THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASCISM
Christopher Hedges1
November 2004
Dr.
James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us
that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting
the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat
Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new
political religion that would direct its efforts at 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. 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.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was 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 Adolph Hitler
placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie
film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and
the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and
Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the
suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched
hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in
Cambridge.
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing
similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities
that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national
crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle
the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany,
mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them
ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and
allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand
wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they
can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and
"satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did
not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil,
a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come
from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with
the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed,
compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given
enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental
moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle
that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis
took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their
lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had
watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher
Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the
Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in
the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the
House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a
majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18
of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the
states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives
earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most
influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle
Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma,
has included in his campaign to end abortion: a call to impose the death
penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place.
Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new
senator elected from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching
in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters
identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of
their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most
important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."
President Bush must further these important objectives, including
the march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with his
faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between church and
state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt
within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly
telephone conversations with Karl Rove during the campaign, has put the
President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this
president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to
implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price
in the next election."
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto
von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end
of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampt," the word from which
we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's
attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the
society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the
more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's
contribution to our democracy.
DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS
The Reconstructionist
movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation
for the most politically active element within the Christian Right.
Rushdooney's 1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law,argued
that American society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in
the Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were given
dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along with all
non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the
evangelical movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in
an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos.
The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would be lifted
to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be manipulated or
influenced, although believers often interpreted catastrophes and wars as
portents of the imminent Second Coming.
Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create
the Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation Theology,
which came into vogue at about the same time. While the Liberation Theologians
crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism, Rushdooney crammed it into the equally
distorting box of classical fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin
America when I was there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist
priests endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and El
Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with conservative Latin
American clerics, backed the Contras fighting against the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua and the murderous military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile
and Argentina.
The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that was harsh, unforgiving and
violent. Offenses such as adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality,
merited the death penalty. The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian
United States. Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the
Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture
and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he
wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his
heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."
"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and
the purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and
society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes.
Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been
merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive." (see The
Religious Right ,
a publication of the ADL, pg. 124.)
Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He
believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than
national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the
churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology
remains at the heart of the movement. It is being enacted through school
vouchers, with federal dollars now going into Christian schools, and the
assault against the federal agencies that deal with poverty and human services.
The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is currently channeling
millions in federal funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing ,
and National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious charity
organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.
Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about
political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only through
signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture believed, but also
through the establishment of the Christian nation. But he remained, even within
the Christian Right, a deeply controversial figure.
Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of
Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more palatable form.
He called on believers, often during emotional gatherings at football stadiums,
to commit to Christ and exercise power within the society as agents of Christ.
He also called for a Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of
slavery, as Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery
punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories. It was
through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came
to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right. The religious
utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson
and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism.
These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil,
embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat
Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion over
society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two years ago
at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas , "He [God] is using me,
all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything I do
and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me." Delay went
on to tell followers "If we stay inside the church, the culture won't
change."
Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent
University, says he is training his students to rule when the Christian regents
take power, part of the reign leading to the return of Christ. Robertson
resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition when Bush took office, a sign
many took to signal the ascendancy of the first regent. This battle is not
rhetorical but one that followers are told will ultimately involve violence.
And the enemy is clearly defined and marked for destruction.
"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right
theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the
greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known."
One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals
of the movement is America's Providential History,
the standard textbook used in many Christian schools and a staple of the
Christian home schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind
to "have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air,
over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that
creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible calls for "Bible
believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He
reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility
for governing other men." (page 19). The authors write that God has
called the United States to become "the first truly Christian nation"
(page 184) and "make disciples of all nations." The book denounces
income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft" and calls
for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled Christian
Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring about the withering away of
the federal government and the empowerment of the authoritarian church,
although this is not explict in the text.
Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder
of the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the Christian
Right.
"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of
religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up
a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no
neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they
will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious
order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."
(Christianity and Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated
environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned, therefore, to
speak in code. The code they use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the
movement, one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no
different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists
who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view
pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for
a suicide attack.
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the
Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who runs
the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking tour a few
years ago in Iowa. She obtained a copy of a memo Pat Robertson handed out to
followers at the Iowa Republican County Caucus. It was titled, "How to
Participate in a Political Party" and read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the
party, not push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers
control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians
have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In
his address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he lifted
a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the light shines
in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." He often uses the
sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law,"
words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto entitled "A Statement of
Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes from hymns, prayers, tracts and
Biblical passages without attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They
are lost on the uninitiated.
CHRIST THE AVENGER
The
Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow segment of the
Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of
Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws heavily
from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These books share an
apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels
where Jesus sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a
great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found the God
portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book in the appendix
of his German translation of the Bible.
These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love,
forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will
befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The world is
divided between good and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those
who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels, the Jesus who
turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and
startling in the ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by
the Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and
homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have rendered the
American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus is portrayed as a man
of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites
and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification
of strength, violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure;
indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a powerfully built
man wielding a huge sword.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the
movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care,
negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many
millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers
them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the
paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy
theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The
New World Order. The book is a xenophobic rant that includes
vicious attacks against the United Nations and numerous other international
organizations. The abandonment of the working class has been crucial to the
success of the movement. Only by reintegrating the working class into society
through job creation, access to good education and health care can the
Christian Right be effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on
the backs of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no exception.
The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are
detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers harbor and
the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for the huge sales of the
apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious
Appearing, based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical Prophecies
about the Second Coming, Christ eviscerates the flesh of millions of
non-believers with the mere sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of
horror, of how "the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood,
causing it to burst through their veins and skin." Eyes disintegrate.
Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The novel, part of The
Left Behind series,
are the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is
heresy." said televangelist James Robison.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and
even the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was predicted
according to believers in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four
angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to
slay the third part of men." The march towards global war, even nuclear
war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming.
And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions
of non-believers to a horrible and painful death.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
The
movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational
disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal
polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in
promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or "intelligent design," like
Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid
scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why
the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school
textbooks include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in
scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and
honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An
understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts
and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the
ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt
called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase
might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist
books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon, taught as a theory
in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas. "Intelligent
design" is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at
least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was
created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not
one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few
thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not
some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to
undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this
assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our school
systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have
evolutionized out of some primordial mud." (speech Delay gave in the House
on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt
wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented
facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part.
Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in
the "masses" inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important
because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school
students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend
schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools saw an
increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional
students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school
enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams
told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has
seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of
opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all
homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where
homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for
Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute's library
were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first
"deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the
election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already
defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot
measures, with the exception of Oregon, had outlawed same sex marriages, as do
27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart
"activist judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family,
even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing
apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of
the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made
them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach
this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational
thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy
Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement
bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values,"
would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the
liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not
count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an
authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home
and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the
press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the
federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication
with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh
eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.
The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an
Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian
Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the
excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The
ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central
theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal
to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not
stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians.
They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem. Let us, if
nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Note from Joan Bokaer: Chris [Hedges] refers to a memo I received
in Iowa from Pat Robertson's organization. The year was 1986 ― two years before his presidential bid, and three years before the
Christian Coalition was formed.
Footnotes:
1. Christopher Lynn Hedges Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. His most recent book is The World As It Is (2011) Chris is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005). [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges ]
2. Source:
[http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
Copyright ©Christopher Hedges. All rights reserved.