Chapter 13

WHY WE WANT TO KILL YOU

IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER 11, ISLAM REPLACED communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism. “The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire,” explained the NAE’s Richard Cizik. Evangelicals’ pro-Israel sympathies had fueled anti-Muslim sentiments even before the terrorist attacks, and in the 1990s, as evangelicals looked for alternatives to a foreign policy agenda long framed by Cold War categories, many had turned their attention to the persecution of Christians in other nations, attention that often ended up focusing on the oppression of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. After September 11, the long history of Christian Zionism and heightened interest in the fate of global Christians became intertwined with evangelicals’ commitment to defend Christian America. Once again, the line between good and evil was clearly drawn. In the days after the attack, President Bush spoke of ridding “the world of evil-doers,” and he warned Americans that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” Some found this rhetoric disturbing, prompting Bush to set aside talk of crusades and take pains to distinguish Islamic extremism from the faith as a whole. But to conservative evangelicals, such language made perfect sense.¹

Billy Graham’s son Franklin called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” Pat Robertson assured his viewers that Muslims were “worse than the Nazis.” James Dobson began to characterize Islamic fundamentalism as one of the most serious threats to American families, explaining that “the security of our homeland and the welfare of our children” were, after all, “family values.” Ted Haggard agreed, insisting that spiritual warfare required “a virile worldly counterpart” lest his kids “grow up in an Islamic state.” In the fall of 2002, 77 percent of evangelical leaders held an overall unfavorable view of Islam, and 70 percent agreed that Islam was “a religion of violence.” Two-thirds also believed that Islam was “dedicated to world domination.”²

The Christian publishing industry helped fuel evangelical fear and strengthen support for preemptive war. Alongside Bible studies and devotionals, Christian bookstores stocked foreign policy titles such as From Iraq to Armageddon and Iran: The Coming Crisis, along with books such as Secrets of the Koran, Married to Muhammed, and The Islamic Invasion. New Man, the magazine of the Promise Keepers movement, carried ads for Mike Evans’s The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps, which issued a call for Americans to awaken to the threat of Islamofascism, “the greatest threat America has faced since the Civil War.” The message was clear: the Islamic threat demanded a robust military response. Even the Quiverfull movement participated in this rhetoric, noting that children would provide combatants in the war against Islam. And, of course, authors like Oliver North and Chuck Holton turned to fiction to stir up fear of radical Islam. But evangelicals also peddled fiction as fact in their effort to raise the alarm about the threat Islam posed to America, and to American Christians in particular.³

IN THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11, several “ex-Muslim terrorists” took the evangelical speaking circuit by storm, offering audiences a firsthand account of the Islamic threat. The most influential of these were the Caner brothers, Ergun and Emir, whose 2002 book Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs was a runaway bestseller in evangelical circles. The brothers had converted to Christianity in their teens, after Ergun attended a Baptist revival meeting, and they ended up at Criswell College in Dallas, where they met Paige Patterson, Criswell’s president. Patterson became like “a surrogate father,” and when Patterson left Criswell in 1991 to take up a position at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, they followed. It was Patterson who convinced them to write Unveiling Islam after the terror attacks, and in its first year the book sold 100,000 copies; it would eventually approach 200,000 in sales.⁴

In Unveiling Islam, the Caners told of growing up as devout Muslims, but after the attacks on America they felt compelled to expose the faith as violent and dangerous. War was “not a sidebar of history for Islam,” they wrote, but “the main vehicle for religious expression.” Muslims quickly raised red flags concerning a number of assertions in the book, accusing the brothers of “either purposely or ignorantly” presenting “half-truth after half-truth, mischaracterization after mischaracterization and falsehood after falsehood.” But the book told conservative evangelicals exactly what they wanted to hear.⁵

Inspired by the Caners’ book, Jerry Vines, former president of the SBC, denounced Islam in provocative language: “Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last of which was a 9-year-old girl.” Speaking on the eve of the Southern Baptists’ annual convention in 2002, Vines denied that Muslims and Christians worshiped the same God: “Allah is not Jehovah,” he insisted, and “Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist.” (When President Bush addressed the SBC gathering via satellite the next day, praising Baptists as “among the earliest champions of religious tolerance and freedom,” the irony was not lost on some observers.) Vines’s claims struck many as extremist, but he quickly drew the support of fellow evangelicals. Falwell jumped to his friend’s defense, explaining how Vines had hard evidence from Unveiling Islam. “If you want to raise the ire of the mainstream press and the swarm of politically-correct organizations in this nation, just criticize Islam [as Dr. Vines learned],” Falwell wrote to his newsletter subscribers. When asked about his support for Vines a few months later, Falwell didn’t mince words: “I think Mohammed was a terrorist.” Falwell’s remarks unleashed a global furor. The Iranian foreign minister condemned Falwell’s comments, intimating that they were “part of a propaganda war by the US mass media and the Zionists” intent on sparking “war among civilisations.” The British foreign secretary called Falwell’s comments “outrageous and insulting.” In India and Kashmir protests erupted; in the Indian town of Solapur violence left at least eight people dead. Falwell ended up apologizing, claiming he “intended no disrespect to any sincere, law-abiding Muslim.”⁶

