This is an excerpt from my review of Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, published in Religious Studies Review. The full review is in a previous post on this webblog.

Every American over the age of thirty knows where he or she was on 9/11. In my case, I was on my way from my home in California to Philadelphia, where I was to give a talk on religious violence. I had stopped over at my parents’ house in Southern Illinois, near St. Louis, and was sleeping in the basement guest room when my older brother came in and woke me with the news. I gave a quick but unprintable response. Just then, my phone started ringing. It would not stop for several weeks. I had just published a book on the comparative study of religious violence that had a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cover. In the publicity tour for the book, I must have gotten into the rolodexes of radio and TV producers as someone who could talk about religion-related terrorism. Now they were desperate to find anyone who could help to make sense of what was going on.

            What 9/11 did to disrupt my life, however, was nothing in comparison to what it did to the whole country. In this intriguing and well-written book, Richard Beck has chronicled the ripple effect of that momentous day. The experience grew from stunned shock to a mobilization for warfare that lasted over ten years and still has implications for the country’s economic, political, and cultural life.

 On the day of the attack, however, the startled nation did not immediately think of war. As Beck makes clear, the initial reaction was shock, mixed with a deep sense of humiliation, compounded with fear. Dark forces seemed to encroach at the edge of what Americans regarded as the apex of civilized life. Beck invokes the historical memory of early American settlers warring with the shadowy forces of Native Americans as a precursor to this dread of being assaulted and humiliated by the uncivilized unknown.

But how should the American public make sense of this new assault? Beck explains that in the Pentagon, war was already in the air. In my own survey of the newspaper headlines that appeared later that day, in the afternoon editions on September 11, 2001, I found that none of them described the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in terms of war. It was not until the next day when President George W. Bush appeared on television that he said that the attacks were “more than acts of terrorism,” they were “acts of war.” On the Fox News Channel and other television outlets, Bush’s phrase “the war on terror” became incorporated into the standard logo for news reports related to the attack and the US government’s response. The logo would remain for months and years that followed.

            In this large and richly reflective book, Richard Beck gives an expansive discussion about how the war on terror has changed American social and political life and laid the groundwork for the contentious politics of the Trump era. The years of mounting paranoia about others, strident xenophobia, and the tightening of political and economic power have led to the moment when a proud and thriving democracy is on the brink of becoming a fearful and frightened autocracy.