American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (review)

When confronted with a contemporary matter of concern, historians' instinctive first question is "how did this come to be?" Confronted with popular evangelical Christian leaders' recent denunciations, critiques, and exposés of Islam, historian Thomas Kidd decided to investigate the presence and role of Islam in the American evangelical imagination from the Great Awakening of colonial times to the post-9/11 anxieties of the present.

What he found, he says, is a remarkable continuity. Over three centuries, evangelicals persisted in seeing Islam as their paramount rival in the worldwide quest for converts, a synonym for tyranny and corruption, a promising target for missionary conversion, and an important player in dramatic scenarios of the end times. Some of these images are broadly present in western culture, but in America, evangelicals seem to have led the way in promoting missions to Muslims and in singling them out for judgment in biblical prophecy.

Kidd shows how the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East and North Africa kept intruding on the consciousness of Americans, who otherwise seemed preoccupied with their own continent. There were encounters with the Barbary pirates, then Americans' growing fascination with "Bible lands" in the nineteenth century. Then the rise of Zionism and the demise of the Ottoman Empire stoked popular interest in biblical prophecies. The creation of the state of Israel and the ensuing Middle East conflicts have turned evangelicals' prophetic speculation into a multi-media industry. The current "war on terrorism," with radical Islam in the foreground, is the latest act of a long-running imaginative drama.

Kidd finds several common genrés re-emerging throughout this story. One is the expose., the personal narrative of a western captive or a native convert, revealing "real" Islam. Another is missionary reconnaissance, showing how ripe for conversion a Muslim community is. And then there is the prophecy, revealing current events' meaning via the ancient prophetic codes.

There is, Kidd shows, a remarkable continuity in the first two literary forms from colonial times to present. But in the field of prophecy he sees a radical shift in Islam's role when evangelicals shifted from historicist views (prophecy fulfilled in history) to the currently popular futurist views, in which most prophecies await future fulfillment. Islam, alongside the papacy, was the longtime rival to "true Christianity" under historicist schemes, but Muslims became bystanders to the restoration of Israel under the futurist hermeneutic.

So the author is doubly surprised when pro-Zionist prophesiers scramble after 9/11 to find a prominent role for Islam. After speculating for decades that Antichrist would be an apostate Jew, now many are suggesting that he will arise from Islamic roots.

If this all were coming from marginal people, trying to make sense of their times but with no pretensions to power themselves, one might dismiss it as an amusing sideshow in American politics and culture. But Kidd shows that in a millennially minded nation, these imaginings matter. They matter even more when American evangelicals now engage in power politics.

Kidd is careful to show that American evangelicals are a diverse lot that harbors significant pockets of dissent regarding prophecy, Muslims and foreign policy. He shows that evangelicals' lengthy missionary efforts with Muslims have brought about a clash between missions and prophecy advocates. He cites evangelical authors with balanced and even appreciative treatments of Islam. But when it comes to popular imagination, the prophecy pundits win, hands down.

That may be so, but one has to wonder whether the author's selection of the kinds of literature to study might have biased his conclusion. If you focus on Bible prophecy books and media, do you miss the prospect that other genrés might be emerging? And how does one deal with the question of opinion-shaping authority? What if one's pastor disagrees with these end-times scenarios, based on what he or she has...