If we have gotten to the stage in this country where people are actually being paid to write articles telling us that it’s President Obama’s fault that people question his religion, then we might as well bring on the meteor to wipe us out like the dinosaurs because there’s no hope left.
This is the dumbest shit ever. The idea that the President Obama is partly to blame for the confusion over his religious faith is ridiculous. While Andrew Jackson was our first Trinitarian president, and he only converted after leaving the White House, we have never had any president who professed to believe in any religion other than Christianity or its unitarian offshoots. If we elected a Buddhist or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Mormon, everyone would know about it.
By the way, we’ve had two Quaker presidents — Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon — so chew on that while you wait for the firestorm.
Funny that you should mention Quaker presidents. I’ve often thought about the peculiarity of Hoover and Nixon being Quaker and completely different from the Quaker folk I’ve known.
I gave the original article a quick read. What a load of horseshit. It is exactly because of a misinformation campaign by the right that so many people don’t know Obama is a Christian. That plus, in the eyes of a lot of conservative Christians, if you don’t conform to their litmus tests you’re not a Christian. The fact that Obama has said nice things about Muslims doesn’t make him one, for God’s sake.
Alan, I have been a Christian all my life but to a large group of Christians I don’t count because of my Catholic upbringing. (Catholics are almost as scary as Jews and Muslims but not quite.) The bottom line is that Jesus said to love one another. That is what I have always tried to do. That means everybody not just the people who think as I do.
Nixon’s (mom’s) brand of Quakerism ain’t like you’d find in PYM. More fundamentalist than anything, though he didn’t fit his mother’s mold, either. Hoover’s midwestern style was closer to my experience–concerned about Native American needs, worked with AFSC after WWII.