{"id":388,"date":"2009-04-02T13:32:58","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T13:32:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/barack-obama-our-first-muslim.html"},"modified":"2009-04-02T13:32:58","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T13:32:58","slug":"barack-obama-our-first-muslim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/barack-obama-our-first-muslim.html","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama: Our first Muslim president?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Pew--Obama<\/span>That’s the positive spin one could put on a new survey from the Pew Forum<\/strong><\/a> which shows that 11 percent of Americans still believe Obama (who is a professed and profesing Christian) is a Muslim. That’s almost unchanged from last fall, when the air was thick with false reports of Obama’s supposedly Muslim faith. <\/p>\n

But look at it this way: More than one in 10 Americans think their Chief Exectuive is a Muslim, and they seem to be fine with that. Or at least they aren’t picketing in front of the White House. These days, that could be considered progress. <\/p>\n

On the other hand…Nearly 1 in 5 white evangelical Protestants and Republicans (they aren’t always the same thing, despite what you hear) think Obama is a Muslim, and fewer than half in each group–38 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Republicans–correctly identify Obama as a Christian.<\/p>\n

And 7 percent of Democrats still think Obama is a Muslim, and 55 percent identify him as a Christian, which is down<\/u> from 61 percent last fall–not a great display of religious perception.<\/p>\n

I always think this myth about Obama is kind of amusing given the furor over his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright: People were mad at Obama for listening to his Christian preacher, but also think he’s a Muslim?<\/p>\n

One semi-sober explanation for this enduring perception is that Obama left his Chicago church after the Wright controversy, and has not yet found a church in the Washington area. When he does, he will be photographed there on Sundays and such.<\/p>\n

Of course, Obama has had a few other things on his plate. And church-shopping is not easy in the best of times, and especially if you are the POTUS–with children. You need a place that can handle the attention and security, has programs for the kids, and fits in with your beliefs, of course.<\/p>\n

Aides and friends are doing some scouting trips, and as religious outreach coordinator said in this story<\/strong><\/a>, “What has become clear is that it’s no easy task.”<\/p>\n

Some would also assume Obama will find a historically black church<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

What seems pretty clear in light of the Notre Dame uproar<\/strong><\/a> is that Barack Obama won’t be attending a Catholic parish anytime soon. Now that<\/u> would be a story…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s the positive spin one could put on a new survey from the Pew Forum which shows that 11 percent of Americans still believe Obama (who is a professed and profesing Christian) is a Muslim. That’s almost unchanged from last fall, when the air was thick with false reports of Obama’s supposedly Muslim faith. But…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nBarack Obama: Our first Muslim president? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/barack-obama-our-first-muslim.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Barack Obama: Our first Muslim president? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That’s the positive spin one could put on a new survey from the Pew Forum which shows that 11 percent of Americans still believe Obama (who is a professed and profesing Christian) is a Muslim. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}