AMERICAN CHRISTIANS AND ISLAM: EVANGELICAL CULTURE AND MUSLIMS FROM THE COLONIAL PERIOD TO THE AGE OF TERRORISM

The Christian Century
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July 27 2009

American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from
the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism by Thomas S. Kidd Princeton
University Press, 224 pp., $29.95

Kidd takes us through the American centuries and shows us a consistent
conversation among Protestant Christians about Muslims–though not
with them.

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Before September 2001, many Americans may have believed that Islam and
Christianity had gotten along peaceably since 1400 or so. In American
Christians and Islam, Thomas Kidd demonstrates otherwise, taking us
through the American centuries and showing us a consistent conversation
among conservative Protestant Chris tians about Muslims–though not
with them. Kidd explains that his book is not "about Islam itself. It
is about American Christians and the views they produced about Islam."

In the tradition of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) and R. Laurence
Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986),
Kidd argues that what these Christians have had to say about the
other–Muslims–has revealed much about the observers themselves. In
eight chronologically ordered chapters, Kidd details conservative
Protestants’ "desire to see Muslims convert to Christianity, the
fascination with missionary work among Muslims, the mixing of political
policy and theology as it relates to the Muslim world (and Israel),
and the insertion of Islam into eschatological schemes." He casts
a careful eye over missionary memoirs, conversion narratives and
popular eschatologies to demonstrate that American Christians have
often imagined themselves as chosen and bound for heaven by imagining
that Muslims are not.

Most colonial Protestants learned about Islam not from Muslim
African slaves but from books, sermons and English and American
accounts of enslavement by Muslim "Barbary" or "barbarian" pirates
from North Africa. The marauding characters in these narratives
engaged in sexual deviance and tyrannical mistreatment of prisoners,
and they often forced conversions to Islam. These texts reinforced
colonial observers’ view of Islam as a superstitious tangle of
works-righteousness constructed around a fanatical impostor.

Protestants used images of Islam in religious disagreements within
and outside the fold. Roger Williams invoked "Mahomet" the impostor
to critique Quakerism in his 1676 book G. Fox Digg’d out of His
Burrowes. George Whitefield exchanged anti-Islamic barbs with
antirevivalist critics, who in turn compared the great itinerant’s
methods to those of the "enthusiast" Muhammad. Even Jonathan Edwards
imagined Islam’s place in the Christian cosmos as one part of Satan’s
doomed kingdom. He took news of Muslims converting to Christianity
as a signal that Jesus’ return was imminent.

Polemical uses of Islam proliferated from the late 18th into
the 19th century. In the Revolutionary and early national
periods, imagined Islam took on the political freight of
antirepublicanism. Traditionalists classed antebellum religious
innovations as defective, along with Islam; the Mormon prophet became,
for instance, "The Yankee Mahomet." Concerns about resurgent Barbary
piracy shaded into abolitionists’ rhetoric; slaveholders were as bad
as barbarian Muslim captors.

The American Board of Commis sioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM)
spearheaded early-19th-century attempts to evangelize Muslims (rather
than simply imagining them) as a way to hasten the millennium. Legal
strictures against proselytizing non-Christians in the Ottoman
Empire, however, meant that Christian missionaries there usually
worked only among Orthodox Chris tians. If they could be converted to
Protestantism, they would witness powerfully to their Muslim neighbors.

ABCFM missionary Cyrus Hamlin, an experienced hand in Turkey, shifted
away from this approach. In his memoir Among the Turks, published in
the 1870s, he did not denigrate Islam as a religion. He promoted social
service and Muslim "uplift." Reformed Church leader Samuel Zwemer
was another sophisticated missions strategist, "the most influential
American Christian missionary to Muslims of his time." He joined
a postmillennial confidence in the imminent demise of Islam with a
commitment to social service–a fusion of conservative theology and
modernist methods that later controversies within U.S. Protest antism
drove apart. Zwemer’s example led mission organizers to acknowledge
past failures to deal respectfully with faithful Muslims as spiritual
brothers and helped them to formulate a comprehensive strategy for
reaching them with the gospel.

