Antebellum writers framed Islam as Christianity’s cosmic mortal enemy.

Evidence

Muslims had “contempt towards the gospel,” as Smith said in 1835, drawing on his experience in Turkey. Starbuck concluded in 1892, “Christendom and Mohammedanism have been misled by no false instinct in their unconquerable and deadly antipathy to each other.” 63 “The Gospel in the Mission Field has no more powerful or bitter foe than Islam, or the religion of the false prophet Mohammed” as a CMS article reported the same year. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger project on how the problem is relocated from ‘them’ (Islam) to ‘us’ (the frightened Christian subject) — the framing of inherent mortal antipathy assigns the conflict a cosmic inevitability that erases who started it.