Obama's Religion Problem

Two conspiracy theories keep recurring about President Obama - that he was born in a different country and that he is a secret Muslim.

The foreign birth conspiracy makes no sense. He was born to an American citizen so it makes no difference where he was born - just ask John McCain who was born in Panama. Some of the wildest versions of this theory say that he was born to a different mother but fail to explain why an American woman and her parents would be willing to raise someone else's child as their own after he abandoned them.

The secret Muslim theory has more traction for several reasons. One is that he actually was raised as a Muslim by his step-father. This was scrubbed from his biography during the 2008 campaign along with any mention of his middle name - Husein. When information is deliberately suppressed, it gives the impression that there is something to hide.

The President's own actions have added to the speculation. In 2004 he was given the keynote speech at the DNC national convention because he was a liberal Democrat who was willing to talk about god. Sometime in the intervening years, he stopped mentioning god except in the context of "clinging to" guns and religion.

Obama admitted in one of his autobiographies that he wasn't really a Christian until he joined the church of the Reverend Wright. When videos of Wright's sermons hit the Internet, Obama disowned him and quit the church. He has not joined a new church since then. For a president who claims to be more religious than Ronald Reagan, this seems a bit strange.

Obama should not have commented on the Ground Zero Mosque. It inserted him into a local controversy and it called attention to the fact that he was hosting a Ramadan dinner at the White House.

In his various apology tours of the Mid-East, he has recalled his Muslim heritage - the same heritage that people were forbidden to mention in 2008.

In an effort to convince people that Obama is a practicing Christian, the White House was reduced to talking about daily bible reading sent to his Blackberry.

Does any of this mean that he is a practicing Muslim? No. But there is precious little to indicate that he is a practicing Christian, either.

I doubt that his mother or grandparents were practicing Christians. I suspect that they were atheists or agnostics. Certainly they didn't raise him as a Christian. If they had then the Reverend Wright couldn't have brought him to Christ.

I think that, coming from an ivy-league, liberal background, Obama is, at best, cool to religion. He joined the Chicago church as part of his quest to create a black identity. Membership gave him access to members of the black upper class of Chicago (including Oprah). But he was never a true believer.

That's why people suspect that he is a secret Muslim. They sense that he doesn't have any real enthusiasm for Christianity and look for alternate explanations. His Muslim background, and his suppression of it, make the secret Muslim idea plausible.

Personally, I don't think that Obama displays any more enthusiasm for Islam than for Christianity. His overtures are based on shared experience, not shared belief and I don't think that he really understands true believers in any religion.