As a boy in Indonesia, Barack Obama crisscrossed the religious divide. At the local primary school, he prayed in thanks to a Catholic saint. In the neighborhood mosque, he bowed to Allah.

Having a personal background in both Christianity and Islam might seem useful for an aspiring U.S. president in an age when Islamic nations and radical groups are key national security and foreign policy issues. But a connection with Islam is untrod territory for presidential politics. ~The Los Angeles Times

As noted at The Plank, the Obama campaign hastily denied any Allah-bowing:

Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ. Accounts in the L.A. Times that suggest otherwise are simply not true.

Was the next headline, “Obama Embarrassed By Muslim Ties”?  Somehow I don’t think it was.  Note how nicely the LA Times spun the story and gave it a pro-Obama title.  It wasn’t a story that stressed that he had actually been a Muslim for a short time or grew up as a religiously confused child, both of which could in any case be attributed to his mother’s decisions, but that one that said he had “crisscrossed” a “cultural divide.”  This supposedly shows that he is capable of uniting different religions, different cultures, different anything, because he can be on both sides of the fence at the same time.  He is Mug and Wump and everything in between. 

However, the story did say:

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

This could be easy to spin as a case of bureaucratic formality where the step-father had to put down something for registration and picked his own religion as a matter of convenience.  Whether anyone would believe it or not is another question, but these full-throated denials don’t help Obama’s credibility more generally for people who would otherwise not necessarily care about this.  It is clear that Obama is embarrassed by this detail in his past and so eager to move away from anything that might conjure up an idea of foreignness or the phrase “black Muslim.”  As the first example of a presidential candidate’s Muslim ties being publicly revealed, it is hard to know whether this will become the equal and opposite version of the politician’s public embrace of his recently-discovered Jewish heritage.  However, from what can be found in this story Obama really has nothing to fear from his years as “Barry Soetero,” but he may well badly damage his credibility if he keeps strenuously denying that he was ever a Muslim.  To most people, if you prayed in a mosque, saying that you were never a Muslim is a bit like saying, “I smoked, but I didn’t inhale.” 

Actually, the bigger problem Obama might have with this story is the bit that draws attention to his knock on prayer:

In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.

Taken out of context, this citation makes it sound as if Obama is something of a great cynic about religion and prayer, as if anyone ever claimed that angels would be visibly descending or that anything should “happen” during class prayers.  That hardly fits with the man who likes to talk up the importance of faith and refers to a “righteous wind at our backs.”  Some people might begin to think that Obama’s religion talk is just a lot of self-righteous wind.