Barack Obama has been President for over 6 years now….

….he started running for President about 8 years ago. He burst onto the national scene nearly 11 years ago. Barack Obama, the President of the United States, is a known quantity. We know him. He is not a mystery. Thus the mere fact that promiment conservatives and Republicans are still… STILL… questioning “who is this Barack Obama?”….”Does he love America?” …. “Is he a Christian?” has everything… EVERYTHING… to do with his race, and everything… EVERYTHING…. to do with their racism.

Yes, I agree with Jonathan Chait on this one:

I have trouble formulating plausible explanations for the Obama-doesn't-love-America meme that don't lean on his race.

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 19, 2015

In 2007, were we asking who is this George W. Bush, does he love America, and is he a Christian? In 1999, were we asking who is this Bill Clinton, does he love America, and is he a Christian? We knew precisely the exact same amount of information about George and Bill’s lives (although you can argue we knew too much about Bill’s personal sexual life).

We were not questioning their religious beliefs, or the sincerity of them, even though we probably had more reason to doubt their religious beliefs given their public and private actions. Bill Clinton said he was raised as a southern Baptist, and we saw him attend Church services from time to time. George W. Bush claimed to be a born again evangelical Christian who found Jesus to help him deal with his alcoholism and drug addiction, and we saw him attend Church services from time to time. Barack Obama claims to be a Christian who came to the religion in his adult life, and was a longtime congregant (multiple decades) of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, pastored by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Some more history about Barack Obama and his Christianity:

Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.[363] He wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he “was not raised in a religious household.” He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as “non-practicing Methodists and Baptists”), as being detached from religion, yet “in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known.” He described his father as a “confirmed atheist” by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as “a man who saw religion as not particularly useful.” Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand “the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.”[364]

In January 2008, Obama told Christianity Today: “I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life.”[365] On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views saying “I’m a Christian by choice. My family didn’t—frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn’t raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me.”[366][367] Obama met Trinity United Church of Christ pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright in October 1987, and became a member of Trinity in 1992.[368]

Quick, name the church and pastor of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before they became President.

You can’t without researching it, and even then I am not sure you will find it.

I propose that we know more about Barack Obama’s Christian beliefs and practice of them than we ever knew about Bush or Clinton’s. So why are some on the opposite side of the political spectrum not only questioning Obama’s religious beliefs, but outright declaring them to be not-Christian?

It is because those asking those questions are racists. Plain and simple. If you don’t question the sincerity of the religious beliefs of white Presidents, but you do of black Presidents, you are a racist. You took for granted the beliefs of Clinton and Bush. You took their word for it. But a black man comes in with a funny name, saying that he too is a Christian, telling us where he worshiped for the past 16 years, who his pastor was, and then speaking in depth about why he is a Christian, well then we have to continually question his beliefs because….

Like Jonathan Chait, the only reason is because of the color of his skin. We didn’t question Bush and Clinton because they were “normal” and “expected.” We do question Obama because he is the “other.”

But these questions about religious beliefs and loving America really have no answer. How are we to really know whether George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are Christians? How are we to really know whether all three love America? To Rudy Giuliani and Eric Erickson and Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal and all others who raised questions this past the week, the answers are clear. And the reason why that is is because Obama is different from them, and therefore he must be bad.

From Philadelphia Magazine’s Joel Mathis:

One problem though: The answers to questions raised by Erickson and Giuliani are ultimately unknowable. They depend on our ability, basically, to mind-read: What does the president in his secret heart of hearts really believe? We can’t really, honestly know, and anybody who posits that they do — like Erickson — fails to recognize the limits of his or her own knowledge.

Maybe it’s time to give up that particular debate. Nothing useful has come of it; at this late date, it’s doubtful anything could.

We do have six years of President Obama’s record to consider, as well as two years of his forthcoming policies to debate. Obamacare, taxes, immigration policy, what to do in Iraq: All of these things matter way more — and will have much more impact on our own lives — than the president’s secret beliefs and feelings about, well, anything. It’s what he does and proposes to do that should matter, not some armchair speculation.

The state of President Obama’s soul? That’s between him and his God.