of large-scale arrests across the nation. Hundreds of immigrants were rounded up in the months after the terrorist attacks, often on flimsy evidence or simply on the basis of national origin. It is estimated that more than 5,000 individuals were arrested, the vast majority of them non-citizens who were deported after spending months in detention.55
During the same time period, an entire “War on Terror” public relations industry and culture developed, fueled and funded by a few charitable organizations. A network of organizations, right-wing think tanks, “scholars,” and activists generated and circulated propaganda to rally support for the detention and surveillance of American Muslims and for military actions abroad. These “disinformation experts” produced and disseminated books, policy reports, blogs, websites, and lectures designed to stoke fears of Islam and Muslims. Between 2001 and 2009, a small number of charitable organizations provided $42.6 million to produce information spreading hate and fear.56 The culture of the War on Terror means that Muslims and Islam are only seen through a post-9/11 lens, never on their own terms.57
In 2010, this anti-Muslim complex seized on a proposed expansion of the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center in lower Manhattan to imagine and popularize what became known as the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy. The Park 51 expansion project was designed as a community center that was to include far more elements than an Islamic prayer space alone. Two blocks away from the World Trade Center site, it was designed to include a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Its opponents, however, peddled the idea that Park 51 was a mosque to be built on Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. They raged that “the Muslims” were trying to take over the site and Park 51 would be their “victory mosque” in celebration of the Twin Towers’ destruction. The controversy reached its zenith that summer, and became a talking point for Republican elected officials and candidates up and down the ballot in advance of the 2010 federal midterm elections. To hear the media report on it, a mosque in lower Manhattan sounded like a new, unprecedented development. In fact, Muslim American communities had been present in Lower Manhattan long before 2010. At least two mosques existed near the World Trade Center, and several designated Muslim prayer rooms had existed within the World Trade Center buildings themselves before 2001.58
The Park 51 mosque controversy roiled the nation. CNN and FOX News polls showed about two-thirds59 of Americans opposed the building of the mosque. 9/11 survivors and victims’ families could be found on both sides of the debate, with some calling the plan offensive or insensitive because the perpetrators of the attacks had acted in the name of Islam. A number said that it was not an issue of freedom of religion, property rights, or racism, but rather that locating the center so close to Ground Zero was insensitive to the families of those killed.60 Commentators invoked a combination of American nationalism and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich declared: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”61
Voices like Gingrich’s, particularly among political conservatives, said they were just looking out for the country. Yet, on the contrary, they were weaponizing political, cultural, and racial differences between “Muslims” and “Americans” and, in doing so, defining the latter by implication as solely Christian. Gingrich and others like him were redefining “Muslim” aggression and “conquest” to include not just violence like the 9/11 attacks but any efforts by Muslims to assert themselves in US politics, law, and culture. After 9/11, this set of ideas became a central element in contemporary right-wing nationalism in both Europe and North America.
Whether it was about “sensitivity” or nationalist territorialism, these speakers had a particular version of America in mind—one that excluded Muslims. The “hallowed ground” where the World Trade Towers had once stood was now American sacred space. And even though that “hallowed ground” also held the remains of numerous Muslim American victims of the attack, there was no place there for their faith. The entire framing of the debate—“American” sacred space on one side, “Muslims” on the other—reified the idea that Muslims cannot be American, and that Muslim worship or Muslim grief is not American worship or American grief. It also placed American Muslims in a position of being called on repeatedly to denounce violence when it was undertaken in the name of their religion. Christians are never asked to do the same, despite the fact that far more terrorist violence in the US is perpetrated by right-wing White Christian nationalists than by Muslims.62
Belief in a Christian Nation
Christian supremacy has continued to thrive in White America. “[N]early sixty percent of White Tea Party movement identifiers believe America ‘has been and is now a Christian nation,’” a belief that spurs them to target minorities in hopes of maintaining their White Christian majority.63 Most press coverage about the “Tea Party” movement that emerged in 2010 described it as an uprising against taxes and “big government,” but paranoia about Islam was also prominent in the movement’s rhetoric and policy agendas.64 The movement gave a platform for mainstream politicians like Gingrich and many others to spout bigoted language and conspiracy theories from the fevered fringes of the political right. Islamic law, or Shari’a, was presented as a looming threat to the American way of life, leading legislators in states like Tennessee and Oklahoma to enact bans on the (non-existent) use of Shari’a in the state court system.
One state lawmaker in Oklahoma refused to meet with Muslim constituents unless they replied to a questionnaire asking whether they beat their wives. Elsewhere, both before and since the “Tea Party Summer” of 2010, elected officials shared hate-filled social media posts urging violence against Muslims. In 2016 alone, Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert wrote on Facebook that Muslims “wait for every opportunity to convert Americans to Islam or kill the infidels—that is what their holy book the Koran instructs them to do”; New Hampshire lawmaker Kenneth Weyler said giving public benefits to “any person or family that practices Islam is aiding and abetting the enemy”; and Florida lawmaker Tom Goodson asked a witness representing the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights organization, whether it was safe for him to ride in the Capitol elevator with her. Others, in local office, used subtler, loaded language to smear Islam as they opposed local mosque-building projects. These and other lawmakers’ comments play on popular bigoted tropes about Islam, which paint the religion as inherently violent and incompatible with life in the United States.65
A huge swath of White Christian America perceives the presence of religious diversity, particularly in public and civic life, as a threat to its existence. Political scientist Janelle Wong’s research, for example, shows that almost 80% of White evangelicals believe that “discrimination against Christians is now as big a problem as discrimination against other groups in America.”66 Like the imagined threat of “Shari’a law,” the perceived need to protect White Christian dominance in public space has been a continuing source of conflict. As the Supreme Court noted and endorsed in Greece v. Galloway, Christian prayer is recited in public spaces, such as state legislatures and the US Capitol, all the time. But when minority religious faiths’ prayers are allowed into those same places, it can spark outrage. In 2007, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invited Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation at the opening of the US Senate. As the pandit was about to begin, Christian extremists in the Senate gallery disrupted the Senate proceedings by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for the “abomination” of allowing “a prayer of the wicked,” of a Hindu, in the Senate chamber.67 The organization behind the protest later wrote: “The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ.… This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.”68
Eight years later, in 2015, the same pandit was invited to deliver the daily invocation for the Idaho State Senate. Three Republican lawmakers refused even to attend the prayer. Senator Sheryl
