Speaking to a French reporter while on his Middle East trip, President Obama said that the United States would be “one of the largest Muslim countries,” if its Muslim population was the measure. Jake Tapper fact checked that claim and reports that the White House used the CIA World Fact Book as a source for Obama’s erroneous statistic that there are seven million Muslims in the U.S. The actual size of the Muslim population in America, according to the CIA, is 0.6% of the total, or just under 2 million.

Tapper points out that the president did not say, and does not believe, that the United States is a Muslim nation, as some have lamented. As evidence for this, he recalls Obama’s speech of April 6, in Turkey, in which the president said that America, “does not consider itself a Christian nation, a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation.” While Tapper may be correct on the literal meaning of the president’s words, the rationale behind them is utter nonsense.

The idea that America would be one of the largest Muslim nations is silly not just because the president’s figures were grossly over-inflated. It is silly because population size is not what makes a nation inherently Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Culture does.

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After spending three years running away from his past, Barack Hussein Obama is now nominally a Muslim again. At least that is the message that ABC’s Jake Tapper has discovered in the new, new way in which the Obama administration is presenting the president’s connections to Islam and his religious upbringing and heritage. Suddenly it’s A’OK to say that Obama has “experienced Islam” and remark about his “Muslim father” again. Rah, rah for Islam.

As Jim Geraghty so famously said that everything that Barack Obama says has an “expiration date,” because it isn’t long after he promises something or makes allusion to some policy direction that he chucks the idea under the bus and drives head-long on to the next “promise” to earnestly offer the American people. And it isn’t just his centrist positions he later conveniently reverses himself on, either, as several of his more extremist liberal ideas have gone under the tram, too — much to the chagrin of many lefties that voted for him.

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As President Obama engaged in his “America Stinks” tour of Europe this week he told audiences in Turkey that the U.S. is not a Christian nation. “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” he said on April 6. This echoes his statement in 2007 when Obama told CBN, “whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation.”

The subtle difference between those two statements just over a year apart is interesting. Candidate Obama seemed to admit that we might have “once” been a Christian nation but are no longer “just” a Christian nation. But, suddenly as president, he seems to be saying squarely that we “don’t” consider ourselves Christian. Interesting that he seemed to feel obligated to mitigate as a candidate his now openly admitted belief that we just aren’t a Christian nation.

In any case, it is obvious that this is Obama’s way of ingratiating himself with Muslim audiences. But whatever his immediate goal, his sentiment is a popular one with Americans that sport left-wing, anti-religious ideology, people who look to Obama as their leader.

But is he right? Is it true that we aren’t a Christian nation? Did the Founding Fathers choose the Christian ethic as the one upon which they based this country, or not? The answer would appear to be an emphatic yes once the historical record is reviewed. It would also appear that we are straying far afield from that grounding.

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