CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE BIRTH OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

The American crusade against intoxicants began earlier than you might think.

Monteith, a professor of religious history, offers a rigorous history that locates the origin of the contemporary so-called war on drugs in the Christian temperance movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author cites and investigates a matrix of American Protestant beliefs regarding social progress, race, and colonialism that, together, helped craft “a society where it seems self-evident that governments should regulate substance use.” This is a work of academic religious study, but Monteith explains with lay-level clarity concepts like morality and postmillennialist eschatology, which are essential for understanding the cultural context in which Protestant activism eventually came to dominate American politics around drugs and alcohol—which were, to them, less distinct than we generally think today. The author argues that the driving forces were Protestant beliefs that the Second Coming hinged on society’s moral perfection, which could be achieved through the cumulative salvation of sober-minded individuals. Because “Protestants frequently treated the mind as a sacred location for God’s work on earth,” they saw the distortions of drug and alcohol use as violations of “biomorality.” These beliefs, often coded in racist, anti-Indigenous, and nativist language, contributed to the moral panic of the eugenics movement. Monteith narrates a strategic shift in which activists—still ushering in the kingdom of God—came to downplay explicit religious arguments in favor of pseudoscientific progress narratives designed to appeal to an increasingly intersectional public. He does not deny that the drug war has been influenced by racism, class antagonism, and other secular forces emphasized in previous histories. Rather, he positions them all as tools and outcroppings of a “transdenominational Protestantism [that] held a profoundly hegemonic grip on American culture.”

An in-depth reassessment of the war on drugs, with lessons for students of American religion, crime, and White supremacy.