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In Decade of Nightmares, Jenkins explores campaigns against child abductions, the war on drugs, and a host of other moral crusades, arguing that most of these relied on inflated statistics, overblown fears, and the rhetoric of demonization. He is especially critical of the early Eighties "panic over missing children." Noting that some activists claimed that as many as 1.5 million children disappeared each year, Jenkins argues that the actual figure was probably less than one hundred.
Readers familiar with Jenkins' The Next Christendom and The New Anti- Catholicism may be unaware of his parallel career as a student of social problems. His 1998 book Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America was hailed as a solid contribution to the sociological literature. Decade of Nightmares employs the same analytical tools, showing that public fears often bear little relationship to the actual incidence of social problems.
A self-described Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, Jenkins has sometimes been labeled a religious conservative. A Catholic colleague of mine once praised him for having the same enemies as he did. In 2004, journalist Jeff Sharlet went further, calling Jenkins a "best-selling neocon crusader disguised as a scholar."4
Jenkins is anything but conservative in Decade of Nightmares. Calling the Reagan Administration's war on drugs "cranky and puritanical," he notes that the "range of acceptable opinions about drug policy narrowed frighteningly in these years." He also criticizes the false equation of homosexuality and pedophilia, unsubstantiated reports of ritual satanic abuse, and claims made by 1980s activists that child pornography was on the rise.
Early sociological scholars of deviance tended to romanticize the bohemian lives of their informants, displaying what Alan Wolfe calls "hostility toward bourgeois values." By contrast, the neo-conservative policy wonks of the 1990s warned against "defining deviancy down," calling for harsh new penalties against crime.5 Avoiding both extremes, Jenkins is equally hard on the Right and the Left, critiquing both the moralistic crusades of conservatives and the naïve openness of progressives. Reporting Kinsey researcher Wardell Pomeroy's shocking claim that adult-child incest could be "a satisfying and enriching experience," Jenkins notes that "little of the expert writing on child abuse published between about 1955 and 1976 can be read today without embarrassment." He also criticizes misguided efforts to mainstream hard drugs, ridiculing those who portrayed cocaine as no more dangerous than nicotine or alcohol.
Several chapters in the book extend Jenkins' critique of "moral panics" to anti-communism and the war on terrorism. An equal opportunity critic of Democratic and Republican foreign policy, Jenkins notes how Cold War fears blinded America to Middle Eastern terrorism. Critical of George Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric, Jenkins also comes down hard on Michael Moore's conspiratorial film Fahrenheit 911.
For Philip Jenkins, battles against evil empires and domestic conspiracies are ultimately rooted in the same Manichaean approach to American politics. In the final analysis, it is this ancient heresy that constitutes the real target of Decade of Nightmares. Arguing that both the Right and the Left "have adopted a worldview based on fears of subversion and predation," Jenkins criticizes the dualistic rhetoric of American politics. Refusing to engage in culture-war polemics, he recognizes with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that "the line between good and evil runs through each human heart."
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