the feminist librarian reads

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.