The British Association of American Studies awarded Associate Professor of Religious Studies Andrew Monteith’s “Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs” the Arthur Miller Institute Best First Book Prize
The British Association of American Studies (BAAS) recently awarded Associate Professor of Religious Studies Andrew Monteith’s book, “Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs,” the Arthur Miller Institute Best First Book Prize.
Monteith’s book, published by NYU Press in 2023, explains how Protestant Christian understandings of salvation, morality and destiny shaped their attitudes toward substance use, beginning in the 19th century and following them into the modern era.
Panelists praised Monteith’s scholarship and his navigation of the complexities around politics, law, religion, race, science and morality as contexts for antidrug movements.
“This is an extremely original … intellectually rigorous work,” the association’s judges said. “It opens up a new way of understanding the wider morality politics of the period, and since.”
Monteith’s areas of expertise include American religious history, social power, cultural studies, and race.
Although “race science” is no longer accepted as real science, during the late 19th century, most Americans considered it valid. Whether Christian or not, the majority of white Americans incorporated race science into how they understood their moral duty towards governance and law, Monteith argues in the book. Protestant ethics overwhelmingly favored regulating access to alcohol, peyote, and other substances in colonial contexts.
Monteith was researching another subject, using records from the United States National Archives, Library of Congress and the United Nations Archives in Geneva, when he found material showing that the drug war began much earlier than commonly thought. He discovered that American religious leaders were instrumental in generating a global push to abolish substance use.
He felt there was a compelling story to tell about the relationship between religious morality and other forms of social power.
“I hope my book contributes to American studies and encourages examining ‘religion’ as bigger than private beliefs or denominational traditions,” Monteith said. “Religion is baked into American culture and regardless of what disciplinary lens we bring to American studies, it will benefit our work to pay closer attention to the ways it overflows the boundaries we tend to assign it.”
The British Association for American Studies was founded in 1955 to promote the study of the U.S. in higher education and by independent scholars. The Arthur Miller Institute awards are given annually for journal articles and first books, eligible to citizens in the U.K and elsewhere who are association members.