Obama The "Muslim"

A very great deal of ink both real and virtual has been spilled in the wake of the Pew poll showing a spike in the percentage of Americans who either think President Obama is a Muslim or simply throw up their hands and answer "don't know." Through all the fog over the president's religious beliefs or lack thereof, a single point demands acknowledgement.

Mr Obama is seen as fundamentally lacking in (a) honesty, (b) candor, (c) understanding of the American predicaments and (d) commitment to the well-being of We the People both domestically and as a player in international affairs. The president's often noted style of cerebral detachment has been widely perceived as utter indifference to the decline of American fortunes both at home and around the world.

In short, The Nice Young Smiley Man From Chicago has been increasingly viewed as not being like the rest of us, not a member in good standing of We the People. His evident hauteur, arrogance, willingness to view so many Americans and their very real worries about the present and future in both domestic and foreign contexts as unworthy of his concern.

Americans have long expected that their politicians, particularly their president, evidently subscribe to what can best termed the American civic religion. This religion, as President Eisenhower indicted through the fog of intentionally warped syntax, is a loose fusion of Judaic and Christian values and imperatives, the product of that World War II era American invention, "the Judeo-Christian heritage."

Subscription to this civic religion requires some specifically liturgical components: going to church at least now and then, invoking the name of the deity on appropriate occasions, and making appropriate genuflections to the power of prayer.

Beyond that it requires acting in ways which are commensual with fundamentally Judeo-Christian values and beliefs. These include an eschewing of unnecessary secrecy, an emphasis upon the better aspects of human behavior, a support for American values politically and socially.

Overall, the requirements of adhering to and expressing the American civic religion are neither onerous nor difficult. Presidents from FDR to Bill Clinton have done so effortlessly and without any questions arising about the nature and character of their beliefs.

Americans are not comfortable with politicians, again particularly presidents, who are too religious, too given to invoking the deity as justification for their policies. George W. Bush was culpable of this--particularly in foreign policy. He was given to averring that God had called him to be president; that God had placed certain tasks before him. His references to the deity, to missions imposed upon him by that deity served to denature his protestations that the US was waging war on adherents of violent political Islam and not Islam per se.

President Obama has gone too far, way too far, in the opposite direction. His policies have seemed to have been predicated upon both an undue concern for the high opinion of Muslims and a complete disregard for the imperatives of the American civic religion.

It is easy to see how many Americans could come to view the president's constant "outreach" to Muslim states and governments as a sign that he is truckling to the perceived dictates of the Muslim faith. When coupled with the administration's cavalier treatment of Israel--which in and of itself violates the "Judeo-Christian heritage"--the view is that Mr Obama is tilting toward Islam as Islam rather than pursuing a clear, rational foreign policy.

Mr Obama's scoffing at "American exceptionalism" as well as his deprecation of the moral right of the US to operate on the global stage without the full, consensual approval of the "international community" also violates the foundation of the American civic religion.

For generations now the American public has viewed the efforts of its government to inculcate stability, deter war, uplift democracy, protect and foster the rights of individual humans not simply as foreign policies but as virtual mandates from the vague deity of the American civic religion. Mr Obama's words and actions have called this long treasured belief into serious question. At the same time he has advanced no real world based justification for having undercut these values and policies.

Even without the purely domestic considerations which may serve to show how Mr Obama has spurned the American civic religion, the foreign policy aspects alone demonstrate how simple it can be to conclude that the president may be either a Muslim of a person whose religious center cannot be seen nor understood.

Whether Mr Obama and others of the multi-cultural, blame-America-first, nationalism-is-dead school like it or not, the US, or, to err on the side of accuracy, We the People, have been and are informed predominately by the religions of Europe--Christianity and Judaism. We have denatured the core of both faiths significantly as we developed our unique, non-compulsory civic religion of the past seventy-five or so years. A politician, particularly a president, ignores this ground truth at peril.

Barack Obama may be a Christian. He might be an animist. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the president's words, actions, policies, even his body language, has conveyed both dismissal and distaste directed at the American civic religion, the "Judeo-Christian heritage." As long as he does so there is no surprise that a greater and greater percentage of We the People will view him as an adherent of a hostile religion or as a person for whom religion in any and all its myriad forms is a stranger passing in the night.