Secular and religious ideologies played a major role in helping the Bush administration explain and sell the war on terror to the American public, according to University of Colorado at Boulder religious studies Professor Ira Chernus in his new book "Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin."
Chernus argues that the war on terror is based not on a realistic appraisal of the causes of the conflict but on "stories" that policy-makers believe about human nature and a world divided between absolute good and evil.
"The Bush administration has given them a language, a kind of imagery to reassure themselves that, at least on the level of our foreign relations, we are the absolute good guys," said Chernus. "But you can't believe that you're the absolute good guys unless you believe that there are monsters out there -- absolute evil guys."
What is interesting about this policy, said Chernus, is that its roots are not embedded in the war on terror but as part of a neoconservative plan to change a countercultural morality that the president and his supporters saw as a domestic threat to the United States.
"Until Sept. 11, 2001, they didn't put all that much focus on foreign enemies, their primary concern was about what they saw as an internal threat within our country, a threat to the moral virtue of our country," he explained. "That is what got the neoconservative movement going and that was Bush's principal issue as he launched his campaign for president."
The president's campaign platform, said Chernus, began as a story about virtuous people, conservatives who accepted traditional moral authority and traditional moral values, at war against what they saw as sinners here at home.
But following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the focus turned from a war against sin to the war against terror, said Chernus. But one aspect that did not change, he said, are the messages being used to frame the battle.
"It looked to me that they had taken this old story they had about the war between virtue and sin here at home and they projected it onto a global scale and applied it to the war on terrorism," said Chernus. "And one day, not too long ago, I came across an article shortly after 9/11 written by one of the top neoconservative writers, Robert Kagan, and he said when the World Trade Center attack came along that we already had a ready-made story to apply to it."
However, Chernus points out that it wasn't only neoconservatives who believed the good versus evil stories, but many liberals as well in part because it was an ideology they were familiar with after living through a war against communism that lasted for more than 40 years.
According to Chernus, by falling back on old and familiar stories about good versus evil Americans are turning their backs on exploring new policies that could make the country safer rather than being locked in a perpetual war against terrorism.
"What I am saying is that treating terrorists as monsters who will never go away and seeing them through the filter of this story that comes from within our own society, that's not the best way to get the terrorists to change their minds," said Chernus. "The best way to get them to change their minds is to talk to them as one human being to another, but within the story that prevails in the United States, we're not allowed to treat them as real human beings and so we say, 'Well, there's nothing to talk about.' "
Chernus has written several books on American culture and national security policy during the Cold War era. For more information on his new book visit .