Abstract
Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs tells the story of how American Protestantism helped generate a global Drug War during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Postmillennial eschatology, colonialism, white Christian nationalism, and Protestant moralities germinated the foundational elements of the Drug War within the Christian Temperance Movement. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these antidrug moralities grew to become supposedly secular, universal norms, shaping private attitudes and public policy toward both addicts and narcotics. While alcohol prohibition has long since waned, the Drug War continues into the present. Instead of representing a separate, private realm of human activity, “religion” coconstituted other spheres of social life, such as law, race, and science. This overlap mattered greatly for the Drug War. Americans enamored with “the civilizing mission” hoped to “civilize” racial others who they considered inferior, often seeking to protect them from substances they thought might regress them morally. The civilizing mission overlay widely held Protestant expectations about what the Millennial Kingdom would look like, and many believed it required them to train “child races” in Euro-American culture. As the century unfolded, “the millennium” gradually came to be called “progress” instead. This shaped how missionaries and other Christians understood their work when they authored and lobbied for drug policy. Furthermore, nineteenth-century scientific norms evolved into the eugenics movement, which led many Americans to read “morality” as a medical category—immorality was an inheritable defect. This medicalized Protestant moral norms, which in turn rendered addicts “degenerates” who were permanently unfixable.
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