In the post-9/11 media, Americans have been shown a distorted and demonized Islam — and many like what they see.

By Bridget Purcell

Becky Fischer, the founder of the fundamentalist Christian children’s summer program in the new documentary Jesus Camp, finds inspiration in unexpected places. “Where should we [as Christians] be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our [Muslim] enemies are putting it. They’re putting it on the kids.” Fischer isn’t denouncing this strategy; she’s marveling at its boldness: “you go into Palestine, and they’re taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps, and they’re putting hand grenades in their hands.” Whether or not such Muslim “camps” actually exist, they nonetheless provide incentive for Fischer’s own programs. No grenades, just a more single-minded commitment to God. Fischer’s camp, “Kids on Fire,” emphasizes raising a young “army” to take back America for Christ. One scene of the film features a group of children, their cheeks smeared with war-paint, performing a manic military dance routine while Fischer raises her arms theatrically and chants “this means war!” over a room of sobbing campers.

Fischer expresses an increasingly common notion that, in order for Christians to combat radical Muslims, they must go beyond them in radicalism — must “out-crazy the crazies,” in the words of contributors on two separate media-review websites. Since September 11th, 2001, the American media has presented a largely distorted image of a hyper-zealous and militaristic Islam. It is this “Islam” that American Christians are reacting against, or, in Fischer’s case, emulating.

This “know thy enemy” approach is not a new strategy of the Christian Right; in fact, it accounts for much of the movement’s historical success. For decades, conservative Christians have successfully adopted the rhetoric, style and organizational strategies of adversary groups in order to both appropriate their appeal and undercut their influence. From anti-communism to anti-feminism, Intelligent Design to Christian rock, conservative Christians have, it seems, found something admirable in their enemies’ tactics — or have at least learned to imitate them credibly. Thus in a sense, Fischer’s remarks are part of a decades-old, tried-and-true strategy.

Still, some American Christians are taking this engagement with Islam a step further. This June, a group of seven African-American men — none of them Muslim — were arrested for planning a terror attack against Chicago’s Sears Tower. Although they had no formal connections to al-Qaeda, they pledged their allegiance to the network and described their plot as a “jihad” inspired by 9/11. The “Islam” shown to them in the media provided a vocabulary of resistance and a way of understanding their own relationship to mainstream America. A 2004 British documentary called Turning Muslim in Texas follows a group of former-Christians who, finding fundamentalism “not conservative enough,” chose to convert. The film features patriotic, pigskin-loving, gun-toting Texans speaking of their new commitment to Islam, and women in full hijab chanting “Allah-ho ack-bar” through thick southern accents.

This renewed interest in Islam is a strange by-product of September of 11th. In November of 2001, bin Laden mentioned in a video that the World Trade Center attacks would ultimately draw Americans to Islam: “this event made people think (about true Islam) which benefited Islam greatly.” This has turned out to be at least partially true, as more European-Americans are converting to Islam than ever before. As Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Ford remarked on NPR , “It is perhaps counterintuitive, [but] each time Islam is in the news it has generated a new wave of interest in the media and amongst the general public — and not just negative, because it’s also been accompanied by an increase…in conversion.”

It is counterintuitive indeed, but this mediated, militaristic Islam is attracting attention and spawning imitation — from Christ-camp kids in camouflage to hijabed southern belles. Once again, the media creates an image of Islam, which then prompts often-zany and sometimes dangerous reactions in the real world. There is, of course, an element here of the spectacular and the absurd, and it is certainly exploited in both Jesus Camp and Turning Muslim in Texas. These are imitative responses to an already-mediated Islam, and yet their products are very real and, as Jesus Camp reminds us, must be taken seriously.

Bridget Purcell is a recent graduate of the Religious Studies Program at New York University.