The Mutual Enemy: Protestant Bias in the American Media Construction of Islam by the Conservative Christian and New Atheist Movements

Scholars have argued that there is a Protestant Christian bias in Western notions of the concept of religion, which usually understands the concept of ‘religion’ through Protestant Christian categories of private, inner belief and free conscience. Extending this debate further, I argue that the insight into the Protestant construction of the American concept of religion has important implications for the most polarized discussions of religion and politics emerging from the Christian Right and the atheist movements on the Left in the United States. Even though the Christian Right and the new atheists are political opposites in many other respects, they produce similar animosity toward groups that they perceive of having a different notion of religion that is not separable from politics in the correct way.