Though my vote would be for the “black Muslim,” it’s remarkable, I think, that politeness and discretion and tolerance flag in such an asymmetrical fashion. One’s personal beliefs and convictions are important indicators of official deportment and ought to be afforded with respect, regardless of pedigree. Such a big schism erupted over the Kennedy presidency, the one and only Catholic office-holder (though there is an unlikely union between the challengers, and we will see what happens with that), and there’s this strange cauldron of questions and assumptions about the incumbent that’s bewitching to a large part of the voting-public—and though maybe assumptions and prejudice are already cemented in regards to the challenger candidate’s affiliation and confession, that there’s little talk of it is still rather incredulous.
Without baiting the same kind of shallow and flippant stereotypes about any community of faith (
teetotalling, narrow-minded harem-mongers could be code for many things), it does seem that one’s background ought to be a matter of discussion—not derision, and an invitation to learn more. Of course, the loser will be forgotten as a wildly inaccurate representative (real or attributed) of his religion but the politics and climate that made this match will still be there, though with different champions and seconds and despite the rumoured separation of Church and State. There is a tendency to reject tenets that are not seeped in and mystified by traditions that did not come from an unattainable past as something too new and too human, but rather than forestalling one’s own established confession, it seems that the aversion comes from not the evangelizing, the otherness or conflicting values, but in the way that it forces one to examine native-held convictions and how one represents them or is represented by them in an unrarefied and maybe unflattering light.
