By Jijo Jacob: Subscribe to Jijo's RSS feed
August 19, 2010 11:30 AM EDT
According to the latest survey by Pew Research Center, more and more Americans have come to believe that their President is a Muslim.
The percentage of people who correctly identify him as a Christian has fallen to just 34 percent. The survey shows that one in five Americans believe that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim.
It's surprising that a great number of Americans don't have the right answers about President Obama.
Unlike most other democracies, Americans choose their leader after a grueling, multi-year campaign that vivisects the candidates' life, beliefs, policies, voting pattern, and every other conceivable shades of life.
The candidates live in a virtual fish bowl for so long a time that glimpses into even the most subtle nuances of their personality are available in the public domain.
During Barack Obama's campaign, his religion was an even bigger issue thanks to his middle name. Yet voters have given a miss to an important detail of the President's life.
Andrew Kohut, Pew Research Center's director, has suggested that the new survey figures could have been influenced by the recent noisy campaign against the President after he supported the right of Muslims to build a mosque near the Ground Zero in New York.
The survey findings apparently substantiate this view. In 2009, only 11 percent of Americans said they thought Obama was a Muslim.
But Obama is a practicing Christian.
His father, Obama has written in his book 'The Audacity of Hope,' was "a confirmed atheist" by the time he met Obama's mother Ann. His mother's view of religion was more ambivalent.
In 'Dreams From My Father', Obama writes that his stepfather, "like many Indonesians … followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths."
The results of the Pew survey could mean Americans are less concerned about the religion of their Presidents. However, till John. F. Kennedy's election, all Presidents were WASPs - While Anglo Saxon Protestants.
According to information available at www.presidentsusa.net, which has been sourced from Presidential history books, there have been 11 Episcopalian Presidents in the U.S. history, while the second highest number of Presidents came from the Presbyterian denomination. Five were Methodists, and four each were Baptist and Unitarian.
The most under-represented religious group is Catholicism when it comes to U.S. presidency. The sect had only one U.S. president despite making up 25 percent of the country’s population.
Also under-represented are Baptists, whose proportion of the U.S. population (18 percent) is twice their proportion of U.S. presidents (9.5 percent). There have been no Presidents from among Lutherans, Jews, Latter-day Saints, Pentecostals and Muslims.
While George H.W. Bush was Episcopalian in faith, his son Georg W. Bush followed Methodism. However, the other Presidential father-son pair, John Adams and John Quincy Adams both followed Unitarian faith.
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