Religion Masters Paper: Effects of 19th Century Scholarship on Dispensational Pre-Millennial Evangelicals

“The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is but the biography of great men.”4 In

Hafsa Turkyolu

U.S. Evangelicalism

Professor Williams

May 2, 2016

Effects of 19th Century Scholarship on Dispensational Pre-Millennial Evangelicals

This paper outlines features of 19th-century scholarship that led to the development of stereotypes about Islam, and illustrates three effects that this scholarship had on Evangelicals in United States. Evangelicals are only one movement under Protestant Christianity that span a range of denominations, organizations, and churches, so it will not be appropriate to generalize the effects to the whole of Evangelicals. However, because there are many factors that overlap within the denominations it is also hard to specify one evangelical group. In regards to this complication, the Evangelicals referred to in this paper are ones that emphasize dispensational pre-millennialism. The reason for this criterion of specification is related to the sense of urgency that comes along with the belief that end of age is approaching rapidly, which is a defining assumption of dispensational pre-millennialists. Other intentions of this specification will become clear later on in the paper.

Western Christian contempt for Islam and discrimination against Muslims dates back to the seventh century, so why is this essay specifically concentrating on the nineteenth century? The 19th century saw the development of "Religious Studies."  Before this development, Christians said hateful things about Islam and Muslims, but they spoke only to other Christians who already shared similar beliefs. Also, prior to nineteenth century anything that was written about Islam was seen as stories or narratives. In his book, American Christians and Islam, Thomas S. Kidd exemplifies this point when he writes, “He filled his account with stories of Muslim cruelties.” Although Religious Studies was established as "scientific" discipline that claimed to be unbiased, in fact it was very biased by its assumptions—namely, that Christianity is the best religion. Yet because those biases were hidden, and the field claimed to be a kind of science, the negative things said about Islam were no longer just something Christians said to one another. They were universal claims about how things were if looked at properly. As a result, one could say that these discriminating and critical remarks against “other” religions began to have more severe and deep-rooted consequences. Scholars either intentionally or unintentionally, meaning they were heedless of the fact that they were caught up in the ‘normative’ cycle, began promoting and elevating Christianity’s stance, which consequently, led to and provoked the deprecation of “other” religions. In this incident, the focus will be on the disparagement of Islam. This standardized depravation of Islam in the nineteenth century had three results that came out in relation to Evangelicals: the islamophobic ideas prior to this century continued to exist with even more legitimacy; this solidified Muslims as the ultimate ‘other/enemy’ of the Evangelicals; and seeing Islam as ‘Evil’ faith, evangelicals took on a more serious stance to missionize Muslims.

I became interested in the history of western ideas about Islam because of the attitudes that surround us today.  Polls regularly show that Americans have negative impressions of Islam and Muslims. For example, YouGov conducted a survey of 1000 adults in the U.S.A. between March 6th and 9th, 2015.  The participants were asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Islamic religion and the results showed that more than half of Americans, fifty-five percent to be exact, had an unfavorable opinion of Islam[endnoteRef:1]. The Pew Research Center had similar results when it asked 3,000 US respondents to rate members of religious groups using a ‘feeling thermometer’ that ranged form 0 to 100. 100 indicated the most positive rating while 0 indicated the most negative possible rating. In the year 2014, Muslims received the score of 40, which can be interpreted to mean that 60 percent had negative views and 40 percent had positive views[endnoteRef:2]. YouGov also teamed up with Islamic Relief this year to get an understanding of Islam’s impression in the United Kingdom, and what they found were no different from Islam’s impression in the US. UK citizens were asked what came to their mind when they heard the term Islam and most responded with words like “terror”, “terrorism” or “terrorists[endnoteRef:3].” These are only three examples of the many surveys that have the same results. After seeing these results I could not refrain from asking why, when, and how did this negative opinions develop? Some people would say they come from the behavior of Muslims, but I believe that is wrong. Others would say it comes from the unfamiliarity; too few people actually know any Muslims. So there must be more to the story, for other religions also have sore followers who commit acts of terrorism, but why is Islam the only religion that gets associated with terrorism? Not to mention, terrorism has no religion. Sometimes to understand the present you have to look into past, and in this situation this could be the best option.   [1: End Notes "Poll Results: Islam." YouGov: What the World Thinks. Accessed December 2, 2015. https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/03/09/poll-results-islam/. ] [2: "How Americans Feel About Religious Groups." Pew Research Centers Religion Public Life Project RSS. July 16, 2014. Accessed December 3, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: pewresearch/all (PewResearch.org | All Feeds). ] [3: Accessed December 2, 2015. http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/q2ibnn2wzp/tabs_HP_islam_20150309.pdf. ]

