In addition to Jonah’s criticism: In terms of his fitness for public office, it doesn’t matter one bit to me whether Obama, as Colin Powell asserts, has “always been a Christian”. But you’d think that Powell, as someone who has been accused before of slanting the facts to fit his desired conclusion, might be more careful with the facts. As Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, he “was not raised in a religious household” (p. 202), and he was baptized, apparently at the age of 27, at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ (p. 208).
Was Powell perhaps trying to divert attention from the highly racialized and radically politicized version of Christianity that Obama adopted from his spiritual mentor?