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A July 2005 Pew Research Center poll showed that even after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, Americans were generally divided in their perception of Islam, with equal numbers expressing a negative and a positive view of the religion, about 38 percent each. Self-identifying evangelical Christians outpaced all other categories with 47 percent expressing a negative view of Islam, while 52 percent of so-called "high commitment" evangelicals expressed a negative view. This pessimism surely reflects what evangelicals and fundamentalists in the pews have heard from some of their pastors. Famously, after 9/11, the 700 Club's Pat Robertson exclaimed, "Somehow I wish the Jews in America would wake up, open their eyes and read what is being said about them. This is worse than the Nazis. Adolf Hitler was bad, but what the Muslims want to do to the Jews is worse." Samaritan Purse's Franklin Graham called Islam a "very evil and wicked religion." Liberty University's Jerry Falwell said on 60 Minutes that "Muhammad was a terrorist." His comments spurred riots among Muslims in Asia, and elicited a fatwa from an Iranian cleric calling for Falwell's assassination. Falwell subsequently apologized. Pastor Jerry Vines of Jacksonville, Florida, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention, averred that Muhammad was a "demon-possessed pedophile."1
Are these comments just the overheated responses of incautious leaders following an unprecedented act of terrorism? Partly. But such conservative Protestant views of Islam have deep historical roots in America. Though the years since 9/11 have seen an explosion of conservative Protestant commentary on Islam, we also need to recognize that American Protestants have been thinking about Islam for a very long time.
I find at least three persistent themes emerging in Protestant thought about the Islamic religion. (American Catholic views of Islam have an important history, too, but telling that story here would require a much longer article.) First, American Protestants have used Islam to justify their own theological or political views. Second, they have dreamed of seeing Muslims convert to Christianity. Finally, American Protestants have inserted Muslims into systems of eschatology that predict the final victory of the Kingdom of Christ over alternative world religions. All of these uses have waxed and waned through American history, but Protestants have persistently marshaled them to validate their own spiritual and/or temporal beliefs.
How did colonial Americans become aware of Islam? There was of course a long history of conflict between Islam and the Christian world, complicated by shifting alliances. Events such as the second siege of Vienna, in 1683, when the Ottoman Empire—which had already absorbed a good deal of territory in Eastern and Central Europe—suffered a decisive defeat, would have been well known in America. (Though there were perhaps thousands of Muslim African slaves working on colonial American plantations, their presence had little impact on the way that elite Anglo-American colonists thought of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.2) It appears that the two main sources from which early Americans derived their impressions of Islam were the enslavement of Europeans in North Africa by the "Barbary pirates," and widely circulated books and sermons related to Islam.
Cotton Mather, one of Boston's leading ministers in the early 18th century, helped frame colonists' understanding of Barbary captivity with regular comments on the pirates. In Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather noted that in response to the provoking sins of New England, "God hath given up several of our sons into the hands of the fierce monsters of Africa. Mahometan Turks, and Moors, and devils, are at this day oppressing many of our sons with a slavery, wherein they 'wish for death, and cannot find it.'"3 Conflicts with the Barbary pirates would resurface and become one of the key foreign policy issues of the new American nation, generating a new round of captivity narratives and reflections on Islam.
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