Don Feder, GrassTopsUSA.com

This is priceless. After 19 months of sucking up to Islam – bowing to the Saudi King, apologizing to terrorist states for our “arrogance,” singing Islam’s praises, supporting the Ground Zero mosque (opposed by upwards of 70% of the public) – a growing number of Americans believe POTUS is a Muslim.

White House operatives must be pulling their hair out. The latest Pew Research Center poll shows 18% of his fellow Americans think Obama is a person of the jihad persuasion, up from 11% in 2009. Only 34% accept the media’s claim that he’s a Christian, down from 48% last year.

More remarkable yet, after Obama has been president for over a year and a half, 43% of voters don’t know what faith he follows. Even among blacks and Democrats, a majority can’t say that POTUS is a Christian.

The White House denial-machine issued frantic, if somewhat vague, pronouncements of presidential piety:

The president prays every day. (So do many non-Christians.) His faith is an important part of his life. (The same could be said of animists, Zoroastrians and members of the Church of Scientology.) Perhaps most hilariously, we are told that every day Obama gets homilies on his Blackberry from “spiritual advisors” – e-Christianity?

One of the men of faith counseling POTUS is Henry Knox (president of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based And Neighborhood Partnerships), who once charged that Pope Benedict XVI is “hurting people in the name of Jesus,” by opposing condom-distribution to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa. Knox also described the pope and certain bishops as “discredited leaders” for opposing gay marriage. On this basis, evangelical preachers and Orthodox rabbis are equally “discredited.”

“While the president has been diligent and personally committed to his own Christian faith, there’s (sic.) certainly folks who are intent on spreading falsehoods about the president and his values and beliefs,” says faith adviser Joshua DuBois. Spreading falsehoods about the president’s values? Are they saying he’s a patriot who believes in the free market and border security?

There’s little in the president’s background, beliefs or behavior that would suggest he’s a serious Christian – or even a casual Christian, for that matter.

Obama’s upbringing was hardly church bells chiming on a Sunday morn – more the muezzin’s call to prayer on Friday eve. The president spent his formative years studying in a Jakarta madrassa.

His mother was an ex-hippy agnostic. Both his biological and step-father were Muslims. His grandparents (a lapsed Baptist and Methodist) joined the Unitarian Universalists – a denomination which proudly proclaims its rejection of Christianity.

In Chicago, Obama was a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Church of the Grotesque for 19 years. This was his introduction to Christianity.

The Rev. G.D. America, Wright preached Black Liberation theology – America is evil, Caucasians are evil, capitalism is super-evil, and Jesus was a Palestinian guerilla. How many churches have given an award to Nation of Islam fuehrer Louis Farrakhan? When Obama says he’s a Christian, he means in the bizarro tradition of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

“What do you believe?” Obama was asked in a Chicago Sun Times interview in 2004, when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Answer: “I am a Christian. So I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith.” (If I say I’m a Buddhist, does that make me the Dalai Lama?) What does he mean by drawing from the Christian faith – taking what he likes and leaving the rest?

If the question was posed to the Christians I know, they would say: “I believe in the message of the Gospels,” or “I believe Jesus died for my sins” or “I believe Jesus is the only begotten son of God and savior of the world.”

So what does Barack Hussein (I know, there I go again) Obama think of a certain 1st century rabbi?

“Who is Jesus to you?” The Sun Times interviewer asked.

Answer: “Jesus is an historical figure for me (so was Napoleon), and he’s a bridge between God and man (Jews would say the same of Moses or any of the prophets, as would Muslims of Mohammed) … and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as a means of us reaching something higher. And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.” Without a teleprompter, this is the way the president babbles.

In other words, Jesus was an important teacher, a really swell guy, a cool dude, and Obama likes him – a lot. This is to normative Christianity what Cheese Whiz is to French cuisine.

