A public opinion poll showing Americans are increasingly convinced, wrongly, that he is Muslim does not trouble him, US President Barack Obama said on Sunday. “It's not something that I can, I think, spend all my time worrying about it,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News, dismissing the results of a recent Pew Research Center. “I'm not going to be worrying too much about whatever rumors are floating out there. If I spend all my time chasing after that, then I wouldn't get much done.” The Pew poll showed nearly one in five Americans - 18 percent - believe Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009. In addition, only about one third of Americans surveyed correctly describe Obama as a Christian, a sharp decrease from the 48 percent who said he was a Christian in 2009. “There is, a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly,” Obama said, on why he thinks Americans appear to be uncertain about his religion. He said that he dealt with it during his presidential race, and earlier when he campaigned for the U.S. Senate. Obama said he won in Illinois because he trusted the American people's capacity to get beyond the “nonsense.” The Pew survey was completed in early August, before Obama waded into a controversy over a proposed Muslim cultural center and Mosque near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York.
