Obama Carrying Cross by RandomUser23447274

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

Obama was baptized into the United Church of Christ denomination and formally joined it in 1988. He left the UCC in 2008 because of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy.
He later worshiped with a Southern Baptist pastor at Camp David but has not become a formal member of any church since 2008.
Though according to his own profession and some others, Obama is a practicing Christian and he was chiefly raised by his mother and her Christian parents, his father, Barack Obama Sr., with whom he lived only as a baby, was characterized by Obama as being a Muslim-raised atheist. Also, his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, with whom he lived during his early childhood, was nominally Muslim. This familial connection to Islam, among other things, is a basis of claims that Obama secretly practices Islam.
According to the Los Angeles Times, false rumors saying that Obama was secretly a Muslim started during his campaign for the United States Senate in 2004 and had expanded through viral e-mails by 2006. The Times compared these rumors to earlier false rumors about 2000 presidential candidate John McCain fathering a dark-skinned child out of wedlock. The rumors were subsequently promoted by conservative talk show hosts, including Michael Savage.
In December 2007 the Hillary Clinton campaign asked a volunteer county coordinator to step down after she forwarded an e-mail message which repeated the false rumor that Obama was Muslim. In June 2008, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself Jewish, spoke out to Jewish voters in Florida against false e-mail rumors which said that Obama was secretly a Muslim and did not support Israel. Bloomberg said: "I hope all of you will join me throughout this campaign in strongly speaking out against this fear mongering, no matter who you'll be voting for."
In 2015, Taha al-Lahibi, a former member of the Iraqi parliament known for promoting fringe conspiracy theories, claimed that Obama was "the son of a Shiite Kenyan father." These unfounded claims do not have broad support among Iraqis, and al-Lahibi's claim prompted mockery.