Obama's Muslim, er ah, Christian Faith

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then candidate Barrack Obama remarked during an interview that his opponent John McCain had not commented on his (Obama’s) Muslim faith.

Obama did not realize his misstatement until the interviewer Chris Wallace said “you mean your Christian faith. Obama agreed with Wallace’s correction. The flub was observed by some commentators, but like his other misstatements there was no enduring fallout.

The question remains, why would anyone make such a mistake? One can understand, for instance, Obama’s error in stating that he had been to 57 states. But it’s different when it comes to one’s religious beliefs. After all, he had been a member of Jeremiah Wright’s church for some 20 years and was a self-styled Christian. This was certainly more than a slip of the tongue.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Obama embarked on his “apologize to Islam tour.” He “announced” that America was not a Christian nation. He did not clarify what he meant by this announcement. Of course, America was not and never had been a Christian nation in any formal legal sense. It certainly had been a Christian nation in terms of its philosophy and political orientation.

The president apparently thought he had sufficiently circumcised the nations Christian heritage and turned his attention from apologizing to Muslims for the barbaric treatment they had received at the hand of their American oppressors, to apologizing for, i.e., defending Islam.

In the face of continuing violence by Muslim terrorists, he declared that their actions were not the result of Islamic beliefs but were the actions of those who perverted the true teachings of Islam. In a recent statement, he even declared that Islam had always played an important role in the life of America, even from the founding. What this role was he did not say.

There was a “made-for tv” movie sometime in the 80s concerning the Roman army’s assault on a band of renegade Jews at the mountain-top fortress at Masada. After engaging in every atrocity imaginable, including launching Jewish prisoners from catapults, the Roman general, portrayed by Peter O’Toole declared to the leader of the Jewish renegades, Peter Strauss, during a clandestine meeting down the mountain, that “this is not Rome.” After repeating this phrase for the second time, Strauss stated how absurd this was in light of the fact that it was the Romans who were committing the outrages.

Well, it seems to me that the president is engaging in a similar case of verbal legerdemain. In the face of continued violence against Christian culture by confessed Muslim terrorists, Obama continually denies that they are acts of terror or, at least they are not motivated by a genuine understanding of the Prophet’s teachings. What the president hopes to gain by this denial in the face of indisputable fact is difficult to understand. Difficult perhaps, but not impossible.

Some time ago, I wrote a piece entitled "Our First Post-Modern President or Why Obama Can't Lie" Without re-posting the entire essay (please read), my point was to explain how Obama’s frequent misrepresentations could not be understood in the traditional sense of lying (ala Bill and Hillary), but in the context of the Post-modern paradigm that controls most of popular intellectual discourse, viz truth is not a fixed set of propositions but is determined by the context in which claims are asserted. In this case, Obama is not lying; he is simply declaring the truth from a different perspective. He is not trying to deny or hide the facts; rather he is creating truth by his statements. Thus, the terrorists are not Islamic, regardless of how often they declare their allegiance to Allah and the Prophet, because they cannot be. In short, he is engaging in the rebellion against God’s authority that has characterized human behavior since Eve overthrew God’s judgment for her own.

Most Christians are not interested in such matters and so continue to misinterpret the conflict in which they are engaged. Obama is not speaking the truth and must be challenged’ of his words. The problem is not Obama’s errant world-view, a world-view that is clearly anti-Christian, but the failure of Christians to think and act as followers of Christ. As Christians, we can only declare Islam to be what it is, an anti-Christian, pagan religion.

We should hope and pray for a Christian of sufficient courage and standing to challenge Obama’s defense of this false religion in the face of “his Christian faith.”