It isn't every day that even a self-important and formerly fairly good newspaper like the Washington Post announces "the truth" about a contentious issue like Barack Obama's religion, but now we have it from their otherwise undistinguished staff writer Eli Sastrow, who was only recently promoted from reporting on swimming, where his cosmic insight was wasted on stories like Ziegler Sets Meet Mark in 400 Freestyle.

Lately the Post has been dispatching the Jimmy Olsen of their national news desk to hotspots like Flag City, Ohio, where he finds a few rubes who are so amazingly stupid that they haven't figured out the truth about Barack Obama!

On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

This set-up illustrates the keen analytic skills that Mr. Sastrow honed at swim meets from Petaluma to Podunk: Either you believe that Barack Obama is a "Christian family man," or you believe he's a "gay Muslim racist." Which sounds more reasonable to you?

Mr. Sastrow also slips in another bogus distinction that old media outlets like the Washington Post would love to see us all accept: The "truth" belongs to newspapers, TV news, and even campaign advertisements, and the internet is dismissed along with other rumor mills like grocery stores and auto shops.

But in spite of the awesome authority of the Washington Post (Colin Powell's speech about Saddam's WMDs was "irrefutable") I can't quite accept that the difficult question of Barack Obama's religion is reducible to a ludicrous contrast between "Christian family man" and "gay Muslim racist."

The myth that "Barry Soetoro" attended a madrassa in Indonesia has been sufficiently debunked, but the only hard evidence about Obama's religious affiliation as a child is his listing as a Muslim on his elementary school registration. Friendly journalists and the Obama campaign usually disappear this document with a lot of hand-waving about how Obama's step-father Lolo Soetoro occasionally had a beer and wasn't really a "devout" Muslim, but Soetoro's spotty attendance at the local mosque doesn't mean he also ignored the core Muslim requirement of Salah, ritual prayer performed five times every day. Did little Barry pray beside his step-father, or did he somehow stand outside the rhythm of everyday life in an Indonesian household?

The story of Barack Obama's church in Chicago is so famous that even the hicks in Hickville know it backward and forward, and Eli Sastrow's pitiful rhetorical tricks probably can't sell a preacher like Jeremiah Wright and a couple of patron saints like James Cone and Louis Farrakhan as witnesses that Barack Obama has much in common with the sort of "Christian family man" you might encounter in an auto shop or grocery store in rural Ohio.

How far did Barack Obama ever subscribe to the semi-Christian black-power ideology of James Cone and Jeremiah Wright? Whatever his other motivations may have been, Barack Obama joined Trinity Church when it was politically convenient to belong to its powerful congregation, and he left it when it wasn't.

So the question of Barack Obama's religion is significantly more complicated than the Washington Post portrays it, and their silly division between Christian "family values" and gay Muslim racism dissolves into more difficult issues like the relative power of childhood training compared to Barack Obama's formerly convenient membership in a powerful congregation.

Does a politically convenient association with the black-power "Christianity" of Jeremiah Wright really run deeper than Barack Obama's childhood immersion in the rhythms of Islam?

The real situation is probably even more shadowy than any division, and it may be that Barack Obama chose the ethnocentric ideology of Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago precisely because it resonated so deeply with his experience of Islam as a child in Lolo Soetoro's house in Jakarta.