Stephen Mansfield, author of several delightful and short biographies—George Whitefield, Winston Churchill, Booker T. Washington—along with spiritual biographies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, contributes the “On Religion” piece in today’s USA Today: “Obama’s faith fits our times,” with the subtitle, “His big-tent approach reflects his diverse spiritual journey. And he is perfectly in step with the country he now leads.”

Mansfield walks us through the religious biography of President Obama, noting how his mother “made sure he experienced every type of religious expression, from Jewish to Hindu and from native Hawaiian to Buddhist, to name but a few.” Mansfield explains Obama’s brief pre-adolescent Islamic practice, and his eventual landing at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Mansfield argues that Obama’s faith is very parallel to the spiritual leanings of America where “the vast majority also believe that there might be many versions of the faith they embrace and that their faith might not be the only path to God. Indeed, Americans are less likely to believe that any single faith is the only path to God, and they are more likely to believe that there is truth in religions differing from their own than at any prior time in the nation’s history.”

Mansfield offers no word of censure to the “many paths” idea of religious plurality. He speaks of Obama’s hermeneutics without offering a word of critique as he plays the words of Jesus off the words of Paul: “Indeed, [Obama] feels free to lean to one Scripture verse over another, to approach gay rights, for example, from the loving words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount but not the bigotry of Paul in his letter to the Romans.”

But Mansfield offers no rebuttal to the idea that Paul and Jesus held contradictory ideas. Mansfield just throws it up there as an idea worthy of consideration and embrace.

Mansfield ends the piece with the “people get the leaders they deserve” line, acknowledging it as a timeworn maxim. But Mansfield isn’t using the maxim as a critique or a challenge to the people to be more, to think more, to reject pluralism, to embrace Christianity.

Mansfield seems to be arguing that religious pluralism is now simply a matter of fact, President Obama is in step with this fact, and, well—nothing else needs to be said.