Is Anyone Religious Enough to Be President of the United States?

[cbayer]

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2015/04/religion_in_the_oval_office_americans_don_t_think_anyone_is_religious_enough.html

Not according to the American people.

By Ruth Graham
APRIL 22 2015 12:53 PM


President Barack Obama takes part in Sunday service at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 17, 2010.
Photo by Yuri Gripas/Reuters

According to a survey taken by political scientist Alex Theodoridis last fall, 60 percent of Americans say that President Obama is either Muslim “deep down” or that they don’t know what the president believes. Among Republicans, a whopping 54 percent believe President Obama is a Muslim—this despite his almost ceaseless declarations of his Christian faith.

It is easy to suspect that this claptrap is an unprecedented display of disrespect. There are certainly unique dimensions to the “debate” over Obama’s faith: his race, his name, his policies perceived as hostile to conservative Christian values, his identity as the first president raised in a non-Christian home, and his longtime membership in an inflammatory pastor’s church, to name a few. But historian Gary Scott Smith’s new book Religion in the Oval Office, which traces the religious lives of 11 presidents from John Adams to Obama, makes clear that dark rumors about a president’s secret faithlessness are nothing new. The hefty new volume and its predecessor, Faith and the Presidency, point to a startling suggestion: No president in history has been Christian enough for the American people.

Thomas Jefferson arguably had it the worst. In the election of 1800, ministers spread rumors that Jefferson held worship services at Monticello where he prayed to the “Goddess of Reason” and sacrificed dogs on an altar. Yale University president Timothy Dwight warned that if he became president, “we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire.” Alexander Hamilton asked the governor of New York to take a “legal and constitutional step” to stop the supposed atheist vice president from becoming head of state. Federalists who opposed him called him a “howling atheist,” a “manifest enemy to the religion of Christ,” a “hardened infidel,” and, for good measure, a “French infidel.” As Smith describes it, insults like these were issued forth from hundreds of pulpits in New England and the mid-Atlantic. When Jefferson won the election, many New England Federalists buried their Bibles in their gardens so the new administration would not confiscate and burn them.

Jefferson, a (possible) deist well known now for his sliced-and-diced Jefferson Bible, may seem like a natural object for such paranoia. But take George Washington, whose reputation of piety has been a major element of his popularity in the centuries following his death; one persistent myth has him kneeling in prayer in the snow of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. During his own time, some doubted the robustness of his faith. Congregationalist clergyman Samuel Langdon, a former president of Harvard University, urged him to publicly proclaim he was “a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The president demurred. Three decades after Washington died in 1799, Episcopal bishop William White fretted he couldn’t bring to mind “any fact which would prove” that the country’s first president believed “in the Christian revelation,” other than his regular church attendance.

more at link

[safeinOhio]

1. If elected, what will the hard right Christians say about Hillary?

I think she should be called America's best Christian. She forgave Bill.

[cbayer]

2. I would predict that they will say that she's not a true christian

because of her position on certain social issues.

As to forgiving Bill? That's a mixed bag out there.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. The article is lumping the huge numbers of don't knows

in with the is a Muslims. That seems problematic. My opinion is that many of the republicans know he is a Christian but use the he's a Muslim meme to express their socially unacceptable upset that an African American is president. It is a way to express their inner racist shithead.

[Cartoonist]

4. Jefferson worshipped Reason?

A Goddess no less? Oh we can't have that. Better to believe in a male God of made up BS.

[cbayer]

5. And sacrificed dogs on an altar.