If I can analogize Obama’s perspective on Christianity, it’s like asking a Jew, “What do you think of the Torah?” And he responds: “Interesting book, filled with historical figures like Moses and Isaiah. There’s a lot of food for thought there. Can’t wait for the screen adaptation.”

My friend Dr. Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America, who’s pastored Southern Baptist churches in East Texas for 25 years, is emphatic: “For evangelical Christians, our only authority is Scriptures. John 1:1-12 is clear. Jesus is not a ‘bridge to God;’ he is God incarnate. Jesus said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me.’”

I’m a Jew. But this is always what I’ve understood Christianity to mean.

Despite avowals of commitment to his “Christian faith,” Obama’s administration is at war with Christianity. Unlike the war on terrorism, the president is deadly serious about this conflict.

Start with his bitter-clingers comments during the 2008 primary campaign. Speaking off the record (so he thought) to members of his church – Democratic donors at a San Francisco fundraiser – Obama tried to explain what’s wrong with Middle America.

People in rust-belt towns have been losing jobs for 25 years “and nothing’s replaced them.” So, “it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain (he probably meant express) their frustrations.”

In Obama’s worldview, what do religion, guns, “anti-immigrant sentiment,” “anti-trade sentiment” and “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” have in common? They’re all bad things – the result of ignorance, malice or right-wing indoctrination. This is what Obama thinks of the Christianity practiced in fly-over country, where they take the New Testament seriously.

As president, Obama has shown his contempt for normative Christianity – the Christianity that thinks of Jesus as more than a community organizer from Nazareth.

Atheists and agnostics have been warmly received in the White House. In his inaugural address, along with various faith communities, Obama paid homage to “non-believers” (the first president to do so) as one of the groups that made America great. Exactly how non-belief inspired the pioneers, settlers, soldiers, statesmen and industrialists who built this country, the president did not say.

Muslims are also a favored minority. Why the White House has practically become their second home. Obama has hosted several ceremonial meals for Muslims. In the latest Iftar dinner (marking a break from the Ramadan fast), the messiah held forth in the usual fashion: “These rituals remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Okay, all kidding aside, try to imagine Obama hosting a Christmas party for Southern Baptists at which he praises Christianity’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. Now, picture the president cutting the ribbon at a Jewish housing project in East Jerusalem.

Besides telling us that America is not (or no longer is) a Christian nation – a distortion of history and reality that defies description – unlike his predecessors, Obama has yet to honor National Day of Prayer with a White House ceremony.

While Bush had an interfaith service in the White House for eight straight years, Obama grudgingly signed a presidential proclamation. He was also a no-show at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, where he might have encountered the type of Christianity practiced by bitter-clingers.

Obama’s political appointees have a special animus toward Christianity.

One of his first judicial nominations was Judge David Hamilton for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. As a federal district court judge, Hamilton ruled that it was unconstitutional to offer a prayer in Jesus’ name before sessions of the Indiana legislature. The ruling was overturned by the same circuit court Obama appointed him to.

In explaining his injunction, Hamilton said that, in the same circumstances, prayers in Allah’s name passed constitutional muster – Allah being a generic name for God, in Hamilton’s opinion. Further, because there are so few Muslims in Indiana, invoking the Muslim deity can’t be considered an establishment of religion, unlike praying to Jesus.

Like Hamilton, Obama worships at the altar of political correctness, America’s established church, and has worked diligently to advance its creed.

Other than signing a new hate-crimes law making homosexuals a protected class (which will be used to censor religious speech), the two clearest indications of Obama’s distance from the Christianity practiced by most Americans is his devotion to abortion and the gay agenda.

Facilitating abortion is an article of faith for the man who once said that having an opinion on when life begins was above his pay-grade.

As a member of the Illinois Senate, Obama voted for infanticide (against a born-alive bill). As a presidential candidate, he boasted, “Throughout my career, I’ve been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice (apparently, a step or two beyond mere ‘reproductive rights’), and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL,” the Vatican of Obama-style Christianity.

