Speaking to a French reporter while on his Middle East trip,
President Obama said that the United States would be “one of the
largest Muslim countries,” if its Muslim population was the
measure. Jake Tapper fact checked that claim and
reports that
the White House used the CIA World Fact Book as a source for
Obama’s erroneous statistic that there are seven million Muslims
in the U.S. The actual size of the Muslim population in
America, according to the CIA, is 0.6% of the total, or just
under 2 million.
Tapper points out that the president did not say, and does not
believe, that the United States is a Muslim nation, as some have
lamented. As evidence for this, he recalls Obama’s speech
of April 6, in Turkey, in which the president said that America,
“does not consider itself a Christian nation, a Jewish nation, or
a Muslim nation.” While Tapper may be correct on the
literal meaning of the president’s words, the rationale behind
them is utter nonsense.
The idea that America would be one of the largest Muslim nations
is silly not just because the president’s figures were grossly
over-inflated. It is silly because population size is not
what makes a nation inherently Muslim, Christian, or
Jewish. Culture does.
Take India as an example. India has the second largest
population in the world at just under 1.2 billion people.
Of them, the CIA
says that
13.5% are Muslim. That gives India a Muslim population of
over 162 million. Compare that to the largest Muslim nation
of Indonesia, which has 200 million. Yet no one would think
to claim that India is a Muslim nation, or that it is even, “one
of the largest Muslim countries,” based on that number
alone. India’s culture is as unique as it is ancient.
In modern times, India’s culture and society may have been shaped
by Muslims, but they are undoubtedly rooted in a history that
long predates the introduction of Islam.
Similarly, America has a history rooted in Western European
civilization, which is undeniably Christian. The Founders
were Christian men who, guided by their Christian faith, stitched
together a nation. Although they had the restraint to
forbid the government from sponsoring a particular religion, to
say that the United States is not a Christian nation is to deny
both its history and the present reality. Indeed, with
roughly one tenth of the worldwide Christian population, by the
president’s own logic the
United
States would be one of the world’s biggest Christian
nations, if not the biggest.
One aspect of the United States’ Christian culture is its
acceptance of other religions. This is simply not the case
in many Muslim nations, where Christians and Jews are shunned,
discriminated against, and even driven out. A powerful
example is the systematic marginalization of the minority Coptic
Christian community in the president’s host nation, Egypt.
It is understandable that President Obama wants better relations
with the Muslim world. It has been, after all, the source
of many of America’s problems for the past 30 years. But to
deny the very nature of the county in that effort is not
outreach, it is obsequiousness. America’s relationship to
Muslims should be predicated on mutual respect, understanding,
and tolerance of one another. That means Muslims must
understand and accept that America is at its root a Christian
nation, just as they must realize that America’s actions in the
world are not guided by that fact. The president does his
cause no favors by pretending otherwise.
