This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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9/11 added ‘war on terror’ to US Christian Right’s racist agenda
By: []
Date: 2021-09
And yet we loved the ‘war on crime’ and the ‘war on drugs’ and Reagan’s invocation of imaginary “welfare queens”. We sang Lee Greenwood’s godawful country music hit ‘God Bless the USA’ at the end of our Christian school talent shows and believed that God would punish the US if our country failed to ban abortion and curtail LGBTQ rights.
The widespread claim that politics in the US has become more fear-based, violent and reactionary since 9/11 is surely accurate. America’s already hardly benign foreign policy took a turn for the worse, with George W. Bush and his cronies exploiting the events of that day in order to get the green light to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq. Hate crimes against Muslims – and Sikhs, and anyone perceived to be Muslim – rose drastically.
But, of course, those of us who were raised as right-wing Christians in the decades just prior to 9/11 were already used to fighting culture wars for the advancement of an aggressive, fear-driven politics of majoritarian grievance. ‘Jokes’ about Bill Clinton’s possible death, as well as speculation that he might turn out to be the Antichrist, were common in the Christian schools I attended in the 1990s, in Indianapolis and Colorado Springs.
After 9/11, it was easy enough to add a xenophobic ‘war on terror’ to our collection of abstract, racist ‘wars’. Thus, by the time Barack Obama became president, many on the Christian Right believed him to be both probably the Antichrist and a crypto-Muslim.
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