Who Doesn't Know Obama's a Christian?

According to a recent Pew Research Study, 47% of Americans don't know that Barack Obama is a Christian. Perhaps better news for the Illinois senator and Democratic candidate for president, is that only about one in ten Americans are still convinced that the candidate is Muslim. From the study:

A Pew Research Center News Interest Index survey earlier in March found that 79% of the general public had heard rumors that Obama is Muslim, and 38% had heard "a lot" about this. The current survey finds that most voters have no misconceptions about Obama's religious beliefs - 53% say that he is Christian. But one in ten believes Barack Obama is Muslim. Roughly a third (34%) say they don't know what his religious beliefs are, though 9% say the reason they don't know is that they've heard different things about his religion, not that they haven't heard about it.

The study goes on to examine voters' attitudes about Obama's race and religion, as well as his handling of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright situation.

After the jump, we'll dig into the study a little more, and maybe discuss why it's good political news for Obama that people don't think he's Muslim.

The worst thing about the relentless email and message-board campaign to convince people, falsely, that Barack Obama is a Muslim is the implication that there is something wrong with being a Muslim. One popular smear has Obama swearing his oath of office on a copy of the Koran, and Obama's defenders, and debunking sites like Snopes.com, are quick to point out that it was Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison who, in fact, swore on the Koran. I always wonder if Ellison is somewhere going, "So, what does that make me?"

According to the Pew study, voters who think Obama is Muslim are about 13% less likely to vote for him, which, as a portion of 10% of voters is not that significant. What's more, I think it is important to note that there's an excellent chance that this handful of folks were never going to vote for him anyway. All in all, if these results are to be trusted, anti-Muslim sentiment in the US seems grossly overstated.

Obama has had to walk a thin line, correcting the misimpression that he is Muslim, while being careful not to play into the idea that there's something wrong with it. He addressed the issue in February while addressing Jewish leaders in Cleveland:

Well, let's just be very specific about what these emails have been. And they have just been virulent and started very early. And I have to say are not. I mean they are clearly political in the sense that they go in waves. And seem to track the next...the next primary or caucus. Suddenly they magically appear in great volume in whatever state it is we are campaigning.

And the emails suggest that A. that I am Muslim, B. that I went to a madrassa C. that I used a Koran to swear myself into the Senate D. That I don't pledge allegiance to the flag. There are all sorts of variations, but you get the general gist. And our general view has been, that the internet is very difficult, because it is very low cost, it can just be churned out and you can't trace it back to where it's coming from. What we have tried to do is just make sure that we are flooding the internet with the accurate information and pushing back as much as possible. I don't think that we are in an era anymore where you can just ignore these things and not dignify them.

There was a time when they would be amplified as consequence of you calling attention to it. I don't think that's the case any more because of our media age. You know we saw what happened with the swiftboat situation back in 2004. All you have to do is run the ad once and then it gets repeated. And so what we've done is try to lift it up and actively debunk it and encourage stories about it.

If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim. We had to send CNN to look at the school that I attended in Indonesia where kids were wearing short pants and listening to ipods to indicate that this was not a madrassa but was a secular school in Indonesia. Where I attended for two year prior to coming back to Hawaii. If you look at Nicholas Kristof's article today it gives you an indication of where I got my name.

My grandfather who was Kenyan converted to Christianity then converted to Islam, my father never practiced he was basically agnostic and so other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child I have very little connection to the Islamic religion. But these are the kind of things that you deal with in politics. What is interesting is that is hasn't worked because I haven't been voted off the island yet.

I was more than a little surprised that Obama didn't mount more of a defense of Islam in debunking the smears. Of course, you can make the argument that it needs no defending, that it goes without saying that there's nothing wrong with Islam. Still, the perjorative nature of the emails seems to beg some sort of disclaimer.

Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that another popular line of attack on internet forums and in emails is to suggest that Obama is disloyal by using just the bolded part of the following quote, from "The Audacity of Hope," out of a context in which he does mount a defense of Muislims:

"Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them (the Muslims) should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

To me, this study says that, after all's said and done, those who would punish Obama for the false belief that he is a Muslim are actually a tiny, stubborn, and very loud minority.