Ten percent of Americans still believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, the same percentage of those who believed the rumor during the campaign. As a group, evangelicals (19 percent) are the most likely to believe he’s a Muslim, according to a new poll from the Pew Center for People and the Press.
Just 38 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Republicans identify Obama as a Christian. During the campaign, Obama made frequent references to his Christian faith and fought smear campaigns that said he was a Muslim. But since he took office, Obama has made very few references to his faith.
In his decision to overturn former President Bush’s policy on stem cell research, he said, “As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering.”
He spoke more about his faith at the National Prayer Breakfast, when he announced the launch of his version of the faith-based initiatives.
I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose.
