Abstract
Andrew Monteith's Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs offers readers a compelling case study of the symbiotic relationship between cultural Christianity and Criminal Justice policy in the United States. The book shows how religious ideology, specifically trans-denominational conservative Protestantism, structured policy and practice related to drug use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religion's role was explicit in many instances, as shown in a substantive chapter on the Christian Temperance movement. Motivated by the belief that God called them to prepare the earth for Christ's return (postmillennial eschatology), Christian activists led the vanguard of prohibition and related movements to eradicate drinking in American culture. Equally important, Monteith shows how particular strands of Protestant morality infused scientific and political discourse more broadly. Thus, even when policy debates were framed in secular terminology, we find protestant moralities operating under the surface.
The heart of Christian Nationalism and the War on Drugs is unveiled in six comprehensive chapters. As described, the first chapter positions the Christian Temperance movement as a product of end-times eschatology. The subsequent chapters establish connections between protestant morality and various societal issues, such as physiological addiction, eugenics, racism, and colonialism. These chapters provide detailed accounts of how religion inspires and validates social action. For example, opium played an enormous role in international commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British and Dutch colonial empires were built on the economics of optimum. However, Christian missionaries serving Asia were repulsed by the trade, arguing that the drugs produced immoral and uncivilized behavior. Thanks to their efforts, by the 1920s, the League of Nations deployed a division to control opium. Monteith draws a direct line between Protestant worldviews and the evolution of drug control policy. Each chapter demonstrates how aspects of protestant morality gradually permeate the broader social structure, shaping the common understanding of social issues.
In line with contemporary progressive orthodoxy, Monteith identifies undercurrents of intersectional racism, sexism, and capitalist statism in this history. He argues that the cultural moral norms of nineteenth and twentieth-century America were inflected by “explicitly White supremacist forms of Protestantism” (p. 235). The book's fourth chapter, “US Colonialism and Substance Use Prohibition,” drives this point forcefully. Criminal Justice policy harnesses and directs the state's immense power. While this terrain should be familiar to many students of U.S. criminal justice history, criminal justice scholars rarely pause to consider the moral framework orienting our policies. The D.A.R.E. Program of the 1980s shares cultural DNA with the Anti-Saloon League of the 1880s.
Curiously, for a work with the term in its title, this book never explicitly defines Christian Nationalism. This is unfortunate as an increasing number of journalists, politicians, activists, and social critics invoke Christian Nationalism imprecisely to describe (usually in a disparaging manner) some confabulation of right-wing populism fused with evangelical protestant identity. A maturing body of social science suggests that Christian Nationalism is a distinct social and religious movement that diverges meaningfully from the evangelical movements of the nineteenth century. Whereas the nineteenth-century movements were anchored to spreading particular theological messages, contemporary Christian Nationalism pushes an identity. One presumes (inaccurately) that the United States was formed to be a refuge for persecuted Christian believers and calls them to rally in its defense. Contemporary Christian Nationalism lacks a coherent theology (or any theology) and instead sacralizes specific cultural boundary markers, confusing civic religion with Christianity.
The case studies in this book serve as a key to understanding our current moment. The book's explanation of end-times eschatology offers enlightening clues. Most Christians before the Civil War believed God commanded them to prepare the earth for Christ's second resurrection and 1000-year reign, prophesied in Revelation's twentieth chapter. This biblical worldview explicitly motivated direct voluntary action. Documented here are the ways this doctrine transcended denominational boundaries (e.g., Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) and unified protestant Christians in outreach efforts. Such unity was a tremendous source of social power that carried forward to the present. As each of Monteith's chapters shows, reform activities become insulated from critique when they gain sacred cover. The dangers of naive myopia ran amuck. Hence, many of the worst instances of Western cultural imperialism and colonial economic exploitation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bloomed under sacred authority. This historical context is crucial for understanding the contemporary Christian Nationalist movement striving to shape social policy today.
Students of Criminal Justice will find insight in the pages of Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs. First, it shows how many of our contemporary control policies emanate from religious mission movements. Second, these case studies draw a direct line between Christian worldviews and the secular ideologies that motivate social policy. Third, and finally, these historical accounts offer insight into the formation of the contemporary Christian Nationalist movement's efforts to shape social policy today.
