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held just weeks after he took the council’s reins, featured luminaries such as Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, former Republican senator Rick Santorum, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Representative Michele Bachmann—along with Jerry Boykin himself, who opined on “Israel, Iran, and the Future of Western Civilization.” 7 When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney huddled with a group of prominent “social conservatives,” the delegation included Boykin. 8
    Did their appearance at the FRC’s podium signify that these Republican heavyweights subscribed to Boykinism’s essential tenets? Did his tête-à-tête with Boykin mean that Romney himself was an Islamophobe? Not any more than those who exploited the McCarthyite moment to their own political advantage—Richard Nixon, for example—necessarily agreed with all of the senator’s reckless accusations. Yet the presence of leading Republicans on an FRC program alongside the general and Romney’s willingness to consult him certainly suggested that they found nothing especially objectionable in his worldview, that he was, in fact, their kind of guy.
    Where comparisons between McCarthyism and Boykinism break down is in assessing their impact. McCarthyism wreaked havoc mostly on the home front, instigating witch hunts, destroying careers, and trampling on civil liberties, while imparting to American politics even more of a circus atmosphere than usual. In terms of foreign policy, the effect of McCarthyism, if anything, was only to cement an already established anticommunist consensus. The senator’s antics didn’t create enemies abroad; McCarthyism merely affirmed that communists were indeed the enemy, while jacking up the political price of daring to think otherwise.
    Boykinism, in contrast, makes its impact felt abroad, rather than at home. Unlike McCarthyism, it doesn’t strike fear in the hearts of incumbents seeking reelection. Attracting General Boykin’s endorsement or provoking his ire hasn’t determined the outcome of any election and is unlikely to do so. Yet in its various manifestations Boykinism provides some of the kindling that sustains anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world.
    Doggedly sticking to their script, American presidents and secretaries of state may praise Islam as a religion of peace and even tout past U.S. military actions ostensibly undertaken on behalf of Muslims. Yet with their credibility among Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the Islamic world about nil, these officials are wasting their breath. The Boykinism that some Americans profess confirms what many Muslims are already primed to believe, namely, that American values and Islamic values are irreconcilable. Certainly, that describes General Boykin’s own view, one with which, according to polling data, nearly half of all Americans concur. 9
    When it comes to providing an ideological justification for U.S. policy, in other words, the pivot from communism to Islamism that occurred between 1989 and 2001 has yielded at best problematic results. No longer a source of internal solidarity as during the Cold War, religion has become an impediment, notably complicating any action involving the use of U.S. military power.
    Recall that during the Cold War, ideology—rough agreement on the meaning of freedom, including religious freedom—had made it possible to create such useful fictions as the West and the Free World. Among inhabitants of these culturally heterogeneous realms, religion had become a private matter, not a hot-button political issue. It was, therefore, irrelevant to the question of whether Western Europeans, Japanese, and South Koreans were willing to permit U.S. military garrisons in their midst. Since the end of the Cold War, by contrast, the presence of U.S. forces among the peoples of the Islamic world has served chiefly as a reminder of religion-centered ideological dissonance—sharp disagreement over what freedom