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Our First Muslim President?

For the past day or so the mainstream press has been all a-twitter (as have Twitter, the blogs, and the talk shows) with recent polls indicating a rising number of Americans think Obama is a Muslim and a falling number believe he is a Christian.

On August 18 The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life started the recent buzz by reporting that Growing Number of Americans Say Obama is a Muslim.

A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama 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. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama?s religion is. The survey was completed in early August, before Obama?s recent comments about the proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center.

Time reported similar numbers from its survey:

In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

The Washington Post repeated some of the findings:

Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent.

The New York Times regards the Pew and Time polls as ?fresh evidence of misperceptions about the president taking root in the public mind,? as a recrudescence of ?the perception of ?otherness? that Candidate Obama sought so hard to overcome.?

A good argument can be made, however, that a wide swath of the public?s ?perception of ?otherness?? is not a ?misperception? at all. Indeed, Dorothy Rabinowitz made not a good but a great, immensely powerful argument on this very point back in June, well before the current Muslim controversies. In The Alien in the White House, in the Wall Street Journal she argued that ?[t]he distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed,? that

it was clear from the first that this president ? single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival ? was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans? leader, a man of them, for them, the nation?s voice and champion.

?Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric,? she continued.

They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president?s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe....

.... The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere ? in the salons of the left the world over ? and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures ? her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands ? something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

There are, obviously, two parts to the questions, doubts, suspicions about whether Obama is Christian or Muslim (let?s leave aside ?none of the above?): belief or suspicion that he?s a Muslim; disbelief or doubt that he?s a Christian. Whether or not any of these beliefs, doubts, or suspicions are ?misperceptions,? there are clearly reasons beyond paranoia, Islamophobia, nuttiness, or racism why so many people entertain them.

Let?s start with Islam. Obama has made no secret ? indeed, he has proudly proclaimed in his autobiographies and various speeches ? that he chose his Muslim father?s name and race when he could have as easily chosen his mother?s and her parents?. He attended a Muslim school as a child in Indonesia, which he spoke of fondly in a 2007 interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Indeed, in a 2008 column Kristof took some of the blame for what he regarded as the successful attempt to ?otherize? Obama:

Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim ? as if that in itself were wrong ? regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia.

In a 2007 column quoting that interview (excerpts of which the 2008 column just quoted said were on Kristof?s blog site, here, are for some reason no longer there), Kristof wrote:

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it?ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ?one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.?

Moreover, Mr. Obama?s own grandfather in Kenya was a Muslim. Mr. Obama never met his grandfather and says he isn?t sure if his grandfather?s two wives were simultaneous or consecutive, or even if he was Sunni or Shiite. (O.K., maybe Mr. Obama should just give up on Alabama.)

In his 2008 article Kristof repeated the ?prettiest sound? line and stated that Obama ?repeated the opening? of the Arabic call to prayer, though he did not repeat that he recited the opening lines ?with a first-rate accent.?

More recently, during his campaign and as president Obama has devoted not inconsiderable efforts to ?reaching out? to Muslims, even to the point of making improved relations with the Muslim world the ?foremost mission? of NASA, the space (spaced out?) agency. According to NASA administrator Gen. Charles Bolden, the president ?charged me with three things.?

One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.

Not only has the president naturally refused to criticize even any part of, or offshoot from, Islam, his administration has famously also even refused to speak of terrorists, much less Islamic terrorists. He has, however, shown no similar reluctance to criticize some Christians.

In June 2007, for example, Senator Obama told the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, that ?some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.?

?But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us,? the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before a national meeting of the United Church of Christ.

?At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,? he said.

?There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its No. 1 legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,? Obama said. ?I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version.?

And what version would that be? The version supplied by his long-term minister and baptizer of his children, the ranting Rev. Wright? In any event, the primary actual evidence of Obama?s Christianity is his long membership in Wright?s church, not an affiliation likely to convince many Americans (and not just in Alabama) that Obama?s Christianity, insofar as it it is real and not simply a political affectation, is not like theirs.

Let us also not forget Candidate Obama?s famous slur on rural rubes, that

they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren?t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

In short, the combination of Obama?s cultural distance from mainstream American, his special ?sensitivity? to Muslims and the Muslim world, and his disparaging remarks about evangelicals along with his long sympathetic association with Rev. Wright could easily lead many quite reasonable Americans to be unsure about his religious identity. This is true, I think, especially because most suspicions that Obama is Muslim or is not Christian are not based on theological speculation. They are much more a comment about his cultural distance from themselves than a firm conviction that he worships Allah, that he bows down to Mecca every day, etc.

Obama, they believe, as Rush Limbaugh has suggested, may be our first Muslim president in the same way that Bill Clinton was regarded by many as our first black president.

Finally, there is an additional, unnoted (so far as I know) reason why so many Americans are skeptical of announcements such as this recent one from the White House:

White House says Obama is Christian, prays daily

WASHINGTON ? President Barack Obama is a Christian who prays daily, a White House official said Thursday, trying to tamp down growing doubts about the president's religion.

This is the same Obama and same White House, after all, who said that its stimulus would keep unemployment from going over 8%, that passing Obamacare would lower medical costs and that all those who like their current insurance will be able to keep it, that health care negotiations would be on C-Span, that bills would be posted on the Internet for 5 days before being signed, that made a ?firm pledge? that

no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

People who no longer have faith in White House assurances on taxes, etc., etc. are not likely to have faith in other assurances just because they are about faith.

Full post as published by Discriminations on August 20, 2010 (boomark / email).