Half of Americans Do Not Know the President’s Religion; 17% of Americans Believe He’s Muslim
30 July 2012
13 Comments
Around 17 percent of Americans surveyed in a new poll believe US President Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Half of Americans Do Not Know the President’s Religion
Three and a half years into President Obama’s first term as president, half of Americans cannot accurately say what religion he is, according to a pollreleased this week.
Only 49 percent of respondents said that Obama was Christian while 17 percent inaccurately said he was Muslim. Nearly one-third of respondents said they did not know the president’s religion, according to the poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
More people – 60 percent – knew that Romney, who has not held elected office in a decade, was Mormon than knew which religion the sitting president subscribes to.
And while only 9 percent of respondents said Romney was a religion that he is not, more than twice that amount said Obama adheres to a religion other than Christianity. The vast majority of those claiming Obama is not a Christian said he was a Muslim.
Nearly one in three Republicans said Obama was Muslim, twice as many as in 2008, the Pew study shows.
“Unfortunately there has been a development of a bizarre echo chamber within right wing of the political spectrum that truth and reality have failed to penetrate,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. “It’s a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing delusion.”
But this seemingly large lack of basic knowledge about the president may have more to do with people’s opinion of Obama than how much they know about religious beliefs, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
“It’s entirely possible that what people are telling us isn’t exactly what they know but they are expressing an opinion,” Cooperman said. “We suspect — it’s hard to prove it– that some of the people who tell us that the president is a Muslim are using the question as a way to express their distrust or dislike for the president.”
Only 8 percent of Democrats said Obama was Muslim. Because there is such a wide divide between the parties’ responses, Cooperman said the results do not “just show whether people are ignorant on the president’s religion but more that they have an opinion on his religion.”
The percentage of people who said Obama was Muslim has stayed fairly steady since August 2010, when firestorm erupted over plans to build an Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City.
Hooper said that while the tension between Muslims and Christians has not been as public since the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy, he has seen “a steady erosion of tolerance and mutual understanding based on this relentless campaign of Islamophobia” since Obama was elected.
“It is visceral hatred for President Obama and to justify it they have to come up with these reasons: he is the other, he’s Muslim, he’s foreign born.”
But as of now, a candidate’s religion will not likely be the driving factor for whether people pick Obama or Romney in November.
Even though 65 percent of those who think Obama is Muslim said they were uncomfortable with his religion, most of them also said they already planned to vote for Romney. And among voters who knew Romney was Mormon, 80 percent either said his faith did not make them uncomfortable or that it did not matter.
“I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter at all,” Cooperman said, but it “doesn’t seem to have a lot of impact on their voting preference.”
Due to the church scandal President Obama was on the edge of, I would be comfortable stating that many more people than the survey suggests realize that he claims to be a Christian. I think the problem comes into the fact that people simply do not believe him. Even the people who state he is Muslim, most know he claims to be a Christian they simply do not believe him. I have talked to some of these people, as I am sure you have also. They so strongly dislike the man they believe him to be untruthful on about every front. Personally I realize he went to church for years, but I am not sure of his convictions. Did he go to church because he is a believer or did he do it for political necessity? I have no idea. If he says he is a Christian then I will take it at face value. However, I have to take this from a man willing to place United States Citizens in armed military custody, for indefinite periods of time, without charges or access to an attorney for simply being suspected of being a terrorist. This makes me doubt his profession of faith. All in all this man is simply not a good leader. I am not really sure what type of leader Romney will be. For all I know we may get Romney and wish we had Obama back. How sad will that be.
30 July 2012 at 12:23 pm