A Review of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck (New York, NY: Crown Publishing group, 2024; 556 pages, hardcover, $33.00)
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.
The book is large in part because the topic is so broad and the reflections are so rich. But it is also because of the way he writes, which is both engaging and maddening. Beck moves in a meandering style that may strike some readers as annoying, eager to get on with it. But the asides are always thoughtful. Some of them have to do with religion.
A large component of the American paranoia and fear of the other was directed towards Muslims. I remember soon after 9/11 when I was invited to be a guest on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect television show, he and one of his other guests went on a screed about the Muslim menace. I tried to make clear that the gang involved in the 9/11 attack consisted of a small, stateless cadre, and that most Muslims throughout the world were as repulsed by the attacks as we were. “That’s what you think,” Maher retorted. It was another guest, the sportscaster, Bob Costas, who came to my defense, affirming that all the Muslims he knew were good people.
American opinion was conflicted about whether Islam is part of the problem. Within an activist political wing of Evangelical Protestantism, however, their judgement was clear. Beck quotes Franklin Graham—son of Billy Graham and heir to his televised pulpit—as saying that Islam was a “very evil and wicked religion” (189). He and other activist Evangelicals claimed that the religion was terrorist by nature. After all, it was founded by a Prophet who was not just a terrorist but “a demon-obsessed pedophile” (189). Beck cites the televangelist Hal Lindsey’s book, The Everlasting Hatred, as saying that the war on terror in general, and the war in Afghanistan in particular, were not just ordinary military engagements. They were a “fulfillment of biblical prophecy” and “a harbinger of the Armageddon” described in the Book of Revelation” (190). Lindsey estimated that ten percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were terrorists, or potential ones. That calculates to some 140 million Muslim terrorists.
Even though most Christians, including most Evangelical Christians, did not believe that Muslims were evil demons, the extreme Islamophobic position, buttressed by religious ideas, subtly infiltrated American culture and political life. Movies, television shows, and other products of popular culture often featured plot lines where the good guys were battling the bad guys, and the bad guys were frequently Muslim terrorists. Often, a “good Muslim” would be injected into the stories to remind the audience that not all Muslims were evil, but the overwhelming message was that there was something dark and dangerous about the world’s second-largest faith.
The political consequences were dire. Key members within the George W. Bush presidential circle were dubbed “neo-cons,” for neoconservatives, who regarded Western civilization as vulnerable to global forces, including especially the Arab Muslim world. In a widely read article (then made into a 1996 book), the Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington, wondered aloud if the post-Cold War world was entering an age of a “clash of civilizations.” Beck notes that Huntington regarded Islam as “a different civilization” that had problems “living peaceably with its neighbors” (203).
According to Beck, the idea of a “clash of civilizations” excited the neocon inner circle of the Bush administration—including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith. Huntington’s idea seemed to vindicate their worldview that Western civilization was under siege. It also gave U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the ideological support for the U.S. military invasion of two Muslim countries, first Afghanistan and then Iraq. In toppling Saddam Husain, American was not just removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, it also was helping Western civilization become more secure. Cheney labored mightily to find some connection between the socialist Saddam and the jihadi Muslims who flew the planes into the World Center and the Pentagon. Alas, however, there was none.
This did not stop right-wing news outlets from continuing to insinuate a camaraderie between jihadi extremists and anti-American leaders throughout the Middle East. It was a view that percolated throughout American culture. The popular support for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a remarkable example of the political power of Islamophobia in America during the height of the war on terror.
This reminded me of one incident shortly after the successful military invasion of Iraq, when a crowd of US military, surrounded by chanting anti-Saddam Iraqis (most of them Kurds), gathered at the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square in Baghdad’s center. But before the figure toppled, a young American soldier climbed up and covered its head with an American flag. His military superiors immediately ordered him down and removed the flag, embarrassed at the Americanization of what was supposed to be a great moment for the Iraqi people. When asked the young soldier why he did it, he explained to a reporter that it was in response to the Muslim attack on 9/11. After the soldier was told that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, the soldier said that, all the same, he felt that he was getting even.
This insidious and sometimes rampant Islamophobia was religious in two ways. The target of its paranoid suspicions was a religious culture. Moreover, the passion with which these fears were expressed was often fueled by religious fervor. When Islam is decried from the pulpit as “wicked” and “demon-obsessed” it gives spiritual blessings to an ethnic hatred that pervades the war worldview.
In Beck’s astute observation, this othering of Islam set the pattern of racial and ethnic discrimination that persists to this day. When the dominant culture dismisses Muslims as unworthy participants in civilized society, this opens up the permission structure for a whole host of minorities to be similarly demeaned. The subtext of the “Make America Great Again” movement is often an unspoken desire to return to an era when White Christians dominate public life. Though Hispanic immigrants are Christian, they are not White, nor is their religious culture compatible with familiar forms of Protestant or suburban Catholic religiosity. Beck draws a straight line from the Islamophobia unleashed by 9/11 to the fierce anti-immigrant animosity of today.
In an interesting aside, Beck observes that many of the neo-atheists of the first decade of this century utilized a hatred of religion in general to shield their strident Islamophobia. Beck points out that the writings of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, while blaming religion in general for violence and intolerance over the centuries, were especially virulent on the subject of Islam. In his book, God is Not Great, Hitchens lambasts all religions but reserves a special place for Islam, which he claimed never went through a reformation to adjust to modernity (2007). This reminded me of a time when I got into a disagreement with Hitchens over the war in Iraq, which he supported in part for cultural reasons, at a private salon in Los Angeles. I had the benefit of having spent some time in Iraq, which he had not, so I could evoke actual knowledge of Muslim modernity and rationality rather than just making stuff up.
The American example of toppling regimes it did not like had repercussions far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. In Beck’s view, the downfall of Saddam awakened similar attempts in other parts of the Arab world. Thus began the rebellions known as the Arab Spring. While they were political and not overtly religious, the populist movements they unleashed were often defined by religious identity and ethnicity. The repression of Sunni Muslims in Syria under the Assad family was countered by angry Sunni militia. Across the border, Sunni Arabs were also marginalized by Shi’a Arab regimes that seized power after the US military toppled Saddam. The two groups of alienated Sunni Arabs combined forces under the banner of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) that terrorized the region for several years. After the territorial defeat of ISIS and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the potency of Arab Muslim anger lingers on in both countries.
In this bold and thoughtful book, Beck has examined the new realities set in motion by the war on terror. He helps us understand that 9/1l was a fulcrum not only in US foreign policy, but also in the American way of viewing the world. It provided a metaphysical template for thinking of White Christian America at perpetual war with the other in ways that have eroded civility and tolerance. It may also have imperiled democracy itself.
References:
Hitchens, Christopher
2007 God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York, NY: Twelve Books.
Huntington, Samuel P.
1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster
Juergensmeyer, Mark
2017 Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th edition, Berkeley; University of California Press.
2025 Why God Needs War and War Needs God. New York: Oxford University Press