Does it matter whether Obama is a Christian?

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 3:54 pm by Jane the Actuary

Does it matter whether Obama is a Christian? 2015-02-26T15:54:14-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I’ve been writing (too?) frequently on this topic (e.g., yesterday’s post on an interview with Obama on religion, a prior post on Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast confused statements on religion) but I’ll try to articulate why I think this matters (still a work in progress), and then move on to other pressing (or not-so-pressing) issues.

Some say that it matters whether Obama is a Christian because, in fact, he’s not just “not a Christian” but a Muslim, and that his indifference to ISIS, his willingness to help Iran get the bomb (or rather, his lack of willingness to stop them), his lack of support for victims of Islamic supremacist-motivated attacks, are all the result of his secret Muslim beliefs. They point to such things as the gesture Obama reportedly made, the “shahada” or a symbolic profession of faith, at a meeting of African leaders in August 2014.

But that’s beside the point. Plenty of non-Muslim leftists make common cause with Muslims out of a belief that Muslims are victims of American imperialism. And before that, plenty of leftists, without being communists per se, were more than happy to believe communist regimes when they said they were peace-loving, that their preservation of the “right to have a job” was more important than fluff like the “right to free speech,” and so on. And Obama’s actions in the foreign policy arena can be judged and found wanting without regard to any Muslim sympathies.

In the same way, I’m not particularly interested in the “Obama doesn’t love America” fight, though for what it’s worth: Obama wants America to be transformed into a mythical European welfare state, and wants America to be as passive about world affairs as, historically, Western Europe has been, when the U.S. did all the heavy lifting. He wants to believe that somehow the stars will align and “history” will see to it that nothing too terribly bad will happen if you leave all other countries to their own devices. (In a way, that’s part of his religion: that some metaphysical force will ensure that justice wins out. See my old blog post on the “arc of history.”) At the same time, he is fairly “transnational” in that he doesn’t believe we as Americans have any greater “right” to prosperity than anyone else, and, if he takes actions that benefit other countries at our expense, such as open borders (that is, boosting the income of those who come in, and family members back home, at the expense of Americans), it’s all a part of smoothing out income inequality.

But as far as the “is Obama Christian” issue:

What religious doctrine Obama believes in ultimately has nothing to do with his position as the President. And plenty of the, for instance, Slate commenters who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Christianity recognize this and go further to say, “of course he’s not a Christian”, but still gripe that Walker didn’t fall in line and say, “Obama says he’s a Christian, so he is,” in the end take the position that “it’s disrespectful to anyone, but especially to the president, to question their own personal profession of religious identity.”

OK, that sentence is a bit of a mess.

Whether someone is a Christian depends on two things: what, in their heart, they believe, and what, definitionally, Christianity is.

Obama believes he is a Christian — let’s take him at his word and not get into the question of whether he’s making claims for political gain.

But his definition of “Christian” is pretty flimsy, and seems to be more about “identifying with the Christian tradition and believing you should be a good person” than about Christian beliefs.

The Slate commenters, too, use this as their operating definition, by tossing around statements like: “Walker doesn’t care about the poor, so he’s not a Christian, either” or “no Republican can possibly be a Christian because they hate the poor.”

But there has to be some connection between Christianity and core historical beliefs that Christians hold.

Yes, “you’re a Christian if you say you are” is a shortcut to avoiding disputes such as born-agains claiming that you aren’t a Christian unless you have had a born-again experience, or evangelicals disputing whether Mormons are Christians. But if you have to abandon any standards at all and open up the label Christian to anyone who claims an affinity with Jesus, even as a misunderstood social-justice reformer — well, what’s the point? I suppose, in a way, this is similar to the concept of the “big tent” Republican party — if your tent is so big that you don’t stand for anything any longer, you’re pretty much lost any meaning to your endeavor except pursuit of power and/or membership numbers.

When it comes down to it, playing a “gotcha” with politicians and asking them to affirm Obama’s Christianity is almost a demand that those politicians deny their own faith, by saying it doesn’t matter whether Jesus is God or just a good preacher. To demand that “Christianity is in the eye of the beholder” says that Christianity is, in the end, nothing of any significance. And, as a Christian, I can’t accept that.

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