UnNews:1 in 5 Americans thinks Obama is Christian?
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
20 August 2010
WASHINGTON -- A new survey reports a sharp increase in the number of Americans who say President Obama is a Muslim. The increase has occurred over the last couple of years, and the poll was taken before the president stepped into the fray to support the Ground Zero Mosque®.
The findings are part of the "Religion, Politics, Bullshit, and the President" poll conducted by the Pee-you Forum on Religion and Public Life early this month. It also explores Americans' attitudes toward religion's impact on society and voting preferences in the upcoming 2010 congressional races.
According to the survey, nearly one in five Americans say Obama is a Christian, down from 71 percent in 2009. Obama claims he is a combination of the Jesus and Mary Chain, but the number of people who say Christian when asked his religion has gone down sharply to 18 percent today. And 43 percent say they don't know what, the heck, religion the president follows.
Here is the recent voting breakdown:
- Americans who say Obama is Christian – 18 percent
- Americans who say Obama is Muslim – 39 percent
- Americans who say Obama is another religion -43 percent
Of the 43 percent, 11 percent say he’s an atheist, 10 percent say he’s Voodoo, 8 percent say he's Illuminati, 3 percent say he is Shaka-Zulu, 5 percent say he’s Zoroastrian, 2 percent say he’s Mormon, 2 percent say he’s a body surfer, 1 percent say Roman Catholic, and 1 percent say bullocks.
And a poll taken of Muslims by Aljazeera show that 100% of Muslims believe Obama is a born Mohammedan.
Alan Cooper, associate director of research for the Pee-you Forum, says, "I think overall the picture that we see is of mass confusion about the president and his religion."
Cooper also says, "When we simply ask people, 'Do you happen to know what is Barak Obama's religion?' it is only 18 percent of Americans who say he is a Christian. The largest single percentage, almost half of Americans, don’t know what religion he is."
The survey also found there was a clear link between how people viewed the president's faith and how they viewed his political performance. Those who view Obama as Christian tended to have a very positive assessment of his job performance. Those who don't know his faith are split in their job approval ratings. And those who say the president is a Muslim give him a negative job approval rating.
But Dr. Bonnie Clyde, professor of government at Georgetown University, says what is driving the president's sinking approval ratings is losing the war on terror and catering to the Muslims hand over foot. "If the war on terror were resurrected from the dead like Lazarus, then you would see less of this," he said.
Wilcox added that because of the viral nature of the Internet, any ideas, wrong or right, about a politician's beliefs, could grow exponentially. Case in point: Sarah Palin's extremist nut-case beliefs became raw vegetables for liberal-atheists during her 2008 vice presidential campaign.
But two years later, a growing number of people see Obama as a Muslim.
"It's a troubling thing," Wilcox said. "I think it is good for all of us to start invading the president's spiritual privacy. We don't know what anyone's true faith is. But we should.”
Cooper speculates that people have more uncertainty about the president's faith because he's not upfront about how he practices his religion. He doesn't attend church, and there are no photos of him leaving a house of worship on Sunday morning with a Bible in hand, or a Gita, or a Talmud, or a Koran.
"We really haven't heard a lot, he's not very public since he took office. The last time was the issue over Jeremiah Right," Cooper said.
Right, the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Chicago, became a lightning rod for controversy in the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama, a longtime follower, distanced himself from Right after snippets of sermon tapes emerged of the pastor saying inflammatory comments, such as “God damn America” and “God damn honkies”.
The Pee-you study also found that though the Republican Party is viewed as more gullible toward religion than the Democratic Party, both political camps lost ground in that category. In 2008, 52 percent viewed Republicans as being gullible toward religion; today that number is down to 43 percent.
For Democrats, 2008 was a banner year. Their push to capture religious voters helped them appear more faith friendly with 38 percent of the people polled. But that number has slid to 26 percent today, back to where it was in 2006. “Basically” Cooper said, “Democrats are a bunch of atheists!”
What this bodes for the 2010 mid-term elections is hard to predict, Cooper says. Most Americans still think it's important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. Reading the tea leaves from the 2008 results can’t help. Exit polling data from that presidential election shows that the second biggest predictor for how someone will vote is religion. The first is race. “Obama is a Negro and also a born Muslim, still some Americans are such idiots that they think he is white and Christian!” Cooper concluded.
Sources[edit | edit source]
- Staff "More Americans say Obama is Muslim" Bangkok Post, August 20, 2010