In 2003, Falwell hired Ergun Caner to teach at Liberty University’s School of Religion, and in 2005 Caner was appointed dean of the school’s seminary, the first former Muslim to head an evangelical seminary. Caner saw himself as part of “a new generation of new evangelists who are provocative, cultural and yet conservative”—a generation who would “sit in the back of the bus no more.” He gained a reputation for his “sometimes politically incorrect style.” Speaking before predominantly white evangelical audiences, Caner was known to mock black Christians and make fun of Mexicans—they were good for roofing and lawn care. Under Caner’s dynamic leadership, seminary enrollment tripled. The Caner brand of Islamophobia continued to sell, and the brothers became among the most sought-after speakers on the evangelical circuit. Televangelist John Ankerberg promoted Caner’s teachings across his media empire, reaching an estimated 147 million viewers along with millions more through his global radio and online presence. Booked years out at evangelical churches and schools, the Caners were also invited to speak to law enforcement and active-duty military.⁷

The more Caner spoke, the more he embellished his story, spinning yarns of growing up in Turkey and being trained as a jihadist intent on destroying Christian civilization. Eventually Caner’s tales started to catch up with him. Muslim and Christian bloggers began to dispute many of his claims. He hadn’t grown up in Turkey, but rather had been born in Sweden and at age three moved to Ohio. After his parents’ divorce he was raised by his Swedish Lutheran mother. He’d never been involved in Islamic jihad, he hadn’t bravely debated dozens of Muslims, and his thick Middle Eastern accent was a sham. Moreover, he got basic facts wrong about Islam. In the spring of 2010, Liberty University investigated allegations against Caner but declined to take action; Liberty’s board concluded that he’d “done nothing theologically inappropriate.” Not about to let facts get in the way of a greater truth, Focus on the Family decided to rerun a 2001 interview with Caner in which he had put forward many of the now-disputed claims. Critics, however, refused to back down, and in the summer of 2010 Liberty bowed to pressure and demoted Caner, though he would stay on as professor. Even then, they attributed the move to “discrepancies related to matters such as dates, names and places of residence,” hardly the full-throated censure critics were demanding.⁸

The Caner brothers weren’t the only “self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorists” making the rounds on the evangelical speaking circuit in the wake of 9/11. Together, Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem formed their own “traveling anti-Muslim sideshow.” Shoebat, a Palestinian American evangelical convert, claimed to have been a member of the PLO and to have bombed an Israeli bank. Anani, a Lebanese-born Canadian, claimed to have joined a militia at the age of thirteen, “trained to become a black belt and an expert with daggers and knives,” and to have killed hundreds of people before meeting a Southern Baptist missionary and getting saved. It was Saleem’s story, however, that was most remarkable—so remarkable that one journalist dubbed him the “Forrest Gump of the Middle East.” Born in Lebanon, Saleem claimed to have been recruited by the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood, taught to shoot an AK-47 by none other than Palestinian nationalist resistance leader and cofounder of Fatah, Abu Jihad, and touted as a model warrior by Yasser Arafat himself. By his own account, Saleem then moved to the United States to wage “Cultural Jihad on America.” He went to the Bible Belt so he could “take on the best of the best.” But then a Christian physician—and the voice of Jesus—led to his conversion to evangelical Christianity. He became an evangelist spreading the good news of the gospel and warning of an ominous Islamic threat.⁹

It was after Saleem came to his Christian college campus that Doug Howard, an expert on the Ottoman empire, began to look more closely at Saleem’s backstory. Saleem had claimed to be a descendent of “the Grand Wazir of Islam,” but Howard knew there was no such thing as a “Grand Wazir.” He discovered that Saleem’s real name was Khodor Shami, that he had worked for Pat Robertson’s CBN for sixteen years and in 2003 had joined the staff at Focus on the Family. In 2006 he’d founded his own nonprofit, Koome Ministries, from which he drew a salary and a generous expense account. Determined to get to the bottom of Saleem’s nonsensical claims, Howard contacted Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, in the fall of 2007. Focus on the Family had been actively promoting an anti-Islamic agenda as part of its ministry, so Howard was surprised to learn that they, too, had become skeptical of Saleem’s claims—not only his tales of a violent terrorist past, but even his claim to have kicked a game-winning field goal for the Oklahoma Sooners. (Saleem/Shami never played for the Sooners.) They had not, however, gone public with their doubts. Nor were they eager to do so.¹⁰

