Southern Baptist church-state specialist Richard Land said the president's speech contained both positive and negative elements.

Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, applauded Obama's comments on battling extremism and supporting religious freedom. He was disappointed, however, in the president's apparent implication of a "moral equivalence" between the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians, as well as his failure to cite the U.S. military's part in freeing oppressed Muslims during the last two decades.