Faith & Spirit Quote by Tom Tancredo

Tancredo isn’t trying to describe a threat so much as to upgrade it. By rejecting the “small group who have hijacked a religion” frame, he dismisses the more careful post-9/11 language that isolates extremists from the broader faith. Then he replaces it with a civilizational claim: not attackers, but “a civilization” with agency, cohesion, and a single intention. The phrase “bent on destroying ours” turns geopolitics into destiny, and policy into self-defense.

The intent is clear: widen the circle of suspicion. “Hijacked a religion” is a concession meant to sound reasonable before the real move: collapsing distinctions between Islam, Islamism, and terrorism. It’s a rhetorical trap that invites the listener to feel sophisticated for considering nuance, then punishes them for it by insisting nuance is naive. “Our civilization” is doing double duty as comfort and boundary marker, implying shared values while implying who doesn’t belong.

The subtext is less about foreign battlefields than domestic permission. If the threat is a whole civilization, then extraordinary responses feel proportionate: aggressive surveillance, immigration restriction, cultural tests of loyalty. It also functions as a political accelerant: fear scales better than facts, and “civilization” language turns a messy problem into a simple us-versus-them story.

Context matters. Tancredo built a brand on hardline immigration politics, and this framing fits the mid-2000s moment when terrorism anxiety, Iraq-era disillusionment, and “clash of civilizations” rhetoric fused into a durable campaign theme: security as identity, and identity as policy.