The narratives of Saleem’s fellow “former terrorists” didn’t hold up any better under scrutiny. In the words of a former Canadian security expert, Anani was “not an individual who rates the slightest degree of credibility.” The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, called into question Shoebat’s entire story. It turns out that religion played little role in his upbringing and there was no record of him bombing a bank. As Howard put it, “the most extreme thing he ever did was attaching Palestinian flag stickers to utility poles around town.”¹¹

Despite the numerous holes in their stories, all three “ex-terrorists” remained sought-after authorities in evangelical circles. Shoebat was “a favorite of the ‘Left Behind’ crowd,” addressing Tim LaHaye’s Pre-Trib Research Center and John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel events. He was also a featured speaker at the 2008 BattleCry convention, the initiative founded in the mid-2000s to recruit a younger generation of culture warriors, backed by Pat Robertson and Charles Colson. All three continued to speak at Christian colleges, conferences, and churches, and on Christian radio and television. They appeared on major news networks as experts on terrorism, spoke at prestigious universities and, in 2008, at the air force academy in Colorado Springs.¹²

The popularity of these “ex-Muslim terrorists” casts in stark relief the dynamics of an evangelical politics of fear. Trafficking in a pornography of violence, these “experts” divulged graphic stories purportedly revealing the sadistic violence of Islam, and in doing so dehumanized Muslims while goading Americans (and especially American Christians) to respond with violence of their own. With books like the not-so-subtly-titled Why We Want to Kill You, they positioned American Christians as victims, thereby justifying an extreme response. They accused any and all detractors of having ties to Islamic terrorism and used imagined threats of violence to bolster their own credibility. Anani claimed to have survived fifteen attempts on his life. Saleem claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood “put a $25 million bounty on his head” and warned that he had “a band of dangerous middle Easterners on his trail.” (Local law enforcement had no record of purported assassination attempts.)¹³

It’s not hard to see what this titillating narrative of imagined violence got the “ex-terrorists.” They sold books, collected speaking fees, and padded their own pockets. But what did it do for evangelicals who promoted their books, engaged them as speakers, and gave them a platform?¹⁴

Stoking fear in the hearts of American Christians played into the hands of conservative evangelical leaders, too. Just as Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, and Mark Driscoll had stage-managed in their own churches, evangelicals in post-9/11 America enhanced their own power by ratcheting up a sense of threat—a tactic that only worked within a militarized framework. Leaders claimed the moral high ground while validating their own aggression. In this way, the popularity of fraudulent ex-Muslim terrorists casts into stark relief the relationship between militarism and fear. Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power, individually and collectively? By inciting fears of an Islamic threat, men like Falwell, Patterson, Vines, and Dobson heightened the value of the “protection” they promised—and with it, their own power.

Not all evangelicals jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. In 2007, nearly 300 Christian leaders signed the “Yale Letter,” a call for Christians and Muslims to work together for peace. Published in the New York Times, the letter was signed by several prominent evangelical leaders, including megachurch pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, Christianity Today editor David Neff, emerging church leader Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Rich Mouw, president of evangelical Fuller Seminary. Notably, Leith Anderson, president of the NAE, and Richard Cizik, the NAE’s chief lobbyist, also signed the letter.¹⁵

Other evangelical leaders, however, voiced strenuous opposition. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, found no need to apologize for the War on Terror or to confess any sins “against our Muslim neighbors.” It was all quite confounding to him: “For whom are we apologizing and for what are we apologizing?” Dobson’s Citizen magazine criticized the Yale Letter for claiming that the two faiths shared a deity, and for showing weakness and endangering Christians. Apologizing for past violence against Muslims would make Christians in Muslim countries more vulnerable to violence, he reasoned. Focus on the Family urged like-minded critics to register their displeasure with the NAE and included the NAE’s PO box for their convenience. Dobson and other conservative evangelicals pressured the NAE to oust Cizik that year, both for his attempts at Muslim-Christian dialogue and for his activism on global warming. This was easily accomplished the next year, when Cizik came out in support of same-sex civil unions.¹⁶

Most evangelicals appeared to side with Dobson and Mohler. In 2007, white evangelical Protestants continued to register more negative views of Muslims than other demographics, and to persist in their belief that Islam encouraged violence. A 2009 survey also revealed that evangelicals were significantly more likely than other religious groups to approve of the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Sixty-two percent agreed that torture could be justified “often” or “sometimes,” compared to 46 percent of mainline Protestants and 40 percent of unaffiliated respondents. The widespread embrace of a militant Christian nationalism would have far-reaching consequences in the age of terror.¹⁷

SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE MILITARY, including at the highest levels of leadership, evangelicals who had embraced a militant interpretation of their faith used their positions of power to advance their religious agenda, which they saw as wholly fused with their military mission. Such was the case for Lt. Gen. William G. (Jerry) Boykin.

