Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times thinks so. Despite the Reverend Wright controversy and his own declaration of how he came to embrace the Chirstian faith, a substantial percentage of American voters, many of them Democrats, persist in their belief that Obama is a Muslim. Kristoff suspects that this is stubbornness on the part of some voters who cannot comfortably admit that the real reason they will not support Obama is his skin color and not his faith.
What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.
The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.
Accidental Blogger 
One response to “Is religious prejudice a cover for racial bias?”
Even if Obama were one, it shouldn’t have mattered, but America hasn’t reached that level of tolerance yet for politicians to be able to trumpet their non-Christian or lack of faith. Which probably explains the conversions of the likes of Jindal, your friend Neeta Sane , and locally here in Pgh , a township commissioner named D.Raja. Political expediency has as much to do with it, and the ability to appear more in consonance with the ‘mainstream’ is critical to getting elected.
I’ve been reading through the ‘Faith’ chapter in ‘Audacity of Hope’ in which Obama acknowledges that though he was quite comfortable with agnosticism, he made a conscious decision to identify with the African American church because :
“I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone…”
snip- more stuff about the general attitudes in the African American church-
“…It was because of these newfound understandings-that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved- that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.”
The “Obama is Muslim” meme is just codespeak for ‘other, black, etc’, targeting predominantly white or Asian/Hispanic voters to act on the basis of their deepest fears regarding blacks. So now, if I hear someone complaining about it among my friends, it’s crystal-clear where they are coming from and also explains why some of them were strongly rooting for Hillary over Obama.
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