The Washington Post reports that an increasing number of people believe President Obama is a Muslim.
The number of Americans who believe — wrongly — that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation’s population.
Those results, from a new Pew Research Center survey, were drawn from interviews done before the president’s comments about the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, and they suggest that there could be serious political danger for the White House as the debate continues.
The president’s religion, like his place of birth, has been the subject of Internet-spread rumors and falsehoods since before he began his presidential campaign, and the poll indicates that those rumors have gained currency since Obama took office. The number of people who now correctly identify Obama as a Christian has dropped to 34 percent, down from nearly half when he took office.
The Washington Post states the President’s religion as if it were a “fact” that is plainly known to it yet strangely inaccessible to a growing number of people. It attributes this divergence to what can only be described as gullibility or ignorance, the product of “Internet-spread rumors and falsehoods since before he began his presidential campaign, and the poll indicates that those rumors have gained currency since Obama took office.”
Another way to put it is that the relative credibility of the Washington Post vis-a-vis these “Internet-spread rumors and falsehoods” has declined. Many of those who were formerly convinced by the Washington Post’s ‘facts’ are no longer convinced by those same ‘facts’.
White House officials expressed dismay over the poll results. Faith adviser Joshua DuBois blamed “misinformation campaigns” by the president’s opponents.
Note to self: there is a government “faith adviser”. But the problem is likely to be faith in Obama himself. Once the electorate catches Obama lying, it’s only one more step to believing he is lying about his religion too. The voters do an a posteriori on his claims. Does he claim thus? The electorate revisits that belief in the context of his observed actions. Hence the President’s defense of the Mosque, coming on a long string of paeans to Islam was bound to raise questions about his deepest belief.
Unlike the Washington Post I do not believe there is any definite way to ascertain a person’s true state of belief except through his external actions. There is no file in Washington that contains the last word on a person’s inner state. We often do not know it ourselves and as we all know it is subject to change over time. People convert between atheism and Christianity and Islam and whatever else with perceptible frequency.
Ultimately handsome is as handsome does. In the present context what should worry the Washington Post is that the rising belief in Obama’s Muslimness is a proxy for his perceived believability and patriotism. In politics it is what people believe that determines whether you are elected or not.
