It's not enough that Barack Obama is having trouble with conservative Christians who either think he is not really Christian at all or that if he is, he is one of those liberal sort of Christians. Now he's also in hot water with America's Muslims.

So much of this nation's anxiety over matters religious seems to be swirling around Obama this season. On the Internet, there continues to be the chatter that Obama is secretly a Muslim, that he never really embraced Christianity. More publicly, James Dobson, the very conservative doctor who founded Focus on the Family, has ripped into Obama's understanding of the Bible. All this, of course, on top of Obama's well-publicized difficulties with the words of his long-time (and now former) pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

But in its effort to portray Obama as a good Christian, not a closet Muslim, his campaign has taken a series of actions that have the effect of insulting and marginalizing this nation's growing Muslim population. Obama need not dis Muslims to reinforce his Christian credentials, but that's what has been happening.

A couple of examples.

When Obama was campaigning last December in Iowa before the early January caucuses, Rep. Keith Ellison of neighboring Minnesota offered to speak on behalf of Obama at a mosque in Cedar Rapids. This was significant because Ellison is the first Muslim elected to Congress and the Muslim community in Cedar Rapids is one of the oldest in the nation. But Obama's team asked Ellison to cancel the rally because it might stir controversy, according to a report in the New York Times.

More recently, campaign volunteers in Detroit kept two Muslim women wearing head scarves out of the crowd right behind Obama at a rally, lest it appear to obvious that he was getting support from Muslims.

Now Obama himself has said all the right things about inclusion and diversity. He has done some quiet things to include Muslims in his coalition. But his campaign is being so cautious about anything that might feed rumors that Obama himself is a secret Muslim that it is reinforcing the notion that Muslims in and of themselves are simply suspect.

If only Obama would say, "Hey, I'm Christian and proud of it, but if I were Muslim like my friend Keith Ellison, I would still be bringing important values to this campaign."

Obama did a superb job earlier this year of getting the nation's racial suspicions out on the table for discussion. He has an opportunity to do something similar with the nation's religious suspicions of those who do not hew to what is considered the mainstream. Or he could do something wonderfully symbolic. Columnist Roger Cohen in today's New York Times suggests that Obama should simply visit a mosque.

George Bush managed to do that after Sept. 11 to send to a needed signal of tolerance. Surely Obama could be at least as courageous as Bush.