Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration.
This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins..
Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning Drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress.
Reformers pursued the civilizing mission, a wide-ranging project that sought to protect child races from harmful influences while remodeling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States.
Yet this book argues that that racism was intertwined with religious impulses.
Antidrug activists expressed-and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives.
While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war.
Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses.
But as this new book shows, the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality.
Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration
