Evangelical leaders manufactured Islamic threat perceptions to inflate their own power

Evidence

Stoking fear in the hearts of American Christians played into the hands of conservative evangelical leaders, too. Just as Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, and Mark Driscoll had stage-managed in their own churches, evangelicals in post-9/11 America enhanced their own power by ratcheting up a sense of threat—a tactic that only worked within a militarized framework. … Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power, individually and collectively? By inciting fears of an Islamic threat, men like Falwell, Patterson, Vines, and Dobson heightened the value of the “protection” they promised—and with it, their own power. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 508

Categorization

• DEFINE: This frames the book’s central mechanism — manufactured threat as an instrument of leader power — in a compact, quotable form.
• XREF: Connects to the manufactured-moral-panic literature and to how protection rackets work politically — leaders profit from the fear they produce. — connects to: Both neocons and realists deploy an Islamic threat frame serving shared US dominance — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 744