Obama's religion matters to us if it matters to him

Mr. Diament, you write, "a person's faith commitment is a key window into their system of values and beliefs." Religion may indeed be the source of most Americans' basic values (aside from our materialistic values, I'd guess). But values that we acquire along with an unquestioned faith in religious doctrine or an unexamined identification with religious leaders can turn out to be dangerous mob-motivating destructive passions, as the history of religions in the western world teaches us. How many Catholics today think that they have a license to discriminate against homosexuals simply because the pope makes an appeal to the British NOT to adopt anti-discrimination laws to protect gays? Unless in the process of education people learn to scrutinize even the values they acquire from their religious affiliations, we risk having large-membership religions dictating our politics. And this situation is precisely what our founders struggled to prevent when they wrote founding documents such as the U.S. Constitution. When an American claims that the source of his or her value system is a religion, we must not exempt that value system from the "fearless sifting and winnowing," the political debates, by which some of us still try to find a consensus on moral/political issues. I agree with you that Americans are "entitled" to know the beliefs and values of the people they elect to office, but the SOURCE of those beliefs and values-- whether faith or reason or whatever--is simply IRRELEVANT in the debate. In particular, it provides no reason for any voter to accept or decline to question or criticize the candidate's value system. Americans who cannot identify with Obama because of his religion or his race or his rational cool, or whatever characteristic, need to re-read, or maybe read for the first time, Jefferson's Declaration and the Constitution and begin to think about the civic virtues embodied in those documents.

@Hebaber

Hear, hear! You don't hear about it much, but atheists are among the most vilified groups, politically. What matters is not whether you believe this or that, but what you do with what you believe.

Obama should admit that he's not a religious believer, Christian, Muslim or other. He's a decent person with high moral standards and it's about time that the American people learn that atheists can be good people and effective leaders.

Neither of Obama's parents were religious believers and coming from the cosmopolitan, academic world in which he's at home, the odds that he is a religious believer are low. So Obama is an atheist--live with it.

And I say that as a Christian myself. If there's anything I find offensive it's Obama's condescending remarks about "People of Faith"--imagining that we're all naive evangelicals and that he can suck up to us by playing games.