It may be a bold but not false to say that Islam has always been a major target of animosity. Of course, there is constant competition between all religions, which result in hateful behaviors towards one another, but Islam is probably the one with the most hits now. Where there is a loser there is always a winner, and that winner most of the time now is Christianity. When one examines the history of religions, he can see the intense and continuous power struggle between all religious traditions, but mainly between Christianity and all other religions. Most, in fact all religious traditions, probably have the ambition to be the one and only absolute religion, but when one looks into history of some Christian groups these desires are more prevalent, or it could also be that the instances of them acting in respect to these desires were recorded more in history. I believe this conquest for Christian superiority is a major factor influencing the stereotypical views on Islam now. In this paper, I will not focus on forceful and bloody methods of obtaining superiority because these sorts of actions can be found in almost all religions. Instead, as mentioned before, I will focus on distinct acts and ideas engineered by some Christian scholars that enhanced the role of Christianity, and show how upraising Christianity usually meant degrading others’ beliefs. In this case, the focus will be on the demotion of Islam and Muslims. As a result of the confrontation of the world’s two largest religions, Christianity came to represent what is good, true and peaceful, and Islam was left to represent all that was evil, false and violent.

Before secular ideas and religious pluralism were the dominant ideologies in the West, American Christians could simply rest on their assumption that being Christian was the only way to be. Of course, Christianity was superior to everything else. But today Christians cannot just rest on those assumptions and that kind of confidence. They are forced into a world that acts as if all religions were created equal, but this view may not be enough to tone down desire for superiority. As a result of these shifts in proclaiming supremacy, new methods emerged to dominate over the other in an ambiguous manner. One method was to adopt these ideas into the academic field in order to legitimize their hateful thoughts, and turn their stories into actual books of facts.

Play on knowledge has always been a big move. Even during the colonial times, Americans would print treatises to allow themselves to believe they had legitimate “knowledge” of Islam. Then these Anglo-American colonists would use their “knowledge of Islam to reinforce the superiority of their brand of Protestantism over its challengers, such as Deism or Catholicism, and to de-legitimize Islam and Muslims religiously, morally, and racially[endnoteRef:4].” Basically, they would hold up Islam as an actual fraud against which Christianity’s legitimacy would become more apparent. When Religious Studies emerged academics, either voluntarily or through intentional guidance, borrowed from these biased literatures on Islam, and unfortunately, the academic field was built on these prejudiced views. For that reason, despite how impressive and grand worldwide spread it achieved, Islam was constantly overlooked because most deemed it to be essentially rigid, perpetually intolerant and restrictive, extremely idealist, with an innate habit toward fanaticism. [4: Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009, 2. ]

Certainly, it was this perception of Islam that significantly altered the image of Muslims, whom just couple centuries before were regarded as the most advanced and elite group of people. As a result, in the course of nineteenth century, Islam obtained a new alienness because the rule of Islam, and Muslims in general, were now moderated and influenced to be viewed unsympathetically as stunted, rigid, and narrow. They were also perceived as the most eccentric of the “old” religions, which provided more reason for them to be recognized as irrational and anomalous. “If such fire-and-brimstone holy outrage was the defining characteristic of Semitic religion, it would seem highly unlikely that this hypercritical force, with an altogether negative, unpromising prospect for a career in constructive history, should have come to play an essential role, perhaps the greatest part ever, on the world historical stage.[endnoteRef:5]” All of these negative components and more were how Evangelicals viewed Islam and Muslims prior to the 19th century. When these perceptions got deemed ‘scholarly,’ this brought a sense of legitimization to Evangelicals and their thoughts, which opened the door for accuracy for other beliefs about Muslims. Before looking into these other beliefs, I think it is crucial to see the continuing consequences of this development of religious academia because it provides an understanding for Evangelicals actions toward Muslims. [5: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 176. ]

