The "Is Obama Christian?" question

I’m pretty confident that the president is what he says he is, a representative sort of liberal Protestant. But we do know for a fact that Obama has deliberately dissembled about his theological convictions on at least one rather important issue in the past. So it’s possible to imagine a reasonable challenge to the president’s sincerity on some fronts, or at least to the political applications of his faith. And if that’s what Walker had done — if he said, “the president professes to be a Christian, but I think his liberal politics are more important to him than his Christian faith” — there probably would have been some media freakout, but the substance of Walker’s comments wouldn’t have been that different from the various attacks on Republican politicians for being un-Christian or un-Catholic, or from President Obama’s own past attacks on religious conservatives for “hijacking” Christianity for right-wing ends. The Wisconsin governor would have been being deliberately provocative, but not without some warrant, and not unreasonably so.

But Walker didn’t provoke or critique. He just professed (feigned?) ignorance about the president’s beliefs and said it wasn’t an issue anyone should really care about. Neither of which, again, seems compatible with a view of religion as an important force in public life.