In the course of a storied military career, Boykin served in an Airborne division in Vietnam and as a Delta Force commander, participated in the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 and in the invasion of Grenada, and took part, too, in the mission to apprehend Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the failed 1993 Somalian mission of “Black Hawk Down.” He later served at the CIA, and from 2002 to 2007 as under secretary of defense for intelligence under President Bush. In that capacity he played an important role in the War on Terror.¹⁸

In the wake of 9/11, President Bush worked to consolidate control over the military and intelligence communities. His immediate concern was the war in Iraq, but the administration had declared war on “bad guys” everywhere, and he and his national security advisors were already looking ahead to Iran. By issuing executive orders and placing the War on Terror under the Pentagon’s control, Bush essentially enabled Donald Rumsfeld to pursue the war off the books, free from restrictions imposed on the CIA, including the oversight of Senate and House intelligence committees. Rumsfeld had two key deputies in this effort: Stephen Cambone, a neoconservative defense intellectual known for his dictatorial style, and Jerry Boykin.¹⁹

Cambone set out to circumvent both the CIA and the State Department, and with his special-ops experience, Boykin “was the action hero” at Cambone’s side. The partnership was, according to one military intelligence source, “a melding of ‘ignorance and recklessness.’” This sort of workaround wasn’t unprecedented. A secret counter-insurgency program called the Phoenix Program had been instituted during the Vietnam War, and in the 1980s a covert unit had been created after the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran; deployed against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it helped lay the groundwork for the Iran-Contra connection. In the twenty-first century, under Rumsfeld’s leadership, the Pentagon was ready to fight fire with fire. “The only way we can win is to go unconventional,” explained an American advisor to the civilian authority in Baghdad. “We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.” Another official concurred: “It’s not the way we usually play ball, but if you see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the American things—and we’ve been the nice guy. Now we’re going to be the bad guy, and being the bad guy works.” Not everyone agreed. As one Pentagon advisor put it, “I’m as tough as anybody, but we’re also a democratic society, and we don’t fight terror with terror.” Rumsfeld, however, had been given the power to effectively establish “a global free-fire zone.”²⁰

A devout evangelical, Boykin pursued his assignment zealously. And he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. He was a frequent speaker at conservative Christian events, especially at Baptist and Pentecostal churches, and he nearly always appeared in uniform. A “circuit rider for the religious right,” he worked in tandem with the Faith Force Multiplier, a group whose manifesto advocated applying military principles to evangelism. Boykin depicted the War on Terror as “an enduring battle against Satan” and assured fellow Christians that God had placed President Bush in power, “that radical Muslims hate America,” and that the military was “recruiting a spiritual army” to defeat its enemy. Part of Boykin’s mission involved evading the Geneva Conventions, and he appeared to be working to replace international law with his own notion of biblical law. He understood himself to be in God’s direct chain of command. President Bush, too, was “appointed by God” to root out evildoers. Clearly, they answered only to the highest power.²¹

When word of Boykin’s speeches came out, Arab and Muslim groups accused him of bigotry and demanded his removal. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee called for an inquiry and for Boykin to step down until cleared of wrongdoing, but Rumsfeld backed Boykin, and he retained his position. The report concluded that Boykin had violated three internal regulations, but the substance of his remarks was not addressed; a senior defense official called the report a “complete exoneration,” finding Boykin responsible only for a few “relatively minor offenses,” technical and bureaucratic matters. Boykin emerged from the situation largely unscathed. Chuck Holton later had his fictional colonel come to Boykin’s defense: “Boykin got flambéed in the press for telling it like it is,” for saying “this war is against radical Islam, and the press tried to crucify him for it.”²²

Boykin, however, had other things on his mind. At the height of the scandal, he was also engaged in a covert operation to “gitmoize” the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Boykin had flown to Iraq to meet with the commander of Guantanamo, who had been called to Baghdad to brief military commanders on interrogation techniques. Under Rumsfeld’s command, Cambone introduced these methods—both physical coercion and sexual humiliation—at Abu Ghraib to extract intelligence on the Iraqi insurgence. All of this was carried out secretly within the Defense Department. When news, including photographs, leaked of the tactics being employed, members of the 372nd Military Police Company took the fall. Boykin remained at his post until his retirement in 2007.²³

