Rhetorics of Race and Religion on the Christian Right: Barack Obama and the War on Terror

by Samuel P. Perry

As the first African American president, Barack Obama faced unique challenges and obstacles when addressing issues of race. While rhetorical attacks on the basis of race directed at Obama were not unexpected, many of the most consistent racially-motivated criticisms of Obama were associated with his religious identity. The Jeremiah Wright controversy gave way to the birther and ‘secret Muslim’ conspiracy theories, while anxieties about Obama’s identity proved particularly potent as modes of political attack in the context of the war on terror. This book examines the ways in which those attacks often originated in the rhetoric of the Christian Right and the ways in which these theories circulated amongst the Christian Right. Perry argues that the intersections of race and religion in American politics produced rhetoric that often caricatured Obama as un-American, anti-Christian, and an enemy of the state. By exploring the arguments used to cultivate these characterizations and tracing the roots of conspiracies that worked to delegitimize Obama’s religious identity through racial claims and stereotypes, a clearer picture emerges of what is at stake when people can no longer separate religious convictions from political arguments.

166 pages, Hardcover

Published November 20, 2019

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was honestly a fascinating and instructive read in the ways that religious rhetoric has combined with rhetorics of politics and race to create a complex situation that had significant implications for the Obama administration and continues to merit consideration in political issues today. Perry's writing deftly handles theological and philosophical issues, demonstrating their interrelated nature and the variety of consequences that spread from their entanglements. And at the core of this examination is a wonderful and admirable spirit of advocacy, using the highest standards of scholarship to not just analyze arguments but to advance them in the name of combatting racist power structures and discourses. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its mix of strong, thorough arguments communicated in an easy-to-read, engaging, and often biting style. The stakes have never been higher in considering the relationship between religious and political discourses about race, and this book provides a stellar entry into understanding the complexities of those discourses in the modern era.