitive New Yorker cover depicting Obama in a turban. Or was it the time that Hillary Clinton slyly said that Obama isn't a Muslim "as far as" she knew? Or was it the time the Hillary campaign allegedly sent to the Drudge Report an image of Obama in Muslim garb? Or when Hillary-consultant Mark Penn's offensive memos leaked out saying that he couldn't "imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values"?

So what is Obama?

So what religion is Obama? Probably the most generous description of Obama's elusive religious identity, should one take him at "his word" as it appears in his slippery memoirs and speeches, is that he's neither Muslim nor Christian; he's something else. His late mother, whom he once called a "Christian from Kansas" but actually was a non-believing anthropologist from Kansas, would have found classifying him tricky too. But perhaps he can be clinically described as a practicing agnostic, with deep roots in and sympathy for Islam, who views his now-professed, politically necessary religion with barely concealed disdain while allowing himself from time to time bursts of syncretistic sophistry and quasi-religious uplift.

- snip -

His de facto culture war with Christianity is of more interest to him than the real and ongoing one with radical Islam. He is the Harvard agnostic and dilettante who stands above all religions, save Islam, and judges their "rationality" and usefulness to the utopia to come. Islam is an intrinsically peaceful religion by his lights, while Christianity, unless it assumes the platform of the Democratic Party and sees Jesus as a forerunner to Saul Alinsky, is dangerously bigoted and an impediment to "progress."

- snip -

The more irrational a religion, the more Obama-style "rationalists" and relativists like it, and if the religion is non-western their enthusiasm grows still more. Obama's gushing about Islam stems not only from his "roots" but also from the western agnosticism to which he essentially converted: relativists quietly admire the rupture in the relationship between religion and reason in Islamic culture because they engineered a similar rupture in their own.

Radical Islam and relativism take different routes of irrationality -- the former adopts "faith" without reason while the latter adopts "reason" without faith -- but come out on the same trail of blood: a culture of death, with daily abortions in the west, suicide bombings in the east, and a "leader of the free world," who reads secularist propaganda at the Huffington Post with memory's ear cocked to the "call of the azaan," blind to both.

This is brilliant. Everybody who has been observing the unholy alliance between radical Islam and the Western Left in Europe for the past 40 years and lately in America as well has been asking what is the common factor in the two seemingly disparate phenomena. Neumeyer has nailed it; it is irrationality.

Pope Benedict XVI pointed out that Islam needs to engage with reason and was answered by violence and shouting. Suicide bombings and abortion are both inherently unreasonable and self-destructive for the cultures which practice them.

Seldom has a leader embodied the Leftist-Muslim link in his own person quite like Obama. It's no wonder people have a hard time believing he is a Christian.