The Paranoid Style
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I’m sorry, but I just find the idea of minaret-shaped candies extremely amusing. ~Reihan
Who wouldn’t?
On a more serious note, Reihan was recently venturing into the bizarre territory of public opinion about Obama’s religion:
But there’s something so forehead-slappingly strange about the notion that you can’t help but wonder how, even after 100 days in office, Obama retains this air of mystery. In October, before the election, the Pew Research Center found that only 51 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a Christian, while 12 percent were convinced that he was a Muslim. The good people at Pew asked the question again in March, and they found that the numbers had barely changed: 48 percent think Obama is a Christian and 11 percent think he’s a Muslim. The rest are unsure.
I share the forehead-slapping incomprehension, and I have said more than a few times when confronted with the idiocy of the Obama-is-Muslim nonsense, but I wish Reihan had kept the paragraph he quotes as part of the original item. This is the paragraph I mean:
So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta as an elementary schooler, Obama met some wily bearded imam who lured him into his roving Muslim-mobile with delicious minaret-shaped candies and converted him to radical Islam. Dazzled by his obvious intelligence, and convinced long before David Axelrod that Americans were itching to elect a half-Kenyan youth as president, he also sold young Obama on the idea of keeping his Islamic zealotry under wraps. That way he could transform America into a radical Islamic caliphate without anyone ever noticing.
This is, of course, brilliant, and it is a pity Reihan didn’t use it in the final version, since I think it conveys very effectively how absurd the fears of Obama’s Muslim connections are. After all, this would not merely be a case of taqiyya, but some kind of super turbo-charged taqiyya the likes of which no one has ever seen.
The Obama as Muslim meme was silly, but I would not call him a Christian necessarily either. He identifies himself as a Christian. He attends a “Christian” church. This is enough to make him not a Muslim. But he is on the record with statements that seem to pretty clearly indicate that he does not accept historic Christian creedal orthodoxy either.
Well, he is a liberal Protestant who until recently attended a UCC church. Make of it what you will. The remarkable thing would have been if he came out of such a background and *did* accept creedal orthodoxy. If people have a problem with him because he is a wobbly liberal Protestant, I can understand and respect that, but at least it is based in the reality of his actual loyalties or associations.
Well, Daniel, as Sailer points out in the comments section, Obama’s former church wasn’t exactly laying down your average milquetoast liberal Protestant line. The preacher was spreading more than a few kooky conspiracy theories himself.
So, what’s more disturbing, that there’s a fringe still holding onto a long discredited theory (of which there are oh so many fringes), or that our president had no problem sitting in church for two decades listening to equally bizarre conjectures from a man whose very sermon inspired the title of one of his books?
Am I the only one who did not have any problem with Jeremiah Wright? Jeremiah Wright is part of the American Jeremiadic tradition. I would criticize him for his unorthodoxy (or reinterpretation of Christian tradition) and weird conspiracy theories but I am not disturbed. I admit I was surprised that so many people were bothered last June by the greatest hits edition of Jeremiah Wright. What is so radical about his church associations anyway that one cannot find in any other black church other than its social activism?
OTOH, Obama is clearly not Muslim. I do suspect that he is somewhat agnostic about God and religion in general. But I am not going to declare he is not a Christian until he himself renounces the Christian tradition.
I suspect that much of the “Obama is a Muslim” talk is a kind of public shorthand for “there is something alien about that man.” My guess is that he is a standard issue agnostic in keeping with his academic-class background. His Chicago church of preference was probably dictated by the popularity of that church with fellow black politicians and his wife’s influence. Obama seemed genuinely miffed and a bit puzzled by the Rev. Wright controversy, as if he thought we were in on the joke. He never took Wright seriously, how could we?
At the risk of being inflammatory, who really takes the black clergy seriously, either theologically or morally? In my experience, the most corrupt element in urban environments are these black religious leaders. They are openly political, personally avaricious and most lack a deep understanding of Christian orthodox theology. The case of “Dr.” King’s bogus dissertation is just the best known example of this phenomenon. Consider the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, just how fraudulent does one have to be in order to be expelled from their confraternity? Were it not for white guilt, most of these mountebanks would be preaching from prison.
I would criticize him for his unorthodoxy (or reinterpretation of Christian tradition) and weird conspiracy theories but I am not disturbed.
But Wright isn’t really the issue. It’s Obama who’s the issue. He was a member of the church, sat through the sermons, endorsed Wright without qualification in his first autobiography and named his second book after one of Wright’s sermons.
If McCain, Palin and the GOP are to shoulder the blame for the “Obama is a Muslim” crowd, why shouldn’t Obama get more scrutiny for his much, much closer association to this crackpot?