As president, on his third day in office, he canceled the Mexico City Policy (which denied foreign-aid grants to groups that perform or promote abortion), sent $50 million to the UN Population Fund for these purposes, picked a Secretary of Health and Human Services who was tight with the king of partial-birth abortions in Kansas, and illegally spent $27 million in tax-dollars to assure the passage of a pro-abortion constitution in Kenya.

Obama Care will inevitably lead to the rationing of medical services for the elderly and euthanasia.

Other than performing a partial-birth abortion himself, on live TV, on Margaret Sanger’s birthday (with an in-studio audience of NOW and NARAL members), it’s hard to imagine what more the president could do to promote abortion on demand.

But that’s nothing next to the presidential embrace of the gay agenda.

Obama was bursting with pride when he told a homosexual gathering that he was the first president to invite gays, lesbians and the “transgendered” to the annual White House Easter egg hunt in 2009 – a very traditional way to celebrate this most important of Christian holy days. Perhaps next year they could hunt for multi-colored condoms.

He wants to repeal don’t-ask-don’t-tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, which will open the door to the federal judiciary mandating same-sex “marriage” nationwide.

His Safe Schools Czar, Kevin Jennings, (who once neglected to report an incident of pedophilia) is the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (Indoctrinators R Us) who calls Bible-believing Christians “hardcore bigots” who should all “drop dead!”

Speaking to the homosexual Human Rights Campaign last fall, Butch Obama promised: “We will see a time in which we, as a nation, finally recognize the relationships between two men or two women.” Would that be before or after we close most evangelical churches, outlaw Catholicism and tear pages out of Bibles?

“This fight continues now, and I’m here with a simple message: I’m here with you in that fight,” Obama told the wildly cheering crowd. That makes him against the voters of 30 states who’ve enacted defense-of-marriage amendments to their state constitutions, the homophobes!

In an effort to reconcile his alleged Christianity with his homosexual advocacy, in 2008 Obama told voters that he follows the Sermon on the Mount (which contains no reference to men who lie with other men), instead of “an obscure passage in Romans.”

That “obscure passage” – Romans 1:26-27 – is crucial to Christian teaching. (“For this cause God gave them unto vile affections …. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another: men with men working that which is unseemly….”) Our president is quite the Bible scholar.

For the record, I do not believe Obama is a Muslim. Where are the gay-friendly imams and mosques that support Planned Parenthood?

It’s true: Obama is inordinately fond of Islam. But so are leftists who didn’t have Muslim fathers and step-fathers and weren’t educated in an Indonesian madrassa.

Islam has become the left’s pet religion. It’s unremittingly anti-American, which trumps every other consideration in their minds. Leftists view Islam as the religion of the dispossessed, like all of those oil-rich Saudis.

Jihad is seen as a war of liberation against the arrogant, colonial West. Thus the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Hamas become inheritors of the mantle of the Viet Cong, Sandinistas and Khmer Rouge. Leftists who gag at the sight of a Ten Commandments monument find the prospect of a mosque at Ground Zero utterly charming.

It’s a mistake to think of Obama’s belief system in the context of traditional religion. The president of the United States is an orthodox, dogmatic, doctrinaire, devout leftist.

Leftism is modernity’s most popular heretical religion. It has a rigid belief system which is impervious to reason and science. It offers a secular vision of heaven (confiscatory taxation and the abolition of private property) and hell (the free market, Sarah Palin and Global Warming).

Its sacraments are income redistribution, distributing condoms to third-graders, surrender in the war on terrorism, and destroying industrial civilization to fight carbon-emissions. Its priesthood includes Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Al Gore, George Soros, Barney Frank and the Unabomber.

This is the faith of Barack Obama. It speaks with the prophetic voice not of Saul of Tarsus but Saul of Alinsky.

This column originally appeared on GrassTopsUSA.com and is published with permission. Visit the author’s website, DonFeder.com.