Rumor Doctor blog archive
Is President Obama a Muslim?
Published: August 27, 2010
No matter what President Barack Obama does to profess his faith as a Christian, an increasing number of people believe he is a Muslim.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that nearly 20 percent of respondents believe Obama is a Muslim, marking a significant increase since last year.
After the poll came out, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton reiterated that Obama is a Christian. “He prays every day,” Burton told reporters.
“He communicates with his religious advisor every single day. There’s a group of pastors that he takes counsel from on a regular basis. And his faith is very important to him, but it’s not something that is a topic of conversation every single day.”
Thanks, Bill Burton, but readers need someone authoritative to issue the final ruling on this one. So The Rumor Doctor will take it from here.
Obama dropped a clue to his spiritual beliefs by referencing the New Testament in his inaugural address. “In the words of Scripture,” he said, “the time has come to set aside childish things.”
That was very Christian of him.
The passage in question comes from 1 Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
In addition, Obama talked in a 2006 speech about how he became a Christian in his 20s while a community organizer in Chicago, according to the website PolitiFact.com.
“It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith," the website quoted Obama as saying in the 2006 speech. "It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn't fall out in church. The questions I had didn't magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."
Rumors that Obama attended a radical Islamic school and that he used a Quran to take the oath of office for the Senate have been disproven, according to Politifact.com.
The Rumor Doctor also contacted Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. As a Muslim, Hooper was pretty confident in saying that Obama is not a Muslim.
“Why would we have any reason to doubt him?” he said.
But Hooper resents the idea that this rumor is being spread to discredit the president. While a minority of Americans equates Islam with terrorism, he said, the word “Muslim” has become a political pejorative.
“With so many people seeking to smear the president, that’s just one alleged smear that they have at their disposal,” Hooper said.
The Rev. Ken Vaux teaches theological ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. He also used to live near Obama in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, so this is a man who knows.
Obama actually holds conservative evangelical Christian beliefs, Vaux said, but he is open to other faiths in a way unlike any other president since John F. Kennedy.
“Obama very clearly feels right at home in a Jewish synagogue; he’ll probably be there next week for Rosh Hashanah,” Vaux said. “He feels at home in a – especially a liberal-type – mosque, like a Sufi worship center. And even more broadly, he feels quite happy at the prayer breakfast because they are not only ecumenical but interfaith.”
THE RUMOR DOCTOR’S DIAGNOSIS: It’s time to put away childish things. This issue is one of them.
E-mail The Rumor Doctor at: jeffrey.schogol@stripes.osd.mil
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