Poll: More Than Eighty Percent Don't Know Obama Is A Christian
December 20, 2007 -- 12:15 PM EST // //
Updated below.
Here's something that gives you a sense of what's at stake in fights like the big dust-up with The Washington Post over their now-notorious piece front-paging the Obama Muslim rumors without declaring them false.
Via Ben Smith, check out this interesting number buried in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll suggesting that a huge majority don't know that Obama is a Christian:
On a similar open-ended question, just 17% correctly identified Obama as being a Protestant (Church of Christ), 2% said he’s Catholic, 8% said he’s a Muslim, and a whopping 70% said they weren’t sure or refused to answer.While the eight percent who have this wrong and believe Obama is a Muslim isn't a huge number, the 70% who say they don't know Obama's religion is a massive amount. When you consider that only 17% got it right, that means that over 80% don't know Obama's a Christian.
That's bad, because the "rumor" that Obama is a Muslim is "out there," and presumably at least some of the people in the 80+% category are susceptible to believing it. This would be particularly true if Obama were to win the nomination, since if this happened there's little doubt that the "rumor" would suddenly be getting circulated a lot more aggressively than it is now. And of course there will also be plenty of people who are inclined towards believing this.
The point is that the startling level of public ignorance on this question drives home very vividly just what's at stake when readers demand that news orgs aggressively call out this rumor as false, as they've started to do. If one media outlet calls the rumors false, then another one does, and another, and so on. And with a little luck, you end up with an electorate that's semi-informed on this question.
Okay, maybe that's a bit optimistic. But we can push for it anyway.
Update: A reader rightly points out that since only 17% actually got Obama's religion right, that actually means that more than 80% don't know it. I've edited the above to reflect this.
Separately, MSNBC misstated Obama's church here: It's actually the United Church of Christ.
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