As with any project like this, there are too many people to thank. I have had so much support from my family, friends, and colleagues that I could write a book on the grace those around me supplied to get this book done. First, I would like to thank the Honors College at Baylor University for funding conference travel that helped develop these ideas and for a summer sabbatical that helped to...

To understand race and racism in the United States, it is necessary to understand the rhetorical connections between race, religion, and politics in the United States. These three pieces of American identity—the political, the...

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash of Flight 93, Americans were ready to believe. Aporias, the perplexities and burdens of overcoming disbelief when navigating an argument,1~1. Aristotle, trans. John Warrington, Metaphysics. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co 1961, Bk 3, 995a27-b2. regarding the characterizations of others—enemies—abated considerably. Americans needed little convincing that a fight was coming; all they needed was a clear explication of the sides involved. President George W. Bush obliged by characterizing the sides in the war on terror as good and evil, with us or against us. In his September 20, 2011, address to a Joint Session of Congress, Bush plainly stated, “You’re either with or against...

During the 2008 primaries and presidential campaign, Obama’s association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright stirred controversy. The Wright controversy stripped away Obama’s connection to an established African American Christian identity by calling into question whether or not sermons delivered in black churches stand as a valid form of Christianity in the American political realm. Wright became a news sensation when then candidate Obama, a member of the congregation at Trinity United Church of Chicago, was made to answer for and explain imprecatory remarks made by Wright at the end of one his sermons. Wright impugned, “Not ‘God Bless America’; God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is...

Another line of delegitimizing Barack Obama’s identity that emerged prior to his campaign for president, but became prominent early on in the campaign, and carried through his presidency was the claim that Obama was not born in the United States.

The U.S. policies and the cultural zeitgeist concerning the war on terror have to a large degree focused only on radical jihadist groups. Moreover, religious extremism and fundamentalism located only or uniquely in Islam became the raison d’être for terrorists and terrorism within the rhetorical construction of the war on terror.

The argument of this book has essentially been that the rhetorics of the Christian Right have become the rhetorics of the GOP to the extent that when Obama became president the coded racism and not so coded racism leveled at him by critics was often couched in religious language, arguments, and delivered in the style of evangelical and fundamentalist anxieties concerning the persecution of Christians. The war on terror would have been undertaken by any president that one readily imagines. Even in an alternate reality where Bush v Gore turns out differently or the electoral college was not the deciding factor in the 2000 presidential election, it is not hard to imagine Al Gore doubling down on Bill Clinton’s existing policies on Afghanistan and rushing into a war that ostensibly has no real resolution.1~1. Eric Knecht, “U.S., Taliban Talks End for Now with No Afghan Peace Deal.” Reuters, March 13, 2019....

Samuel P. Perry is associate professor in the Honors College at Baylor University, director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core rhetoric programs, and an affiliate faculty member of the Communication Department. His work deals with rhetorics of race and racism, as well representations of violence and extremism.

This series will provide space for emerging, junior, or senior scholars engaged in research that studies rhetoric from a race or religion perspective. This will include studies contributing to our understanding of how rhetoric helps shape race and/or religion and how race and/or religion shapes rhetoric. In this series, scholars seek to examine phenomenon from either a historical or contemporary...