Some warned that coercive conversions did not belong just to the past but may again menace Christians. For instance, in 1835 Eli Smith, an American missionary in Turkey, imagined for his audience in a Boston magazine that the dead ancient Christians of Western Asia warned American Christians today, "Hereafter, upon the fair face of your beloved America, as now upon that glory of all lands which was once our country, a night of apostacy may settle down, and hordes of yet unnamed barbarian invaders fasten deep the blight of some new Mohammedanism" [sic].

XREF: Connects to anxieties about religious coercion and the imagined threat of 'Mohammedanism' as a foil for American Protestant identity — relevant to orientalism and religious-freedom discourse.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 81