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

In the last two decades, several books have appeared that take their subject the relationship between American Christians and the Middle East. (For example, see Ussama Makdisi's superb study Artillery of Heaven [Ithaca, NY, 2008], and Fuad Shaaban's Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: Roots of Orientalism in America [Durham, NC, 1991]). Yet, for the most part these have been narrowly focused scholarly works. American Christians and Islam is the first book that covers the longue durée of American Christian views on Islam and Muslims. Starting from the colonial period and extending through the post-9/11 era, Thomas S. Kidd aims to show that American Christians (in reality almost exclusively white conservative Protestants) have always had a problematic and primarily antagonistic relationship with Islam. Rather, than see 9/11 as the turning point in that relationship, he shows that the same themes (conversion of Muslims, missionary work among Muslims, and Islam and Muhammad as the antithesis of Christianity and Christ) have coursed through Evangelical discourse and diatribe for more than 300 years.

Across eight chapters, Kidd illustrates his argument with a rich and convincing collection of evidence. Amongst early Americans, Islam came to play a key role in shaping both intra-Protestant theological arguments (where opponents associated each other's views with that of Muhammad), as well as the nascent American national narrative. The same themes continued through the age of the early American Republic. As with the Barbary piracy in the eighteenth century, pirate attacks on American ships in the nineteenth century generated a keen interest in captivity narratives and eschatological writing with a historicist bend. Thus, Islam came to be seen by the likes of Jonathan Edwards as the smoke locusts in Revelation 9. According to Kidd, it was this sense that there was a growing clash between Islam and Christianity that underpinned the American missionary efforts to Muslims. While producing only a handful of converts to Christianity, this nineteenth and early-twentieth missionary movement was formative in the shaping of American Orientalism with its "Bible lands" travel narratives and conversion stories that depicted Muslims as thirsting for Christ.

In the twentieth century this missionary movement split over the lack of any tangible evidence of success. Orientalists such as Samuel Zwemer believed in an organized effort to slowly convert Muslims. However, increasingly Dispensationalists came to dominate the missionary movement, and they interpreted unfolding political events as signs of the End of Times. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Zionism and the political project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine produced a new dominant narrative among American evangelicals whereby Arabs and Muslims were the enemies of Israel—whose re-establishment was another sign of the End of Times—and thus the enemies of Christianity. The confluence of the Zionist narrative and project with the eschatological evangelical organized efforts and prophetic pronouncements that Christians must support Israel only intensified after the 1967 and 1973 wars, and came to a feverish pitch in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and then the events of 9/11.

The story that Kidd tells is compelling and enlightening in its nuanced depiction of conservative American Christian views on Islam and Muslims across three centuries. However, the very strength of the narrative (its encyclopedic nature) also makes for a weakness: namely, the absence of any sustained and deep analysis of the causes for the overwhelmingly hostile approach to Islam. Although Kidd dismisses Edward Said's Orientalism (New York, 1978) as a flawed rubric of analysis, he does not offer any convincing alternative as to why Islam would be held in such sustained contempt and fear by American evangelicals. Actions by some Muslims (piracy and much later terrorist attacks) may account for some of this but they hardly explain the...