Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs / / Andrew Monteith.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Monteith, Andrew,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Recovers the religious origins of the War on DrugsMany 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Protestant Moralities, Substance Use, and the Millennial Kingdom -- 1. Christian Temperance, Millennial Progress, and the Immorality of Addiction -- 2. Sin, Addiction, and Biomorality -- 3. Degeneracy, Eugenics, and the Great American Race -- 4. US Colonialism and Substance Use Prohibition -- 5. Protestants, Colonialism, and International Drug Reform -- 6. The Products of a Moral Panic -- Conclusion: The Long Arm of Protestant Hegemony -- Acknowledgments -- Archival Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author