Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781479817924)

Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs

Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as this new book shows, the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality.

Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed--and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the "civilizing mission," a wide-ranging project that sought to protect "child races" from harmful influences while remodeling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress.

This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins.

Author: Andrew Monteith
ISBN-10: 1479817929
ISBN-13: 9781479817924
Publisher: New York University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/18/2023
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2023
Library Journal 07/01/2023 pg. 72
Choice 01/01/2024