Even after his retirement, Boykin pressed his agenda. He founded Kingdom Warriors, an organization to promote militarized Christianity, and he accepted a position as executive vice president of the Family Research Council. He also published Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom, a book endorsed by kindred spirits Oliver North and Stu Weber. Boykin decided not to submit the book to the Pentagon for advance review and ended up receiving “a scathing reprimand” after a criminal investigation revealed that the book disclosed classified information. Boykin was unrepentant, insisting that the censure was payback for his vocal objections to the Pentagon, particularly his opposition to the integration of women in the military. In 2014 Boykin published another book, coauthored with “terrorism expert” Kamal Saleem. CBN featured Boykin and Saleem on The Watchman, a program devoted to exposing how “radical Islam” was on the march around the world, and the Family Research Council touted their dystopian exploration of “what happens when Islam rules” as an “exciting merger of reality and fiction.”²⁴

EVANGELICALS WEREN’T the only ones renegotiating their views on foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, nor were they the only ones who thought President Clinton’s pursuit of humanitarian wars and peacekeeping missions betrayed American interests and values. During the 1990s, a group of young conservative intellectuals developed a plan for how America should brandish its unrivaled military and economic power, and though they were not particularly religious, these self-described neoconservatives did have faith—an expansive faith in American power. And they had their own patron saints: Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. They believed that there was a direct connection between domestic and global issues, and, by invoking patriotism to encourage sacrifice, they sought to instill “military virtues” in the American public. For these neocons, the military embodied the nation’s highest ideals even as it unleashed violence and death, and there was no contradiction. War would provide Americans with “moral clarity.”²⁵

The neoconservative agenda meshed exceedingly well with evangelical militarism. To the chagrin of neoconservatives, Bush had campaigned on a more restrained foreign policy, but the terror attacks had changed everything. In his 2002 State of the Union, the evangelical president christened Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “axis of evil” and suggested that preemptive war might be in order. Prominent neocons, including Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer, and Stephen Cambone, were already ensconced in the administration, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were sympathetic to neocons’ calls for military action. The invasion of Iraq provided the state of perpetual war that neoconservatives—and many evangelicals—had longed for. And it transformed President Bush into a warrior president, an identity memorably enacted in his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.²⁶

Whereas in previous generations a sense of the inherent risk of war had prevailed, a sense that war could lead to unintended consequences and that military power was “something that democracies ought to treat gingerly,” by the early 2000s this sense had all but disappeared. With evangelicals in the vanguard, Americans had come to see the military as a bastion of “traditional values and old-fashioned virtue,” a view only possible by turning a blind eye to reports of military misconduct and sexual abuse within the ranks. Members of the military tended to agree with assessments of their superior virtue, although some senior officials did express reservations, suggesting that such tendencies were not healthy in armed forces serving a democracy. But there were no serious checks on this inclination. When civilians become the leading militarists, the very concept of civilian control of the military loses its potency.²⁷

AFTER THE CONFUSION and frustration of the 1990s, conservative evangelicals had regained their footing in 2001. The election of George W. Bush placed a kindred spirit back in the White House, and the terror attacks ensured that foreign policy was once again framed by a clear battle between evildoers and Christian America. By the end of Bush’s second term, however, evangelical confidence once again began to falter. As the death toll mounted among US forces in Iraq, support for the war diminished among Americans generally, and among American evangelicals. Evangelicals still supported the war at rates significantly higher than the general public, but between September 2006 and January 2007 white evangelical Protestants who believed the United States made the right decision in using force in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein dropped from 71 percent to 58 percent. White evangelical support for the president reflected a similar disenchantment. Seventy-nine percent of white evangelicals had supported Bush’s 2004 reelection, but as his warrior status diminished, his approval rate steadily declined.²⁸

Support for the president dropped most precipitously among younger white evangelicals. In 2002, 87 percent of white evangelicals ages eighteen to twenty-nine approved of the president’s job performance; by August 2007, his approval rating among this group had dropped by 42 percentage points, with most of the decline (25 points) occurring since 2005. Younger evangelicals weren’t just unhappy with the president; since 2005, Republican Party affiliation among this demographic had dropped by 15 percentage points. For leaders of the Christian Right this was cause for alarm. As the end of Bush’s presidency neared, they looked ahead with trepidation. To their dismay, they were presented with two unsatisfactory choices for his successor.²⁹