Billy Graham's Son Questions Obama's Faith

The Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, said on Tuesday that he was not sure if President Obama was a true Christian and that he could not definitively say that the president was not a Muslim. “He’s come out saying that he’s a Christian,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. Obama in an interview on the MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The question is, what is a Christian?”
Asked whether Mr. Obama was a Muslim, Mr. Graham replied, “I can’t say categorically.”
“Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama,” he said, citing the rise of Islamic parties in the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring and what he called a weak American response to the growing persecution of Christian minorities in Africa and the Middle East.
“All I know,” Mr. Graham said, is that Mr. Obama “seems to be more concerned about” the Muslims of the world than “the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries.”
“Barack Obama is an incredible man,” he said. “He could be speaking to these countries now, demanding that they protect the Christians.”
Under Islamic law, Mr. Graham volunteered, “the Muslim world sees Barack Obama as a Muslim” because his father and previous generations were Muslim.
Mr. Graham, 59, is president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and of Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian relief organization.
“He says he believes in Jesus Christ and I accept that,” Mr. Graham said of the president at one point.
“I have no idea what he really believes,” he said at another, going on to imply that Mr. Obama’s policies raise questions about the sincerity of his faith. “For me, the definition of a Christian is whether we have given our life to Christ and are following him in faith and we have trusted him as our lord and savior.”
This is not the first time that Mr. Graham and other evangelicals have cast doubts on Mr. Obama’s Christian beliefs. Last weekend, Rick Santorum, the Republican presidential candidate who calls himself a conservative Catholic, said that the president was guided by “some phony ideal, some phony theology.” He later said that he was not questioning Mr. Obama’s Christianity, only his view of man’s place in nature.
The White House has shrugged off the attacks on Mr. Obama’s faith.
“I did meet with the president this morning and amazingly he didn’t bring this up,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. “This president is focused on doing the things that he believes the American people elected him to do.”