Over half (54 percent) of Republicans, 26 percent of independents, and 10 percent of Democrats, when asked in a recent poll which religion describes President Obama's "deep down" beliefs, said he is Muslim.  The poll was conducted in October 2014, by Alex Theodoridis of the University of California at Merced and released in February.  Choices included Muslim, Christian, atheist, spiritual, or "I don't know."  While 45 percent of Democrats said Obama is Christian, his stated belief, only 18 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans agreed.  Many also responded "don't know" – i.e., 47 percent of independents, 26 percent of Democrats, and 19 percent of Republicans.

Why are Americans suspicious of Obama's avowed Christianity?  Perhaps because his Christian piety increases when it serves his politics, and just as quickly vanishes when it does not.  Defending his executive amnesty, Obama lectured Americans that the Bible says we must not "oppress the stranger" – if those strangers happen to be four or five million illegals and potential Democratic voters.  Yet his administration oppresses into court the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns who have ministered to thousands of the neediest elderly "strangers" worldwide since 1839.  Their crime: refusal to pay for Obamacare-mandated abortive birth control drugs.  While the president incessantly invokes the Bible's "I am my brother's keeper" clause and even uses it to title a new initiative for young black men, he ignores his own brother who lives in poverty in Kenya. 

Recently, the sincerity of Obama's Christianity also came into question when his longtime advisor and confidant David Axelrod, in his book Believer, revealed that the president for years lied in proclaiming he opposed gay marriage because of his Christian faith.  In fact, wrote Axelrod, Obama was a supporter of same-sex marriage for years before the 2008 election, but Axelrod advised him to conceal that fact because "opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church."

Politicians often "evolve" to other views.  But for Obama to tell Pastor Rick Warren in 2008 that "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman … for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union – God is in the mix" is to invoke Christian belief in such a cynically hypocritical way that it leads inevitably to the following: if he would lie about his "sacred" Christian values in order to get elected, what else might he lie about?

Those seeking clues to the president's "deep down" loyalty may find them in his stubborn refusal to call "Islamic terrorism" what the whole world knows it is.  His insistence that the "Islamic State is not Islamic" may be the silliest artifice ever devised to distinguish "normal Muslims" from the fanatics.  We all know that most Muslims don't behead people; the president simply protests too much.  But when he tells us, "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," mass head-shaking ensues.  The harsh reality that he cannot ignore: a terrorist army of 25,000 to 40,000 dedicated Islamists conquering territory from the Middle East to Africa who claim they are following the dictates of their religion and document that claim with numerous writings from the Koran and Mohammad himself.

His obsessive insistence that Islam is "a religion of peace" could indicate that Mr. Obama's teachers in his Muslim school skipped lightly over the religion's brutal history.  Starting with its founder, who led conquering Muslim armies against the "infidel" in the early 7^th century, the religion has always "converted" by the sword, sweeping through the Mid-East and North Africa, then invading France and Spain, obliterating the peaceful spread of Christianity from hundreds of years before.  The "infidel" was the Christian and the Jew, whom the Muslim texts encourage the believer to butcher or enslave.

Obama's roots are in Islam; his Kenyan father was a Muslim, which, according to the religion's rules, would typically mean the son is also.  Growing up in Muslim Indonesia with a Muslim stepfather, his earliest influences were Islamic.  He attended a Muslim school and studied the Koran, and he has said of those years that the Muslim call to prayer is "one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset."  As an adult at the "church" of a black supremacist and hater, Obama heard vile denunciations of America shouted from the pulpit by Jeremiah Wright for twenty years – and, he says, became a Christian.

Mr. Obama's loyalties remain murky.  At the recent prayer breakfast, he offered a standard mind-meld of secularism and multicultural orthodoxy, declaiming that nobody should be "so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn't speak to others … that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth."  This is the all-religions-lead-to-God catechism of those who typically can't bring themselves to believe in any religion.  Obama is saying it's arrogant, and simply wrong, to believe that Christian values or those of any faith are superior to any other.

His words directly contradict Christ's, who said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).  Obama's deepest belief seems to be that nobody can claim any belief as truth.  The nearly 80 percent of Americans who profess Christianity would side with Jesus.  To be a Christian, you must believe that Christ is truth and reject other faiths.  Likewise, to be a Muslim, you must reject other faiths.  Obama can't choose a side, though he leans heavily toward doubt.

America picked our side 238 years ago.  Our mainly Christian Founders from the very beginning chose Judeo-Christian foundations and a system of laws derived from the Old Testament's Ten Commandments.  Our Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson (whom secularists claim as their own despite his repeated avowal that he was a Christian) three times refers to the Christian Creator God as the giver of our human rights and equality, and holds fast to "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" in the coming struggle.

This radical notion of human equality, never before embraced by a government, springs from the Bible.  As the Apostle Paul said, "[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  Our Judeo-Christian values of equality, liberty, justice, and tolerance are what set our nation apart and make us exceptional.  Although most of the Founders were Christians, they built into the Constitution the freedom to choose any religion.

If people in Islamic nations have any rights, they are bestowed not by God, but at the whim of dictators, kings, and imams implementing Islam's sharia law.  There is no freedom of speech or equality in Islam and no such thing as women's rights; half the population lives under virtual house arrest, treated as inferiors under the law.  The ISIS brutalities that Obama calls a "perversion" of Islam – beheading, flogging, mutilation, stoning, and slavery among them – are actually practiced in nearly all Muslim nations to varying degrees.  Homosexuals are executed or flung from tall buildings.  All are free to choose their religion as long as it's Islam; if not, jail or death awaits.

As Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu noted in his speech to Congress, "America's founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; Iran's founding document pledges death, tyranny and the pursuit of jihad."

It shouldn't be hard to choose which faith and moral code is superior between Islam and Christianity.  Mr. Obama may not be as feckless as he is simply lost.

Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who's been published at Townhall.com, The Washington Times, the Daily Caller, American Thinker, and others.  Tweet her: @joyoverbeck1