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By Thomas S. Kidd Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009, 224 pp., ISBN 9780691133492. Spiritual conflict with Islam has a long lineage in Christian thought. Bernard Lewis, the dean of Western scholars of Islam, points out that the two faiths have so much in common that they are natural opponents. Each conceives of itself as exclusively bearing God’s final message to the rest of mankind, correcting or completing prior beliefs. In addition, many adherents on both sides believe that the world is in the last stage of a millennial struggle. These parallels inevitably lead to hostility, says Lewis, and that is the real clash of civilizations. This is an ancient enmity. It persisted through the Crusades, the fall of Byzantium, and the Reconquista of Spain in 1492. Islam is the only religion that has ever imperiled Christianity’s very existence. For almost a thousand years, it threatened to conquer Christian Europe, through invasion as well as conversion and assimilation. For centuries, Islam, variously represented by Saladin, the “Grand Turk,” or the Ottoman Empire, was associated with the forces of darkness. In medieval folk eschatology, Mohammad and Islam were identified with the Antichrist or Gog. In American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, Thomas S. Kidd, an associate professor of History at Baylor University, has performed the enormous service of providing a much-needed, comprehensive, and reliable study of American Protestants’ attitudes toward Islam. In an admirably clear exposition, Kidd demonstrates that from Cotton Mather to the Christian Zionists of the present time, conservative Christians’ views of Islam have been intertwined with geopolitics, and have often been colored by fear. Many American Christians have seen Muslims as presenting posing a global threat, and they have responded with both denunciation and a desire to convert them. Kidd begins his survey with the Barbary pirates, who began to seize, enslave, and ransom Christian sailors in the early sixteenth century. The accounts of these events (which reverberate with recent news stories coming out of Somalia) took the particular form of the captivity narrative, which helped shape and reinforce Western stereotypes of Muslims and Islam. These narratives affirmed the superiority of Christianity and associated Muslims with Satan. That accusation became typical. Cotton Mather, who had some knowledge of the Qur’an, called Mohammad an imposter and referred to the pirates as “Mohametan Turks and Moors, and Devils.” As Kidd shows, the tone was now set for later denunciations. Jonathan Edwards spoke of Muslims, Roman Catholics, and heathens as the three constituents of Satan’s earthly kingdom. By the mid-nineteenth century, a branch of evangelical theology known as dispensationalism emerged and Book Reviews 255 256 Insight Turkey Vol. 12 / No. 3 / 2010 developed this pattern by regarding Muslims as the inevitable enemy of God’s plan to restore the Jews to their ancestral home in the Holy Land. Nineteenth-century missionaries sought to “redeem” Muslims by bringing them to Christ, but had little success. Kidd follows these efforts into the twentieth century, noting the very interesting fact that in 1932 a commission sponsored by John D. Rockefeller called for a new focus on collaboration, education, and service, not proselytizing and conversion. That controversial proposed change in direction fractured the Protestant missionary community. Among the most interesting foci of the book, and one of the most relevant for our own time, is Kidd’s discussion of Christian Zionism. He follows the enthusiastic responses to Britain’s capture of Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917, which many biblical literalists took to be a step toward the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy that the times of Gentile control over the Holy City would come to an end (Luke 21:24). Some dispensationalists believed that God had fought on the side of the British in order to set the stage for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. Many conservative Christians saw the establishment of Israel in 1948 as a crucial realization of God’s plan, and they regarded the Arabs’ hostility to the Jewish settlers as a futile expression of anti-Semitism at the end of times. As Kidd notes, many Biblebelieving Christians consider the Arabs to be the descendants of the biblical Ishmael. They believe that Arab antagonism toward Israel is a survival of Ishmael’s enmity toward Isaac. One of the strengths in Kidd’s book is its nuance. He notes, for example, that Southern Baptist writers expressed some sympathy for the plight of Palestinians and, by one account, most missionaries in the mid-twentieth century were pro-Arab. Christianity Today, the main publication of modern evangelicals, sponsored debates on the Israeli-Arab conflict that included rejections of dispensationalism and support for Palestinians. Evangelicalism is far from a monolith. In fact, it is radically individual, and many born-again American Christians today are critical of Israeli policy and sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. This is something that Kidd might have developed further, along with recent mainline Protestant movements demanding that certain companies cease doing business with Israel. Christian Zionism today remains true to its roots in biblical promise and prophecy. Dispensationalists, in particular, expect the Muslim world to ally with Russia at the end of times and be defeated in an attack against Israel. This was expressed in detail by Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. Kidd’s final section deals with the anti-Muslim comments by Pat Robertson et al. after 9/11, tracing the source of such views to Muslims who have converted to evangelicalism. Kidd concludes this excellent book with a welcome call for Christians to take Muslims seriously, to minimize or eliminate offensive language, and to highlight cultural similarities. He asks them in particular to reject sensationalistic stories about the ostensible evil and demonic character of Islam. Stephen Spector, Stony Brook University