In order to portray the lasting effects of the nineteenth century developments, I want to briefly compare sections of writings of two scholars: Abraham Kuenen, who wrote his book in the nineteenth century, and Robert Spencer, who is an active writer in our current time frame. Kuenen was a Dutch Protestant theologian and a critic, whose writings mainly dealt with tracing the roots of Christianity back to the Hebrew prophets with the intention of getting rid of criticisms that were downgrading Christianity’s position. How can one go about glorifying Christianity without denouncing Islam? Kuenen was in fact one of these scholars, who represented Islam as an instance of deterioration and reversion from the beginning. He expressed Muhammedans as perpetrators of “fanaticism, constantly fired by colonists of Arabia and by pilgrims returning from Mekka, infectious too, like all fanaticism, which by its very nature, might lay hold of the masses of the population, and certainly makes them very dangerous subjects. But this infectiousness of the political idea of Islam is not proof of its spiritual supremacy[endnoteRef:6].” The unfavorable reality of Islam, endangering and infecting the whole world, is once again ascribed to the intolerance of its founder and to the Arab line, for, in Kuenen’s opinion, “the Arabic nation was not the cradle but the boundary wall of Islam[endnoteRef:7].” In summary, for Kuenen Islam is a religion of fear, not of love. Abraham Kuenen’s book once again demonstrates and confirms Islam’s perception as the perfect example of fanaticism, intolerance, and confined strictness during the nineteenth century. “ It may be added that, despite better, far more extensive scholarship on Islam available today, little had changed about this image[endnoteRef:8].” [6: Abraham Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions Lectures Delivered at Oxford and in London, in April and May, 1882,. London: Edinburgh, Williams and Norgate, 1882,33. ] [7: Abraham Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions Lectures Delivered at Oxford and in London, in April and May, 1882,. London: Edinburgh, Williams and Norgate, 1882,55. ] [8: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 197. ]

Robert Spencer is a conservative Catholic, who may currently be the most active and renowned anti-Islamic apologist. His books are a perfect example of these persisting stereotypical perceptions of Islam. He has a similar anti-Islamic tone like Kuenen, and most of the nineteenth century scholars. Almost in every section of his books, one can see reminisces of the prejudices about Islam that were intellectualized in nineteenth century, like Islam being an intolerant, narrow, and lacking religion. But he mainly emphasizes the idea of Islam being a violent religion. The titles of his books are enough evidence of this priority: Not Peace But a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West , Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. The list can be expanded. One can estimate the material dealt in these books, which have such Islamophobic titles.

I perceive his immense number of books as an extension and more detailed explanation of the agendas of previous scholars. For instance, Abraham Kuenen briefly mentions his opinion of Islam being a religion of fear rather than love. Robert Spencer takes this modest implication and elaborates it in almost all his books. He dedicates one whole book to support this supposition; Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. After supporting his argument with evidence that he clearly nit-picks, he comes to a similar conclusion as Kuenen, “ Christianity is a religion of peace, and it is a religion without jihadist movement. Islam is a religion of the sword and there are, by even the most conservative estimates, more than one hundred million active jihadist seeking to impose sharia not only in the Islamic world, but in Europe and ultimately in the United States[endnoteRef:9].” As this quote hints, a theme that was not active in the nineteenth century was imposing fear in people against the “other”, in this case against Islam. Whether it is a new theme or a former theme, they are all used for the same purpose and that is to authorize Christian superiority. Even though, the methods used differ this ambition still continues to exist and, most likely, is what still impacts stereotypical outlooks on Islam. [9: Robert Spencer, Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't. Washington, DC: Regnery Pub., 2007, 209. ]

Many conservative Protestants, including Evangelicals, are highly influenced by Spencer’s arguments. A well-known anti-Islamic evangelical is Ergun Mehmet Caner, a Swedish-American academic, author, and Baptist minister, who became famous for his book, co-authored by his brother, called ‘Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look on Muslim Life and Beliefs.’ His book is also devoted to depicting Islam as a religion of violence, and by doing so it inevitably injects fear towards Muslims. Caner, like Spencer, focuses greatly on the concept of jihad and Prophet Muhammad too help support his negative claims. He selectively and misleadingly quotes versus from the Qur’an that rationalize jihad, and portray Muslims as individuals that love to engage in jihad to become martyrs. He devotes one whole chapter in his book to ‘exposing’ the “militant messenger”, who practiced polygamy, shed people’s blood to gain political power, and who supposedly received his revelations from demonic sources rather than God. While Prophet Muhammad is put down because he is accused of taking other peoples lives, Jesus’s stance is elevated because “he gave his life on the cross.[endnoteRef:10]” This book, as well as Kuenen’s and Spencer’s books, is most likely written out of frustration for the rapid growth of Islam in the West because when concluding all three authors emphasize the necessity of stopping Islam. [10: Ergun Mehmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner, Unveiling Islam: An Insider’s Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs. Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2009, 51. ]

