WASHINGTON – Conservative commentator Glenn Beck voiced sharper criticism of President Obama’s religious beliefs Sunday than he and other speakers offered from the podium of the rally Beck organized at the Lincoln Memorial a day earlier.
During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” which was filmed after Saturday’s rally, Beck claimed that Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim.”
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity,” Beck added.
Beck made the remarks in answer to a question about his previous accusation that Obama was a “racist” who has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” He contended that that statement “was not accurate” and that he had “miscast” Obama’s religious beliefs as racism.
Obama told NBC’s Brian Williams on Sunday that he hadn’t watched the Lincoln Memorial event but that he supported Beck’s and his supporters’ right to rally.
Obama, asked on NBC about polls showing confusion over his religion, pointed to “a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly.”
In the aftermath of Saturday’s rally, Democrats have gone on the offensive against Republicans by claiming that the event was evidence that the GOP has been overtaken by extreme elements in the party.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said that the rally made clear that “there is a raging battle going on within the Republican Party for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”
Haley Barbour, the head of the Republican Governors Association and governor of Mississippi, responded that the rally was a reaction to the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, who he said “have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history.”
Estimates on the size of the rally have varied widely. According to one commissioned by CBS News, 87,000 people attended the event.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican who spoke at the event, told a reporter afterward that she thought more than 100,000 people had attended.
Beck said that the crowd was between 300,000 and 650,000.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said that no fewer than 1 million people had been in attendance.