World War I pushed this moderation toward a somber millennialism. Some
American Christians, including ABCFM missionaries, interpreted the
war as a strictly political event. Others, however, worried that
events such as the Armenian genocide in Turkey revealed a cosmic
conflict brewing between Christianity and Islam. (One strength
of Kidd’s book is its insistence on the diversity of Protestant
evangelical opinion.) Prophecy-watchers thought the war presaged
millennial transformation: the British capture of Jerusalem, the
Balfour Declaration and the formation of the League of Nations
fit some interpretations of the book of Daniel. They also began to
think more pointedly about how Christianity could take political
advantage of Islam’s apparent postwar vulnerability. As the
fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1910s and 1920s heated
up, conservatives rededicated themselves to conversionary missions,
giving no quarter to non-Christian religions. Groups such as the
Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Sudan Interior Mission
acted on views of Islam as Christianity’s great cosmic foe.

The postwar landscape that Kidd surveys in the second half of the
book probably looks more familiar to his readers than any other
in the book. The Holocaust and the creation of Israel fueled both
a cataclysmic, dispensational view of Islam’s destruction and a
de-emphasis on missions. Islam’s anticipated demise became a kind
of prophecy placeholder, marking the way to Israel’s triumphant
expansion and the Jews’ subsequent conversion to Christianity. Voices
like Kenneth Cragg’s in The Call of the Minaret (1956), clear about
Muslims’ need for the Christian gospel while wary of extreme Zionist
energies, faded. Dispensationalist Christians overwhelmingly supported
Israel as a matter of prophetic correctness. Cold-war concerns about
Russia’s designs on Israel bolstered conservative Christian support
for American anticommunism as biblical prophecy became the playbook
for geopolitical engagement.

Still, some evangelical conservatives tried to temper assumptions about
the inevitability of conflict with an insistence on the political roots
of the conflict between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews. In 1969,
for instance, Charles Ryrie of Dallas Theological Seminary cautioned
that "a concern for people, more than for politics or even prophecy,
brings the Palestine problem into proper perspective." As the furor
over Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,
demonstrated, such voices may not be welcome in contemporary
discussions of Israel and Palestine. But Kidd shows that they have
sounded clearly in years not too far past, giving hope that they
might return.

Through the revival of Christianity in Indonesia in the 1960s, the
rise of OPEC and the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s, and the events
of 2001, Americans’ focus on the Middle East has intensified. Missions
to Muslims–or at least conversations about them–have continued. Yet
Islam has, over the past several decades, taken on new force as the
image of Christianity’s foil, explaining some Christian conservatives’
support of the Bushes’ wars in Kuwait and Iraq. New dispensational
readings of biblical prophecy claim that the Antichrist will be a
Muslim, explaining some Christian conservatives’ suspicion of Barack
Obama’s Islamic background.

Still, Kidd explains, other conservative Christians read prophecy
differently–by containing political events in a political realm
and holding to a spiritual promise of redemption for all through
Christ, not through Jerusalem. In the words of one conservative
observer, "Arabs, too, have a prophetic future." This moderating yet
consistently Christian voice seems always to be there. Indeed, Kidd
makes an interesting though not thoroughly compelling case for seeing
George W. Bush as a brake on hardline Christian prophecy-watchers
who hoped, post-9/11, for the destruction of Islam at the hands of
the U.S. military.

Many of the motifs of earlier conversations about Islam recur in
early-21st-century imaginings: an insistence on Islam’s demonic
or violent nature, for example, and on its inevitable, ultimately
unsuccessful challenge to Christianity. Our skittishness toward
Islam has a long history, but we have been shadowboxing an imagined
Islam. Kidd suggests that Americans may now be reaping the whirlwind,
and his book offers an informative tonic that might move Christians
in the U.S. beyond deeply embedded suspicions and into more hospitable
encounters with Muslims at home and abroad.

Anne Blue Wills teaches the history and culture of U.S. religions at
Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.