As mentioned before, the legitimization of the negative views on Islam allowed Evangelicals to see and accept other views as true facts. One thought that Evangelicals came to emphasize more, in relation to formalization of pessimistic views on Islam, is the affiliation of Muslims with Satan. “The association of Islam with Antichrist was common in the colonial period[endnoteRef:11],” but it became even more popular during the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, a branch of evangelical theology known as dispensationalism emerged and developed this pattern by regarding Muslims as the inevitable enemy of God’s plan to restore the Jews to their ancestral home in the Holy Land.   According to these dispensationalists Arab/Muslim nations would ally with Russia and attack Israel with nuclear weapons, but the invasion would inexplicably fail, and the Antichrist would emerge from the states of the former Roman Empire. He would advise a seven-year peace treaty that would initiate the Tribulation. Before Antichrist comes into power though, either before the Rapture or after it, both Russia and Muslim nations would be destroyed. Once the Islamic nations had been destroyed, the Antichrist “would turn on Israel and unleash a horrific period of anti-Semitism[endnoteRef:12].” After all the commotions end and Jerusalem becomes one whole country again, that is when Jesus would return. This was the popular Christian prophecy that most Evangelicals began to cling onto more after the effects of 19th century scholarship on Islam. However, this prophecy changed after the 9/11 attacks. [11: Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009, 21.] [12: Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009, 157. ]

“ Perhaps the most distinctive change in Christian eschatology since 2001 has been the rise of speculation in some circles that the Antichrist would come from Islam, and particularly that he would be (mis-) identified by Muslims as the messianic Mahdi[endnoteRef:13].” The main reason for this alteration in the prophecy is due to the fact that most dispensational Evangelical’s saw Islam as a completely Antichrist religion that was fatally compromised by a demonic and antichristian spirit. Now that there were similar accusations made on a scholarly level, it made it easier and more approachable for Evangelicals to adopt this prognostication. Also, there were other occurrences happening that put the spotlight on Muslims and contributed to their association with Antichrist. First and foremost, Muslims became the number one public enemy of Evangelicals after the demise of Communism. Then with the 2001 terrorist attacks and their increasing number in the United States, many Americans began to view Muslims as a global threat. Either way though, both prophecies help solidify Muslims as the enemies of Evangelicals. [13: Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009, 159. ]

The end communism, controversies in Jerusalem, increase in problems in the world, and much more all bring along the belief that world is coming to an end.Evangelicals took it more serious to missionize the Muslims. This is their reaction to the academic formation of religious studies in 19th century.

Pat McEvoy, a secretary at a high school in Columbus, said she had known very little about Islam before the seminar. Her school has an influx of students from Somalia, and as she walked through the hallways she regarded these immigrants as ''a virtual mission field.''

She said she felt an obligation to save them from an eternity in Hell.

''If I had the answer for cancer, what sort of a human would I be not to share it?'' Ms. McEvoy said.

Ottoman empire end, Russia, isreal__>solidified

In this paper, I tried to outline some components in history, specifically factors that occurred during the 19th century, which led to the establishment of contemporary stereotypes about Islam and influenced the behaviors of dispensational Evangelicals towards Muslims. Earlier Christians could just assume their own superiority, but modern secularism implies that all religions are created equal. This change in society generated different responses in the 1900s, one being the invention of "Religious Studies", and the precise way in which that invention maintained the superiority of Christianity in a scientific guise. The establishment of comparative theology and the study of philology were other factors that were biased by a desire to prove the superiority of Europeans and/or Christians. All of these responses came out of Western context and was therefore alien to rest of the world. This resulted in the stereotyping of Semitic languages and Semitic peoples, including Muslims. This was a great change in perception because just a couple centuries before Islamic culture was recognized as advanced, civilized, and modern. To portray the lasting effects of the nineteenth century developments, I attempted to compare two scholars: Abraham Kuenen and Robert Spencer. Both authors had similar biased perceptions of Islam within their texts; it is rigid, outdated, intolerant, and violent.

I realize that I only touched upon a small portion of the 19th century scholarship, and concentrated only on one religious tradition so my argument can be lacking. However, I do believe with further research, better and more adequate results can be obtained about the effects of 19th century studies on not just Islam, but all religions. I hope in this paper I have suggested one possible way of reading this material, and have opened an interesting topic of discussion. Through this research I was partly able to answer a very intriguing question of mine concerning negative perceptions on Islam. But now I am left with an even harder question, and that is how should 21st century scholarship go about to annihilate these bias views within the academic field?