American Evangelical Islamophobia: A History of Continuity with a Hope for Change

precis:

This is a historical survey of Protestant attitudes toward and writings about Muslims since colonial New England to the present time, mostly leaning on Thomas S. Kidd’s American Christians and Islam (2009). The author makes three main arguments. First, there is an impressive amount of continuity in the polemical discourse that conservative Protestants have deployed against Islam and Muslims, some of which picks up tropes that go back to the early centuries of Christian-Muslim polemics. Second, this discourse is best studied through the lens of three principal matrices: the political, the prophetic/eschatological, and Christian mission to Muslims. Finally, since 9/11, there has been a hardening of evangelical Islamophobia, as well as a growing wing that seeks reconciliation.