The “social life,” as Arjun Appadurai terms it, of the Quran as an American cultural/political/racial object reveals how it is linked to competing narratives of American democracy and American empire. In this paper, I use the Quran as a trace in the twin American debates today about how much “we” should tolerate Muslims and how “we” should make tolerant Muslims abroad. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 made the Quran one of the most iconic objects in contemporary American debates about tolerance and its limits. In 2004, a U.S. military sniper’s use of the Quran for target practice in Iraq led a high-ranking U.S. general to make a public apology to Iraqi tribal elders and deferentially kiss the Quran. The two starkly opposed images, of a Quran pierced by an American soldier’s bullets and a uniform-clad, decorated U.S. general kissing the Quran, circulated on American television together; American pundits debated whether the general’s conciliatory gesture was evidence of Americans’ characteristic tolerance of all faiths, merely a pragmatic military tactic intended to stave off a violent backlash from Iraqi insurgents, or an acquiescence to the pressures of liberal political correctness. More recently, a viral tweet conjured the image of Vice President Pence squirming as two new Muslim Congresswomen would be sworn in on Qurans (the Vice President only officiates Senators’ swearing in ceremonies). A number of unresolved, recurring questions tied to pervasive American anxieties about Muslims as a minority in the U.S. as well as about the liberal doctrine of tolerance generally animated the media coverage. What kind of a book do American publics understand the Quran to be? Is it comparable to the Bible, or is the Quran fundamentally very different from Judeo-Christian scriptures accepted as American by the general public? What are the appropriate ways U.S. officials should engage the Islamic religious text — and by extension Muslims — at home and abroad? By analyzing debates about tolerance and its limits, I chart the production of American discourses about the Quran, and the production of an American “common-sense” view of Islam intimately entangled in Americans’ ideas of democratic national identity, belonging and American global ascendancy. Through the case studies of U.S. government-sponsored deradicalization programs in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US, I analyze the anxieties, policies, and practices designed to police how Muslims read the Quran.