They have a sense of his soul*
by digby
In an interesting piece drawing together two strands of contemporary debate, Elizabeth Stoker Breunig at The New Republic writes that there's no way to tell if someone is a Christian --- or a Muslim, for that matter. It concludes with this:
Back in 2008, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, then writing for The Atlantic, proposed that most presidents are probably heretics of one sort or another, and that a better question is what kind of heretics they are. Heresy and orthodoxy are certainly categories with better defined parameters than the broad label of Christian, but the development of heresy and orthodoxy as classifications have been, to some degree, matters of historical and political convenience, as Harvard Divinity professor Karen King points out in her book What is Gnosticism? Discovering whether or not a person’s professed beliefs align with particular heresies can tell us whether or not they are heretics, in other words, but it cannot answer definitively whether or not they have a relationship with God that can be described as Christian.
Given the infinite list of problems in externally proving a person’s faith, the decision to describe someone as Christian or not is usually a matter of prudence in achieving some sort of goal, religious or political. What is really at stake in the question of whether Obama is a Christian or not is what Christianity has been made to mean in this country, which is often little more than shorthand for political conservatism. The conservatives who refuse to acknowledge his Christianity seem bent on preserving this conflation of the right wing and Christianity for electoral reasons; the Obama advocates who oppose them would probably like to reveal them as judgmental hypocrites for the same purposes. But what the ongoing muddle in the debate about Obama’s Christian qualifications (along with a similar effort to establish the Islamic States' Islamic-ness) really reveals is that trying to assign religious labels, however politically expedient, is usually a foolhardy endeavor.
She has a point, especially for conservatives: if you can't be sure that Barack Obama is really a Christian, despite the fact that he clearly says he is one, why in the word do you feel so confident that the extremists of ISIS are truly Muslim?
*George W. Bush famously said of Vladimir Putin:
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship."
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