Obama’s religious “choice”

For the past week, I have been bugged by Obama’s answer to the question about why he is a Christian.  Here, mostly in his own words, are Obama’s thoughts on the subject:

“I’m a Christian by choice,” Mr Obama said. “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,” he continued.

“And I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God,” Mr Obama said. “But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace.”

Mr Obama said he seeks to do that through daily prayer and public service. “That’s what I strive to do. That’s what I pray to do every day,” he said. “I think my public service is part of that effort to express my Christian faith.”

Every news outlet has focused on the phase “Christian by choice,” but that’s a completely meaningless statement.  In a free country (as opposed to a theocracy), once one is an adult, ones faith is always a matter of choice.  You can choose either to stick with the faith you were raised in, or you can choose to embrace another faith.  This is kind of like saying “I breath air ’cause it’s there.”  You haven’t added anything to the discussion with that observation.

What strikes me about Obama’s approach to Christianity is that Christ’s nature seems to be an afterthought.  He does mention “Christ’s precepts” early on, but I like them too without being a Christian.  I think he was, to use Bush’s word, a great “philosopher,” but that’s kind of a no-brainer — meaning you’d have to have no brain to fail to appreciate his wisdom and his all-encompassing humanity.

It’s his take on Christ’s unique divinity that bugs me.  Yes, he does get to it (although some newspaper articles seemed so uncomfortable with that point that they sort of glossed over it themselves), but it just seems weirdly self-referential.  He gets to the salvation bit eventually, but he starts off with the fact that Christ provides him with a good role model of humility.  Are my antennae set way too high, or is that a funny thing to hear coming out of the mouth of a man who promised to still the waters and who routinely appeared in temple-like settings, the better to remind his followers about his own special qualities?

I guess what I’m saying is that Obama’s Christ seems to him to be a role-model as a fellow God, rather than a mere mortal.

Reality check here, please?