Afterword

A Political Afterlife of a Theology of Race and Conversion

Not all infidels are desirable converts to Christianity; the conversion of non-Christians to Christianity can have unwelcome repercussions. Brabantio certainly found this to be true; he could not have known that welcoming a converted Moor into his home would lead to the loss of his daughter, his property. Iago and Roderigo suggest that Othello’s marriage to Desdemona is a kind of home-invasion robbery. Othello has crossed boundaries he should not have; he has disturbed the sanctity of home. Brabantio later amplifies the consequences of this invasion when he states, “For if such actions may have passage free, / Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (1.2.98-99). But why should Brabantio speak of bond-slaves and pagans? Othello is neither at the moment he marries Desdemona. And what does any of this have to do with the state?

The panic Iago and Roderigo inspire in Brabantio through the language of thievery resonates with that expressed by Thomas Newton in A notable historie of the Saracens (1575), which deals with an invading Ottoman empire: “They were (indeede) at the first very far off from our Clyme & Region, and therefore the lesse to be feared, but now they are even at our doores and ready to come into our Houses.”1 Newton’s panic is conveyed through an image of decreasing distance between Christians and infidels: a movement from far away to right outside the door to inside the house. He fears the effects of this decreasing distance; he worries that it will lead to forced conversion to Islam. This fear is brought home by the questions raised about what happens once Muslims are inside the house.

Through metaphor both Brabantio and Newton collapse differences between the home and the nation, between the personal and the political. Newton is concerned with actual Muslims who might invade England and force English men and women to forsake Christianity. Brabantio, in contrast, resorts to racializing religious difference in a moment of parental crisis. He excludes Othello from the baptized race at the point at which he recognizes the full consequences of the infidel-conversion motif—political chaos seems to be a stretch, though. Brabantio’s dismissal of Othello’s Christian identity brings to the fore that a refusal to believe in conversion is not always theologically motivated.

The infidel-conversion motif, if one puts his or her faith in it, generates a potentially troubling narrative of boundary crossing and inversion of perceived social hierarchies. Perhaps it is because I began writing these words in the spring of 2012, with a U.S. presidential election gaining momentum, that I find myself pondering the connections between Shakespeare’s Othello and America’s forty-fourth president, Barack Hussein Obama. The first person I heard make this comparison was Emily C. Bartels, in brief remakes she made while chairing the panel “Un-Mooring the Moor across Cultural Borders” at the 2010 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. But as I now think about the fears Obama’s origins and “travels’ history” (Othello, 1.3.141) have aroused in the political imaginary, I find the similarities between Othello and Obama just too striking to ignore: Both figures’ Christian identity seems to be gainsaid by their genealogy and geographic origin.

A 2008 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center stated that 12 percent of Americas believed that Obama is Muslim, a belief shared in equal percentages by Republicans and Democrats; 11 percent of Independents held this belief. A quarter of those polled were unsure of his religious faith. Some 37 percent of Democrats who believed that Obama is Muslim stated that they would still vote for him. Although these Democrats were still willing to vote for a supposedly Muslim candidate, the poll revealed that Obama’s supposed Muslim faith was actually a more important factor for Democrats than for Republicans; the latter were unlikely to vote for him even when they believed he is Christian.2

Although poll statistics can seldom be taken at face value, the Pew report raises important questions about our contemporary feelings about the connections between race, genealogy, geographical origins, and religious identity. The question must be asked: Where did the 12 percent get the idea that Obama is Muslim? Although President Obama writes of his conversion to Christianity in his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, the veracity of that conversion, as well as his birth within U.S. borders, have aroused continued scrutiny and skepticism in some quarters; those who wish—to use the phrase popularized by Republican primary candidate Michele Bachmann—to “take back America” have often questioned both his geographical origins (whether he was born in America) and his religious faith. In this political context few have asked whether Obama is a “good” Christian whose beliefs and political views are compatible with Christian orthodoxy—there are, and have always been, numerous Christian orthodoxies.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama explores what he inherited from his father. Although Obama inherited his father’s name and a phenotype that marks him as black within American constructions of race, a portion of the population on both the left and the right seems to believe that he also inherited his father’s religion despite his paucity of contact with his father after the age of two and despite his descent from Kansans on his mother’s side. Those who believe that the President is Muslim unwittingly embrace a theology of race that, as I have been arguing, emerged in Reformation England. Today, as then, religious identity is understood to pass from father to child. Muslim identity—like dark skin, dark hair, and brown eyes—seems to be a kind of dominant genetic trait. For some it seems to operate through the principle of the “one-drop” rule that in many ways continues to construct racial identity to this day. Obama’s “black” skin betrays his genealogical ties to his father and Muslim Africa.

I am not arguing that Obama’s political antagonists, or those who believe that he is Muslim, are racist. Rather I hope to highlight that we are still living with two major consequences of the Reformation: its redefinition of the origins of religious identity and its theological skepticism about the conversion of non-Christians to Christianity. Moreover, because skepticism about Obama’s religious identity is as common among Democrats as it is among Republicans, we can see that belief in race and geographical origin as indicators of religious affiliation has crossed political-confessional divides. Constructions of race and religion are intimately tied to questions of political legitimacy, both locally and globally. To acknowledge the possibility of any sort of conversion—from one religion to another or, through naturalization, from one nationality to another—is to acknowledge the permeability of both ideological and material borders and hence to recognize the value of inclusiveness in cultural and political life. To affirm the reality of conversion is to deny the reality of rigid, unalterable identity, whether racial, religious, or national.