This Manichean vision of struggle between forces of light and darkness has left its legacy in apocalyptic depictions of Islam, alongside the Catholic Church, as vehicles of the Antichrist in opposition to evangelical truth. The recurring theme of the fear and threat of Islam in eighteenthto twentieth-century America, reinforced in this fashion by the perspective of British colonialism, helped to consolidate the concept of Islam as a single homogeneous whole, an essentialized portrait that was severed from any historical context.

DEFINE: Explains the process of 'essentialization' — collapsing Islam into a single, ahistorical, homogeneous entity through apocalyptic framing.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 40