February 13, 2007 6:11 AM

What would Jesus do? Well, of course- he'd round up all unbelievers and have them executed

The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy: We must attend to growing social and economic inequities in order to stop the most dangerous mass movement in American history — or face a future of fascism under the guise of Christian values

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age — he was then close to 80 — we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.” The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

I’m going to start out with my standard boilerplate disclaimer that I have nothing against Christianity. I am no more anti-Christian than I am anti-American, though I’ve been accused of both at various times. To be honest, my problem is not with Christianity, because the religion itself has remain largely unchanged over the centuries. No, my problem is with those who practice Christianity as if we were still in the midst of the Crusades. Christianity is not a zero-sum belief system- I’m right, you’re wrong, and therefore I have the right to oppress and marginalize you as I see fit. After all, it’s God’s will.

Sadly, Christianity is a religion that lends itself to zealotry and intolerance in the same way that radical Islam does. No, Christians aren’t killing civilians with car bombs, though they do murder the occasional abortion provider. To describe some of these zealots as “American Taliban” is no exaggeration. While they might speak the language of Christianity, their actions and their goals and dreams are the stuff of Machiavelli and Mussolini. What they’re after is nothing less than a Christian Dominionist government, with radical Evangelicals controlling every aspect of public life.

If you think I’m kidding, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.

[Adams] was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer….

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure — personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers — those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

Drawing comparisons between modern-day America and Nazi Germany is a dangerous, and not always altogether accurate, proposition. Nonetheless, there are some lessons to be drawn from this history. Hitler rose to power out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic, a time when German pride had taking a beating after WWI, and German economic and political prospects were anything but rosy. The social and economic tenor of the times provided fertile ground for a charismatic leader with simple answers (sound familiar?) and someone to blame for all of Germany’s problems.

What relevance does this have today? Well, human nature hasn’t changed in the past 70 years, and America has it’s own charismatic leader with simple answers and someone to blame for America’s problems. 9.11 and the now-permanent War on Terror © have provided Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © with a ready-made enemy that can be demonized in whatever way best suits his purpose of the moment. By now, we all know that “the terrorists” are out to destroy Our Way of Life © . We also have been thoroughly indoctrinated enough to understand that this is a classic tale of Good vs. Evil: radical, hateful Islamofascism vs. good, God-fearing Christian Americans. When the struggle is viewed in this light, it’s much easier to agree to a creeping curtailment of our civil rights when we can be convinced that it’s necessary to keep America safe.

Remember…if you’re not with Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader ©…. I could go on, but there’s no need to. We’ve heard it almost daily since 9.11. All of us are aware of the propaganda the Far Right has employed to convince Americans that their very continued existence depends on granting those in power virtually unchecked powers to prosecute the glorious and never-ending War on Terror © . That many of those in power, including Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © , follow a pronounced Christian Dominionist ideology, seems not to disturb most Americans (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!)

This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true — the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s a chapter and verse description of what’s happening in America today. If you don’t believe me, you’re living proof of Josef Goebbel’s “Big Lie” theory. You’ve been thoroughly and irretrievably propagandized.

How long before those of us who actively and openly dissent will be branded as enemies of the state and, even worse, enemies of Christianity deserving of the fate of heretics…the modern-day equivalent of being burned at the stake?

The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state” — where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens — awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement — the most dangerous mass movement in American history — will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance.

The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

If it seems that I’m painting a dark picture, it’s because I’ve been paying attention since 9.11. While I understand that our world post-9.11 is a very different place, I don’t like what I see the country I love- my homeland- turning into.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on February 13, 2007 6:11 AM.

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