The Christian publishing industry sold war-supporting Islamophobia through books and fiction

Evidence

The Christian publishing industry helped fuel evangelical fear and strengthen support for preemptive war. Alongside Bible studies and devotionals, Christian bookstores stocked foreign policy titles such as From Iraq to Armageddon and Iran: The Coming Crisis, along with books such as Secrets of the Koran, Married to Muhammed, and The Islamic Invasion. New Man, the magazine of the Promise Keepers movement, carried ads for Mike Evans’s The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps, which issued a call for Americans to awaken to the threat of Islamofascism, “the greatest threat America has faced since the Civil War.” The message was clear: the Islamic threat demanded a robust military response. Even the Quiverfull movement participated in this rhetoric, noting that children would provide combatants in the war against Islam. And, of course, authors like Oliver North and Chuck Holton turned to fiction to stir up fear of radical Islam. But evangelicals also peddled fiction as fact in their effort to raise the alarm about the threat Islam posed to America, and to American Christians in particular. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 496

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly substantiates the commercial-artifacts methodology already used in ‘Grafting & Growth’ at the level of cultural transmission — here consumer publishing products manufacture a moral enemy and martial response.
• QUESTION: The claim that evangelicals ‘peddled fiction as fact’ — Oliver North/Chuck Holton novels treated as nonfiction — raises the question of how genre conventions blurred in this market; worth chasing whether readers actually conflated them.
• XREF: Overlaps with the reader’s earlier interest in how the moral-dimension of social reaction drives panic — here the publishing apparatus manufactures the panic target. — connects to: The Eurabia conspiracy theory about Muslim demographic domination has circulated widely through bestselling authors — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 50